The Quality of Silence

  She turned off the Dalton and onto the rudimentary link road.

  Chapter 19

  The link road stopped as it met the river-road in a T-junction. To the north was Anaktue. The ice on the river in that direction had no markers or any sign that a vehicle had driven on it. It curved sharply thirty or so metres away and Yasmin couldn’t see what lay beyond. In the other direction the river-road had delineators on the ice and had clearly been used as a road. Yasmin guessed that the man killing the animals and sending her emails may have used this road as he ran away from Anaktue.

  It would be far too dangerous to drive to Matt on the unmarked and untested river ice. She had to turn around. She started the manoeuvre but the truck was huge and cumbersome and her turning circle too wide to get it turned around.

  She’d just have to do a three-point turn. She would turn right onto the road with delineators then reverse onto the iced-over river towards Anaktue, then turn the truck back onto the link road.

  She turned right onto the road with delineators with no problem, then she started reversing. As the back wheels hit the iced-over river towards Anaktue, the rig juddered and she feared the ice was thin and unstable. She moved forwards again so that the whole truck was on the river-road with delineators. She couldn’t reverse onto the link road because it was too tight to turn. They would just have to wait here.

  She opened her window, cutting the engine and strained to hear the sound of a helicopter. Instead, she heard the ice creaking. Despite being within the delineators they were too heavy for the ice. The road couldn’t have been driven on by a truck as heavy as theirs. She didn’t know how to uncouple the load and make themselves lighter. She was afraid of even trying because her experience with the snow chains meant that even if she knew what she was doing, which she didn’t, she had little confidence in getting things done quickly in sub-zero temperatures. She would just keep moving slowly to shift the truck onto the next section of ice.

  It would still be easy for the police helicopter to see them; they weren’t far from the Dalton and the river-road was exposed.

  Imagine a huge river. Then imagine it covered with ice in the dark. And we’re driving on it! Mum says the ice is so thick we won’t go through and that other people have driven here before us because of the delineators, which is what the posts are called. It’s funny to think that underneath us there’ll be frogs, right at the bottom of the river because that’s the warmest place. There’ll be loads of sorts of fish too, but I don’t know much about fish.

  ‘Shall we tell each other more interesting facts?’ Mum says. Perhaps she’s a bit frightened too.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like to start?’

  ‘OK. You know you asked me about the school for the deaf?’

  Mum nods. She asked me in the storm but my fingers wouldn’t work.

  ‘A girl there told me that sometimes the deaf community give you a sign name.’

  ‘Deaf community’ sounds kind of strict but Anna, that’s the nice girl, said it’s cool. I said super-coolio? And she said, straight back, Yes, super-coolio!

  ‘What kind of name?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Anna laughs a lot so her sign-name is Giggle. And Anna’s dad laughed at a friend’s joke in the pub – Anna says all her family laugh a lot – but when her dad laughed his beer went down his front and now he’s called Dribble.’

  ‘Dribble? Really?’

  ‘Yes. But lots of people have names that aren’t funny.’

  ‘What name would you be?’

  ‘I can’t choose it. It’s chosen for me.’

  I think Mum looks a bit sad.

  ‘I’ll still be Ruby,’ I tell her. ‘But I’d be another name as well. I can be me but more than me too.’

  Mum doesn’t say anything for a little bit and I’m worried she thinks it’s awful, because she and Dad chose the name Ruby for me.

  ‘I think that’s great,’ Mum says.

  I think so too, as long as it’s not Dribble.

  ‘What kind of interesting fact would you like?’ she asks.

  ‘Something about space.’

  ‘OK. Did you know that in space it’s totally quiet? Even when stars explode, they don’t make any sound at all.’

  ‘So in space everyone hears like me.’

  ‘Yes. I like thinking how quiet it is up there. Billions and billions of light years of quietness.’

  I like that too.

