The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

  ‘You wouldn’t be beholden.’

  Jack had hurried up to them and Silesian let go of her arm.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked her and she nodded. Jack turned to Silesian. ‘Leave this lady and her daughter alone, you got that?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Yasmin said to Jack. She turned to Ruby. ‘OK?’ Ruby nodded and they carried on pulling their cases towards the exit of the airport.

  Jack was physically barring Silesian from following them and Yasmin was grateful to him.

  She wished that she had left Ruby at home in England, but since Matt’s parents had died she hadn’t trusted anyone to look after her and Ruby was fearful of being away from home. Few people could talk to Ruby or understand her and there could be unintentional cruelties, like turning out her nightlight so Ruby wouldn’t know if they said something to her as they left her room, those final goodnights that she needed. So how could she leave her here, in this city on the other side of the world from home, with strangers, and that disturbing man nearby?

  We’re next to the big doors of the airport. Each time a person comes in the doors slide open and cold dashes inside too and it makes my face hurt. I’m worried the blond man will come after us. Mum must know because she says, ‘He’s just a slimeball and we don’t need to worry about slimeballs.’

  I showed her the sign for ‘slimeball’ ages ago. I made it up and it’s a bit gross, you put your finger in your nose. It’s the first time Mum’s done it. I know she wants to make me smile, so I do but I don’t feel smiley.

  ‘I really don’t want to stay in a hotel with a sitter,’ I say. Mum nods, like she understands. I think she’s a little bit worried about the slimeball man too. Like he might come and find me. She doesn’t say anything for quite a long time. Four lots of people with trolleys of cases come through the doors and each time a jet of cold air blasts in with them.

  Mum says that she’s come up with two scenarios, and she finger-spells scenarios. I can tell we’re a proper team now. Our scenarios are:

  one) Dad got out of the village and went to get help, but he wasn’t able to find any and when he got back all the policemen had gone home again.

  two) he was away filming and took longer than he meant, and when he got back to Anaktue, it was terrible because it had burned down and all the police had left.

  In both scenario one and scenario two he‘s at Anaktue waiting for us and now we just have to get to him.

  I’m super-happy about the ‘we’ because I know for definite now that she’s not going to leave me behind.

  Mum says if it’s scenario two, Dad might have been using huskies and a sled and I hope that he was, because he’ll have huskies to stop him being lonely. He’s told me all about them. One of them is called Pamiuqilavuq, which means ‘Wags-his-tail’; and I think he must be a lot like Bosley; I hope Dad has Wags-his-tail with him.

  We’re at the place where you get a taxi now. I thought we were going to get a taxi all the way to Dad but Mum said we can’t do that because cars can’t drive across Alaska in winter. Mum’s on her phone, so there must be 3G here, and I think she’s sorting out our plan.

  In northern Alaska, Captain Grayling hung up the office telephone, ending his conversation with Yasmin Alfredson. The poor woman had phoned them on her mobile, near Fairbanks Airport he thought, from the sounds of it. She’d come up with scenarios, creating stories for herself in which her husband was alive. Then she’d demanded they search again. He’d recognised what she was doing because he’d done the same when they’d told him about Timothy – refused to accept it because acceptance was impossible to bear. Denial was a melting ice floe but you clung on to it anyway. He’d needed to spell it out to her, force her into the drowning ocean; tell her that there were twenty-four bodies and twenty-three villagers, her husband’s phone and wedding ring had been found at the scene of the fire, the long and thorough search had found no survivors – because there were no survivors. She had become silent on the phone, and then hung up. He hoped that she could get a flight home quickly and that her relatives and friends in England would look after her.

  It was up to her to find Matt, she knew that now. Just her.

  A long-repressed memory surfacing with the smell of whiskey and unwashed clothes; the shadowed damp grass of the cemetery cold through the thin soles of her shoes. She was twelve, visiting Mum’s grave. Wanting to press a switch and make it light outside. Her father taking a bottle out of his coat pocket and drinking it, right there, right by her headstone. They were shutting up the cemetery car park by the time she got him to the car.

  She got into the driver’s seat. Dad too drunk to even notice.

