The Quality of Silence

  I’d love to hear the story. Why don’t you try typing with the special gloves Dad got us?

  I can’t type in gloves. Liners will be fine for a bit, Mum. When my fingers get cold I’ll put on my gloves.

  At the beginning of time, Raven made the world with the beating of his wings. There’s a long bit about a sparrow but I’ll skip that bit because it isn’t the best bit.

  Ok.

  Raven loved all the people and animals he’d made and wanted to know more about them. One day when Raven was out paddling in his kayak he saw a whale and when the whale yawned he paddled inside.

  The whale closed his mouth and it was very dark. Raven kept on paddling till he came to the white ribs of the whale rising up all around him. Dad said the white ribs were like ivory columns. And in the middle there was a beautiful girl who was dancing.

  I need to put on my gloves now.

  Ruby put on her gloves and they walked in large circles, swinging their arms. Yasmin flashed on Adeeb’s torch to see where they were going, then hurriedly turned it off. They needed to conserve the torch battery. She should have thought of bringing something to start a fire, for light as much as warmth. She put her hand on Ruby to slow her down. They had to keep their circulation going but not sweat, because sweat would evaporate off their skin, draining their bodies of heat, hastening hypothermia. She’d feared sweating when she and Ruby had run away from the tanker driver and the cracking ice, and so had made them walk as well as run.

  She kept looking at the sky, hoping to see small moving lights of a plane or a helicopter that had spotted their flare, but there was nothing.

  Ruby was crouching on the ice again, typing on the laptop in her glove liners.

  Why aren’t the police here?

  I’m sure they will be soon. Someone will have seen our flare. It’s a lovely story. Can you tell me the rest of it in sign?

  But we’d have to use the torch for you to see my hands and we’d be using up the battery.

  Raven saw that there were strings attached to the dancing girl’s feet and hands. The strings were also attached to the whale’s heart.

  Raven fell in love with the girl and he took off his beak and showed her his human face.

  Raven wanted to take the beautiful coolio girl out of the whale and marry her. But the girl said she couldn’t leave the whale because she was the whale’s heart and soul.

  My fingers are too cold.

  Ruby stopped typing and put on her gloves over her liners. She closed the laptop. With the laptop shut it was completely dark.

  Yasmin heard Ruby’s voice in the darkness.

  ‘The beautiful girl danced inside the whale. Raven saw that when she danced fast the whale swam fast and when she danced slowly the whale swam slowly.’

  Ruby’s oral voice was quiet and hesitant but clear. Yasmin thought that she’d been waiting for this moment for years, but Ruby had been using her voice since she first learned to sign, only Yasmin hadn’t been listening.

  ‘Raven forgot the girl couldn’t leave the whale and he picked her up and flew her outside.’

  I don’t like doing this at all; making my mouth into shapes and doing special teeny movements with my tongue and teeth and lips and hoping the right noises are coming out as words. But it’s the only way of talking in the dark. Mum is holding my hand tightly and that’s one good thing about mouth-talking, we can hold hands at the same time. But I can’t hear anything Mum says back to me, maybe that’s why she’s holding my hand.

  I’ve been practising with Voice Magic and Dragon Dictate. I say something and I look at what gets typed and then I keep on trying. I use a mirror too, like my speech therapist tells me to, and put my hand on my throat to feel the vibrations and in front of my mouth to feel the little puffs of air. Some days my typed words stay gobbledygook. But some days it gets better. It was nice and private and I could do it when I wanted to and no one else was there to hear me make mistakes. Or to hear me do well. I want my mouth-voice to just be something I choose to do. I hope Mum can understand the story.

  ‘As Raven flew with the beautiful girl into the sky all the strings snapped,’ I say with my mouth-voice. ‘In the sea the whale got stiller and stiller.’

  Yasmin heard Ruby’s courage as she spoke and thought that her oral voice, if and when she chose to use it, was something beautiful and rare.

  ‘The whale died and the girl in Raven’s arms got smaller and smaller until she disappeared,’ Ruby said. ‘And then Raven knew that everything that is alive has a heart and a soul.’

