The Quality of Silence (4 page)

‘Even if he was on a filming trip,’ Captain Grayling said, ‘surely he’d have come back to Anaktue, or the airstrip, in time to get to Fairbanks to meet you?’

‘Something must have gone wrong with the sled or a dog,’ she said.

‘You said your husband didn’t tell you where he was when he called?’

‘No.’

‘Any clues at all as to where he was?’

‘No.’

‘Can I ask what he did say to you?’

‘We didn’t speak.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We lost the connection before he could say anything.’

‘He didn’t say anything at all?’

‘No. As I said—’

‘So how do you know it was him?’

‘It was two in the morning in England and he’s the only person who calls me at that time. We often lose the connection. He has a satellite phone and needs a clear line of sight to the sky. Or maybe his phone just ran out of charge. As he hasn’t called again I think that’s the most likely.’

‘Could it have been someone else ringing you. Maybe a wrong number?’

‘No. It was him.’

She didn’t tell Captain Grayling how surprised she’d been that Matt had called her. Apart from that terrible call eight days ago, he’d virtually stopped phoning her, though he steadfastly emailed Ruby. During a rare phone call between them a month ago, she’d accused him of not bothering any more and he’d told her
that he couldn’t phone her from Anaktue, he had to trek for two miles and climb an icy ridge to get a satellite link. Oh, and it was also winter so pitch black when he made the trip and at that moment he was speaking to her in minus thirty. She hadn’t pointed out that he did that trip every time he sent an email to Ruby, which was frequently; just glad that he did. There’d been a storm yesterday. It would have been an even harsher journey.

She wished she could believe in some rewind in their relationship, unknown about by her, which meant he walked for two miles in the arctic cold and dark to speak to her, but knew that wasn’t true. She didn’t know why he had called her, especially when she was getting on a plane with Ruby in just a few hours’ time and he’d see her face to face.

‘Which satellite phone company does your husband use?’ Captain Grayling asked.

So he intended to check out what she’d told him with Matt’s phone company. She gave him the name of the company and hoped it wouldn’t delay their search.

She waited to feel some kind of relief but none came. Perhaps, after all that anxiety, she needed to actually touch him to feel relief.

She hadn’t yet asked either Lieutenant Reeve or Captain Grayling if Corazon was a victim of the fire. She hadn’t wanted to say her name.

@Words_No_Sounds

650 followers

ANXIETY: Looks like a chessboard with the squares quickly moving about; feels sweaty and shivery; tastes like prickly ice-cream.

I usually don’t do very well with speech therapists but there was one man, he was really young, I think he was still learning to be a doctor, and he asked me if I saw words as clearly I couldn’t hear them. Mum doesn’t like me saying ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ but Dad finds it funny. And the young sort-of-doctor did too. I hadn’t told anyone this before him, but I do see words and touch them and taste them too. I know that’s weird but this young sort-of-doctor didn’t think so. He thought I should tweet about it and I said ‘Great plan, Batman!
’
(as I knew he liked book characters brought into our chats). He was my first follower and now I’ve got hundreds, which is weird – (WEIRD
– Looks psychedelic; tastes dip-dab-sherbet-fizzy).

That tweet I did about ‘Excitement’, the one when I thought Dad was waiting for us at Arrivals? It’s funny because I said the word ‘Excitement’ looked like the furry hood of his Inupiaq parka but in October when he went out to Alaska I tweeted ‘Sadness’ and Sadness looked like his furry parka hood too. So I think how you see a word, just like what it means in a sentence, is all about context and timing. At school I wouldn’t use a word like ‘context’ because people think me being on the ‘Gifted and Talented’ programme is as weird as being ‘Special Needs’; being both is super-weird and not in a dip-dab-sherbet-fizzy way.

Usually it helps to tweet a feelings word.

But it didn’t help.

The policewoman was checking Yasmin’s contact details when Lieutenant Reeve came in. He told her that Captain Grayling was waiting to speak to her on the phone in his office. She went with him and picked up the phone.

‘I’m sorry,’ Captain Grayling said. ‘We’ve made a terrible mistake.’

He sounded gentle. She made his face softer, his physique less bulky.

‘A satellite phone was recovered near one of the burnt-out houses by a junior member of the search team. He called the last number. He was hoping it would locate someone who might still be alive, a possible casualty.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It was a public safety officer who made the call to you, not your husband. He

managed to get a second or two’s connection. I’m sorry. It was a confusing scene and he’s young and inexperienced. He should have reported this to me straight away. He’s being disciplined, of course; he should never have done it.’

‘Matt’s alive,’ she said to Captain Grayling. ‘Whether he made the call to me or not.’

‘Mrs Alfredson—’

‘He must have dropped the phone when he got out of the fire.’

‘But he wasn’t there when we searched.’

‘He must have gone to call for help. It’s what Matt would do. He’d have tried himself and, if he couldn’t, he’d go and get help. And he dropped his phone but didn’t realise. He has to trek for miles to get a proper signal and—’

‘I’m sorry Mrs. Alfredson but—’

‘Or he was away on a filming trip,’ she said. ‘Like I told you, and dropped the phone before he left and—’

Captain Grayling interrupted. God how he hated doing this. ‘There were twenty-four bodies recovered from the scene. The village had twenty-three residents at the time of the fire. I was given this information yesterday and have checked it again today.’

‘You can’t be totally certain about the number of people there,’ she said and heard the fast desperation in her voice, the measured certainty in his.

‘There were plans to install new generators at Anaktue so a detailed survey was done on every household. There was also a survey carried out for a possible new Inupiaq school. It was very specific on the numbers of villagers living there and at what times of the year.’

