The Quality of Silence (24 page)

‘I know you can’t answer on the CB,’ Coby continued. ‘You think there’s some psycho on your tail. And I don’t know ’bout that, but let’s say there is – and you think there is, so I’m goin’ with that – you’re not goin’ to answer back and give anythin’ away, right? So I’ll just keep comin’ on and doin’ my party piece at you till this storm’s let up. Got that? Good.’

She wished she could say thank you.

Outside it was minus forty-eight. Inside it was plus ten. She didn’t know how quickly the temperature would drop inside the cab. When it got to zero she’d wake Ruby and make her move around and keep her circulation going.

In the dark cab, Ruby pressed up close to her, she carried on reading her blog.

I know lots of people are scared of wolves because they think they’re like the wolves in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’; nasty animals that like killing things. Or because they make a frightening noise. But wolves aren’t like that at all, especially Arctic wolves. They’re really beautiful, with thick white fur that’s specially designed to keep the cold out. And Arctic wolves aren’t very big. I think the main thing people don’t like about wolves is that they are in a pack, and they surround an animal, like a herd of musk oxes, and then they get one little musk ox away and kill it. But wolves are much smaller than musk oxes so they need to do it as a pack. And they need to eat otherwise they’d die. And they don’t have much energy for chasing things, because staying warm in Alaska is a full-time job, and so they go after the animal that will take the littlest amount of energy.

Anyway, we eat lamb, don’t we? Nobody wants to eat mutton. Though I don’t think a wolf minds much about what the musk ox tastes like.

Yasmin could imagine Matt smiling at that, enjoying Ruby’s chatty blog. And she related to the wolves, putting what energy you have towards survival made sense to her.

She’d thought that when Ruby was on her laptop she was lonely, leaving the real world to enter cyberspace, peopled by strangers, not realising that there could be intimate worlds inside it.

She remembered back to Scotland, her fury that Ruby would be doing a blog, not understanding that it was about Matt and Ruby, that it was a place for them to meet and be close. One of many places. And she could have – should have – found places to join Ruby too.

There was another page of the blog. She’d thought that when Ruby saw the dead Arctic fox cub, its pretty face smeared in blood, she’d known, finally, these photos weren’t from her father and had stopped blogging.

The temperature in the cab was dropping quickly. One degree off freezing now. She took off the glove on her right hand, and felt Ruby’s face, as she’d done countless times when she’d been ill. Her forehead was warm, she’d let her sleep a while longer. Then she read the final page.

(I saw something super-coolio today, Dad! And I want this to be about all the amazing things in Alaska, and I hope that’s OK. I don’t have a picture but maybe we’ll be able to take one when you’re with us.)

I saw three moons!

Cross-my-heart true!

It was the usual one, and two other moons, one on either side of it, which are called moondogs. Mum told me all about them. Paraselenae is their proper name. They’re made by moonlight bouncing off ice crystals. They’re beautiful. The three moons looked like they’d shared out the sky.

It was minus two now inside the cab, minus fifty outside. There was still fifteen more minutes before she could run the heater again.

She opened a new document on Ruby’s laptop and typed

You can see our breath like smoke. There’s no lemony smell of Mr Azizi any more, no smell of anything; the cold has killed it.

The wind is rocking our truck, like we’re a battleship in a stormy sea.

Mum’s being sergeant-major-Mum, saying we need to put on all our things – ALL of them, Ruby. So we’re even getting out flannels and putting them inside our hats to make another layer and when it gets warm again my hair’s going to smell of toothpaste. School only let me leave during term-time if I brought homework and I’m ripping pages out of my books to put as another layer. It’ll be the best excuse ever – ‘I HAD to tear up my homework otherwise I might have got hypothermia!’

I have put Mr Azizi’s map, folded out, inside my fleece, really carefully, because it has Anaktue on it, and that’s where Dad is, and so we don’t want to tear it.

Mum checks the thermometer. It’s minus six in here and minus fifty-four outside. We’ve got the little light to the cab on and Voice Magic. And Mum and me are wearing the special gloves Dad got us so we can still sign too. I’d be frightened if we couldn’t talk to each other.

Mum says she thinks we’re in the eye of the storm. I look out of the windscreen to see if there’s an evil eye watching us, like Sauron in
The Lord of the Rings
, but there’s just the reflection of our faces; but they don’t look like our faces because we have goggles and face masks on and lots of hats.

Now we’re stamping our feet and waving our arms around, and Mum says we also need to keep ALERT. She says our job, each of us, is to keep the other one awake. So we’ll tell each other an interesting thing. I have to go first, but I don’t know what to say to Mum. I think she must see that I don’t know.

‘Can you tell me the story about the Inupiaq hunter on sea ice?’ she asks.

I wanted to tell her ages ago, when we were still with Mr Azizi, because it’s a really happy kind of story and I thought it would cheer her up. But she didn’t think it was interesting then.

‘Are you sure?’ I ask.

‘Absolutely,’ she says and I can tell she’s doing a big beamy mum smile under her face mask.

‘OK. A hunter was sitting all alone by a breathing hole in the sea ice,’ I say. ‘The ice seemed like part of the land because it was so, so thick.’

She nods at me to go on, like she’s really interested.

‘He had to sit really still. For hours and hours and hours.
The wind got stronger and stronger, like it is now I think. It tore the ice away from the land and the ice floated off into the sea. To start with, the hunter didn’t even know the ice he was sitting on had broken off. He didn’t know there was deep deep sea between him and the shore. And the poor hunter got carried further and further out to sea on the ice. Dad said sometimes a hunter drowned or froze to death. But their families always held out hope.’

That’s what Dad said – held out hope. But I think it should be held ON to hope, because hope is a warm thing you want to keep close to you.