  Ruby finished speaking and the silence sounded so loud to Yasmin that it jolted her.

  She strained to listen, but the snow absorbed any sounds into itself. She looked out into the darkness and it had absorbed all light and colour. They couldn’t go further forwards because the man who’d sent the emails was in front of them. They couldn’t turn and walk away because they risked coming within range of the tanker driver’s bullets. She and Ruby were trapped within these fearful boundaries, and beyond them were the impassable confines of the Brooks mountains and the Arctic Ocean: box within box.

  As long as she was on her way to find him, she could believe Matt was alive; she could outrun the facts. But now they confronted her, as if they’d pursued her from Lieutenant Reeve’s office in Fairbanks, and here in the icy wilderness surrounded her.

  Matt had told her the truth about his wedding ring and the animals, yes, and therefore about Corazon too, but that didn’t mean he was alive.

  Her loving him didn’t mean he was alive.

  She could no longer move any closer towards him and neither could she run from her fear.

  She felt her stasis shadowed by the frozen immobility of the treeless tundra; a forced stillness within a vaster stillness.

  Above her the stars were unreachable light years away.

  In the darkness and silence, she finally had to face the truth.

  He was dead.

  He had died on Monday afternoon while she and Ruby were still in London.

  She screamed her grief, fracturing the silence, and surely Ruby could feel it against her skin, this monstrous sound.

  She heard her name coming back towards her in the darkness.

  She knew it couldn’t be true.

  Matt called her name again.

  Chapter 20

  Mum’s running and she’s holding my hand and I’m having to run super-fast to keep up with her, but it’s icy and slippery so she’s kind of holding me up too. In her other hand she’s holding Mr Azizi’s torch and its light jiggles as we run.

  There’s a light shining towards us. I’m frightened it’s the man who killed the animals. It’s getting bigger quickly; he must be running too and he’s getting closer.

  Someone is shining a torch into my face and I can’t see anything. He’s pulling me towards him and he puts his arms around me and I feel a warm cushion of air inside his furry hood and I see his face. I hurl myself against him; like I can disappear myself inside him.

  Daddy’s holding me tightly and he’s looking at Mum.

  ‘How are you here?’ he says to her. ‘How is it possible that you are here?’

  * * *

  Yasmin needed to touch him to believe him alive. He went towards her, holding Ruby’s hand, she pulled down her face mask, wanting his skin against hers. She put her face to his and kissed him and felt his warmth, tasted his breath and his lips and smelt his body and wanted the taste and smell to be strong, so that every sense in her could believe that she had found him.

  She thought this land of darkness and ice had been her Hades, fraught with danger, and it had been like a pact – if she overcame her terror, risked everything she had, then she would be able to bring him back from the dead. She put her arms around him as he kissed her, holding onto him as if he might be taken from her.

  Matt looked at her face and saw the cost of her reaching him – her skin raw and bleeding, exhaustion in the shadows under her eyes; so glorious and impossib
ly brave. He took off his glove and as he traced her cheek he allowed himself to believe that she was here with him and that he could hold her again.

  He felt Ruby move closer to the two of them. He needed to get them to warmth.

  Mum and Dad are looking at each other like the other one is a magic trick, but a lot better; like each other’s face is a beautiful awesome-sauce miracle.

  Happiness is like a huge balloon inside me. If I went outside everything would jump into bright colours; there’s no way it could stay dark and cold. But I don’t want to go outside, I want to stay right here with Dad and Mum.

  Dad’s aputiak is the cosiest place you can ever imagine. Mum and Dad and me are all inside and there’s a qulliq, which makes it light and warm. There’s quite a long tunnel as the entrance with a caribou skin as a flap-door and a little hole in the roof for the smoke from the qulliq.

  Mum wants me to get into my sleeping bag, which she took from Mr Azizi’s cab. I feel warm already, but she says ‘just in case’. There’s loads of room to stretch out. Daddy said he built it for the huskies too, so he could keep an eye on them, but I think they must be outside cooling off. Huskies get too hot even when it’s freezing cold. Dad says his supplies ran out yesterday and the qulliq will only burn for a few more hours, which I think is Mum’s just in case. There’s a bonfire outside, near our aputiak, but Dad says it will be out in an hour or so. He looks really worried when he says that, but I’m not worried at all. Not any more.

