The Quality of Silence (9 page)

Dad still hasn’t emailed back. But it’s really hard for him to check his emails. His satellite terminal is a lot more tricky to use than Mr Azizi’s because you can carry it around.

Mum and I are coming out here at Christmas, which is only four weeks away, and Dad and I are going are going to write a blog together – aweekinalaskablog.com – about all the animals and birds we see. Dad got me a special cover for my laptop so it will work in the cold and I’ve just put it on because I think we should start our blog as soon as we’re all together.

Adeeb checked his mirror. For the last fifteen miles or so, he’d seen blue headlights in the dark behind them, like two azure damselfish. HID lights were rare on the Dalton. The damselfish truck seemed to be following him, speeding up when he did, slowing when he did. He’d had a rookie follow him a couple of times, tailing him so he’d learn what to do, and so Adeeb would be there in case of any accident, but there was no rookie following him today. Nor could it be a friend, keeping mutually watchful eyes on one another. He had a reputation for keeping himself to himself, a reputation he felt had been created for him rather than earned. Marked as a loner he’d felt acutely alone on his trips north.

In a few minutes they were coming to the first steep incline and his hands gripped hold of the steering wheel in anticipation, as if he’d be holding on to it rather than using it to steer. He dreaded the hazardous driving ahead and feared the ice.

Before his friend Saaib’s accident, he had thought that ice, like glass, was delicate, the very fact of its transparency making it not quite solidly formed. He’d wondered how ice could really take the weight of a truck.

When Saaib arrived in the UK he found work in the pouring room of a glass factory. It was a huge room, Saaib said, with a totally even floor, into which was poured – carefully, by special machine – molten glass, which then solidified into a perfectly even sheet on the even floor, before being cut. But one morning something went wrong with the careful special machine and the molten glass gushed into the room, too much and too fast, and the liquid glass forced its way out of windows and doors and set light to whatever it touched. Only the level room, made of marble, could withstand the heat; outbuildings and offices were destroyed in the fire. Saaib had been badly burned. Since then glass and ice had seemed not only tough to Adeeb, but vicious, murderous even, and all the time their transparency belied their power.

Yasmin closed her mouth against a scream so that Ruby couldn’t see her fear. They were plunging down a sheer drop into the darkness. She watched Adeeb locking the differential gearing in the rear axle, so that each wheel had all the torque it could, but it wasn’t working because they were going too fast down this precipitous slope; surely this was too fast. They got to the bottom and the momentum sped them up the opposite slope. They reached the top. She was shaking from adrenaline.

She turned to Ruby who smiled at her, showing no sign of being afraid, as if this was an adventure. She was excited about getting to her dad and excited about the road itself, not realising how dangerous it was because how could a mother who makes you eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and has a homework schedule stuck to the fridge do something that puts you at risk?

‘I‘m sorry I frightened you,’ Adeeb said to Yasmin. ‘I had to drive fast enough for us to get up this side. Too slow is as dangerous as too fast. I should have warned you; should have warned you about the whole road before we left Fairbanks
.
It’s just that sometimes I don’t remember how bad it is until I’m driving it again.’

‘I asked you to take us,’ Yasmin said.

‘Do you want to go back?’ he said. ‘Because I’ll take you.’

The cab’s thermometer measured the outside temperature as minus twenty-four, already colder than Fairbanks. At Anaktue the average temperature in winter was minus thirty and could reach minus fifty, without the windchill. This road was dangerous, yes, she knew that now and wished to God that Ruby was somewhere safe, but if she left Matt there wasn’t a risk that he would be hurt but a hundred per cent, no margin of error certainty that he would die.

‘I want to go on’, she said.

I keep thinking we’re going to skid and I grab hold of Mum, like you do on a roller coaster. In our headlights you can see this ginormous pipe running right next to the road. It looks like a huge black vein in a white body, and inside there’s all this slushy warm oil pumping along.

