The Quality of Silence (8 page)

Our load is a ready-made house for oil workers. Mr Azizi said we are like a tortoise with our house on our back, but hopefully faster. Or a speedy giant snail. He speaks very clearly and makes sure his face is pointing at me. Mum didn’t even have to explain. I think he must have a friend who lip-reads. Our house weighs tons, which is good Mr Azizi said, because if you’re heavy you stick to the road
like glue
. He put one hand on the other and mimed trying to pull them apart. He says pipes aren’t a good load because they swing around like you’re doing the Highland fling. And he mimed that too.

Now he’s giving us his Grand Tour. There’s loads of switches and dials, like in an aeroplane. There’s a bed above our seats, Mr Azizi’s sleeping bag and our suitcases are on top of it. Mum and I have to squash up onto one seat, but it’s pretty big, so we fit. There’s only one seat belt though and Mum’s made me wear it. There’s a porta-potty. But we’ll have to stop somewhere. There’s no way José I’m using a potty. We’ve got a CB radio, which he says all the drivers use, because the road we’re going to go on gets quite narrow and there aren’t road lights so you have to let other drivers know where you are so you don’t bump into each other.

Yasmin was glad they were with Adeeb, who was thoughtful and careful and would surely drive them safely. She studied the map he’d given her. He’d told her it was for trekkers in the summer not drivers in the winter, as there was just one main road from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, the Elliot Highway, which led onto the Dalton Highway. She found Anaktue marked on his map; over three hundred and fifty miles away from Fairbanks and thirty-five miles to the east of the Dalton Highway. She hoped there was a smaller road linking the Dalton Highway to Anaktue but there was nothing, not even a hiking trail; so no way of getting there by vehicle. They’d have to go to Deadhorse and get a taxi plane to Matt, as she’d first planned.

OMG! We have a satellite in the truck! Mr Azizi is linking my laptop up to it! I never ever say ‘OMG’, even though it’s really easy to finger-spell, because I don’t like words you have to do with a ! I look really dorky when I pull a ! face. Dad says it’s easier to do it with your voice, you just sound screechy when you say ‘OMG’, like teenage girls, who use it the most. When he says ‘screechy’, I say, ‘Like fingernails dragging across a blackboard?’ And he says, ‘Spot on.’ Even though I can’t hear the screechy sound, I get the general uggghness. But the satellite is OMG in a coolio not screechy way because now Dad can email me back, even when we’ve gone past mobile reception and Wi-Fi.

Mr Azizi says that when we leave Fairbanks it’s going to be really dark. He shows me a little light I can use when Mum and me need to talk to each other, so we can see each other’s hands and lips.

Did you know that the loudest bird in the world is called the superb lyrebird? Really! And I think some people – a very few – should have ‘superb’ as their name too:
the Superb Mr Azizi!

I want Mum to say thank you to him for me, but she would tell me to say it myself
‘USING YOUR WORDS, RUBY’
so I give Mr Azizi a ‘thank you’ smile, and he understands because he smiles back and gives a little ‘you’re welcome’ shrug.

He’s getting out of the truck to give it one final check and then we’re going to set off. Mum watches him through the windscreen. She’s all tensed up like a greyhound; you know, at the start of a race? All their muscles tightened right up, ready to spring out and race at a hundred miles an hour after the pretend furry rabbit. I think she’s worried Mr Azizi will change his mind. But I’m sure he won’t. He has something settled about him, like he says something and he’ll do it. Mum’s like that too, but in a less calm way. You’d have to know her for ages to know that about her.

* * *

In the yard’s fiercely bright overhead lights, Adeeb saw a man walking around each truck, searching for something or someone. It was that man Silesian Stennet, not wearing a hat despite the cold, his blond hair glittering in the artificial glare. Silesian was carrying a crate, which Adeeb had seen him standing on so he could harangue truckers high up in their cabs. Silesian disturbed him, though he wasn’t sure why, and he felt bad about it because really he should admire the man, coming here as he regularly did, and standing on his almost literal soapbox, to warn tanker drivers carrying heaven-knows-what to and from the fracking wells. The drivers invariably just gave him a load of abuse for his pains. Like Adeeb, they found him disturbing, which is maybe why they ridiculed him.

