Being deaf isn’t something I can change. Mum doesn’t understand this but I don’t know if I even want to. It’s my Ruby-world; a quiet world that I look at and touch and sometimes taste but don’t hear. Dad says quietness is beautiful. So maybe my world is lovelier than other people’s. And maybe making sounds I can’t hear in my quiet world would spoil everything.
Max is really worried about changing schools; has an upset tummy about it and everything. I’m worried too, but my tummy’s been OK.
Yasmin reached the front of the queue and the hostile woman.
‘I need to get to Anaktue.’
‘I don’t know where that is, ma’am.’
‘About five hundred miles north of here.’
‘We don’t cover it.’
‘The nearest town then? Deadhorse, I think?’
She’d remembered it was the place Matt flew to when he came to Anaktue, that he’d get a taxi plane from there.
‘I told you, lady, we don’t cover that region.’
‘Can you tell me how to get there? Please?’
‘I do Northern Airways check-in; I’m not a travel agent.’
A man came up to Yasmin. About forty, he was dressed in overalls, a peak cap with ‘Am-Fuels’ on it; a 9/11 pin.
‘You’ll need Arctic Airways,’ he said. ‘But their last flight for the day left ten minutes ago.’
She felt rising panic and he must have noticed because he looked at her with kindness.
‘I might be able to get you on a flight to Deadhorse,’ he said. ‘From Deadhorse, you can get a taxi plane to most places in the north.’ He paused a moment. ‘Is Anaktue the place that’s been on the news?’
‘I imagine so.’
She didn’t volunteer anything more and he didn’t press her.
‘Can you wait a little bit while I see my daughter onto her flight?’ he said.
Behind him was a young woman, eighteen or nineteen, looking excited, eyes darting around, a smile reappearing every few moments, a rucksack on her back.
Mum’s handing out the little cards I’ve written, asking people if they know anything about Anaktue and she gets really funny looks. Some rude people just put theirs in the bin right in front of us. I’m writing some more now, on the back of a different taxi place. I’m a bit worried that people will phone or email Mum thinking she’s the taxi.
I’m still thinking a bit about the nasty girl gang at school and gossiping.
Dad told me about this film where a preacher tells people why gossiping is so terrible. He says that when you say a bit of gossip, you’re emptying a feather pillow out of a high window into the wind, and if you want to take the gossip back you’d have to find every single feather and you could never ever do that. But it would be good if that was true of Mum’s cards and they go all over the place, and someone will know something that will help us find Dad really soon.
Fifteen minutes later, Yasmin saw the man in the peaked cap threading his way through shoals of people towards them. She thought he looked nervous.
‘Jack Williams,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Sorry to take a while but I wanted to see my daughter through the departure gate. She hasn’t been away from home before. Not for more than a week anyway.’
Yasmin liked him for being anxious.
‘Freedman Barton Fuels are flyin’ a load of us worker bees to the wells south of Prudhoe, via Deadhorse,’ Jack continued. ‘It’s a charter. I know the pilot and gave him a call. If you want to hitch a ride it’s fine with him. ’Course it probably ain’t legal, but he’s not goin’ to tell anyone. There’s a couple of spare seats.’
‘Thank you,’ Yasmin said.
He smiled at Ruby. ‘I wish all daughters could stay put at your age. Not get all grown up and want to go off travellin’.’
Yasmin wasn’t sure how much of that Ruby had understood, but Jack spoke clearly and didn’t put his hand to his mouth so she’d have got most of it.
‘Come on, I’ll show you the way. Those your cases?’
I don’t like this man. Don’t trust him for a second. He’s all smiley-smarmy. He’s got our cases and his sleeve has wrinkled up and you can see an Omega watch. Dad has one like it, quite like it, that Grandpa left him. He says it’s much too precious to wear everyday so why’s this man wearing it on just any old day? Now he’s seen me staring.
Yasmin had seen Ruby looking at the watch, more like glowering at it. No wonder Jack noticed.
‘I used to buy presents for my wife,’ he said. ‘When you work at the wells, it’s ugly and dirty and you want somethin’ nice at the end of it. I’d get her pretty things. Right before our twentieth anniversary, she took a heap of her jewellery back to the store. Swapped it with this. Gave it to me.’
