The Quality of Silence Read online

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 i
n 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?

  Ruby was patting her arm; her suitcase had got caught in frozen slush at the edge of the pavement. Yasmin helped her to right it.

  There was a better explanation. He’d gone on a filming trip, just like she’d told Captain Grayling. There were in fact all sorts of animals to film, the Alaskan winter wilderness teeming with them. She’d been wrong not to believe him. And then something had delayed him; a dog getting injured, or the sled breaking. It didn’t matter. The point was he was nowhere near Anaktue when it was on fire. And, just as importantly, he’d have his emergency kit with him. And the phone? As he’d set off with the huskies he’d dropped it and didn’t notice; silencing snow again, lost objects dropping into it and making no protest. If he was in a sled it must be difficult, leads to the dogs tangling maybe, lots to think about and distract you from a dropped phone. And then? He got back to the village after the fire, after the police had searched, last night perhaps, this morning even, to find it burned to the ground and deserted.

  She had studied physics and astrophysics, not medicine, so she didn’t know how long he could survive.

  She wasn’t going to allow Captain Grayling’s body count evidence, it was unproved, not verified. It was incorrect. It must be incorrect. And here was the base of illogic on which she built the rest of her cogent hypotheses – that he had to be alive because she loved him; an emotional truth so keenly felt and absolute, that it couldn’t be dented by rational argument.

  Helping Ruby with her suitcase, they headed towards the airport building. She would get on a plane with Ruby to the north of Alaska and they would find him.

  As they reached the terminal she saw that the light had dimmed dramatically since they’d first arrived, that spell of dazzling daylight over. She knew that there were carefully calibrated words for dusk and nightfall here. She and Matt had spoken about it on the phone when he first came to Alaska – a good call, one of very few good calls. This light was called ‘nautical twilight’, with the sun between six and twelve degrees below the horizon. Soon the sun would dip to twelve to eighteen degrees below the horizon, and it would be ‘astronomical twilight’. And then it would be simply black.

  Chapter 3

  @Words_No_Sounds

  650 followers

  NOISE: looks like flashing signs, neon-bright; feels like rubble falling; tastes like other people’s breathed out air.

  It’s horrible here. There’s loads and loads of people with suitcases and trolleys. I’m writing Mum’s mobile and email address on little cards and keep getting jogged. On the back of the card there’s a taxi company but Mum says they’re only open in the summer. She says we’ll give our cards to anyone who might be able to help.

  I was a bit worried about the police being slowcoaches but now I think it’s really good because it means Mum is going to get Dad, and so he’ll see how much she loves him. He might not know that because she’s hidden it under lots of crossness.

  * * *

  Yasmin asked the five people queuing at the Northern Airways counter if she could queue jump and they must have seen her desperation because they kindly stood aside. She faced the scowling woman at the counter.

  ‘Do you know how I get to Anaktue?’

  ‘There’s a line, ma’am’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You have to wait your turn, lady.’

  Yasmin stepped away. The hostility of the woman would clearly only be appeased by queuing. She signed to Ruby, asking how she was getting on with the cards, and Ruby signed that she’d finished; a silent conversation that crossed the noisy hall. She’d given Ruby the task to make her feel useful, but also in the long-shot chance that someone would take a card who knew something about Matt and Anaktue.

  She noticed a sign up for tour parties to the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights. For a few seconds she was interested before remembering that Anaktue was hundreds of miles further north and, in any case, it didn’t operate during the midwinter months.

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: We’re coming!!

  From: [email protected]

  Hi Dad, Mum is coming to find you and I’m coming too. We’re at the airport and Mum’s going to get us plane tickets. Mum really really wants to see you. I can’t wait to see you too.

  Love you megatonnes

  Puggle

  I know Dad’s laptop is broken but his satellite terminal works so he’ll just need to borrow someone else’s laptop. If Dad’s OK then some of his friends in the village must be too and they’ll have taken a laptop. Inupiat people aren’t stuck in the past like some people think. They hunt caribou and make aputiat but they have snowmobiles and laptops too; it’s not an either/or thing. And someone’s bound to have taken their laptop when they got out of the fire. I would. After Bosley who’s our dog and Tripod our cat, my laptop would be the next thing I’d take. So Dad’ll be able to check his emails.

  Dad and I think that when I go to secondary school I’ll be too grown up to be called Puggle, as it’s a baby name. But he agrees that I can’t become a grown-up Puggle and be called Platypus; so we’re still working out what he’ll call me.

  When I emailed Dad I saw I’d got emails from people at school, but when I’m actually AT school most of them don’t talk to me. It’s not coolio AT ALL to talk to ‘the-deaf-girl’, which they say like it’s one word, like that’s my name.

  Tanya, head of the girl gang, is the most nasty – ‘Oh look, here comes the-deaf-girl want
ing a goss’ – I can read her lips really clearly and she’s started wearing pinky lip balm and that’s what I look at while the girl gang laugh. And then I say, ‘Why would I want to goss with you? You have the personality of a toaster! And anyway gossiping is horrible.’

  They go on laughing because they don’t understand sign and think it’s funny I’m doing-weird-things-with-her-hands. But Jimmy understands signs and he laughed because ‘personality of a toaster’ was funny.

  * * *

  (NASTY: feels like barbed-wire; looks like a rabbit with its leg in a trap; tastes like whispering glittery lip balm.)

  When I email or Facebook, people who can’t sign understand me straight away and get my jokes. Also they tell me jokes and I get them straight away too, which is important for a joke. (Not people like Tanya, but people who email or Facebook me.) And people tell me private things too. Max, who’s been in my class since Reception, is upset we’ve only got two and a half terms left in Wycliff Primary. He’s really worried about secondary school; like me. But at school we don’t ever talk to each other. It’s like there’s two worlds, the typed one, (like emails and Facebook and Twitter and blogging) and then the ‘real’ one. So there are two me’s. And I’d like the real world to be the typed one because that’s where I can properly be me.

  Dad got me my laptop. Mum hates it and right away called it thatbloodylaptop. She always glares at it, like the laptop could glare back at her and she could win the glaring competition.

  Mum thinks if I could mouth-talk everything will be better. She tells me that almost every time we walk home from school. Instead of arguing, I hold her hand. But sometimes I do argue with my voice – my hand-voice so I can’t hold her hand any more – and I say, ‘No it won’t,’ or ‘You don’t understand!’ Because

  for one) I’ll never sound like they do.

  for two) that’ll be the other thing about me; I’ll be the-deaf-girl-with-the-stupid-voice; and it’s bad enough being the-deaf-girl without being the anything-else-girl too.

  I’d rather be the-showy-off-brat-girl, the-nerdy-know-it-all-girl, any of those sorts of things, because those sorts of things you can try and change, if you want to. Or not. Up to you.