The Quality of Silence (16 page)

We got to the top of Cairngorm and he showed me how to connect the laptop to the satellite terminal.

‘Then you turn it on,’ Dad said.

‘
Well, duh,’ I said and Dad said with technology you need to be pedantic; and Mum said the word ‘pedant’ comes from the Greek, meaning ‘the slave who escorts children to school’, and that it was no fun being a pedant so I shouldn’t be too hard on Dad. And they both laughed. And I could see how much they liked each other, just for a little bit, like best friends laughing at the same thing; like me and Jimmy and the word ‘tortoise’.

‘Did you know that a group of satellites is called a constellation?’ Mum said and I said ‘I love that!’ But Dad isn’t that interested in satellites. He says he’s just glad when ‘it does what it says on the tin’.

Dad had bought us all special arctic work gloves, which are meant for people who do tricky jobs in really cold places. He says mittens are warmer than gloves because your fingers are like ten little radiators, but you can’t sign in mittens. He wanted us to practise in the gloves like a dress rehearsal. We could sign in the special gloves, but we couldn’t type in them so we had to take them off.

He showed me how to upload a photo onto our blog page. He was really excited about it too. But Mum wasn’t smiling any more. She didn’t know about our blog. She’d thought he was just showing me his satellite terminal. She hadn’t been there at breakfast. I lip-read bits of what she was saying; there was a lot of ‘reals’ – ‘. . . real friends . . .’. And ‘. . . I don’t want a virtual world for our daughter but the real world,’ for another example. And she said something about being lonely and isolated, but I didn’t watch her mouth any more.

I was worried Dad would tell me we couldn’t do it, but he just kept showing me what to do. When you get a connection there’s a little picture of a satellite that flashes. In Scotland it only took a minute; Dad said there are so many satellites above Europe they’ll need to get traffic lights and lollypop ladies up there. But in space above Alaska there’s hardly any so when he saw the flashing satellite he’d have yelled ‘Hoorah!’, which he yells in American sign – fists beating once on your chest then going up in the air HOORAH – even though I wasn’t there, I know he yelled it in sign because he really likes that sign – then he put Mum’s email address, and his little box sent his photo up into space and then to us.

In Scotland I didn’t get how super-coolio a satellite terminal is, but it’s a wonder of the world. Because in this huge dark cold place, with no houses or wires or anything, Dad’s little box connects up to space and he’s sent us an email. It’s like that mollusc that was 507 years old and was alive at the same time as Henry VIII. A Tudor mollusc! Some things are just catch-your-breath amazing.

We’ve stopped in a pulling-over place because Mum has to clean the lights. She’s putting on her arctic clothes, which takes ages because there’s so many layers, and while she’s doing that I email Dad again: ‘Please tell us it’s you! PLEASE!!’ I just pressed reply, so it’ll go into Akiak’s inbox. Dad isn’t nosey so he might not even look at his friend’s inbox. He hasn’t got my other emails, because he’d have to log in to his own account, which is fiddly so he’d have to take his gloves off for ages and just have liners on and he might get frostbite. So he won’t do that. If he loses his fingers he won’t be able to talk to me.

I’m sure the photo is for Dad’s work, not our blog. But just in case I’ll upload it. I won’t publish anything yet, not till Dad’s here, it’s our blog
together
.

Mum was really upset by Dad’s photo. I shouldn’t have told her how weird it is. But I know lots of great things about musk oxes.

‘Musk oxes look fierce with their big horns,’ I tell her. ‘But they’re not at all, they’re gentle vegetarians. They’ve got long hair that looks like a beard—‘

‘Can you use your words, please, Ruby?’

I am! I am signing my words.

Yasmin waited and Ruby turned away from her, as she always did. But Yasmin wasn’t going to stop asking her. Her determination that Ruby would speak, that one day her daughter would be heard, was undiminished. She refused to be intimidated by an email. She was going to find Matt and he was going to be OK and Ruby was going to speak with her own voice and if the man who sent the email was watching them out there in the darkness then he would just have to watch her as she made that future happen.