Captain Grayling sounded so reasonable and kind. She saw DI Lieutenant Reeve watching her; he must have spoken to Captain Grayling first. He had a glass of water ready for her. Captain Grayling was continuing, the sound waves relentlessly hitting her eardrums and turning into words.

‘Of the twenty-seven villagers, four of the young Inupiat men are away working at the wells in Prudhoe Bay as they do every winter, which means there were twenty-three villagers remaining. And as I said, we recovered twenty-four bodies.’

‘You haven’t identified Matt though, have you?’ she said.

‘You told Lieutenant Reeve the wedding ring was his.’

‘But he wasn’t wearing it, was he? And you haven’t done proper forensic tests, you can’t have done. You would have told me.’

Grayling felt compassion for this woman coursing through him, threatening to dislodge the dead weight of grief always present inside him, so precariously balanced. He wished there was a way of telling her that wasn’t brutal.

‘The fire was very intense,’ he said. It left some bodies barely identifiable as human let alone as a person with a name and family. It was unlikely they’d even be able to get dental ID for some of them.

‘I wish I hadn’t been the person who had to tell you, but your husband is dead. I’m so sorry. I know that Lieutenant Reeve will look after you.’

He hung up the phone.

The phone call from Matt had simply been tangible evidence of what Yasmin had already known, carried on the tip of a knife and now in the core of her, that he was alive.

In truth, she hadn’t been surprised to learn the phone call wasn’t from him, the surprise had been when she thought he’d called her. She wished he had, not because it would be a sign of reawakened love for her, but because then the police would have to believe her and she wouldn’t be in an Alaskan police building next to an airport with no clue, really, as to what she should do.

Mum’s just come in. She’s crouching down, so her face is close to me and I can read her lips easily. She tells me that Dad is fine. There’s been a mistake, but she will sort it all out. She looks too tight, like when you miss hitting a Swingball and the cord wraps itself round and round the post. I pretend not to notice and smile at her.

She tells me that Dad dropped his phone, which is why he hasn’t been able to call or text us. An older policeman comes in and asks Mum to go with him. She says she’ll be back soon. As they leave, the older policeman puts his arm out towards her, then drops it again without touching her. Lots of people don’t know how to behave towards Mum, her looking so lovely puts them off, but it’s completely clear she needs an arm around her.

In his office, Lieutenant Reeve tried to usher Yasmin Alfredson to a chair but she wouldn’t sit down.

‘Matt’s not dead,’ she said. ‘The state trooper in the north, Captain Grayling, has to search for him.’

Lieutenant Reeve had read somewhere that there were four stages of grief, denial being the first.

‘I’m sorry, he doesn’t think there’s any point.’

‘So he just gives up? How hard can it be to go and look for someone?’

He was afraid that her voice would break into a scream or a sob and kept his own voice calmly firm.

‘If Captain Grayling thought there was the remotest chance then he’d go. He flew a helicopter himself to Anaktue, despite the storm. Wasn’t even on duty but came in anyway. And he was the last person to leave; spent nearly twelve hours in minus thirty, searching.’

The man was a maverick in Fairbanks terms, running the show up in the north, as if he owned the place, often with scant regard for rules. But he would always go the extra mile, never abandoning a search and rescue mission while there was any hope left. People said it was ever since his son had died in Iraq.

Yasmin had fallen silent. Still not saying anything, she got up and left the room.

My bracelet vibrates which means there’s a loud noise. It’s like a James Bond gadget for deaf people so I know if someone’s shooting at me (the man in the special shop said that and I thought it was pretty funny). It’s meant to let you know if a car’s coming, in case you forget to look both ways.

Mum comes in with our suitcases; it must have been the door banging shut behind her that made my bracelet vibrate. She doesn’t smile at me. She always smiles at me when she sees me, even if I’ve only seen her five minutes before; like every time she sees me she smiles because she’s super-pleased to see me again. Some people think she’s aloof. I’ve lip-read them saying that. The mean words are easier to lip-read than the soft warm ones. I think if she didn’t look so beautiful they’d see her better.

She tells me that Dad is OK but there’s been a terrible fire at Anaktue. She says the police are being idiots and slowcoaches so we’re going to have to go and
find him ourselves
.

They left the police station, dragging their suitcases across the compacted snow. The cold felt sharper now. She and Ruby were wearing liners inside their arctic mittens; their face masks pulled up.

Where was he?

She had to think it through, calmly, rationally, as the scientist she’d once trained to be.

Captain Grayling had searched the airstrip thoroughly and it would presumably be a flat open area, so relatively easy to spot someone. Captain Grayling was probably right and Matt wasn’t there.

So where was he? Think. Logically. Forget the cold and Ruby’s face looking at her. Focus.

If Matt was at Anaktue when the fire started, what would he do? He’d try to help and, when he couldn’t, he’d go to call for help. In his haste she imagined his phone dropping from his pocket and falling silently onto the snow. So, not noticing, he trekked on through the storm for two miles then climbed the icy ridge to get a satellite connection. And then what happened? He felt in his pocket for his sat-phone and it wasn’t there. Maybe he started retracing his steps, looking for it, not knowing he’d dropped it right back at the village. How long did he search for it? Perhaps he then tried to walk to get help. He’d have been desperate. There were children in the village. Corazon. If he walked too fast he’d sweat and his sweat would freeze against his skin and he’d get hypothermia. But he understood the danger of hypothermia. It wouldn’t help him for her to worry. Focus. But she saw his eyes as he realised that there was no town or village or house to go to, no help for a hundred miles, but he kept walking anyway as if he could make it different, before finally knowing it was futile. She wanted to put the warm palm of her hand against his face. Focus. And all the time the police were searching Anaktue and the airstrip and it was dark, stormy, and their lights never spotted him because he wasn’t there. How long till he returned to Anaktue, to find it deserted and the police gone?