Adeeb turned away from Silesian Stennet and checked the satellite receiver mounted above the cab. The man who sold him the truck had installed it and claimed it was designed for ships and could get reception any place on the planet. He’d given Adeeb his sat-phone. Adeeb hadn’t wanted to keep the expensive contract going but Visha had made him. There was no cell reception or Wi-Fi in northern Alaska, not for hundreds of miles. She said she had to know he was all right. Said she wasn’t fussing. She’d stood there, long-fingered hands on her hips, daring him to disagree with her. He’d put an arm around her, awkward with those pretty hands still on her hips.

‘I feel fit as a fiddle, no problems at all,’ he’d said. (His mother, who’d taught him English, enjoyed colloquialisms.)

‘Then I want to know you feel fit as a fiddle no problems at all every day,’ Visha had said.

He phoned home on the sat-phone every night, just long enough to reassure Visha and say good night to the boys. In the far north it helped him mark out night from day, reassured him that the diurnal rhythm still existed somewhere.

Before getting back into his cab he checked everything one more time – snow chains, spare tyres, tyre jack, tools to repair hoses and lines and filters. Today he was Amundsen triple-checking his airship before setting off over the North Pole, not a middle-aged refugee from Afghanistan with incipient OCD. He suspected that the special repair tools and the flares, the emergency medical kit, all of it, was totally inadequate against the enormity of what northern Alaska could throw at them. But he would be taking Yasmin and Ruby only as far as the Arctic Circle – whatever their real reason was for that – and no further.

Mum is a bit turned away from me, like when she’s playing Twenty-one and is trying to hide her expression so Dad and I think she might have an ace and a king. I can’t see her eyes, which are usually Mum’s giveaway. I gently pat her arm to get her attention. Her eyes are all filmy.

‘Dad told me a story about an Inupiaq hunter on sea ice,’ I say because I think the story will cheer her up.

She says with her mouth-voice, ‘Can you tell me using your words?’

Normally, I’d turn away from her, so I can’t read her lips any more. Then she’d come in front of me again and we’d do a little maypole dance around each other. But we can’t do that in Mr Azizi’s truck.

‘I
am
using my words,’ I say to her, in my hand-voice. She just shakes her head, like I’ve made her sad.

The funny thing is that Mum understands everything else. She’s kind and funny and wonderful; super-coolio-wonderful. Sometimes at school when I’m upset, I think of her and I feel hugged, just by the thought of her. But there’s a hard bit, like a bit of gravel in a snowball. And it’s awful because the only thing that’s hard in her is something that I really really mind about.

It’s a shame about the story because I think she might’ve really liked it.

I’m looking for Dad out of the windscreen, like suddenly there he’ll be! I know it’s stupid, we haven’t even left Fairbanks yet, haven’t even left the yard, so it’s too early to be looking for him. And anyway, he’s in Anaktue, waiting for us. I just really want to see him.

Mr Azizi is trying to turn out of the yard onto the road, but there’s loads of trucks coming in and we can’t fit past them. Most of them have ‘AM-FUELS’ or ‘F.B.F.’ on them, which the man at the airport said stands for ‘Frack Baby Frack’, but Mum said he was only joking. Some of the trucks have houses on them, like the one we’ve got. Mum’s asking Mr Azizi questions, like how he stops fuel freezing. I’m not even trying to lip-read his answers because I’m pretty sure we won’t have done that in science. Last week we put baby teeth in Coca-Cola to see-what-happens, (borrowed from the Year Twos after the tooth fairy’s visited as most of us Year Sixes have lost our baby teeth). So instead of trying to lip-read their conversation I look out for Dad again.

The slimeball man is next to me; BANG next to my window. He must be standing on something because his face is close to mine. I can see the top of his head; there’s a horrible grey line either side of his parting, like a rat. I try to get further away from him, but I can’t get very far away because I’ve got a seat belt on and Mum is next to me.

Mum hasn’t seen him because she’s turned away again, probably hiding her filmy eyes from me.

