The Quality of Silence (12 page)

She smiled and he was glad. But he wondered if that was why northern Alaska felt hostile to him. It wasn’t just the unholy cold and bleakness and darkness, this place was a frontier where people didn’t circle their wagons but their spy satellites. The Governor had spoken about eco-terrorists, though Adeeb knew that the man who shot the pipeline was a regular drunken criminal, nothing more. But they were afraid of the usual type of terrorist attack too, by people who probably looked a lot like him. He’d heard there were plans to set up checkpoints along the Dalton Highway and a special anti-terrorist task force, to safeguard one of America’s most valuable infrastructures. What would they make of him, an Afghan refugee, at one of their checkpoints? The only thing he’d ever blown up was a balloon, but would they trust him on that? He’d already learned not to go out and about with a backpack or wearing a puffy jacket.

‘Do you know why the pipe’s really high like that?’ Ruby asked him on her machine. Running along next to them, the pipeline was raised high up on stilts. He saw her smile and knew she was enjoying the role of quizmaster with the answer in her pocket; his boys were the same.

‘No, I don’t. Do you?’

‘It’s so caribou can go underneath,’ she said, ‘when they migrate, so they can

use the same path they always have for thousands of years.’

No spy satellites or checkpoints for caribou, Adeeb thought.

‘But Dad says that fracking can make some birds migrate the wrong way and they get lost. No one knows really why that happens yet.’

‘That’s very sad.’

‘Yes.’

She stared out of the window, her huge green eyes just visible from the little light in the cab; as if she was entranced.

‘It’s amazing out there, isn’t it?’ she said.

If he hadn’t seen her eyes he would have thought she was joking.

‘Truthfully, I’m not that keen on it,’ he said. If it were up to him he’d give it back to the Russians for nothing.

‘There aren’t enough colours for me here,’ he continued. ‘You know when I was listening to Chopin earlier?’

‘Yes.’

‘It helps me to imagine I’m somewhere else.’

‘With blossom?’

‘Yes. And other places too.’ He’d been training himself to find beautiful images in his new home of Oregon. ‘On sunny days we go to the park and there are oak trees, not like the short little trees out here, but giants. When the sun goes down in the summer the top leaves go from green to yellow, like they’re turning to gold.’

Mum said I can’t tell Mr Azizi where we really want to go. She promised me she’d tell him herself, soon. So I’ll tell him about my trees, as he’s told me about his.

‘In the summer,’ I say on Voice Magic, ‘it’s still light outside when I go to bed. There’s these trees outside my window. I don’t know what kind, but they’re really high and their branches touch each other. You can’t see their trunks and you can’t see their tops, just the middles. All these branches are covered with leaves. Sometimes I imagine it’s not air between their branches but water and I’m swimming through them, twisting and sliding through sunny passages of leaves.’

I’ve never told anyone about tree-swimming before, but he told me about his oak trees and I think it might be the same kind of feeling. And it’s nice to think of them, our summery green trees, because it’s really weird being in darkness all the time.

There’s new words on my screen: ‘What is your favourite music?’

No one has EVER asked me that question. Like it would be the stupidest question in the world. Maybe he means drum music, or the glockenspiel.

‘Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto,’ I say. ‘Brahms and the Beatles.’

Voice Magic recognises the names because I’ve said them before, but just to me not anyone else.

Mr Azizi nods. Like he’s not one bit surprised.

‘How about getting some sleep?’ he asks me. ‘You look tired out.’

I really, really want to go to sleep. Like sleep is right behind me about to kidnap me by putting a big heavy blanket over my head and dragging me off.

‘I’ll take care of your mum for you,’ he says; so I nod and close my eyes, but I’m too jumpy to sleep, even though I’m being kidnapped with a heavy blanket. So I think of Brahms’ first symphony because sometimes it helps.

