The Quality of Silence (17 page)

‘Did Dad say anything else?’ Mum asks me. ‘About the oil company?’

She takes the torch so that she can see my hands.

‘He said oil is made by plants and animals that died in ancient seas,’ I say. ‘It takes millions and millions of years and we are looters and hooligans, thieves from the future.’

He was upset and cross. ‘They drill two miles down – two miles! – and then they go out sideways and crack the rock with poisons into bits so we can force out the gas or oil, and do you know what we do with the gas and oil that has taken millions of years to make, deep under the earth?’

‘Run a tumble dryer on a sunny breezy day?’ I said, knowing it would be something like this. Dad really doesn’t like tumble dryers.

‘Exactly. Or accelerate a car down a clear stretch of road. Millions of years . . .’ He waved his hands up in the air. ‘Gone in forty seconds.’

Mum holds the torch for me so I can see my way back up to the cab.

As Yasmin climbed the steps, she checked again for the blue headlights. There was still no sign of them. He must have turned around.

She joined Ruby in the cab, the fabric of their clothes stiff with cold. They changed out of them, the warm air painful on their skin, the ice on their clothes melting. Yasmin found a towel, a swimming one of Ruby’s that had incongruous suns all over it, and wiped up the icy water. Her hands were still stiff and awkward from scraping the lights, and the skin on her left hand looked scalded. Ruby had to help her take off her jacket. Her face mask had stuck to her skin with a layer of ice and she had to rip it away, leaving her face raw.

The heater was puffing out warmed air, the interior light was bright and the cab felt like a sanctuary. But with the warmth came tiredness again. At some point she would have to stop and sleep a little while, but not yet.

She put on the CB, checked there were no vehicles coming in either direction, then pulled out onto the road to the north. The headlights shone further and more brightly, illuminating a light tunnel a quarter of a mile long of tumbling snowflakes.

Chapter 11

The wind had strengthened, gusts of snow billowed across the road like chiffon veils. Yasmin moved her head from side to side, trying to ease the tension in her neck. She checked her mirror again but there was still no one behind them.

She was so proud of Ruby, holding a torch in the freezing cold and not complaining once. Hardly anyone knew about Ruby’s courage, nor how bright and funny she was, because she didn’t speak to them. But one day she would, and then everyone would know her too.

She and Matt had argued incessantly about allowing Ruby to sign or making her use her oral voice; and about the laptop and the internet and for the last year the huge decision about where Ruby would go to school in September. The mainstream secondary school had an excellent learning support department, but Matt didn’t trust it. ‘She’ll be special,’ he said. ‘You know that’s how they tease each other? You’re “special.”’ Yes, Yasmin did know that. And it wasn’t each other, it was Ruby. She nodded and their eyes didn’t meet because they had failed as parents in protecting their child. Yasmin thought that secondary school would be better than primary school, they’d talked to the head teacher who’d given reassurances, but Matt hadn’t been swayed.

‘She has to learn to survive in the real world,’ Yasmin had said. Why didn’t he understand that? ‘If she does that now, the tough part now, while we’re there with her, helping her, then—’

Matt had interrupted her, ’It’s not working at the moment.’

‘Not now maybe but—’

‘The real world thing, it’s bollocks. The world is a million different places and Ruby will find the place she wants to be.’

Then Ruby had come downstairs and interrupted them, but their argument had continued, in disrupted fragments, with nothing gained or conceded on either side because when you argued about your child there was no compromise or turning away from what you believed was right.

Secretly, Yasmin yearned to be kind to Ruby; to stop trying to make her speak with her mouth and to let her sign and to spring her, right now, out of the mainstream school where she was so unhappy. But if she did that she’d be a coward. She had to find the courage to look down the road at eighteen-year-old Ruby, twenty-five-year-old Ruby, Ruby the age she herself was now; when her parents wouldn’t be there to help her, not every day like Yasmin was now. She had to do the right thing for Ruby and risk Ruby hating her, because she was doing it out of love.

