The Quality of Silence (20 page)

‘You turn around now, you hear me?’ Coby said. ‘But first, you’re goin’ to need to put on snow chains. It’s comin’ down real fast now and’ll be gettin’ slippy.’

Slippy. Something a little girl would say of a polished wooden floor in her socks. She momentarily loved Coby for his understatement.

‘So you need those chains, even if you wanna kill yourself and keep drivin’ you need those chains.
Do you know how to put them on?’

She understood that he’d get her to put on the chains and then he’d persuade her to turn around. He was doing this one step at a time with her, patiently and kind.

‘No.’

‘OK, they’re stored by the wheels, under the truck. You lay ’em in front of the wheels then roll over them, then hook ’em closed.’

‘OK.’

‘Then you look for a turning place.’

‘Thank you.’

She hung up the CB and checked her driver’s mirror. No one behind her. She stopped the truck. Ruby had put on Voice Magic and had been listening to this.

‘We are still going to Dad,’ Ruby said. ‘You told the people before that we’d stop at Coldfoot but we didn’t, so we are still going to Dad.’

A statement not a question, because it was unthinkable for them to leave him in an arctic storm. Yasmin’s terror of abandoning him, that had first haunted her mind and then become a presence on the road ahead, was right in front of her in the darkness.

For now, she had to focus on putting on snow chains, because whatever she did they needed snow chains.

As she pulled on her arctic clothes, she saw herself, so many years ago, walking along the sunny leafy pavement from the deli towards the newsagent; the beaten-up car mounting the pavement and Matt pushing her out of the way. Through the sound of the arctic wind, she heard the reverberating clang as the car hit the lamp post; the horn blaring senselessly loud and urgent as the driver slumped forwards, just sixteen years old.

That night she and Matt had talked and she had known why they could marry. It wasn’t because he’d put himself between her and the car, but because they talked about the boy – what made him do it; what kind of home and family and education; what kind of hopelessness – because Matt used his full intellect to try to understand what had happened.

And because while their leafy-neighbours exchanged outraged emails about the joyriding delinquent getting what was coming to him and ‘thank God nobody innocent was badly hurt’, Matt had felt grief for the boy. Because the following day he’d found the mother by the lamp post with her cellophaned carnations and bought parcel tape from the newsagent, and tied the flowers onto it with her.

‘You are my prince’s kiss,’ she said to him. ‘And goodnight kiss and shoes that fit and a glass slipper and with you there’s no such thing as a vacuum in nature, nor in me any more, and I love you.’

The snow is like thick net curtains, from the sky to the ground, layers and layers of them. Mum is putting on all her arctic clothes, because we have to put on snow chains.

‘I can help,’ I say.

She shakes her head.

‘I can shine a torch again,’ I say. ‘And if I get too cold then I’ll get back in here.’

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘But I really don’t want you to come outside, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Promise?’

‘OK.’

Mum’s still looking at me, waiting.

‘OK, I promise.’

She wouldn’t let Ruby go outside again; a child would become hypothermic faster than an adult. She tugged her Arctic work gloves on over her liners and went out, closing the door as quickly as she could.

The cold was shocking in its violence. She’d thought the colour of cold was white, like snow, or blue perhaps, like on a cold tap, but cold like this was conceived in a place without daylight and was black, the absence of all light and colour.

She heard a piercing scream, then realised it was the sound of the wind gusting newly fallen snow across the hard-packed snow beneath; white wraiths crossing the road and barren terrain.

She shone Adeeb’s torch and found the chains. She tried to unhook them, but couldn’t hold the torch at the same time. She wedged the torch into snow and shone it under the truck. The chains seemed welded by cold into the hooks that supported them. It was hard to get a grip. After three attempts, she managed to get purchase on the chains and, using all her strength, tugged them free.

She had to move the torch again to shine it at the wheels. Then she laid the chains in front of them.

The snow around the wheels turned pale blue. There were headlights in the darkness behind her.

He’d realised they weren’t at Coldfoot and come after them. Her conversation with Coby on the CB would have just confirmed it. She couldn’t tell how close he was.

She felt that the tanker behind her and the man sending the violent photos were working together and they were closing in.

The wind became a caterwauling siren, getting louder; the boy’s terrified face in the darkness. He’d died before they got there.

Her goggles had fogged in the extreme cold. She felt for the steps to the cab and managed to climb up and get inside, but couldn’t find the handle to pull the door closed.

* * *

I put on my gloves then I lean across Mum and reach out for the door and tug it shut. I can’t see Mum’s eyes in her goggles, which means she can’t see out. I help her to take them off and I wipe them clear for her. She drives very slowly, just a tiny way. She puts on her mask and goggles and goes outside again. I watch her out of the window in case she does need my help after all.

Crouched by the truck, Yasmin studied the tanker’s lights. They weren’t getting any bigger, so he’d stopped too. It was as if he was biding his time. The screaming of the wind in the dark changed into a low-pitched moan as it eddied around the truck. She’d left the torch wedged in snow, pointing at the wheels, but it had become buried. She scraped around in the snow with her hands to feel for it, but her gloves were too thick. She took them off and just wore liners as she felt for the torch. After two minutes, she found it and hurriedly put on her gloves, then turned it on. In the torchlight she saw the tyres had missed the chains by a few centimetres. She’d have to do this all over again. And she needed to do it quickly, but there was no way to do it quickly.

She felt time falling away from her in the gusting snow.

She would never get to Matt in time to beat the storm.

The low moaning of the wind and the tanker behind them pressed her fear hard and tight.

She looked up at the cab, the amber light illuminating Ruby’s small face at the window.

