The Quality of Silence (35 page)

Maybe she should tell them the truth and then they could go and look for her. Because what threat was Ruby to them? She was ten, a slight little girl. Even if Ruby got the terminal and laptop working, and surely she couldn’t, not in the dark in minus thirty, on her own. But even if she did, who would she email? Who could she ask for help? Did she even know anyone’s email address?

‘I want to hear what you’ve got to say,’ Matt said to Grayling. ‘You told us you wanted to explain things, well, I’d like to know.’

He thought the only way they could ensure Ruby’s survival was to stop these men going after her, to keep them talking, and Yasmin knew he was right. Even if Ruby wasn’t a threat, they’d still see her as a potential risk and go after her.

‘OK,’ Grayling said. ‘Let’s talk by the bonfire, let the child sleep.’

It was as if he was doing a small kindness to make up for larger brutality. He turned to Jack.

‘That was always our plan,’ he said to Jack. ‘That we would explain.’

They walked towards the bonfire; the last piece of debris was burning.

‘So what exactly happened here?’ Matt asked.

‘A well casing cracked,’ Jack said. ‘The blowback got contaminated. Probably with arsenic. Travelled as a plume down the river.’ His tone was undramatic, almost nonchalant. ‘First I knew was my foreman getting hysterical. All these dead animals and fish. It’s routine to have dead animals near a fracking site, but this was different. I knew there were Eskimos down river, sent one of my workers to check it out. Told him what to do.’

Matt thought he saw a shape in the darkness and his eye muscles tightened to focus, but the shape was a shadow of the last flames of the bonfire, nothing more.

‘The people living in Anaktue boiled their water for drinking,’ Matt said.

‘Boiling just concentrates the level of arsenic,’ Jack said, his tone still neutral.

‘Are there any other people who—’

Jack interrupted, ‘Just one Eskimo village that no one’s ever heard of.’

‘So you destroyed the evidence?’

‘I paid a man to light a fire. The snow did the rest.’

‘And here?’

‘My foreman panicked, fucking idiot, started dismantling everything. Lit the bonfire.’

‘He needn’t have bothered?’ Matt said.

‘There was nothing to show there’d ever been a problem. It’s a fast-flowing river, five perhaps ten miles an hour, the arsenic plume would’ve reached the Arctic Ocean and the river would have tested clean. But like I said, the guy panicked, made everyone pack up and leave; even destroyed the fucking road.’

Yasmin was searching the darkness for Ruby and she knew it was an effort for Matt not to do the same; that he was forcing himself to look at Jack.

‘All of the waste ponds are full,’ Matt said to Jack. ‘Were they full before the arsenic leak?’

‘People aren’t always as safety conscious as they should be.’

‘So you dumped the poisonous blowback in the river?’ he asked.

‘Like I just said, people aren’t as safety conscious as they should be. Some of them are plain lazy.’

‘If the river flows at ten miles an hour,’ Matt said, ‘it would only have taken four hours for the arsenic plume to reach the village.’

‘No one realised in time to warn them,’ Grayling said and Yasmin thought

she heard genuine sadness in his voice. She tried to see his eyes, hoping to find some charity there, but the dying light from the bonfire reflected off his goggles and she couldn’t see behind them.

‘The problem we have,’ Jack said. ‘Is that this isn’t a leak that poisoned a well, like most fracking accidents. People who make decisions on energy policy aren’t a load of hillbillies getting their water from a fucking well.’

The bonfire was going out; the rig and the detritus of the fracking site were no longer visible in the darkness. Yasmin feared that soon there would be nothing to guide Ruby back to them. But it would be worse if these men went after her.

‘You said there was a good reason for covering this up,’ Matt said to Grayling. ’I still haven’t heard it.’

‘A river’s different to a well,’ Grayling said. ‘Rivers move. If there’s an accident they can poison everyone downstream. Washington gets its water from a river. New York gets its water from a river. People will be afraid of poison coming out of their faucets. The people who decide our energy policy may be afraid too. They could stop hydraulic fracturing.’