  Yasmin thought about the silence in space. The philosophy course she had knitted through had addressed issues such as ‘If the tree fell and no one saw it, did it really happen?’ put into slightly more, but not much more, grown-up language of bundle theory and subjective idealism. For Yasmin, after Ruby was diagnosed as deaf, it became ‘If the tree fell and only Ruby was there, did the tree make any noise?’ She thought that if the sound waves didn’t ping against an eardrum and get turned into nerve impulses to a brain, then they existed as a vibration in the woodland air, a soft tremor over mossy ground, a nearby tree swaying, a leaf brushing in a minute stroke against her daughter’s face.

  ‘Your turn again,’ she said to Ruby.

  ‘OK. Did you know that Inupiat people have sign language as part of their regular language. Like it’s just a normal kind of thing.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. That’s great.’

  ‘Dad told everyone in the village about me and there’s an old lady who’s going to teach me some of their signs.’

  She hadn’t yet told Ruby that everyone in the village had died in the fire; she didn’t know how.

  ‘Dad says if it’s freezing cold and the wind is blowing, you have a scarf over your face and it’s difficult to answer questions with your mouth-voice, so if you raise your eyebrows it means “yes” and if you squint your eyes quickly it means “I don’t know.” But they have signs for complicated things too.’

  She would have to tell her soon.

  ‘And they’ve got these really great words for things. There’s a word that means “guest expecting food”. Dad said that’s a really useful word. And—Stop! We have to stop!’

  Mum’s stopped the truck and I’m jumping down out of the cab onto the ice. It’s the family of otters.

  The babies and parents are huddled up together on the ice. It’s not like the photo. I can see their damp fur and their open eyes and their whiskers. I touch one of the otters, kind of stroking him, and then I see that he doesn’t have a leg.

  Suddenly, there’s all these colours on the ice, pinks and greens and blues and I look up and there’s dancing sheets of lights in the sky and I hate them. It’s like a cheesy Disney film. But if it was a cheesy film, the family of otters wouldn’t be dead. There’s a husky dog. He’s dead too. He must belong to the man because huskies aren’t wild. And the lights are still dancing as if everything is pretty, like it’s the ball at the end of Sleeping Beauty with the fairies turning her ball dress blue/pink/blue/pink and I want them to STOP and for it to be just dark again.

  Tears were streaming down Ruby’s unprotected face. It was the first time in all of this that Yasmin had seen Ruby properly cry.

  ‘How could someone do this?’ Ruby shouted with her hands. ‘Why?’

  Yasmin put her arm around her, because her own hands could form no answer. She saw Ruby’s tears were freezing to her cheeks. Above them the sky was luminous green and pink, billowing lights across the whole of the sky. She heard the ice creaking more loudly than before.

  She hurried Ruby back towards the cab and just to the side of their truck saw a deep gash in the ice. They’d missed it by a foot or so. On the other side of the truck was a perfectly round small hole with small cracks in the ice emanating from it. It looked as if it had been made by a bullet or a drill. She wondered if the person who had ripped down the sign had also tried to destabilise the ice and destroy the route. She had driven between the two holes.

  They got back in the cab.

  The photo of the otters was only six and a half miles from his last l
ocation.

  She started driving, inching along, just enough to move the weight of the truck onto the next section of ice. If she drove slowly enough the police would easily reach them before they got near to him.

  Around them the aurora blazed and the lights were radiantly stunning.

  ‘It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?’

  But Ruby didn’t respond.

  * * *

  If you think something is horrible for being beautiful, then it isn’t beautiful any more, is it?

  ‘Alaska is really famous for the aurora borealis,’ Mum says. ‘People come from all over the world just to see it.’

  I don’t want her to tell me about the aurora borealis because it’s probably a trick. She’ll tell me that they’re not really there and it’s made by something else, like the paraselenae.

  ‘Up above planet Earth,’ Mum says, ‘it’s like a war.’

  Ruby turned to look at her. Yasmin understood that Ruby needed a cosmic counterpart to the dead creatures on the ice; that it was good and evil now for Ruby; the childish world of the small scale had gone for her.