Mrs Branebury, the teacher who organised the harp concert, got me into him. We had a lesson just the two of us last term. She said she’d been learning some very basic sign language, so I didn’t need to have a special assistant with me, which I really like as it’s funny having two grown-ups to only one of me. Mrs Branebury must have worked really hard at her signing. She wrote lots of things down, but she did a lot of signing too.

She said she could tell I didn’t really like percussion instruments and that air-glockenspiel was (and she wrote this bit) ‘
entertaining but not a good long-term musical option
’. And then she told me that music isn’t all about rhythm, in case I was worried about that? Which I was. She said it was about cadence and melody and harmonies and high notes and low ones. She said there were pictures and stories in the music and that everyone could imagine their own. She said she’d give me her picture story about Brahms’s first symphony and then I could see if I’d like to give mine. She said it’s a majestic piece of music so she sees mountains with lots of thunder and lightning going on, beautiful and awe-inspiring. Did I want to have a go?

I said I’d choose a battleship in a storm, not mountains, because I think a battleship is more exciting. And she signed, ‘Thank you, Ruby, from now on that’s how I’ll see it too.’

Mum sometimes says ‘big as a battleship’. I don’t know anyone else who says that.

So I’m thinking of Brahms’s first symphony and I see that big battleship, grey and powerful, pushing through giant waves, and above are all these dark clouds, those ones that look like they’re an army, mustering all their forces on the edge of the sky. I have a few seagulls too, doing that thing that seagulls do, kind of chasing after the ship, then dashing up into the sky. And the seagulls are the high notes, the ones a reed instrument makes, because birds sometimes live among reeds.

When we were still friends, I asked Jimmy what his favourite piece of music was, apart from pop, because he’s really musical and is learning the piano and the cello too; and he said Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. He told me it sounded like catching the wind with silver lassos. And I think he must have loved me to tell me that.

Chapter 8

Snow had drifted along the sides of the road, narrowing it to a single lane. Yasmin felt the darkness closing around them. Twice she’d almost fallen asleep but had forced herself back into consciousness again.

She’d heard Adeeb asking Ruby about music and she’d flinched, thinking it was insensitive. But Ruby had answered his question, on that awful machine, and Yasmin had felt the wind knocked out of her. Ruby was asleep now, so she couldn’t ask her how she knew about this music.

Ruby hadn’t let anyone hear her speak for two years now; point blank refused to talk at all. Yasmin had tried everything and was constantly on her case, which she hated doing, and was furious that Matt took the easy soft option of ‘just let her be’. Speech therapist after speech therapist had drawn the same silent blank. One of them had encouraged Ruby to sign up to Twitter, and every time she tweeted Yasmin felt sadness pinch her that she was talking to strangers. If only she could speak with her mouth, Yasmin was sure she’d have friends.

When Ruby’s hands had made the shape of wings for an angel it had moved her. Driving through this dark night, she’d thought about the sign for dawn – a circle made between your thumb and finger coming up from your arm as the horizon.

She’d remembered vividly Ruby’s excitement after an English lesson on her gifted and talented programme.

‘We learned about onomatopoeia!’
Ruby had said, the moment Yasmin met her at the school gates. Yasmin hadn’t understood why words that sound-like-the-thing-they-describe had lit up her face.

‘
Sign language is onomatopoeia all the time, Mum. Visual onomatopoeia!
’

Yasmin had been struck by the truth of it.

But most of the world, almost everyone, didn’t know sign language, so however beautiful and visually onomatopoeic the sign for ‘angel’, Ruby must learn to say it with the roof of her mouth and her tongue and her lips.

It wasn’t that Yasmin wanted Ruby to speak so much as she wanted her to be

heard.

‘Are you all right?’ Adeeb said to her quietly, knowing she was awake.

Even though he needed to be concentrating on driving she felt there was something deliberate in him looking so determinedly ahead and not at her.

‘Your husband, he was at Anaktue?’

His voice was kind and she felt the tension of her lies.‘Yes,’ she said.

‘The wildlife film-maker?’ Adeeb asked.

Ruby’s gadget was still on, Adeeb’s words coming up as type. Yasmin closed the laptop.