‘You don’t think they’re right to be afraid?’ Matt asked.

‘No,’ Grayling said. ‘What happened here was a tragic isolated event. A whole series of things happened that shouldn’t have, and it was just a terrible fluke that the fail-safes didn’t work.’

As she listened to Grayling, Yasmin hoped there was a slim chance that he hadn’t been lying; that after he had explained his bigger picture he would let them go and then they would find Ruby.

‘There’s a cost for every type of energy,’ Grayling continued. ‘We have to choose the one that has the lowest cost. Hydraulic fracturing gets fuel from right here, under our own land. We can’t be held to ransom for it. We don’t need to fight wars for it.’

‘What you need to understand,’ Jack said. ‘Is that Alaska protects the rest of the US. Always has done. First against the Commies and now against Arabs. We’ve provided fuel for America from regular oil wells and now from fracking too. The interior of Alaska’s got huge reserves just sitting there, under land that isn’t of any use for anything else. Two billion barrels of recoverable oil, eighty trillion cubic feet of natural gas. A bunch of Eskimos isn’t going to fuck that up for us.’

Matt heard Jack’s aggression and pugilistic nature. He was a man who wouldn’t back away from a fight or an argument; maybe Matt could use that to keep him away from Ruby.

Jack started walking towards the aputiak.

‘By “us” you just mean the USA?’ Matt said.

‘Other countries aren’t my problem,’ Jack said.

‘You think you’re patriotic?’

Jack stopped walking. ‘No question about that. Fracking got our country out of recession. Made us independent. Strong. Can’t be leaders of the free world if we rely on foreigners for our energy supply.’ He carried on walking.

‘When astronauts first went into space,’ Yasmin said. ‘They took photos of Earth. And then everyone could see that it was just one planet; a beautiful blue planet in the darkness of space.’

‘Animals and birds don’t know about countries,’ Matt said. ‘Some of them migrate for thousands of miles, all the way across the world. It’s just one planet for them too.’

‘You’re fucking tree huggers now?’ Jack said, but he’d stopped walking towards the aputiak.

‘Just saying we have a bigger picture than yours,’ Matt said. He turned to Grayling. ‘And you haven’t convinced me. Not yet.’

‘The truth is, the reality is, we do have individual territories,’ Grayling said. ‘And people fight each other over oil. And we send our boys to die overseas.’

‘You think fracking will end wars?’ Matt asked.

He heard a sound behind him and turned to grab hold of Ruby, put his body between her and these men, but it was just the strengthening wind disturbing a pile of waste containers behind them.

I’ve got right to the top, because when I went a little bit further my feet were going downwards, so I came back to here.

The wind is slapping my face WHACK! WHACK!

I can’t see any stars, just the dark and snow coming down and down, like fuzzy cold white blossom.

Up there, above where the blossom snow comes from, are satellites.

I remember Dad in Scotland, telling me what to do. I take Dad’s terminal out of the backpack and turn up my laptop screen to the brightest it will go, but it’s still hard to see where to put the cable to link the laptop to the terminal. I try and feel for the holes with my gloves but it’s super-fiddly. I take my gloves off and just use the thin liners.

I’ve linked them up and done what Daddy showed me to do. My keyboard isn’t freezing because of the special cover.

The terminal is looking for a satellite up in space. On the screen it says ‘Searching . . .’

I open up Dad’s and my blog with the photos and co-ordinates, which are where the animals died all along the river. When the terminal finds a satellite, I’m going to publish it, even the silly bits with me talking to Daddy because I don’t have time to delete them. I hope Daddy doesn’t mind that I’m doing this because it’s an emergency.

My fingers are getting really cold.

It still says ‘Searching . . .’

Mum said that a group of satellites are called a constellation, just like stars. But I think there’ll only be one or two above me here.

There were no flames in the bonfire; just ash glowing in pockmarked red spots. Yasmin’s stomach hurt from needing to be with Ruby, she could feel her fingers trying to grasp at a child who wasn’t there.