  The Elephant and Castle roundabout, three lanes of traffic, too much of it, too fast, too noisy; beaten-up cars like theirs, vying for space and not letting her turn, shouting their horns at her. She’d watched Dad drive all those trips to and from the hospital, watching how he drove so she wouldn’t think about what was happening to Mum. Along the Old Kent Road, high-rise council flats crowding around her, graffiti, half standing to reach the pedals. Stalling. Cars honking at her. A man peeing on the pavement. Traffic lights turning red. Crying with fear, shaking with it, but getting them home.

  She’d tried to forget and had been too ashamed to tell anyone, even Matt. But it had been up to her and she had got him home.

  She put her arm around Ruby against the vulturine cold. By Fairbanks Airport, sharply-bright lights lined the pavements and roads; softer lights from buildings shone out. Tomorrow there would be a morning with daylight. In the remains of Ankatue there would be no lights at all; and that far north there would be no morning but a polar night for another two months. Matt would be in darkness until they reached him.

  Chapter 4

  Mum said we’ll get a lift in a lorry to Dad and now we’re in this place with DREADNAUTUS MEGATRON trucks. I bet in the night they all transform into huge thinking robots. There are tankers, which are as long as our whole road in London. Jimmy would think this place is AWESOME SAUCE! (My friend. Used to be friend. We had our favourite words for things.)

  Mum says that nearly all the trucks are going to the oil wells at Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse is just before it, so they’ll go there on the way.

  The first two places we went, Mum asked the receptionist if one of their drivers could take us with them to Deadhorse. NO! Taking passengers is AGAINST THE RULES! You have to imagine that bit in red to match the expressions on their faces. Like they were also saying, ‘You are so DIM to be even asking this question.’ Then she talked to a few drivers, and they said the same thing, but instead of the underlining-in-red expression they smiled at her and took ages to say it. She’s been offering the money Grandpa left Dad and her, but it doesn’t do any good. I think she should tell the drivers how good she is at physics. She doesn’t tell people usually but if they knew that about her they’d see that she would be useful if their truck broke down. But she just gives them one of my cards. We’ve hardly got any left.

  We’re off to the repair shop now. She says a driver with a truck needing repairs will need our money more and take us with him, even if it is breaking the rules.

  Inside the repair shop was the smell of diesel, flashes of sparking welding tools, grime and oil engrained in the ridged concrete floor. Pop music was playing. Like the company calendar on the reception desks, the music made the place feel like it could be anywhere at all. Only the seeping cold reminded you it was Alaska.

  As she dragged their cases across the ridged concrete with every man in the place staring at her, Yasmin remembered that people had once found her daringly independent; they’d admired her for being so self-sufficient and so strongly her own person. But since Year Four of primary school there hadn’t been a choice.

  Lots of kids didn’t have a father at home, but everyone had a mother; a centrifugal presence, flinging Yasmin to the edge where she was different and apart. She’d watch, giddy with longing, as other people’s mothers waited at the school gates
, their snacks and hugs ready, while she walked home to a silent empty flat, or music blaring out as if she belonged to a family of teenagers. That was glossing it kindly. Russell in prison by nineteen, Davey permanently excluded, Dad’s brain mashed by booze and grief. Every morning she came downstairs to the smell of last night’s food not yet in the bin, the remains hardened onto the plates. She’d wash up then make herself breakfast. She’d longed to find a breakfast table already laid because that would mean homework checked and clothes that were clean and a story before bed. The girls who wanted a glass slipper and a prince’s kiss to wake them up clearly had school shoes that fitted and a mother kissing them goodnight and didn’t have a clue.

  Until Matt, for all those years, she had felt weightless with loneliness.

  Two drivers at the repair shop had now turned her down; their vehicles belonged to the haulage company and they didn’t have to pay for repairs. They were like the other beer-gut-thrusting, combat-wages-earning drivers, keen to say no but keener still to first have a woman audience for their machismo as if they were rocketing off for intergalactic warfare rather than driving a road. Now a third driver was turning her down. As she listened, knowing it was pointless, but unable to abort the effort until it was confirmed, a young man slid out from under a lorry on a kind of low go-kart.