She checked her mirror again. There were blue headlights behind them.

There had been no sign of him when she’d been cleaning the tail lights. Or when she’d turned out of the passing place. She’d been sure that he must have turned around. Instead, he had turned his lights off and waited, hidden in the darkness, to follow her again.

She thought of the man with the dyed blond hair at the airport – Silesian Stennet – and his unnerving refusal to break eye contact with her, following her down the corridor, taking hold of her arm.

She didn’t think that an obsession so extreme could be formed in minutes, but she remembered his pale dyed hair streaked with sweat, offering to look after Ruby, wanting her to owe him even as he professed otherwise, ‘
You wouldn’t be beholden.’
And there’d been other men, ostensibly sensible men, who’d claimed
coup de foudres
upon seeing her; lightning bolts landing all around her, jolting her, but only later when she learned of them.

The voice who’d asked her if she had a gun, was it Silesian Stennet? She couldn’t remember his voice at the airport clearly enough to do a match with confidence, but it could well be the same man. She knew she’d heard it before.

But she hadn’t seen Silesian Stennet since the airport so he didn’t know she was out on the Dalton.

She checked the blue lights again; they were keeping an exact distance behind her.

She took hold of the CB mouthpiece. ‘MP 156 heading northbound. Can the truck heading north behind me tell me who you are?’

There was nothing.

The silence on the CB was broken by Coby’s warm slow voice. ‘Gutsy lady, did I just hear you on the CB again?’

‘Is it you behind me?’ she asked Coby, desperately hoping that it was.

‘I’m at MP 170. Can’t see anyone in front of me right now,’ he said.

So he was twenty miles north of her.

‘Just got the latest on the storm,’ Coby said. ‘Anyone else out there gotten this?’

‘Big blow,’ someone said. ‘Massive fuckin’ blow.’

‘They’re sayin’ hurricane force winds,’ Coby said. ‘Minus fifty. They don’t know for definite when it’ll hit. Reckon ’bout seven hours.’

‘Bin told there’s a risk of avalanches at the Atigun Pass,’ another trucker said. ‘Ain’t had the time to clear the snow from yesterday.’

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ a trucker said, and other drivers were swearing too
.

‘Avalanche buried a truck three weeks back,’ Coby said, explaining the oaths to her.

‘A north wind blows in, only takes an hour to load a slope,’ another driver said.

‘Ain’t no one settin’ out now from Fairbanks or Deadhorse,’ came another voice. ‘Leastways not from Northern Haulage and I reckon other companies will be the same. Too damn expensive to risk losin’ a rig in a blow.’

‘You gettin’ this, gutsy lady?’ Coby asked in his unhurried tone.

‘Yes.’

‘Reckon we should be on first name terms.’

‘Yasmin.’

She saw that next to her Ruby had turned on Voice Magic and was following this.

‘Where are you?’ Coby asked.

‘MP 150.’

‘OK. Too far from Fairbanks to turn around. Best thing, go on to Coldfoot, twenty-five miles from you; hard drivin’ but nothin’ worse than you’ve already done. Hole up there and wait this thing out. I’ll be there first. Have your coffee waitin’.’

‘Reckon you’ll be queuin’ for that,’ another driver said. ‘Anyone can’t get back to Deadhorse or Fairbanks’ll be waitin’ there.’

Was the driver with blue lights behind her listening in? She was pretty sure he would be. Adeeb had said all the truckers listened in to the CB.

‘See you there,’ she said. ‘If they have a motel, I may stay over.’

She hung up the CB.

‘We can’t stop,’ Ruby said. Voice Magic gave her words the same techno-impersonal tone as ever but Yasmin felt Ruby’s body shaking.

‘We’re not going to stop,’ Yasmin replied. They had seven hours, maybe a little more, to get to Deadhorse and while the drivers had been speaking on the CB she’d calculated their average speed and the distance to travel and they could make it.