  ‘The sun hurls solar wind at us. It travels at millions of miles an hour towards us. Sometimes it throws a coronal mass ejection towards us. And it’s about ten billion tons of plasma, which is the same as a hundred thousand battleships and it can be as wide as thirty million miles. And these ejections mean solar wind comes at us at supersonic speed.’

  Ruby nodded. Yasmin saw that she was watching the lights now.

  ‘The Earth has a magnetic shield all the way around it. An invisible bubble. It’s called the magnetosphere. The solar wind hits the shield. And that’s what we’re watching now. Those lights are the shield protecting our planet.’

  As Ruby looked at the sky, Yasmin thought about the metal at the core of the Earth creating a magnetic field as the Earth turned, which travelled for thousands of miles into space and protected them.

  For the first time the darkness around them was alive with colours.

  The emailed photos of animals and birds, despite their menace, had allowed Yasmin to trust Matt, and Ruby’s blog had given her some understanding of why he’d want to be in Alaska, but when she had seen the unparalleled beauty of the night sky here, when she’d seen Polaris and known that she was on the axis of the Earth, when she saw the aurora borealis playing out a cosmic battle in the heavens above her, she shared Matt’s passion for this place. She’d come to the other side of the world for this in winter too and her trust in him went deeper.

  Then the lights stopped and they were back in darkness.

  She saw two small blue moons in her mirror. She thought it was an optical trick, because surely this couldn’t be true. He couldn’t be coming after them.

  The blue headlights were vividly clear behind them.

  Why would he risk being found so close to them? Surely he’d listened to the CB, heard the police say they would get her and Ruby after the storm. For crying out loud, the man had gone on the CB earlier and talked to the police himself. She remembered his lies, the stranger’s voice that was familiar, saying that he was going south, not north; that he’d passed her thirty miles back and there was no one behind her. He’d even given a precise sham location, MP 174. At the time she hadn’t thought about how specific he’d been. But now it felt wrong. She was afraid that scrutiny would bring forth something frightening, but had no choice but to think this through.

  So he’d given his location, MP 174. That hadn’t seemed particularly important; just a false detail in a larger lie. And then he said he’d passed her thirty miles back. Doing the maths – which surely the police would have done – her position at thirty miles further north of him would put her at MP 204.

  She paused for no more than ten seconds, to look at Adeeb’s map. MP 204

  was at least forty miles south of where they had actually been. He hadn’t just been falsifying his own location, he’d been falsifying theirs.

  But surely to God she’d told the police where they were. Surely they’d asked for her location. No, because they thought they already knew it from the helpful tanker driver. And she’d been too preoccupied and frightened to think clearly.

  She remembered the building wind and snow, the outriders of the storm, as he’d lied to the police; an hour later it had hit at full force. The police would assume that she’d have driven ten miles at most in those conditions. They’d never think that they’d crossed the Atigun Pass.

  The police were looking for her and Ruby south of the Brooks mountains. No one was looking for them out here on the northern tundra.

  The tanker man is behind us again. But the police will get to us soon and they will find him and put him in jail, but first Mum’ll make them take us to get Dad.

  It feels even darker because the aurora borealis was in the sky and now it’s gone it’s left a shadow of itself, like another layer of dark.

  The river-road is getting narrower and narrower and I think this is a little bit what growing up is like. You can’t turn around and go back, even if you’re frightened and really want to. You can never be a little Reception child again.

  It’s getting colder outside. Mr Azizi’s thermometer says it’s nearly minus thirty.

  Yasmin had to keep Ruby away from the tanker driver. But the faster she drove away from him, the nearer they came to the man who’d sent the emails.

  She and Ruby weren’t wearing seat belts. If the truck did go through the ice, she didn’t know how long they would have to get out. She did know, from Adeeb, that once you went in the water you died of hypothermia long before you had time to drown.