She looked out into the blackness and saw the mutilated musk ox and the raven and the buried wolves and heard the storm building.

There was horrifying clarity; the choice she had to make sharply focused, right bang up in front of her. She had to turn around. There was no longer any other option. It’s what Matt would want her to do, and she felt that without needing to articulate it as a thought. Ruby’s life trumped everything.

She would think about Matt when Ruby was safe.

If she thought about him now she wouldn’t be able to put on the snow chains and get back in the cab and drive; she wouldn’t be able to breathe or blink or swallow.

Twice more during a dark frozen hour she failed to get the chains on and had to do it all over again. The tanker’s lights remained the same size; parked and waiting.

When she’d tried to find the torch in the snow she’d felt the metal of her wedding ring and Matt’s becoming colder in the sub-zero arctic temperature and then the soft skin of her finger was sticking to the metal, like lips to a frozen iron railing. Matt had told her the truth about needing to take off his wedding ring when he was working.

She thought back to holding his ring at the police station, the touch-warmed metal in her fingers.

Chapter 14

The temperature had dropped three degrees in the last fifteen minutes. Yasmin finally had the chains on. She went back up the steps to the cab. Through the window she saw Ruby shaking, her face pale. She hurried in.

The laptop was open on a new email.

The photo was a dead Arctic fox with gently rounded ears and big eyes in soft white fur. Yasmin wanted to see it as being like a plush toy you could buy, impossibly fluffy and appealing, not a once-living creature, but the fox’s childlike vulnerability and soft beauty reminded her so strongly of Ruby that she caught her breath. The man’s torch lit only the cub’s face. Blood was smeared around its mouth.

The subject was DSC_10027; 68733615 14965998 under the photo.

He’d sent it four minutes ago.

Ruby looked devastated, but there wasn’t time to comfort her, she must get her to safety. She hurriedly started driving, looking for a place to turn.

I was crying with Bosley and Dad came in and we talked about school and Jimmy and he said we could do a blog together. He showed me photos on his iPad of beautiful animals and birds. There was a photo of an Arctic fox cub. Dad said every time he saw an Arctic fox cub and looked at its pretty face he’d be able to see me really clearly. Just like Mum and the peridot in the ring.

The fox cub in the photo is dead.

Dad would never send Mum that photo.

The emails aren’t from him.

When I thought Daddy was emailing us, I thought that he was safe because he had a laptop and a terminal with him and he was OK enough to type things and send them.

There so much snow falling, like it’s an army of siafu ants. One little ant-flake can’t hurt you but millions and millions of them kill everything, even people. Dad might not have anything with him. Not a laptop or a blanket or a knife even. What if the snow attacks him and he can’t hide?

The sign for Daddy is making a D shape with your fingers, and the shape makes me cry, but I’m trying hard not to. And it’s no good because Mum can’t see me sign because she’s driving so I put on Voice Magic.

‘Dad needs a knife to make an aputiak,’ I say. ‘He might not have one.’

‘I think he has his survival kit with him,’ Mum says. ‘And he’ll have all the tools he needs.’

I read her words on Voice Magic, over and over again. I wish I was a little Reception child again and could believe her and think that Dad is safe.

But I’m in Year Six. And in September I’ll be in secondary school.

I look out of my window at the siafu-ants-snow, like if I stare at it enough, I can make it go away, but it looks like there’s even more. Mum’s said something because there’s more type on Voice Magic:

‘We have to go back to Coldfoot and wait there till the storm’s over.’

She can’t mean that.

‘We’ll set off as soon as the storm’s over, I promise, go straight to find Daddy then.’

‘No! We can’t leave him!’

I’m trying to shout but Voice Magic won’t shout.

‘He might die! Mum, please!’

It isn’t my voice, it’s a stupid fluffy vacuum bag voice.

‘I’ll be alone!’

I type something for her to read in my own voice and I push my laptop onto her. She’s driving us into this big lay-by and I know it’s where she’s going to turn around and leave Dad.

She stops the truck, but the engine’s still running because I can feel the humming of it under me.

‘Daddy is all right,’ she says. ‘He’ll have made a shelter.’

It makes me feel sick to shake my head.

‘It’s scenario two, Ruby. Daddy went off on a trip and took his survival things with him.’

But she doesn’t really believe there’s a scenario two. She just wants to believe there is. It was like that even outside the airport, the very first time she said it. I didn’t think it in words, just felt it. But I didn’t mind because for ages I thought Dad had important things with him, like his terminal and a friend’s laptop and a knife.

‘I was just pretending that I believed Dad went off on filming trips,’ Mum says and I’m so surprised I do a little flip-jump inside. ‘I pretended to the police, to you, to me even. But now I’ve seen pictures of a musk ox and Arctic wolves and an Arctic fox and a raven and the wing prints of a ptarmigan and Lord knows how many other creatures there are out here too.’

‘There’s river otters,’ I say. ‘And snowy owls and snowshoe hares. Loads and loads of things.
’

‘Exactly,’ Mum says. ‘And Daddy came out here to film them. And I think he was away on a filming trip when the village caught fire. So he’s got his survival kit with him, with everything he needs.’

She’s smiling at me and I know she really believes it.

‘He told me an aputiak is a good shape in a storm,’ I say. ‘Because it’s curved and the wind just blows over the top.’

‘That’s true, I hadn’t thought of that. Well then, his emergency kit will have the tools to make an aputiak and he’s snug inside it.’

When her wedding ring and Matt’s had frozen to her finger the Matt she knew and loved had come crashing into her memory, his decency and honesty assailing her. He hadn’t lied about his wedding ring. And he hadn’t lied about coming here for the animals.