The slimeball man is taking off his big mittens, but it’s so cold, why’s he doing that? He opens his bare hand and puts two fingers against his palm, which means ‘Mummy’ – MY sign for her.

Mr Azizi hasn’t seen him, because he’s looking straight ahead, waiting to turn onto the road.

The slimeball man is moving his fingers slowly around his face, the sign for ‘beautiful’.

His pudgy hands must be getting really cold because they’re turning all mottled, like ugly blue and mauve jellyfish. He signs, ‘Get your mummy for me.’

He’s pointing one of his horrible fingers at Mum.

There’s a gap for us to go and Mr Azizi drives out of the yard and onto the road and slimeball man is running after us, but he’ll never catch us.

I don’t know if I should tell Mum about him. I pat her arm and she turns to me and her eyes are filmy, just like I thought they’d be. I don’t want to make her more upset. And we’ll never have to see him again. He’s miles away from us already.

@Words_No_Sounds

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CREEPY: looks like hands turning into jellyfish; tastes like cakes that are alive; Feels: too close

Chapter 5

It was inhumanly dark. Yasmin’s eyes couldn’t make sense of the blackness. They’d been driving for seven hours and she’d long since stopped looking for glowing halos from far-off cities or towns because there were no cities or towns. Clouds made a barricade over the earth, so there was no moonlight or starlight; nothing to pierce through the weighted darkness apart from the truck’s headlights. Adeeb had told her that they shone for a quarter of a mile ahead, and to Yasmin they seemed like a search beam over an immense black ocean; a person disappeared in such a scale.

She remembered her terror of the dark as a child, how sometimes it had stopped her from even breathing, and it was linked to her being flung to the edge, a void in the centre of her life, where once her mother had been.

Her brothers and father had thought her fearless; they’d enjoyed her fists in the air to settle an argument, her bruises and grazes; the kid’s got balls. It was one way to try and fit into the all-male family. But being physically unafraid was easy; because after her mother died, what was there left to be scared of? Eight in the evening in February when they’d left the hospital. She’d tried to get out of the car but her father had put the child-locks on – the metal handle digging into her fingers, the smell of old takeaways, stale cigarettes, her nine-year-old arms in the cheap fleece too weak to force the door open and she couldn’t rescue Mum. Couldn’t stop them putting her into a dark box and nailing it shut.

Darkness was death and grief. But she’d hidden her fear from everyone, suffered her night terrors alone.

And then one night, ten months after her mother had died, she’d pulled up her bedroom blind and looked out of her window at the dark, confronting her demons, determined to face down her fear and had seen stars, like thousands of tiny celestial nightlights.

Through the rest of her childhood the stars had comforted her, not only for their lights in the darkness but because as she looked at them she could imagine herself far away, as if the pain of grief was soldered into their flat and street and all the places she’d ever been with her mother, or seen on TV with her even, and that if she could only imagine herself far enough away grief couldn’t follow her there.

Her comfort from the stars had matured into an intellectual fascination and they had become more not less astonishing as she’d studied them.

This road was eerie, an endless strip of ice through the dark, but it hadn’t been nearly as perilous as she’d feared.

She felt Ruby move closer to her and she put her arm around her. Her determination to find Matt wasn’t driven solely out of her love for him but out of her love for Ruby too. She couldn’t bear for Ruby to suffer the appalling bereavement of losing a parent; the terrible violence of that grief.

She remembered putting on Matt’s wedding ring at the police office, and knowing that he had to be alive, not only because of her love for him, but because of Ruby sitting next door.

The road is made of ice and we’re driving on it! Cross-my-heart true! Our headlights show it all white with snow and mucky bits sticking on it. Around our headlights it’s dark and it’s like driving into a ghost train tunnel and never seeing the end.

Mr Azizi said in winter they pour gazillions of gallons of water onto the old gravelly road and then it freezes. He said ice is the only thing that won’t break with big trucks driving on it, because ice is very, very tough. I think he wanted to make me feel safe but there was something in his face that meant he thinks this isn’t a good thing. He told me about the ice before we left Fairbanks, when I could still read his lips.