And his wife died, Yasmin thought, so he always wore her watch. She felt compassion for him in a way that before today she wouldn’t have imagined.
They followed Jack as he led them along a corridor and into a small departure lounge. There were fifteen to twenty men, most wearing F.B.F. caps and overalls, a few with Am-Fuels caps. Yasmin took hold of Ruby’s hand. She feared the day men like these would no longer see Ruby as a child. To her relief, the men didn’t notice their arrival, focused instead on a slight man wearing a suit, his back was towards them, his blond hair shining in the artificial lights. Yasmin could sense their hostility towards the suited blond man, almost feel its abrasiveness against her skin.
‘Fuckin’ tree-hugger,’ one of them said to him.
‘Ain’t no trees up in North Alaska, no one told you that?’ said another.
The blond man met their aggression with superiority. ‘Aren’t you concerned, or at least interested in what you’re working with? Carcinogens that cause cancers, radioactive chemicals—’
A man with a tattooed face interrupted, towering over the blond man. ‘Do we look sick?’ He turned to other workers. ‘Comes here and does his party piece every fuckin’ week.’
Yasmin could see the blond man’s face now and was surprised that he was in his fifties, his eyebrows grey, his skin pallid.
The man with tattoos continued, ‘Heard it all before, fella. Know what F.B.F. stands for? “Frack Baby Frack”. Sarah Palin. The lady had vision.’
The blond suited man’s tone was still superior. ‘You’ve been taken over by American Fuels, so you can’t make that joke any more.’
Yasmin saw that Ruby, lip-reading, was intimidated by these men and their language.
‘He said “frack baby frack”,’ she told Ruby, finger-spelling ‘frack’. She asked her not to lip-read any more; she’d tell her if there was anything important.
She saw that the men were now staring at her. Jack came closer.
‘This lady and her daughter are gettin’ a ride with us to Deadhorse,’ he said.
One of the men laughed. ‘Got a mall now, has it?’
‘We want to get to Anaktue,’ Yasmin said. ‘We’re getting a taxi plane from Deadhorse.’
‘Ain’t you seen the news?’ a muscular man said to her. ‘It’s burned to fuckin’ toast, everyone and everythin’.’ He looked around the others. ‘Said on the news, stupid fuckers stored fuel right by their houses.’
‘Hydraulic fracturing may have caused the fire,’ the blond man said, his pallid face animated as if this stimulated him. ‘Anaktue is only forty or so miles north of Am-Fuels’ wells at Tukapak.’
‘Wouldn’t know ’bout that,’ the muscular man said. ‘But I’d be guessin’ it’s forty or so miles of fuckin’ snow.’
‘People have set fire to the water coming out of their faucets,’ the blond man said.
‘Yeah right,’ the muscular man said. ‘It ain’t fuel explodin’ like the news said, it’s water burnt everythin’ down.’
‘The fumes could well have ignited,’ the blond man said. ‘That’s always a risk.’
‘Oh for cryin’ out loud,’ Jack said and Yasmin was sure he was moderating his language because of her and Ruby. ‘You’re tellin’ us fumes
from a frackin’ well went forty miles across northern Alaska, in minus thirty, in high winds without breakin’ up then got to Anaktue and exploded? Spontaneously?’
‘It’s possible,’ the blond man said.
‘That’s bullshit and you know it,’ Jack said. He stared at the blond man’s face, as if reading him a line at a time. ‘Jesus. You’d like it to be a frackin’ accident. You want somethin’ like this to happen.’
‘OK, you’re right,’ the blond man said. ‘Hydraulic fracturing is an accident waiting to happen; a disaster waiting to happen. Better a small village in Alaska has everyone die than a highly populated area. So yes, if wiping out a village is what it takes to stop this madness, then yes.’
Yasmin was repulsed, but she had to talk to him because he knew where Anaktue was – “only forty or so miles north of Am-Fuels’ wells at Tukapak”. Anaktue was a tiny place, more of a hamlet than a village, so how did he know?
She went over to him, holding Ruby’s hand. She found his unflinching eye contact with her invasive.
