The Quality of Silence (19 page)

She couldn’t see the blue lights, he must have fallen a distance behind them, but she was sure he was still following them.

She drove up a steep incline, her right leg aching, unable to sustain the unnatural angle of reaching for the pedal for much longer. Ruby’s hand brushed against her as she signed in her sleep. It was only adrenaline that was keeping her awake.

At the top of the incline she saw a halo of light as if the sun was rising. She knew it couldn’t be true, that it was like a mirage of water in the desert; that she was hallucinating the sunrise out of exhaustion and primal need for light. She reached the top of the hill and beneath her was a collection of buildings, with orange sodium lights and floodlights and flickering neon. Coldfoot.

She drove into Coldfoot, Ruby still asleep. It was a tiny place; basic low-rise buildings lined the road. She slowed to a crawl as she passed them. Through windows honey light filtered out onto the snow. The pull towards company and safety was physical, each lit building exerting its own drag
.

There was a gas station, flooded with bright lights, showing pumps purpose-built for trucks and beside it was a rudimentary large truck park. There was a ranch-style café and a motel, built out of the same modular unit as the house on her rig. She’d lived in one of the most metropolitan cities in the world but she’d never before felt civilisation so acutely.

Perhaps she could leave Ruby here. Perhaps she would be safe. But the blue lights driver would arrive, looking for her. She imagined him hunting for her in the café, the motel, and instead finding Ruby.

Coby would look after Ruby, she was sure. And there’d be other decent men here to protect her. But she’d need to ask Coby, check that the other men were trustworthy, and as soon as they clapped eyes on her they’d stop her from leaving again. She was sure of that. And she couldn’t ask Ruby to find Coby herself while she drove off again because how would Ruby find him? Who the hell would understand sign language out here in the middle of nowhere? She’d be utterly vulnerable.

She drove towards the parking area. The two-way road was poorly lit, with dark shadows between the street lights. There were about fifteen trucks already parked, and another truck driving in ahead of her. Presumably all of them were waiting out the storm.

She drove around the parking area then back towards the Dalton. In the shadowy space between two lights she pulled over and stopped. From here she’d see him arrive. And once he’d driven past them they’d slip away. Hopefully, he’d spend a long time searching for her and they could get a distance ahead of him.

She turned off all the lights, including the interior one in the cab, just leaving the heater on. Snowflakes tapped noiselessly and relentlessly against the side window, soft battalions pressing at the huge windscreen in front of her. In the dark and the warmth, her face slackened with tiredness. She opened the window a crack and the narrow band of icy air kept her awake.

Eight minutes later, blue headlights came towards the truck park on the other side of the road. She’d made a terrible mistake; headlights coming towards them would flood the cab with light. She bent down, lying across Ruby, in a futile effort to hide.

Moments before his lights reached them, the driver turned them off. He must have wanted to hide their distinctive colour.

She was still lying across Ruby, so didn’t see him in his cab as he passed them just a foot or so away; she just made out that he was driving a tanker.

She turned on the engine and drove away, only putting on her lights when she reached the road. She checked her driver’s mirror: no blue headlights from the tanker just the receding lights of Coldfoot.

Adeeb had told her Coldfoot got its name from gold prospectors who’d get this far north then lose their nerve and turn around. She understood the loss of nerve. Driving away from Coldfoot felt like you were pulling against a rope that tethered you to safety and any further it would break and you’d be away from the shallows and into the deep ocean. The people who built Coldfoot knew that this was as far north as a person could reasonably go. She felt the diminishing lights tugging her back to warmth and shelter. She drove on. The lights of Coldfoot dwindled and then she went round a bend and they disappeared.

When she looked in her driver’s mirror there was just darkness behind her. She knew the tanker driver would only be at Coldfoot until he realised she wasn’t there and then he’d come after her. She listened to the CB but there was nothing about her; anyone who’d heard her earlier conversation with Coby would assume that she was heading towards Coldfoot or had already arrived there and was waiting out the storm.

She passed a milepost; they had 239 miles to go until Deadhorse, with no kind of services along the route.

She drove another ten miles; the snow was getting heavier and the wind fiercer, outriders of the storm to come. She felt sleep deprivation dulling her reflexes and dragging on her limbs.

A truck came towards her, hurrying towards Coldfoot, its headlights fuzzy through the falling snow and darkness, but still bright in the cab as it passed them, startling Ruby awake.

‘Are we nearly at Dad?‘ she asked in that awful machine voice.

‘Still a long way to go.’

‘Is it morning yet?’

‘Yes.’

It was 6 am. Yasmin’s body and mind, calibrated for a circadian rhythm, felt trapped in the darkness of night, as if in a fold of time. There would be no more lights from a human habitation to provide a man-made sunrise.

As she drove through this dawnless beginning of a new day, her eye muscles were losing the strength to focus. Her right leg went into spasm. Around the light tunnels made by her headlights she thought she saw the darkness move, a thing with sinews and a pulse. And then abruptly it liquefied, black water surrounding them.

She saw a passing place a few metres ahead. She managed to manoeuvre the truck into it. She hadn’t factored in a stop in their journey to Matt, but she couldn’t physically drive any further. She asked Ruby to wake her up in fifteen minutes.

She closed her eyes. In the dark and the quiet, she remembered back to her first visit to Cley with Matt, the sound of the sea thumping and hushing next to them. They’d undressed in the dark and she realised that she loved the smell of him and the sound of his voice as much as the way he looked and his ease with talking about things that mattered.