‘We’re still going to Daddy?’

‘Yes.’

Once they got to Deadhorse, she’d persuade a taxi plane to fly to Matt. Minus fifty. Hurricane winds. She had to reach him.

She was afraid of the risks to Ruby, of course she was, but perhaps she’d been conjuring up additional dangers where none existed. The blue lights were still behind them, but it didn’t mean the driver was following them. Dozens of truckers must be driving this route. He could have simply pulled over for a rest break and turned his lights off. Or perhaps he’d been cleaning his lights too and had turned them off as she had. There had been no more emails, thank God. Perhaps it was just some kind of one-off weird spam. Exhaustion could have been making her paranoid and in this landscape it was easy to be afraid.

As she drove on, she thought about her and Matt’s first meeting, no
coup de
foudre
involved. He later told her that he’d seen her around the university, but he’d been unfairly dubious about a person so unreasonably beautiful. Or possibly, he’d said, it was some kind of Darwinian self-preservation thing about the competition being too fierce and him keeping his tusks or horns or antlers safe.

And then he’d spoken to her and got to know her and had fallen in love with her and had been afraid, he’d admitted, of these feelings he had for her. But there it was. There he was. Slain. No help for it. And she’d felt they were kindred spirits even in their fear of love. As a physicist, she knew the equations and consequences for when an object plummets from a height, but there had been nothing rational or logical about her falling and no equation for where or how it would end.

While obsession was about ownership, a narcissism reflecting on the person who felt it, she knew now that passion was love, at its most extreme edge, that made you cross an Arctic wilderness in winter; and this, here and now, was where it could lead you.

Suddenly the blackness lightened. The clouds, blown by the harsh wind, had separated and illuminated the mountains. In the half-light, she saw how high they were and the sheer drop down a precipice, barely three feet from the left side of the road. She wished it had remained dark so that she didn’t have to see the violent terrain, a scene from a gothic tale, nothing soft or hospitable, which dwarfed her into nothing.

She looked up at the night sky, a long-forgotten reflex from childhood when she’d felt small and afraid.

She saw three moons. She felt reality tilting.

She realised that two of the moons were paraselenae. They were rare and beautiful; she’d never seen them before.

She pointed at the sky for Ruby.

‘There are three moons, Mum!’

‘They’re called “moon dogs”.’

‘Why are they there? Why don’t we have moon dogs at home?’

‘They’re not real. They’re made by moonlight.‘

‘How? Tell me!’

‘Up there, really high in the clouds, are ice crystals. The moonlight bounces against the crystals and makes the moon dogs. Their proper name is paraselenae.’

She stopped the truck for a few moments so she could finger-spell ‘paraselenae’. It occurred to her that the only thing she ever taught Ruby that really mattered to her was to try to talk; more surprising was her realisation that the paraselenae mattered to her.

‘Paraselenae,’ Ruby finger-spelled back to her.

Then the clouds covered the moon and the paraselenae and it was dark once more. She continued driving.

The illuminated clock on the dashboard showed it was 3 a.m. The black heart of the night, Yasmin thought, but there was no heart to this night because there’d be no daylight to end it. It was snowing again, the flakes only appearing when they were in the headlights, as if they’d been suddenly formed in the darkness. Her limbs were heavy with tiredness. Outside the cab it was minus thirty.

Ruby tapped on her arm.

There was another email.

She wanted to prevent Ruby from looking at the photo, but Ruby had already scrolled down. She checked her mirror – the blue headlights were still a long distance behind them – and stopped the truck

A blackly shining dead bird filled the screen, even its beak and feet black, the feathers with a metallic glint, its ghastly eyes protruding. Yasmin found it demonic and recoiled.

A school trip to the Tower of London, recalled in ugly detail. Ravens devouring biscuits soaked in blood and a whole rabbit, tearing it up. Other girls screaming, Yasmin silently appalled.