The Quality of Silence (27 page)

He’d probably intended to do worse and had first wanted to make sure they couldn’t call for help by CB or satellite.

She was driving fast now, swerving twice to avoid snowdrifts that had gathered on the road.

‘What was the loud noise?’ Ruby asked.

She didn’t know what to tell her.

‘Mum?’

‘Someone broke the satellite dish,’ she said. ‘I think whoever it is doesn’t want us talking to anyone. But the police won’t be much longer.’

The police would spot them easily. There were no trees or even bushes; added to which they had a bloody huge prefab on their truck. How hard could it be to see them?

They had no CB. No satellite connection. The nearest house was over a hundred miles away.

I should have emailed someone at school; Jimmy, because I know his email off by heart. I did think of that, but I thought it was night in England and he wouldn’t get my email till morning and that was too long. But I don’t know if it is night at home. I don’t even know if it’s night here. It feels like it’s night everywhere; like night has swallowed up the days.

I’m looking out of my window because I’m hoping to see ptarmigan wing prints again, but there’s just snow and darkness.

I suddenly know what I should have done and it makes me feel sick.

‘I should have tweeted,’ I say to Mum.

‘There was nothing you could have done. Really.’

She probably thinks it’s a stupid idea. But it isn’t. And now it’s too late.

Before Dad went to Alaska he said he wanted to make sure no trolls had sneaked their way into my Twitter followers, like in ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’, with me as a billy goat.

He said, ‘Your followers are retweeting you like crazy. It’s like you’ve got six hundred baby three-wattled bellbirds.’

He said that because only baby birds make a tweeting sound, and the three-wattled bellbirds are really really loud, so their babies tweeting would be really noisy too.

‘Although,’ Dad said, ‘some people say the superb lyrebird is louder.’

I laughed, because I think it’s super-coolio to have ‘superb’ as a part of your name.

Then he said ‘How about I call you the Superb Ruby?’

That would just be embarrassing.

And then he said, ‘Have you seen this? You have followers all over the place. America, Australia, Japan, Canada, all over Europe, everywhere.’

So somewhere it must be daytime and somebody would have been up and seen my tweet asking for help, and they’d be a grown-up and know what to do.

Now it’s too late.

Mum gives my hand a quick squeeze. ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘Really.’

I don’t think it is OK.

‘He’s turned around,’ Mum says. ‘There’s no lights behind us any more.’

I twist round and check and she’s right. It’s just black behind us. I look for ages and ages and there’s nobody there.

‘He knows there’s a police helicopter looking for us and doesn’t want them to find him too,’ Mum says. ‘He’s running away. And so is the man who sent us the emails.’

I do a hoorah sign, which makes Mum laugh.

Yasmin had driven for fifteen minutes and still no lights behind them.

Ruby tapped her arm. On the side of the road there was a post sticking up out of the snow, splintered wood at the top where the sign had been ripped away. Next to the broken signpost was a turning.

If Ruby hadn’t been looking out of the passenger window and alerted her Yasmin would never have seen it. She remembered checking Adeeb’s map, hoping there was a river-road they could drive on to Anaktue. She’d seen the River Alatnak looping close to the highway. They’d now reached that point. Adeeb had said it would only be possible to drive on the river-road if a link road had been built to it. This must be the link road. She guessed that Soagil Energy had already started building their infrastructure.

Anaktue was thirty-five miles away. If the river-road was safe, she could drive to Matt and be with him in less than two hours. The police helicopter would still spot them, they’d be close to the Dalton and their truck was huge. She could lead the police to him.

She turned off the Dalton and onto the rudimentary link road.

Chapter 19

The link road stopped as it met the river-road in a T-junction. To the north was Anaktue. The ice on the river in that direction had no markers or any sign that a vehicle had driven on it. It curved sharply thirty or so metres away and Yasmin couldn’t see what lay beyond. In the other direction the river-road had delineators on the ice and had clearly been used as a road. Yasmin guessed that the man killing the animals and sending her emails may have used this road as he ran away from Anaktue.

It would be far too dangerous to drive to Matt on the unmarked and untested river ice. She had to turn around. She started the manoeuvre but the truck was huge and cumbersome and her turning circle too wide to get it turned around.

She’d just have to do a three-point turn. She would turn right onto the road with delineators then reverse onto the iced-over river towards Anaktue, then turn the truck back onto the link road.

She turned right onto the road with delineators with no problem, then she started reversing. As the back wheels hit the iced-over river towards Anaktue, the rig juddered and she feared the ice was thin and unstable. She moved forwards again so that the whole truck was on the river-road with delineators. She couldn’t reverse onto the link road because it was too tight to turn. They would just have to wait here.

She opened her window, cutting the engine and strained to hear the sound of a helicopter. Instead, she heard the ice creaking. Despite being within the delineators they were too heavy for the ice. The road couldn’t have been driven on by a truck as heavy as theirs. She didn’t know how to uncouple the load and make themselves lighter. She was afraid of even trying because her experience with the snow chains meant that even if she knew what she was doing, which she didn’t, she had little confidence in getting things done quickly in sub-zero temperatures. She would just keep moving slowly to shift the truck onto the next section of ice.

It would still be easy for the police helicopter to see them; they weren’t far from the Dalton and the river-road was exposed.

Imagine a huge river. Then imagine it covered with ice in the dark. And we’re driving on it! Mum says the ice is so thick we won’t go through and that other people have driven here before us because of the delineators, which is what the posts are called. It’s funny to think that underneath us there’ll be frogs, right at the bottom of the river because that’s the warmest place. There’ll be loads of sorts of fish too, but I don’t know much about fish.