Wearing all her arctic clothing, she put on the work gloves Matt had bought them all. Mittens wouldn’t give enough dexterity to grip the scraper. She got out of the cab, closing the door quickly to keep Ruby warm.

She took a breath and the freezing air went into her lungs and she felt them going into spasm. She gasped and more cold air went into her lungs and it was as if she was drowning.

She pulled her balaclava down over her mouth. She took a breath and this time the air warmed between the balaclava and her skin before she breathed it in and the air reached her lungs.

Breathing carefully, she started cleaning the huge tail lights with a scraper; the air from her exhaled breath, trapped within her face mask, froze against her skin.

Cold felt like it was a hunter and she was warm prey. Behind her the desolate winter landscape was reddened by the glow from the tail lights.

As she crouched, trying to scrape off the ice and dirt, she looked for the blue headlights, hoping to see them. There was no sign of them in the darkness.

She’d dismissed the idea that the driver and the man who’d sent the email were the same person because it wasn’t practically possible. Instead, she saw the blue lights driver as their protector because with him behind them the man calling himself Akiak wouldn’t risk an attack.

The cold was freezing her eyebrows and eyelashes, but it had also forced her awake and sharpened her thoughts.

If this man wanted to attack them why would he bother to first frighten her with an email?

Fear must be the point.

He wanted her to turn around.

Her thoughts were staccato, bullet-point thinking, as if in this sub-zero temperature mental processes, like physical ones, had to be done with the utmost economy.

Why would anyone want to prevent her from getting to Matt? He had no enemies or dark hinterland. He was a wildlife cameraman and the worst thing he’d ever done was kiss a woman who wasn’t his wife.

Maybe the man who’d sent the threatening email wanted to stop her from going to Anaktue, rather than to Matt, but it was hardly likely that she’d find something the police had missed.

The only thing that made sense was that Matt knew something, most likely about Anaktue, and this man didn’t want her to rescue him because then the secret, whatever it was, would get out.

The scraper fell onto the ground and she picked it up
.
She hadn’t done up the glove on her left hand securely and ice came inside the glove, burning like acid against her skin.

What could Matt have discovered?

Ever since the airport, when he hadn’t been there to meet them, she’d absorbed what everyone had said, seizing on anything as potentially vital. Now, as she cleaned the red tail lights encrusted with snow and ice and dirt, she thought back.

‘
All the hydraulic fracturing companies know where Anaktue is. They’ll have source rock samples and drilling data for Anaktue.
’

‘Anaktue is sitting on hundreds of thousands of barrels of shale oil.’

‘I met an Inupiaq guy, couple of months back, lived in Anaktue, but he’d bin workin’ at Soagil’s regular wells at Prudhoe? Said he’d be fired if his family didn’t sign.’

‘No longer going to pursue it out of respect to the villagers.’

‘Yeah right. And tourists come to Alaska for the sunshine.’

Their voices in different places and times threaded together into a common theme.

Surely to God the police would have found out if the fire was a murderous land grab. Surely they’d have discovered it was arson.

But now she was outside in this degree of cold, when it was a struggle simply to clean the truck’s lights, she realised how hard it would be to investigate a crime. She was working at the lights in minus twenty-eight, and the cold was predatory and remorseless. Arctic clothes protected her now but Anaktue, miles further north, would be colder still.

And the unutterable darkness. They’d have needed to work with artificial lights, positioning them, choosing what they lit and not knowing what they had left in the dark. What kind of conditions were those to get to the truth; when you didn’t suspect anything other than catastrophic human error?

She thought about Akiak. Perhaps the name wasn’t an alias but his true identity. He could have wanted to allow the fracking company to drill. The man in the cafeteria said they’d been offered a hundred thousand dollars.

