The Quality of Silence (6 page)

‘Fuckin’ tree-hugger,’ one of them said to him.

‘Ain’t no trees up in North Alaska, no one told you that?’ said another.

The blond man met their aggression with superiority. ‘Aren’t you concerned, or at least interested in what you’re working with? Carcinogens that cause cancers, radioactive chemicals—’

A man with a tattooed face interrupted, towering over the blond man. ‘Do we look sick?’ He turned to other workers. ‘Comes here and does his party piece every fuckin’ week.’

Yasmin could see the blond man’s face now and was surprised that he was in his fifties, his eyebrows grey, his skin pallid.

The man with tattoos continued, ‘Heard it all before, fella. Know what F.B.F. stands for? “Frack Baby Frack”. Sarah Palin. The lady had vision.’

The blond suited man’s tone was still superior. ‘You’ve been taken over by American Fuels, so you can’t make that joke any more.’

Yasmin saw that Ruby, lip-reading, was intimidated by these men and their language.

‘He said “frack baby frack”,’ she told Ruby, finger-spelling ‘frack’. She asked her not to lip-read any more; she’d tell her if there was anything important.

She saw that the men were now staring at her. Jack came closer.

‘This lady and her daughter are gettin’ a ride with us to Deadhorse,’ he said.

One of the men laughed. ‘Got a mall now, has it?’

‘We want to get to Anaktue,’ Yasmin said. ‘We’re getting a taxi plane from Deadhorse.’

‘Ain’t you seen the news?’ a muscular man said to her. ‘It’s burned to fuckin’ toast, everyone and everythin’.’ He looked around the others. ‘Said on the news, stupid fuckers stored fuel right by their houses.’

‘Hydraulic fracturing may have caused the fire,’ the blond man said, his pallid face animated as if this stimulated him. ‘Anaktue is only forty or so miles north of Am-Fuels’ wells at Tukapak.’

‘Wouldn’t know ’bout that,’ the muscular man said. ‘But I’d be guessin’ it’s forty or so miles of fuckin’
snow
.’

‘People have set fire to the water coming out of their faucets,’ the blond man said.

‘Yeah right,’ the muscular man said. ‘It ain’t fuel explodin’ like the news said, it’s water burnt everythin’ down.’

‘The fumes could well have ignited,’ the blond man said. ‘That’s always a risk.’

‘Oh for cryin’ out loud,’ Jack said and Yasmin was sure he was moderating his language because of her and Ruby. ‘You’re tellin’ us fumes from a frackin’ well went
forty miles
across northern Alaska, in minus thirty, in high winds without breakin’ up then got to Anaktue and exploded?
Spontaneously
?’

‘It’s possible,’ the blond man said.

‘That’s bullshit and you know it,’ Jack said. He stared at the blond man’s face, as if reading him a line at a time. ‘Jesus. You’d
like
it to be a frackin’ accident. You want somethin’ like this to happen.’

‘OK, you’re right,’ the blond man said. ‘Hydraulic fracturing is an accident waiting to happen; a disaster waiting to happen. Better a small village in Alaska has everyone die than a highly populated area. So yes, if wiping out a village is what it takes to stop this madness, then yes.’

Yasmin was repulsed, but she had to talk to him because he knew where Anaktue was – “only forty or so miles north of Am-Fuels’ wells at Tukapak”. Anaktue was a tiny place, more of a hamlet than a village, so how did he know?

She went over to him, holding Ruby’s hand. She found his unflinching eye contact with her invasive.

‘Silesian Stennet,’ he said to her, holding out his right hand, plump and freckled with age spots. She didn’t take it.

‘I was finance director of a hydraulic fracturing company,’ Silesian continued, not breaking eye contact. ‘But I couldn’t in all conscience continue, not with the knowledge I had of the risks. But some people just don’t want to be warned.’

‘How do you know where Anaktue is?’ Yasmin asked. ‘Do you know people there? Have you heard from someone?’

‘Like I said, I worked for a hydraulic fracturing company. Anaktue is sitting on hundreds of thousands of barrels of shale oil. It’s only thirty five miles from the Trans-Alaska pipeline, so the infrastructure is almost in place to ship out the crude. All the hydraulic fracturing companies know where Anaktue is. They’ll have source rock samples, 3D seismic data and drilling data for Anaktue.’

Jack watched Yasmin with Silesian Stennet and wondered if he should warn her about the son-of-a-bitch; tell her that he’d been convicted of sabotage at a fracking site; that he was just lucky no one got hurt. Several inches taller than Silesian, Jack could see his blond parting had grey streaks running in a line either side. He wanted to be a young man with a cause, but he was a middle-aged zealot embracing obsessions.

* * *

No one’s mouth is open, no one is speaking and Mum has gone like the Swingball again. She’s forgotten she’d tell me if someone said something important or interesting.

The man with the blond hair says in sign, ‘Do you want me to tell you what’s happening?’

It’s super-coolio when someone knows sign language and they’re not deaf. Like when President Obama signed ‘thank you’ straight back to someone who’d signed to him, like it wasn’t a big thing. Mum hasn’t even noticed because she’s listening to whatever it is.

The blond man finger-spells ‘Announcement’ and now he’s signing something about a dead horse. He means the place; the place where we’re going to so we can find Dad.

In American Sign Language the sign for a horse is putting your hand to your head and wiggling your pretend ear, like the puppet horse in
War Horse
. In British Sign Language you pretend you’re holding the reins while you gallop, which is more fun to do. I think about the story of the sign not what it means because I’m worried it means something bad.

The blond man is holding out his phone. He’s typed something for me to read. I go closer to him, which isn’t very far, so Mum won’t mind. I read what he’s typed:

There’s been a crash at Deadhorse airport. A cargo plane has spilt its load. No flights landing till it’s cleared up. Might be tomorrow or the day after.