‘Shall we tell each other more interesting facts?’ Mum says. Perhaps she’s a bit frightened too.

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like to start?’

‘OK. You know you asked me about the school for the deaf?’

Mum nods. She asked me in the storm but my fingers wouldn’t work.

‘A girl there told me that sometimes the deaf community give you a sign name.’

‘Deaf community’ sounds kind of strict but Anna, that’s the nice girl, said it’s cool. I said super-coolio? And she said, straight back, Yes, super-coolio!

‘What kind of name?’ Mum asks.

‘Anna laughs a lot so her sign-name is Giggle. And Anna’s dad laughed at a friend’s joke in the pub – Anna says all her family laugh a lot – but when her dad laughed his beer went down his front and now he’s called Dribble.’

‘Dribble? Really?’

‘Yes. But lots of people have names that aren’t funny.’

‘What name would you be?’

‘I can’t choose it. It’s chosen for me.’

I think Mum looks a bit sad.

‘I’ll still be Ruby,’ I tell her. ‘But I’d be another name as well. I can be me but more than me too.’

Mum doesn’t say anything for a little bit and I’m worried she thinks it’s awful, because she and Dad chose the name Ruby for me.

‘I think that’s great,’ Mum says.

I think so too, as long as it’s not Dribble.

‘What kind of interesting fact would you like?’ she asks.

‘Something about space.’

‘OK. Did you know that in space it’s totally quiet? Even when stars explode, they don’t make any sound at all.’

‘So in space everyone hears like me.’

‘Yes. I like thinking how quiet it is up there. Billions and billions of light years of quietness.’

I like that too.

Yasmin thought about the silence in space. The philosophy course she had knitted through had addressed issues such as ‘If the tree fell and no one saw it, did it really happen?’ put into slightly more, but not much more, grown-up language of bundle theory and
subjective idealism
. For Yasmin, after Ruby was diagnosed as deaf, it became ‘If the tree fell and only Ruby was there, did the tree make any noise?’ She thought that if the sound waves didn’t ping against an eardrum and get turned into nerve impulses to a brain, then they existed as a vibration in the woodland air, a soft tremor over mossy ground, a nearby tree swaying, a leaf brushing in a minute stroke against her daughter’s face.

‘Your turn again,’ she said to Ruby.

‘OK. Did you know that Inupiat people have sign language as part of their regular language. Like it’s just a normal kind of thing.’

‘No, I didn’t. That’s great.’

‘Dad told everyone in the village about me and there’s an old lady who’s going to teach me some of their signs.’

She hadn’t yet told Ruby that everyone in the village had died in the fire; she didn’t know how.

‘Dad says if it’s freezing cold and the wind is blowing, you have a scarf over your face and it’s difficult to answer questions with your mouth-voice, so if you raise your eyebrows it means “yes” and if you squint your eyes quickly it means “I don’t know.” But they have signs for complicated things too.’

She would have to tell her soon.

‘And they’ve got these really great words for things. There’s a word that means “guest expecting food”. Dad said that’s a really useful word. And—Stop! We have to stop!’

Mum’s stopped the truck and I’m jumping down out of the cab onto the ice. It’s the family of otters.

The babies and parents are huddled up together on the ice. It’s not like the photo. I can see their damp fur and their open eyes and their whiskers. I touch one of the otters, kind of stroking him, and then I see that he doesn’t have a leg.

Suddenly, there’s all these colours on the ice, pinks and greens and blues and I look up and there’s dancing sheets of lights in the sky and I hate them. It’s like a cheesy Disney film. But if it was a cheesy film, the family of otters wouldn’t be dead. There’s a husky dog. He’s dead too. He must belong to the man because huskies aren’t wild. And the lights are still dancing as if everything is pretty, like it’s the ball at the end of
Sleeping Beauty
with the fairies turning her ball dress blue/pink/blue/pink and I want them to STOP and for it to be just dark again.

Tears were streaming down Ruby’s unprotected face. It was the first time in all of this that Yasmin had seen Ruby properly cry.

‘How could someone do this?’ Ruby shouted with her hands. ‘Why?’

Yasmin put her arm around her, because her own hands could form no answer. She saw Ruby’s tears were freezing to her cheeks. Above them the sky was luminous green and pink, billowing lights across the whole of the sky. She heard the ice creaking more loudly than before.

She hurried Ruby back towards the cab and just to the side of their truck saw a deep gash in the ice. They’d missed it by a foot or so. On the other side of the truck was a perfectly round small hole with small cracks in the ice emanating from it. It looked as if it had been made by a bullet or a drill. She wondered if the person who had ripped down the sign had also tried to destabilise the ice and destroy the route. She had driven between the two holes.

They got back in the cab.

The photo of the otters was only six and a half miles from his last location.

She started driving, inching along, just enough to move the weight of the truck onto the next section of ice. If she drove slowly enough the police would easily reach them before they got near to him.

Around them the aurora blazed and the lights were radiantly stunning.

‘It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?’

But Ruby didn’t respond.

* * *

If you think something is horrible for being beautiful, then it isn’t beautiful any more, is it?

‘Alaska is really famous for the aurora borealis,’ Mum says. ‘People come from all over the world just to see it.’

I don’t want her to tell me about the aurora borealis because it’s probably a trick. She’ll tell me that they’re not really there and it’s made by something else, like the paraselenae.

‘Up above planet Earth,’ Mum says, ‘it’s like a war.’

Ruby turned to look at her. Yasmin understood that Ruby needed a cosmic counterpart to the dead creatures on the ice; that it was good and evil now for Ruby; the childish world of the small scale had gone for her.