The sub-zero temperature had welded dirt onto the tail lights, and she had to turn the scraper around and use the handle to chip at it, her knees aching from crouching, her left hand stinging with pain.

Could she convince the police that the fire was a land grab; that she thought Matt knew about it; that someone was trying to scare her off?

But it was just guesswork and conjecture and she had nothing to substantiate it. Again, she faced the risk that the police would simply prevent her from getting to him and they wouldn’t be convinced to go in her place. Now that she was out in this killing cold she was more afraid for him. Even if he had his emergency supplies with him, she didn’t know how long he could survive.

Ruby joined her outside. Yasmin was alarmed, but saw that Ruby was properly dressed, with all her arctic clothes, and that she’d remembered to pull her balaclava down over her mouth and her gloves were correctly fastened.

Light from the cab spilled down enough for them to see sign.

‘Did Dad say anything about an oil company wanting to frack Anaktue’s land?’ she asked.

Ruby nodded and Yasmin was startled.

‘They didn’t want them to,’ Ruby continued. ‘Corazon organised everybody.’ In the light from the cab Ruby finger-spelt ‘Corazon’.

Snowflakes started falling, twisting in the amber light
.

‘He told you about Corazon?’ Yasmin asked.

Ruby nodded. ‘She’s super-clever, Dad said.’

I can’t believe Mum and me are chatting out here in the freezing dark. It’s like we’re teeny people talking at the bottom of a deep freeze, with just a little yellow pilot light on, and the lid shut. But I know why. It’s because out here you think about the big things. And I think that this is big for Mum, because Corazon and her twin brother, Kaiyuk, are Dad’s best friends out here. A best friend is what stops you being lonely.

As we’re chatting at the bottom of a deep freeze, I want to tell her that I’m sad that she didn’t ask Dad about his friends, because when he was home she never really asked him anything about Anaktue or Corazon and Kaiyuk and I know he’d have been super-pleased if she had.

Mum signs to me that she has to turn the headlights off before she can clean them. They’re so bright that she wouldn’t be able to see afterwards. She tells me to get back in the cab, but I just pick up the torch that she’s left wedged in the snow and shine it so that she can see to get back into the cab, because the steps are covered in ice.

She turns the headlights off and you can’t see the road ahead any more and it’s like this little patch of light from the cab where I’m standing is all there is in the whole world.

I keep holding the torch so she can see her way back down again. She shakes her head because I didn’t do what she said and get in the truck, but I can tell that she’s smiling at me too, even though she’s got her face mask on.

I go with her to the front of the truck and hold the torch while she bends down and scrapes at the huge headlights.

It’s horrible having the balaclava pulled over my mouth because my breath turns damp inside it and then gets icy. Dad said that Inupiat parkas have big furry hoods so that the freezing air warms up before it gets to your nose and mouth, like there’s a warm cushion of air against your face, and when you breathe out your breath doesn’t freeze against your skin. Though he says it doesn’t work on snowmobiles because the cold air comes at you too quickly. He wears an Inupiaq parka with a big furry hood not one like mine from an outdoors shop.

I hope Dad’s with Corazon and Kaiyuk. He said he was friends with Kaiyuk first and then he met Corazon and it was like meeting a woman version of Kaiyuk. Dad wishes he has a twin sometimes, and asked me if I did. I said no, because truthfully one of me was probably enough for everybody and he laughed and said it absolutely wasn’t, but there could never be two of me.

Corazon and Kaiyuk know this old lady, I think she’s their great-great-aunt, and when she was young she helped stop the government test a nuclear bomb right by where her village fished. The government man said the village should be grateful for a harbour and they were so good at nuclear bombs they could make a harbour in the shape of a polar bear. Their great-great-aunt said that for one) they didn’t need a harbour and for two) she’d rather have a real polar bear. Dad and I think that she’s super-coolio.

Mum hasn’t been saying anything, just cleaning the lights, then she turns to me and I can see her face in the torchlight and also her hands.