I feel sick. Like in the plane when I walked down the aisle and thought that underneath the floor was miles of sky.

The blond man says, ‘Why are you going to Anaktue?’ and he finger-spells ‘Anaktue’.

‘To find Dad,’ I tell him.

‘At Anaktue?’ he says and his face is kind of smiling, like he thinks it’s funny.

‘Yes.’

I don’t like being close to him. When he put his phone near my face to read his hands smelled like old fish.

You know how I said that Jack guy is creepy? Well, he isn’t, not really. I was just annoyed with him for being with us, when it should be
Dad
with us. Was even annoyed with him helping us, which is stupid, because we need his help to get to Dad. So even though I find this blond man creepy, I’m not going to trust my creepy-monitor.

I go closer to Mum. A man’s talking to her, but she’s still forgotten she’d let me know anything important, so I’ll lip-read him. I can’t make out every word but quite a lot.

He says small taxi planes will still fly from Deadhorse because they don’t need the main runway. We can still get to Dad!

There’s another man, the one with lots of tattoos, saying something about getting to Deadhorse from here, but I can’t read his lips very well because he mumbles. And now another one is smiling like it’s really funny.

‘And how’s she meant to do that?’ he says, then he sees me and stops for a moment. ‘Get the effing bus?’

And now he’s looking at Mum and he’s saying something I can’t lip-read then he says,

‘You can’t drive there. It’s five hundred miles on an ice road.’

I tug at Mum, making her look at me. ‘What will we do?‘ I say. ‘How will we get to Daddy?’

She tells to me to wait a moment. The blond man comes closer to me again and shows me his phone:

Why does your mother wear two wedding rings?

I look at Mum’s hand. She always has her wedding ring on and sometimes her engagement ring or the ring Dad gave her when I was born, which is made of a stone called peridot, which is green and means joy, and Mum says is the same colour as my eyes so she can look at her ring when I’m not there and imagine my face really clearly, but Dad says it also means he was on a bit of a tight budget.

She doesn’t wear Dad’s wedding ring too because
he
wears his ring. I don’t understand. It’s like the floor of that plane is just soggy paper and I’m falling through it.

Mum is grabbing the man’s phone and snapping it shut and shoving it back at him. She bends down so that her face is close to mine. ‘Daddy takes off his ring when he’s working,’ she says. ‘Which is why a policeman found it. And now I’m keeping it safe for him.’ She’s mouth-speaking and signing at the same time. ‘Daddy is OK.’

The blond man is watching her sign and it’s like he’s stealing something from me.

Wheeling her suitcase with one hand and holding Ruby’s hand with the other, Yasmin walked away from the departure lounge along a long corridor towards the exit. Ruby was struggling to keep up, her suitcase tipping over on its wheels.

She must think of a plan. There had to be a plan. Had to be. If she couldn’t think of a plan would that be the moment someone would tell her to face facts? And who would that someone be? A policeman? Someone from England? As long as she was on her way to find him, Matt was alive. And it wasn’t some reactionary grief, fuelled by a need in her, but because if she stopped believing he was alive, if she let people and their facts crowd around her, he’d be left alone in the northern Arctic wilderness and wouldn’t survive.

Mum says that we need a team talk. Dad used to do our team talks till he came here then Mum took over. At home, Mum says she and Bosley are ‘Team Ruby’ and it’s a let it all out time, because it’s not good to keep things bottled up and I should have a good old cry if I want to (rather than risk crying in public, which she thinks is embarrassing too). And, when I do, Bosley wags his tail, bumping it against me, and it’s like he gives me some of his tail-wagging happiness. Sometimes Tripod is there instead of Bosley and he purrs with trembly happiness on my lap and that’s really nice too but usually it’s Bosley.

Mum says we’re going to go to a hotel, but I thought we were going to find Dad. She says that a good hotel is bound to have a sitter service. For a little bit I don’t know what she’s talking about. And then I do and I say, ‘No!’ She’s never left me with a sitter before. I don’t want to be left with a sitter. She says it won’t be for very long. And she’ll make sure that the sitter is nice.

The blond man is right behind us and he’s been watching us sign. It’s like he’s been stealing but I didn’t even know. He must have run some of the way, because his face is all shiny and his blond hair has got dark sweaty streaks in it.

He comes in front of us so we can’t walk down the corridor any more. He’s staring at Mum, not saying anything, just doing that ‘OMG! she’s so GORGEOUS! I’m going to turn myself into a total dork by just staring at her’ thing. But they always look more dorkish by not saying anything for ages and ages. Mum never notices. ‘
Mum’s romantic roadkill
’, Dad calls it. ‘
She’s a hit and run driver
.’

‘
No, she’s not, because she doesn’t even know she’s hit them
,’
I say, defending Mum, which makes Dad laugh.

That sounds like they tease each other all the time, but they hardly ever do.

The blond man is speaking now, and I can see his lips.

‘I can help you find a good hotel here,’ he says.

‘We’re fine, thank you,’ Mum says. But she doesn’t mean the ‘thank you’.

She takes my hand and case and we walk along the corridor away from him.

But he’s coming too. He reaches out to touch her, like she knows him already, like she’s his wife or girlfriend, but she doesn’t let him because she doesn’t even like him.

‘You’ve never been here before,’ he says. ‘So you don’t know what places rip you off.’

Yasmin tried to get Ruby away from Silesian but he was blocking their path.

‘You need a sitter, right? I’ll look after the girl. Keep her safe for you.’

‘I said we’re fine.’

‘It’s no trouble. I live here in Fairbanks. Just a block away. Professional sitter service would be expensive. I’d be happy to do it for free.’ He took hold of her arm.

‘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.