  Under threat from behind and in front and underneath she looked up at the stars, but they could no longer comfort her or make her brave. Instead, she felt her cowardice. It was her lack of courage that meant Ruby was in such danger.

  Ever since the policeman in Fairbanks told her that Matt was dead, she hadn’t dared to stop moving, but had gone forwards, ignoring everyone, risking Ruby’s safety, going forwards to find him because she was too afraid to stand still and look at their facts. It wasn’t just that Matt needed her to rescue him, but that she desperately needed him and wasn’t brave enough to face a life without him.

  In the storm, she’d believed that Matt was safe in an aputiak. But where was the proof? All she’d had, all she’d ever had, was faith, which by its very nature meant no evidence to support it. Faith was made up of love and hope and trust, nothing else.

  When she’d received those horrifying photos, she’d chosen to believe it was because Matt was alive and this man didn’t want her to find him. But now she wondered where the logic had been in that.

  Mum’s made me put on all my arctic clothes. She’s driving while she puts on her outdoor things so I’m helping her. I put on my face mask and goggles, but Mum doesn’t put hers on yet because she won’t be able to see clearly to drive.

  The truck abruptly stopped. Yasmin pushed her foot hard down on the accelerator pedal but nothing happened. She felt something dragging them backwards. She looked out of her window. She heard groaning and the cab was tilting. Their load had broken through the ice and was sinking.

  I’m taking the torch like Mum said I should, but I’ve also got my laptop. I tuck it inside my parka then I jump down onto the ice. Mum is throwing our food in a bag down onto the ice and she’s clambering down too and she’s holding the flare and Mr Azizi’s sleeping bag.

  The house is tipping down and making a big hole in the ice; our bag of food goes through and now our house is going through too, a bit at a time, like it’s in slow motion. My bracelet is vibrating so our truck must be making a loud noise as it sinks. The headlights tilt upwards into the sky, like they’re search beams. And then they go into the water too.

  Mum and me are running because the ice is cracking all around us and we jump over the cracks. Now everything is blue.

  I look behind us and see it’s the tanker’s headlights that are making everything blue. The river must b
e really deep because you can’t even see our house or our cab any more.

  The blue light is fading because the tanker’s headlights are shrinking. He must be reversing. I think he’s afraid that the ice will crack more and he’ll go through and then it will be one jumbo hole, with him in it as well.

  Mum’s holding my hand and we’re running away from the tanker and over the ice. I’ve got a stitch and Mum must know because we just walk for a bit, still holding hands, and then we run again and then walk again.

  When they’d jumped out of the sinking cab, Yasmin had heard a shot but Ruby didn’t know the tanker driver had fired at them. She hurried Ruby away over the creaking cracking ice. When she thought they’d gone about half a mile, she stopped. They were surely out of range of his bullets now and the ice around them was stable.

  She knelt down on the ice and tried to unwrap Adeeb’s emergency flare, Ruby shining the torch so she could see. But her gloved fingers couldn’t tear off the flimsy wrapping, so she took off the gloves off and worked wearing liners. She panicked that she didn’t have matches, but found that the lid of the container could be used to strike the end of the flare. It took six strikes before it caught. The flare went into the sky, crimson red, a trail of light behind it. She hurriedly replaced her gloves.

  She and Ruby watched the red flare as it stayed in the night sky, as if it had joined the stars. Maybe the police had widened their search and would spot it or perhaps other planes were flying again and one of them would see it. The flare fizzled out and it was just stars above them again.

  She guessed that the man who’d sent the emails was only about half a mile away and he would have seen the flare. But she’d had to try to get help. With no shelter or way of keeping warm, Ruby wouldn’t survive for long. They had Ruby’s laptop, but without a satellite terminal it was useless to them.

  Crouched on the ice, Ruby took off her gloves and opened her laptop. Wearing her silk glove liners, she typed:

  Shall I tell you the story about the raven? The one Inupiat people believe in?