  ‘You’re the second person bin askin’ for a lift.’

  With Deadhorse Airport out of action, she supposed that other people would be resorting to hitching lifts too. Though the workers at the airport had seemed happy enough to be getting a few more days in Fairbanks.

  ‘Try Adeeb Azizi,’ the young man said. ‘Over there. Owns his own rig.’

  Adeeb didn’t usually smoke, but there were times when the carcinogens were worth it for the nicotine hit. One rocky bump, an oil pan torn open, and a seven hundred dollar bill. His insurance only paid out in the event of a write-off. He’d hoped there were only six more runs for him to do to Deadhorse this winter, now there’d have to be another. It was a cliché, wasn’t it, the dad saving for his kids’ college fees so that they could leave him far behind? He wanted to be left behind. He wanted to see his sons disappearing over the horizon with not even a puff of exhaust from their hybrid cars as they entered a better world than his. What was it they said? First generation corner shop owner (or in his case trucker – better wages, more dangerous), second generation banker, third generation poet? His grandchildren could be poets. A wonderful thought. The problem was that his boys would soon be teenagers and, at only forty-five, high blood pressure was giving him an old man’s risk of a stroke. Clocks were ticking everywhere he turned. Seven hundred dollars.

  He saw a graceful slender woman and a child coming towards him. She seemed composed, but was surely aware of every mechanic and trucker staring at her. Halfway across the floor she bent down, so her face was level with the little girl, and said something to her. The little girl moved her hands in reply. Then they came closer and he saw that the graceful woman was afraid but combative, as if daring you to notice. He sensed that she wasn’t afraid of the men, but of something larger.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked her.

  ‘I need to get to the Arctic Circle with my daughter; to see the Northern Lights. We are with a tour party, but we missed them. They’ll wait for us at the visitors’ centre there.’

  Was there a visitors’ centre? Yasmin wondered. Surely there must be. Must be some kind of tourist thing. And even if tour parties didn’t go in midwinter, maybe this driver didn’t know that. And, once they got that far, she’d somehow persuade him to let them carry on with him.

  Adeeb thought that this anxious woman was a terrible liar. But he wanted to help her. His older boy said he had a thing for ‘maidens in distress’. ‘Damsels,’ his wife Visha had corrected. ‘They’re called damsels, I believe,’ and she had smiled at him.

  ‘There isn’t a visitors’ centre at the Arctic Circle,’ he said. ‘But there’s a truck stop with a cafeteria shortly before it. I think that’s the place you must mean?’

  ‘That must be it, yes,’ she said. ‘So will you take us, just to the Arctic Circle? It’s what, a hundred miles?’

  But knights didn’t generally worry if their medication was still correct and the cost of a doctor to find out.

  ‘I’ve been unwell,’ he said. ‘If something happens to me on the road, well . . .’

  ‘Someone would stop, surely, and help?’ she said, cutting right to it. What was it that made her so desperate to get a lift? Adeeb wondered. And yes, someone would stop and help. The camaraderie of the road had never included him, not in the usual run of things, but a driver would always help another trucker in distress, even him, and he’d have a woman and child with him. Someone would take them back to Fairbanks, should the worse happen. He looked at her again. They’d probably be queuing up.

  ‘Yes they would,’ he said.

  ‘So will you take us?’ she asked.

  He should turn her down. Alongside everything else, there was a possible storm forecast. But it was only a maybe and, even if it did hit, it wouldn’t be till he was well past the Arctic Circle. And he saw how scared she was and desperate and trying so hard not to show it.

  ‘I’ll give you four thousand pounds,’ she said.

  He’d have taken them without the money.

  ‘I’ll take you as far as that trucker stop, just before the Arctic Circle.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said and smiled at him, a womanly smile that brought Visha momentarily into this cold, oily place.

  Mum and me are in the cab of Mr Azizi’s truck. Jimmy would love this truck; he’d call it ‘Awesome Sauce!’ for definite. It’s all shiny red with silver exhaust pipes and a big long snub nose with a silvery grille mouth, like a shark showing its teeth. We’re really high, so we had to use steps up the side to get into it.

