Read Online The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton - Free Book Online Page A

know her for ages to know that about her.
    * * *
    In the yard’s fiercely bright overhead lights, Adeeb saw a man walking around each truck, searching for something or someone. It was that man Silesian Stennet, not wearing a hat despite the cold, his blond hair glittering in the artificial glare. Silesian was carrying a crate, which Adeeb had seen him standing on so he could harangue truckers high up in their cabs. Silesian disturbed him, though he wasn’t sure why, and he felt bad about it because really he should admire the man, coming here as he regularly did, and standing on his almost literal soapbox, to warn tanker drivers carrying heaven-knows-what to and from the fracking wells. The drivers invariably just gave him a load of abuse for his pains. Like Adeeb, they found him disturbing, which is maybe why they ridiculed him.
    Adeeb turned away from Silesian Stennet and checked the satellite receiver mounted above the cab. The man who sold him the truck had installed it and claimed it was designed for ships and could get reception any place on the planet. He’d given Adeeb his sat-phone. Adeeb hadn’t wanted to keep the expensive contract going but Visha had made him. There was no cell reception or Wi-Fi in northern Alaska, not for hundreds of miles. She said she had to know he was all right. Said she wasn’t fussing. She’d stood there, long-fingered hands on her hips, daring him to disagree with her. He’d put an arm around her, awkward with those pretty hands still on her hips.
    ‘I feel fit as a fiddle, no problems at all,’ he’d said. (His mother, who’d taught him English, enjoyed colloquialisms.)
    ‘Then I want to know you feel fit as a fiddle no problems at all every day,’ Visha had said.
    He phoned home on the sat-phone every night, just long enough to reassure Visha and say good night to the boys. In the far north it helped him mark out night from day, reassured him that the diurnal rhythm still existed somewhere.
    Before getting back into his cab he checked everything one more time – snow chains, spare tyres, tyre jack, tools to repair hoses and lines and filters. Today he was Amundsen triple-checking his airship before setting off over the North Pole, not a middle-aged refugee from Afghanistan with incipient OCD. He suspected that the special repair tools and the flares, the emergency medical kit, all of it, was totally inadequate against the enormity of what northern Alaska could throw at them. But he would be taking Yasmin and Ruby only as far as the Arctic Circle – whatever their real reason was for that – and no further.
    Mum is a bit turned away from me, like when she’s playing Twenty-one and is trying to hide her expression so Dad and I think she might have an ace and a king. I can’t see her eyes, which are usually Mum’s giveaway. I gently pat her arm to get her attention. Her eyes are all filmy.
    ‘Dad told me a story about an Inupiaq hunter on sea ice,’ I say because I think the story will cheer her up.
    She says with her mouth-voice, ‘Can you tell me using your words?’
    Normally, I’d turn away from her, so I can’t read her lips any more. Then she’d come in front of me again and we’d do a little maypole dance around each other. But we can’t do that in Mr Azizi’s truck.
    ‘I am using my words,’ I say to her, in my hand-voice. She just shakes her head, like I’ve made her sad.
    The funny thing is that Mum understands everything else. She’s kind and funny and wonderful; super-coolio-wonderful. Sometimes at school when I’m upset, I think of her and I feel hugged, just by the thought of her. But there’s a hard bit, like a bit of gravel in a snowball. And it’s awful because the only thing that’s hard in her is something that I really really mind about.
    It’s a shame about the story because I think she might’ve really liked it.
    I’m looking for Dad out of the windscreen, like suddenly there he’ll be! I know it’s stupid, we haven’t even