  Dad’s got a beard, all frozen up, and the ice on it is melting because of the qulliq. He said he saw our red flare and ran to find who it was, he never thought it was us, and then he heard Mum.

  Dad doesn’t understand how we got here and Mum’s all shaky and teary, so I tell him how we got a lift in a truck and then about Mr Azizi getting ill, so Mum drove it herself. ‘Across northern Alaska?’ Dad asks, like he can’t believe it. And I say yes, and I can see how proud he is of her – the Superb Mum!

  ‘You were out in the big storm?’ he asks me and I nod.

  ‘You must have been frightened,’ he says.

  ‘I was cold.’

  ‘I bet you were.’

  ‘Mum and I danced to keep warm.’

  I tell him about the tanker man too, but I say we don’t need to worry about him any more because he stopped chasing us when our lorry went through the ice.

  As I talk to him, he takes Mum’s hand and I think it’s to make sure she’s really OK and she’s really here.

  ‘You sent us the emails, didn’t you?’ I say to Dad.

  ‘Yes. But I never thought . . .’ His fingers stop moving, like he doesn’t know what to say. ‘I thought you were safe in Fairbanks or were back in London. I never dreamed . . .’

  His fingers don’t have the words again, and he looks so tired and hurt. I didn’t see that before. The balloon was too big. But his lips are all cracked and bleeding.

  ‘Did everybody die?’ Mum asks him.

  ‘Yes.’

  He means the whole village; all his friends; the old lady who was going to teach me Inupiaq signs. Everyone. But Daddy didn’t die.

  ‘Corazon?’ Mum asks, and she looks so sad.

  He nods and they speak with their eyes to each other and I think it’s a language that no one else could ever understand.

  His hands move, slowly, like the words sting.

  ‘And Kaiyuk, her twin; everyone. I should have been there.’

  He starts to say something, but then he stops and my bracelet is vibrating. There’s a light shining from outside and the snow walls of our aputiak turn pale icy gold. Mum and Dad are putting on their goggles and hurrying out and I wriggle out of the sleeping bag and go after them.

  I’m blown right over, like there’s a whirlwind sucking the air out from underneath me, and there’s a glare so bright it’s like looking at the sun and a noise is rattling my teeth.

  The bright light snaps off and the jangling stops. I blink a few times because I’m still blinded and then the darkness comes back. Mum is shining a torch and I can see there’s a helicopter on the snow, it looks like a giant black dragonfly with its wings getting slower until they are still. There’s writing on the side: ‘Alaska State Troopers’. A man is getting out; his face is covered in a black rubber mask and goggles and he looks like an insect too. He’s got a badge on his sleeve with ‘State Trooper Alaska’. He turns to close the door behind him, and he must whack it shut because my bracelet vibrates again. Now he’s coming towards us.

  Captain Grayling saw the group on the snow, the parents and the little girl; a family out here in the middle of the thirty below wilderness; relief punched him almost over.

  ‘Oh thank God, thank God. You’re all right? Your little girl, she’s all right too?’

  ‘Yes,’ Yasmin Alfredson said.

  He bent down on the snow to be at the little girl’s height, and she backed away from him. He pulled down his face mask. ‘I’m sorry, scary mask.’

  But she still didn’t go near him and he felt his culpability. He was the reason that she and her mother had ventured into the arctic wilderness. He hadn’t protected them. No wonder the little girl wanted nothing to do with him and he admired her spirit.

  He took hold of Matthew Alfredson’s arm, more of an embrace than a handshake.

  ‘How do you apologise to a man for thinking he’s dead?’

  Captain Grayling was older than Yasmin had imagined, his face finer and more careworn. He came with them into the aputiak, crawling through the tunnel entrance.

  ‘Did you see the tanker?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. The driver’s in the chopper. Turns out he’s not so great at reversing.’