  Our load is a ready-made house for oil workers. Mr Azizi said we are like a tortoise with our house on our back, but hopefully faster. Or a speedy giant snail. He speaks very clearly and makes sure his face is pointing at me. Mum didn’t even have to explain. I think he must have a friend who lip-reads. Our house weighs tons, which is good Mr Azizi said, because if you’re heavy you stick to the road like glue. He put one hand on the other and mimed trying to pull them apart. He says pipes aren’t a good load because they swing around like you’re doing the Highland fling. And he mimed that too.

  Now he’s giving us his Grand Tour. There’s loads of switches and dials, like in an aeroplane. There’s a bed above our seats, Mr Azizi’s sleeping bag and our suitcases are on top of it. Mum and I have to squash up onto one seat, but it’s pretty big, so we fit. There’s only one seat belt though and Mum’s made me wear it. There’s a porta-potty. But we’ll have to stop somewhere. There’s no way José I’m using a potty. We’ve got a CB radio, which he says all the drivers use, because the road we’re going to go on gets quite narrow and there aren’t road lights so you have to let other drivers know where you are so you don’t bump into each other.

  Yasmin was glad they were with Adeeb, who was thoughtful and careful and would surely drive them safely. She studied the map he’d given her. He’d told her it was for trekkers in the summer not drivers in the winter, as there was just one main road from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, the Elliot Highway, which led onto the Dalton Highway. She found Anaktue marked on his map; over three hundred and fifty miles away from Fairbanks and thirty-five miles to the east of the Dalton Highway. She hoped there was a smaller road linking the Dalton Highway to Anaktue but there was nothing, not even a hiking trail; so no way of getting there by vehicle. They’d have to go to Deadhorse and get a taxi plane to Matt, as she’d first planned.

  OMG! We have a satellite in the truck! Mr Azizi is linking my laptop up to it! I never ever say ‘OMG’, even though it’s really easy to finger-spell, because I don’t like words you have to do with a ! I look really dorky when I pull a ! face. Dad says it’s easier to do it with your voice, you just sound screechy when you say
‘OMG’, like teenage girls, who use it the most. When he says ‘screechy’, I say, ‘Like fingernails dragging across a blackboard?’ And he says, ‘Spot on.’ Even though I can’t hear the screechy sound, I get the general uggghness. But the satellite is OMG in a coolio not screechy way because now Dad can email me back, even when we’ve gone past mobile reception and Wi-Fi.

  Mr Azizi says that when we leave Fairbanks it’s going to be really dark. He shows me a little light I can use when Mum and me need to talk to each other, so we can see each other’s hands and lips.

  Did you know that the loudest bird in the world is called the superb lyrebird? Really! And I think some people – a very few – should have ‘superb’ as their name too: the Superb Mr Azizi!

  I want Mum to say thank you to him for me, but she would tell me to say it myself ‘USING YOUR WORDS, RUBY’ so I give Mr Azizi a ‘thank you’ smile, and he understands because he smiles back and gives a little ‘you’re welcome’ shrug.

  He’s getting out of the truck to give it one final check and then we’re going to set off. Mum watches him through the windscreen. She’s all tensed up like a greyhound; you know, at the start of a race? All their muscles tightened right up, ready to spring out and race at a hundred miles an hour after the pretend furry rabbit. I think she’s worried Mr Azizi will change his mind. But I’m sure he won’t. He has something settled about him, like he says something and he’ll do it. Mum’s like that too, but in a less calm way. You’d have to know her for ages to know that about her.

  * * *

  In the yard’s fiercely bright overhead lights, Adeeb saw a man walking around each truck, searching for something or someone. It was that man Silesian Stennet, not wearing a hat despite the cold, his blond hair glittering in the artificial glare. Silesian was carrying a crate, which Adeeb had seen him standing on so he could harangue truckers high up in their cabs. Silesian disturbed him, though he wasn’t sure why, and he felt bad about it because really he should admire the man, coming here as he regularly did, and standing on his almost literal soapbox, to warn tanker drivers carrying heaven-knows-what to and from the fracking wells. The drivers invariably just gave him a load of abuse for his pains. Like Adeeb, they found him disturbing, which is maybe why they ridiculed him.