Free The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton Page B

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