I’m squashed up next to Mum and she’s got her arm around me and it feels really nice. Normally I don’t do this, because I need to practise for being eleven and grown up and at secondary school and everything. I wish she’d tell Mr Azizi that we want to go all the way to Deadhorse because I’m sure he’ll say yes and then she won’t look so worried. I hope that if I go to sleep when I wake up we’ll be near to Dad.

As Adeeb navigated their truck round hairpin bends and down hills more like ski-runs than a road, Yasmin focused on the drive axles and the air-actuated clutch and how power flowed to the tyres without any differential action, giving each wheel all the torque the road permitted. She’d never enjoyed the engineering part of physics but out here, in this truck, she was glad she knew how Adeeb was keeping control because she understood why, for the moment, Ruby was safe.

Ruby had fallen asleep, tired out from the long flight, the trauma of their arrival and the anxiety of trying to find a way to get to her Dad. Of course she was exhausted. Ruby’s head slipped a little and she juddered momentarily awake before settling into sleep. Yasmin stroked her hair and tried to stop her head from slipping down. If the danger to Ruby became too great she knew she would have to ask Adeeb to turn around or get a lift in a truck going back to Fairbanks. But for now they would keep going.

As Ruby slept, Yasmin strained to see more of the vast landscape surrounding the ice-ribbon road.

The scale of Alaska frightened Adeeb; a million and a half square kilometres, and the only sign of humanity through his windscreen was the ice road itself and the trans-Alaska pipeline running alongside it; technological marvels they might be, but Adeeb didn’t think they felt either human or civilising.

At the beginning of their journey, he and Yasmin had spoken about the mechanics of driving his truck. She said she’d studied a bit of engineering as part of her physics degree but hadn’t specialized in it; she’d chosen astrophysics. Adeeb thought that a woman studying astrophysics was one definition of freedom.

But they hadn’t actually talked – not about whatever it was that preoccupied her, had made her lie to him and bring a child to the Arctic Circle in winter. He guessed that she didn’t want to talk to him about it and it wasn’t something he could ask her. He hoped he’d be able to help her, if she did volunteer it.

His headlights illuminated five spruce trees at the edge of the road, whitened by snow and ice. Although the trees were over a century old they were barely three feet high; it was a brutal place to grow. Further north, there were no trees at all. He’d read about northern Alaska after his first journey to Deadhorse and the Prudhoe Bay oil wells, in the hope that knowing a place would tame it in some way, soften it a little, but the opposite had happened. He knew now that a landslide a hundred feet wide was moving towards the ice road, frozen soil and rocks and shrunken trees stealing closer by a few centimetres a day, gaining speed and destroying anything in their way; as if the land itself, like the cold, was not just passively hostile but actively aggressive.

Worse than the dangers of the road and the cold and the isolation was the absence of colours; just the white snow in his headlights and then the dark. In this monochromatic landscape he felt a craving for colours like a need for warmth. He thought of Leyla Saerahat Roshani and wondered if she had a lonely Afghan driver in mind, when she wrote her poetry:

‘I
plant my eyes/in the mirror/so that a sign/small and green/may emerge, proclaim/the eternity of Spring.’

But he’d never seen anything green and spring when it came would be brief.

His love of poetry, like his knowledge of English, was a gift from his mother, a teacher in Zabul before the Taliban stopped her from teaching.

For the last thirty miles he’d seen Yasmin staring through the windscreen, as if searching for something, more tense with every mile they covered, and he wanted to tell her that he’d never seen anything out there. Perhaps he’d been too focused on the road but he believed there was nothing to search for; nothing to see, just a sterile wasteland of snow and ice. Even the predatory packs of wolves, for which truckers carried loaded guns, were probably more myth than truth.

A truck passed him, going the other way towards Fairbanks. The glare of the truck’s headlights momentarily flooded his cab, shining on Ruby and Yasmin.