He’d said it was incredible that they’d met one another, both in a lecture of a subject neither was taking. What were the chances? She said that four and a half billion years ago, give or take, comets bombarded the Earth, bringing with them ice, which melted into water. ‘You have proof of that?’ he asked. ‘Crashing a satellite into a comet and measuring the amount of water,’ she replied. ‘And?’ ‘A billion litre water bomb in space,’ she told him. ‘The comets crashed and volcanoes erupted, blowing out steam that turned to cloud and it rained for thousands of years. People quibble about the exact amount of water and from where but however it got here, voila . . .’ She pointed at the sea. She said the chance of a planet with water to sustain life was trillions and trillions to one, so remote as to be unimaginable. That was the miracle. Them meeting each other four billion or so years later, not doing the same course, wasn’t so much of a long shot.

She remembered the warmth of him next to her and the bumpy shingles under their blanket and then she felt she was falling into the solid core of the Earth and Matt.

Chapter 13

Ruby was asleep next to her. She switched on the cab’s light and saw her own face as a chiaroscuro in the windscreen against the darkness outside.

She put on the truck’s headlights, but there were no light beams. The blackness outside was solid. Her old terror of being trapped in a coffin under the earth slithered around her. Her breathing shallow, she flicked at switches. The wipers pushed snow clear of the windscreen like snowploughs.

In the beam of the headlights, she saw heavy snow, with gusting winds blowing it violently fast across the road in front of them. She looked at the clock in the cab. She’d been asleep for three hours. She hurriedly checked her driver’s mirror, but there was no sign of the blue headlights. A delineator post showed that a foot of snow had fallen while she’d slept. The thermometer read minus forty outside.

She put on the CB. Drivers were talking to each other from depots at Fairbanks and Deadhorse and the truck stop at Coldfoot. No one else on the CB was out on the road.

There was another email on Ruby’s laptop. He had sent it while she slept.

All she could see in the photo was snow and she felt relief. The torchlight was weaker than the previous photos, the white of the snow bleeding quickly into the dark around it. She reluctantly clicked the cursor to zoom further in and saw black marks. There were animals partially buried under the snow, their white coats indistinguishable from it; just black lines of fur, like kohl around their dead eyes, and the black tips of their noses giving them away. There were five animals in all, but there could be others. She tried to see how they had been killed but couldn’t see any blood or injury; maybe the torchlight was too poor.

Was he warning her that this is what would happen to them – buried without trace under the snow?

The subject was DSC_10025; 68945304 149992659 under the photo.

She turned up the brightness on the laptop screen to maximum. In the bottom right hand corner of the photo, she could just make out the shadowy image of a husky dog, with a part of the harness, a buckle perhaps, glinting faintly in the torchlight. So whoever this man was he was travelling by sled, silent and invisible in the dark. How close was he to them?

The light had woken up Ruby. She was about to shut the laptop but Ruby had seen the photo.

‘Arctic wolves,’ Ruby said.

* * *

I think Dad’s sent the photo to show what poachers have done. Because it’s only people who kill wolves.

But they still have their beautiful thick white coats and a poacher would take their fur.

They must have got caught in a blizzard and buried
.
Probably a bank of snow fell on them or an avalanche even.

‘We have to tell the police that Dad’s alive,’ I say, because surely now we’ve

had THREE emails from him Mum’ll realise they’re from Dad.

But Mum doesn’t say anything and I know she
still
doesn’t believe me, so the police wouldn’t either, and I don’t know how to make anyone believe me. In our headlights there’s huge sheets of snow, like shape-shifting ghosts haunting the road.

Yasmin was driving again. The snow came thick and fast towards the windscreen; the wipers on maximum speed.

Abruptly, their headlights were extinguished and they were driving in total darkness. She slowed quickly, trying not to skid, praying they would keep on the road. And then the snow fell away from the windscreen, a fat sheet of it. The snow had accumulated on the roof while she’d slept and then fallen onto the windscreen like a blindfold.

She heard Coby’s voice come onto the CB, less calm than usual. ‘Anyone yet seen that crazy woman?’

So she’d gone from gutsy to crazy; she thought that fair.

‘I’m here,’ she said.

‘Jeez. Yasmin. I’ve bin real worried about you.’

‘I fell asleep.’

‘You’re in your cab? I just been looking in all the trucks.’

She wanted to tell him the truth, but the tanker driver may be still be looking for them in Coldfoot, and might hear this.

‘Yasmin?’

But surely he’d have discovered by now they weren’t at Coldfoot and would already be coming after them. As she debated about what to say, Coby must have guessed the truth.

‘You went past?’ he asked.

She was silent.

‘Jesus. The storm’s goin’ to hit in two hours.’

Two hours. It was impossible for her to get to Matt; even a quarter of the way to Deadhorse.

‘That soon? Are you sure?’ she said.

‘Comin’ in real fast. Much quicker than they thought. You’ve gotta turn round.’

‘My husband’s out there. He won’t survive.’

‘I’m real sorry about this, lady,’ another driver said. ‘But you won’t get to Deadhorse and there’s no safe place to stop on the way. Once you cross the mountains, you’re on the north slope arctic plain; ain’t no trees to stop the wind. Storms blow across there like it’s turned into hell itself. Eighty-eight thousand square miles of nothin’. Do you know how big that is? State of Utah. Bigger even.’

‘It just ain’t an option,’ another voice said. ‘The winds will knock you clean over, the snow can bury you, you can’t get out of your truck for anythin’, so you can’t fix your brakes, your lines, nothin’. If your engine goes you freeze inside your cab.’

Then came Coby’s voice, slow and kind. ‘There just ain’t the time for you to reach Deadhorse, Yasmin. Not even if your truck were a turbo and it was July, OK? You gotta wait it out in Coldfoot. Your husband’s just gonna have to wait for you.’

In a storm like this without protection? When even experienced drivers in their nice warm cabs in massive trucks were taking shelter? Through the closed windows of the cab she could hear the wind.