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘He’s not saying anything at the moment, but I’ll get the truth out of him.’

  He paused a moment and Yasmin saw guilt in his face.

  ‘I started searching for you the moment I knew you were on the Dalton,’ he said. ‘But the storm hit and I couldn’t control the chopper. I started looking again as soon as the winds dropped enough to fly. I scoured every mile of the Dalton south of the Atigun Pass and there was nothing. So I headed north.’

  She guessed he’d believed the tanker driver’s location and looking for them on the tundra had been a last ditch effort motivated more by hope than a realistic expectation.

  ‘The storm had eased, visibility was much better,’ he continued. ‘Then I saw your flare so I followed it. I found the tanker. Then came on to find you. The wind during the storm and the ice have damaged a blade. Made it here, but it’s not safe to fly out again. I’ve radioed for help to come and get us all.’

  ‘How long till they get here?’ Matt asked.

  ‘An hour, maybe a little more. It’s a trek even by chopper.’

  Captain Grayling saw Yasmin Alfredson signing to the little girl, and only then realised that she was deaf. The child’s utter vulnerability shocked him.

  ‘You’re angry with me, right?’ he said to the child. ‘I’m angry with me too.’

  Yasmin translated his words into sign, but she didn’t soften.

  ‘I should have believed your mother,’ he said to her. ‘It’s my fault you went on such a frightening journey. I should have looked for your dad myself.’

  Yasmin translated and this time the little girl nodded, her body no longer so pointedly removed from him. She said something to her mother.

  ‘Do you know if Adeeb Azizi is all right?’ Yasmin asked.

  He nodded, smiling, and made the sign for ‘OK’, the only sign he knew.

  ‘I did search for you,’ he said to Matt. ‘Flew over the whole area around Anaktue, God knows how many times, checking and rechecking.’

  ‘When was that?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Monday afternoon and into the night.’

  ‘I was over thirty miles away by then,’ Matt said.

  Dad’s talking with his mouth-voice for the state trooper and sign-voice for me. He does that when he’s with me
and someone who can’t sign; it’s a really hard thing to do because in sign language the grammar’s different and you need to use your face too. And Daddy looks so tired.

  ‘I left Anaktue twice,’ he says. ‘The first time was last Wednesday. That’s a week ago, isn’t it?’

  Captain Grayling nods, but I don’t know what day it is today; it feels like we’ve been driving for one long night, because of night swallowing up the days.

  Yasmin had so many questions for Matt, but knew she needed to listen to his story of the last few days, the details and facets of it, as he would need to listen to hers; because they were days that broke you down and made you again, differently to how you were before.

  ‘You said you left Anaktue a week ago?’ Captain Grayling said.

  Chapter 21

  Matt had woken early that morning, a sleepless night spent on a camp bed, a journey ahead of him. Corazon was in her bedroom asleep, but her twin Kaiyuk was already up tending to his huskies. Matt heard their barks across the stillness of the early morning and Kaiyuk’s voice as he fed them. He and Kaiyuk had talked long into the night and Matt guessed he’d decided not to go to bed at all.

  Pulling on his atikluk over his atigi parka, he went outside and was disorientated as he was every morning by the stars and moon still being in the sky, as if they hadn’t got the hint. The blast of cold air wiped sleep away from him.

  He walked past the cluster of wooden houses and cabins, the buzzing from the generator building, towards the kennels. From here you could see that two of the wooden houses were tilted, their foundations built into the permafrost, which in the last few years had started to thaw.

  Kaiyuk already had the dogs harnessed up for him in a gangline, each dog attached by a separate tug line. This would only be Matt’s second time out alone with a husky team and for longer than before. Kaiyuk gave him some last-minute advice about the musher being the leader of the pack, and to make sure the dogs always knew that. Then he’d given Matt a crescent-shaped lamp carved from stone; his own qulliq. ‘If you’re going native . . .’ he said to Matt, grinning at him. Then the two men had embraced and Matt felt the solidity of their friendship. He hadn’t woken up anyone else to say goodbye before his trip, it hadn’t seemed necessary.