He should never have brought them. He hadn’t thought it through properly. He’d been too selfish to think it through properly. He realised now that he hadn’t been motivated by chivalry but by a selfish yearning for company on the road. His headache, which had felt so mild in Fairbanks, bothered him more now.

Only a sliver of wilderness could be seen in the beam of the headlights but enough for Yasmin to see that it was relentlessly barren. Matt had told her he’d come back here to film animals. He’d told Ruby all about the winter wildlife. She’d suspected that he was, at best, exaggerating so that Ruby wouldn’t know the real reason he was staying away from home. Yasmin had never challenged him because she’d thought it was a screen that protected both of them from a painful truth, not about Corazon – she didn’t know about her then – but that he found home life stultifying, her stultifying, and needed to get away. Too decent to formally separate, too loving to cause Ruby anguish, he’d used winter wildlife in Alaska as a necessary fiction. For mile after bleak mile that fiction had stretched and broken.

She remembered the prolonged quiet during their phone call eight days ago, the time it had taken for her angry words to reach him and then his words travelling back to her across the globe – ‘
I kissed her because I missed you.’

It had made no sense. But the reason he’d returned to Alaska in wintertime had become clear.

She fervently hoped she was wrong; not because it would mean that Matt was, kiss apart, faithful to her. In the great scheme of him being alive or dead that really, astonishingly, didn’t matter to her now. But because if he’d told her the truth about coming here for the animals there was a chance he’d been away filming when the village burned down, and that would mean he’d have his survival kit with him and not be out there in the killing cold and dark unprotected.

Two months after their knitting expedition, she’d asked him to meet her at Cambridge station. When he saw her on the platform, she was wearing wellies and carrying a large, oddly shaped holdall and he later admitted he’d feared that loving her would not always be straightforward. At King’s Lynn their train terminated and they got the last local bus of the evening, winding their way along the coast in the dark, the only passengers, until they reached the seaside village of Cley. He’d followed her over the wet shingle, the sea roaring-hushing alongside them.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing up.

He looked at the enormous dome of the Norfolk seaside sky; an upended cosmic glitter jar knocked clumsily across it.

She took a telescope and tripod out of the holdall, digging the tripod into the shingle and calibrating the telescope.

‘Now look.’

He’d thought she was going to show him the moon up close, or a planet and he’d see rings or satellites or whatever planets had. He hadn’t been prepared for it at all. The thousands of stars he’d seen with his naked eye had turned into hundreds of thousands; and all the time they had been there, these stars beyond stars.

They’d fallen asleep on a rug over bumpy shingles; the rhythmic thumping and sighing of the sea near to them. When she woke up, dawn was lightening the sky and had turned the stars invisible. Matt was already awake. He took her face in his hands.

‘What . . . ?’ she asked.

‘I see you,’ he said and she felt like landfall spotted by an explorer too long at sea.

I’m pressed against Mum and I can feel her heart beating really fast; like the little shrew Tripod caught (even though he’s only got three legs he still catches them). I know she’s thinking about Dad. She hasn’t seen that I’m awake so I look at her for a bit and she’s staring out of the windscreen and she’s biting on her lip, like she wants to cry and is having to stop herself.

I feel like I’m spying so I wriggle a bit, so she knows that I’m awake. She gives me a squeeze-box hug.

I shouldn’t have let myself fall asleep. I thought Mr Azizi would look after her, but he has to drive this truck, and he doesn’t know Mum well enough to see the signs of when she’s upset, things she’s never done before, like biting her lip and not crying.

I think she’s worried that it’s scenario one and Dad doesn’t have anything with him. But I know that he’ll be OK. His Inupiat friends showed him how to make an aputiak, which is a kind of igluNot the big sort, with rooms and everything, but the kind they make when they go on a hunting trip, just temporary, till Mum and me get there. So I’m sure he’s built himself an aputiak and he’s just waiting till we come and find him. He told me it’s snug inside.

‘How can it be when it’s made of SNOW?’ I said.