‘Ruby? You said the family held out hope?’

She’s worried I’m not ALERT, but I’m just thinking about hope.

‘Yes. Because this man was isiqsuruk—’ I fingerspell ‘
isiqsuruk
’
‘—which

means “a strong and enduring hunter” and he got all the way to Siberia on his bit of ice. And the next winter he came home to his family back over the frozen sea.’

Mum’s smiling at me, but I can see tears in her eyes through her goggles, and I think the tears hurt because her eyes look redder.

‘That’s a great story, Ruby.’

I think so too but I wish Dad had told her, because he tells it much better than me.

We’re stamping our feet now in our big boots, which are tight because we have so many socks on, and we’re pretending we’re marching on parade, in front of Buckingham Palace with tourists taking our picture, and I imagine that Buckingham Palace has snow in front of it and the soldiers with bearskin hats stop marching and have a snowball fight so I run on the spot and wave my arms and pretend I’m throwing. Mum says I’m doing brilliantly. It’s harder for her than me because she has to stoop while she does the pretend marching and snowball fighting.

Mr Azizi’s thermometer says it’s minus eight in here and minus fifty-six outside.

Now I’m jumping and so is Mum, though a crouched kind of jump, and we’re waving our arms like someone we know is winning a race and we’re cheering them on and we decide it’s Bosley in a dog race, though Bosley would just run to the crowd, wagging his tail, and ask to be stroked. Our arms keep bumping into each other so we can’t do really big arm waves.

Mum says I’m one of those people at airports with the flags telling the planes where to park and I have a jumbo jet with a short-sighted pilot so I have to make super-big arm movements.

‘You told Mr Azizi you liked music?’ she says and then she finger-spells ‘Brahms’.

I didn’t know she’d listened to me talking to Mr Azizi.

‘His symphony has a battleship in a storm in it,’ I say and Mum smiles. I think Mum might feel like we’re inside the music too.

‘What other music do you like?’ Mum asks.

But it’s her turn to tell me an interesting thing.

‘Please, Ruby, I’d love to know.’

‘I like pop too,‘ I say. ‘The Beatles most of all because of the pictures in their songs.’

‘“Yellow Submarine”?’ Mum asks. ‘I love that one.’

‘Yes and “Octopus’s Garden”. I like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” the most. And I do quite like Rihanna’s diamonds and star song too.’

It’s tiring signing, like my hands have just run a long race. You can’t see our faces in the windscreen any more. There’s ice on the inside of it, in swirly patterns; in some places it’s much thicker than other places.

‘Ruby? We’re talking about music?’

‘Sometimes I like dancing to it,’ I say. ‘If the music’s on loud enough.’

I use the American sign for dancing, making a dance floor with my left hand and dancing two fingers on my right hand.

I look at Mum and I can see from her eyes, behind the goggles, that she’s happy about this and I wish I’d told her before.

‘I can sort of feel the music on the floor, if there isn’t a carpet, and then through the rest of me. And I can copy the other person dancing and if they sign the words that’s really good too.’

Jimmy said I was an awesome-sauce groovy dancer. (‘Groovy’ was our word that week, and we thought it’s a hippy-in-purple-bell-bottoms word.)

‘Where do you dance?’ Mum asks. She really wanted me to do ballet at school but I don’t like ballet.

‘At Jimmy’s,’ I say. ‘His mother always yells at him to turn the music down but he won’t.’

She said the music was
deafening!
which Jimmy and I thought was pretty hilarious.

‘Good for Jimmy.’ Mum says. ‘I’ve got a great idea. We can dance!’

The air stings when you breathe, like you’re breathing in siafu ants with their sharp pincers. I think if you touched the door handle without gloves your skin would stick to it.

‘I will sing,’ Mum says. ‘Rihanna!’

I pull a face at her, though she can’t really see it because I’m wearing a face mask. But she knows and I can tell she’s laughing at me.

‘I’ll be John Lennon not Rihanna then,’ she says, and her eyes are still smiley behind her goggles.

She pulls down her face mask so I can lip-read her singing ‘Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds’ and she signs at the same time. Dad says that singing is lovely for the sound it makes, even if you don’t understand the words. And I think signing is like that too. Like it’s beautiful just for itself.

You make singing and signing with the same letters.

Mum is signing and singing about tangerine trees and marmalade skies. And it’s good thinking about them because it stops you thinking about the cold and being frightened.

Mum’s words are little puffs of white and it’s funny that words look like that; like you can see that they’re made of breath. I wonder if each word has its own special shape. Speech therapists have told me about breath sounds and now I can see them. Maybe if we lived somewhere this cold I’d learn to read word-shapes in the air.

Mum’s singing Rihanna’s diamonds-star song now. We both want to giggle when she signs ‘a shooting star’. And I haven’t told anyone this, but last term Mum told me about sex, as I’m going to go to secondary school next year and I need to know grown-up things. She told me that the sign for ‘star’ looks very like the sign for ‘vagina’ so you really have to watch out when you sign ‘star’. Then we both giggled for ages and ages, and she said she thought that a star was a nice name for it. So when she signs ‘star’ in the Rihanna song we laugh, but it hurts to laugh because the siafu ants sting you all the way down inside.

Mum says that there’s no such thing as a shooting star. It’s really little bits of dust and rock falling into the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up; and I think that would be an even better song because it’s really exciting and also you wouldn’t have to worry about the vagina/shooting star thing.

We’re not doing proper dancing, we’re just kind of moving as much as we can and pretending it’s dancing. Then she stops signing and dancing and under her goggles her eyes aren’t crinkly with a smile.

‘You don’t spend so much time with Jimmy nowadays?’ Mum says.

There’s a song they used to sing:

Jimmy and Ruby,