Matt was arguing with Grayling and Jack, trying to keep their focus on him, telling them that the next wars would be fought over clean water. Yasmin thought that Jack’s patriotism was thin and fragile as an eggshell; that it was muscular greed and entitlement that motivated him and, at any moment, he’d cut this short and go to the aputiak; discover Ruby had gone. Jack would kill them without pity or compunction, she knew that, but there was a chance Grayling might stop him.

‘Do you know how much water it takes to frack a single well?’ Matt asked. ‘Five million gallons. Which is legally polluted by poisonous chemicals to turn it into fracking fluid. No one knows how to dispose of it. That’s without any leak into the groundwater, the aquifers, the rivers.’

He spoke with conviction, his knowledge of fracking from the villagers’ campaign, but his focus was still on the darkness; as if he’d be able to catch a glimpse of Ruby if he stared at it hard enough.

‘It’s clean water that’s going to be as precious as fuel one day,’ Matt continued. ‘More so, because you can cut down your energy needs; if it gets desperate you can go back to how we lived before electricity or the car was even invented. Live like the Inupiaq. But water is essential for life itself and it’s global. Wars over water won’t be for power, like they are now, but for survival.’

‘I’ve listened to enough,’ Jack said. He turned to Grayling, ‘I’ll start the chopper. You get the terminal and laptop.’

Grayling didn’t move. It would be Jack who flew the helicopter away from here, Yasmin thought, but she didn’t know if Grayling would be his passenger.

‘We can’t leave them,’ Grayling said. ‘They have no shelter. No means of keeping warm.’

‘But you will leave them, Davey. Just like you didn’t tell your pals where they were in the storm.’

‘I thought I could find them myself and—’

‘Still haven’t told your pals where they are now, have you?’

Jack was walking towards the aputiak. Grayling didn’t reply.

‘Davey’s the eldest,’ Jack said. ‘Eleven cousins, and him at the top. He likes people to look up to him, always has. Even as a boy he had to be admired. The good boy; the good guy; the state trooper. Even his son died patriotically – that’s the image, isn’t it, Davey?’

Grayling was silent. They reached the aputiak, lit from inside by the kudlik. The pale yellow light caught on their goggles, reflecting tiny images of itself.

Matt saw a gleam of light on metal. Jack was levelling his gun at the aputiak. He and Grayling thought Ruby was inside.

‘I never intended this,’ Jack said, anger in his voice. ‘But you left me no fucking option.’

A sound cracked through the falling snow, metal punctured through the snow walls. Yasmin screamed.

‘It’s much kinder to do it quickly,’ Jack said and Matt thought that he believed his crime would be less if the time taken to die was less.

He fired another bullet at the aputiak. Yasmin wanted to shout a warning to Ruby that the man had a gun and to hide.

He fired again and she thought about the tree falling, the sound turning into a mossy tremble, a leaf brushing against Ruby’s cheek; she was trying to think calm things for Ruby, as if that would help her.

The qulliq inside the aputiak, dampened by falling snow and ice, was extinguished.

Jack switched on his torch. It glinted on the badge Grayling’s arm and then shone on his face. He had barely reacted.

Jack went into the half-destroyed aputiak and found no child; instead a dead husky mutilated by bullets. Matt saw that the dog enraged him.

It’s taking so long. I’m thinking of the paint-splattered purple heather in Scotland and Dad’s funny Superman T-shirt and being warm but it’s pitch-black-dark and so so cold. I think of Dad up here, all on his own, and I must be brave too.

I’ve got a picture of a flashing satellite!!

Our blog is publishing onto the net. All the pictures and the co-ordinates and everything!

But we don’t have any followers for our blog. Not one. Nobody even knows about it. No one will see it and help.

I can’t see the yellow glow from the aputiak or the orange bonfire dot. I don’t know how to get back to Mum and Dad.

Jack made Matt and Yasmin take off their jackets, face-masks and goggles. As he locked their protective clothes in the helicopter, they ran from him towards the hill, because surely that’s where Ruby had gone, the place where Matt had sent his emails. Without arctic protection, they quickly lost body heat and their muscles became weaker and they couldn’t run fast.