‘He isn’t dead.’

Adeeb heard the frightened vehemence in her voice.

‘But no one’s looking for him,’ she continued. ‘Everything has burned down so he doesn’t have any shelter, at best a tent but maybe not even that and he might be hurt. It’s twenty-two below freezing here, much colder where he is, and I don’t know how long he can survive.’

Adeeb didn’t know the right thing to say or do. The police had said on the radio that the wildlife film-maker was dead.

‘The police—’ he began.

‘They’re wrong,’ she interrupted. ‘Will you take us with you to Deadhorse? Then we can get a plane to Anaktue.’

Deadhorse was over three hundred miles away.

‘The road gets more dangerous the further north you go,’ he said. ‘After the cafeteria place, which we’ll get to soon
,
there’s nothing else for sixty miles until you get to Coldfoot. There’s a tiny village called Wiseman eight miles later, but it’s three miles off the Dalton and the road’s been closed for weeks. Then it’s two hundred and fifty miles of nothing, worse than nothing. There’s no hospitals or any kind of medical aid or help. If we break down, if the storm comes early, there’s no one to call for help because no one can get to you.’

‘We love him.’

* * *

Yasmin saw Adeeb look across at Ruby who was sleeping.

‘She and her father, they have this closeness. I can’t explain it properly. She’d be lost without him.’

Adeeb nodded and she wondered if he also knew the pain a child feels when a beloved parent dies; the terror of it; shock waves rippling out and out and there’s no circumference to contain them.

‘I wish I hadn’t had to bring her,’ she said. ‘That I didn’t need to be doing this, but I have no other choice.’

Adeeb admired her hugely – her determination and her love for her husband and her courage. And she was fiercely loving and protective of her child, he could see that. He knew that she wasn’t undertaking this journey lightly. But still.

‘If it was your wife out there . . .’ she said. ‘What would you do?’

And everything was clear. Because, yes, he’d get a lift with a stranger, however dangerous the road, his boys with him if they had to be, and he wouldn’t stop till he reached her. Nothing would persuade him otherwise.

The forecast storm wasn’t due to hit till after they’d reach Deadhorse. The headache that had been bothering him hadn’t got any worse and was caused by the worry he always felt when he was driving this road. He was one of the most experienced drivers, probably the most cautious because he had his own rig to look after, as well as being a natural neurotic. If anyone could get them there safely he could.

‘I’ll get the next weather update,’ he said. ‘If we can definitely get to Deadhorse before the storm then I’ll take you.’

‘Thank you.’

He smiled at her. ‘My mother would have loved to have met you,’ he said.

What would she have made of a woman who’d studied astrophysics? Who’d travel with her child across northern Alaska in winter out of love for her husband? She’d have thrown up her hands into the air, bangles jangling, her eyes widening, her whole being taken up with being amazed.

She had died three months before they left Afghanistan and came to the USA to seek asylum. His mother would have thought seeking asylum made him sound like a lunatic in one of her Dickens novels. And that was pretty much how he’d been treated, when people weren’t afraid he was going to blow them up. His mother wouldn’t have imagined that.

We’ve stopped and the bright light’s on
.
I quickly open up Voice Magic. Mum is showing Mr Azizi the map and they’re talking about Anaktue. So Mum has told him and Mr Azizi has said yes! I knew he would! And Mum looks different now.

Mum says there’s a river and in a hundred and seventy miles it loops near to this road. She traces the river with her finger. ‘And then it goes north for about thirty-five miles all the way to Anaktue.’ Her finger touches Anaktue lightly, like it’s precious. Mr Azizi says someone needs to have built a road that joins the river to the Dalton. And the river-road we passed was for a mining company so they’d have checked it was safe. It would be too risky for us to use a river-road that no one had checked. And he keeps on saying ‘we’ and ‘us’ so I keep feeling happy because even though we can’t drive on the river, he’ll still help us to get to Dad. He says we’ll stop at the cafeteria and get some extra food and water.