‘Silesian Stennet,’ he said to her, holding out his right hand, plump and freckled with age spots. She didn’t take it.
‘I was finance director of a hydraulic fracturing company,’ Silesian continued, not breaking eye contact. ‘But I couldn’t in all conscience continue, not with the knowledge I had of the risks. But some people just don’t want to be warned.’
‘How do you know where Anaktue is?’ Yasmin asked. ‘Do you know people there? Have you heard from someone?’
‘Like I said, I worked for a hydraulic fracturing company. Anaktue is sitting on hundreds of thousands of barrels of shale oil. It’s only thirty five miles from the Trans-Alaska pipeline, so the infrastructure is almost in place to ship out the crude. All the hydraulic fracturing companies know where Anaktue is. They’ll have source rock samples, 3D seismic data and drilling data for Anaktue.’
Jack watched Yasmin with Silesian Stennet and wondered if he should warn her about the son-of-a-bitch; tell her that he’d been convicted of sabotage at a fracking site; that he was just lucky no one got hurt. Several inches taller than Silesian, Jack could see his blond parting had grey streaks running in a line either side. He wanted to be a young man with a cause, but he was a middle-aged zealot embracing obsessions.
* * *
No one’s mouth is open, no one is speaking and Mum has gone like the Swingball again. She’s forgotten she’d tell me if someone said something important or interesting.
The man with the blond hair says in sign, ‘Do you want me to tell you what’s happening?’
It’s super-coolio when someone knows sign language and they’re not deaf. Like when President Obama signed ‘thank you’ straight back to someone who’d signed to him, like it wasn’t a big thing. Mum hasn’t even noticed because she’s listening to whatever it is.
The blond man finger-spells ‘Announcement’ and now he’s signing something about a dead horse. He means the place; the place where we’re going to so we can find Dad.
In American Sign Language the sign for a horse is putting your hand to your head and wiggling your pretend ear, like the puppet horse in War Horse. In British Sign Language you pretend you’re holding the reins while you gallop, which is more fun to do. I think about the story of the sign not what it means because I’m worried it means something bad.
The blond man is holding out his phone. He’s typed something for me to read. I go closer to him, which isn’t very far, so Mum won’t mind. I read what he’s typed:
There’s been a crash at Deadhorse airport. A cargo plane has spilt its load. No flights landing till it’s cleared up. Might be tomorrow or the day after.
I feel sick. Like in the plane when I walked down the aisle and thought that underneath the floor was miles of sky.
The blond man says, ‘Why are you going to Anaktue?’ and he finger-spells ‘Anaktue’.
‘To find Dad,’ I tell him.
‘At Anaktue?’ he says and his face is kind of smiling, like he thinks it’s funny.
‘Yes.’
I don’t like being close to him. When he put his phone near my face to read his hands smelled like old fish.
You know how I said that Jack guy is creepy? Well, he isn’t, not really. I was just annoyed with him for being with us, when it should be Dad with us. Was even annoyed with him helping us, which is stupid, because we need his help to get to Dad. So even though I find this blond man creepy, I’m not going to trust my creepy-monitor.
I go closer to Mum. A man’s talking to her, but she’s still forgotten she’d let me know anything important, so I’ll lip-read him. I can’t make out every word but quite a lot.
He says small taxi planes will still fly from Deadhorse because they don’t need the main runway. We can still get to Dad!
There’s another man, the one with lots of tattoos, saying something about getting to Deadhorse from here, but I can’t read his lips very well because he mumbles. And now another one is smiling like it’s really funny.
‘And how’s she meant to do that?’ he says, then he sees me and stops for a moment. ‘Get the effing bus?’
And now he’s looking at Mum and he’s saying something I can’t lip-read then he says,
‘You can’t drive there. It’s five hundred miles on an ice road.’
I tug at Mum, making her look at me. ‘What will we do?‘ I say. ‘How will we get to Daddy?’
She tells to me to wait a moment. The blond man comes closer to me again and shows me his phone:
Why does your mother wear two wedding rings?
I look at Mum’s hand. She always has her wedding ring on and sometimes her engagement ring or the ring Dad gave her when I was born, which is made of a stone called peridot, which is green and means joy, and Mum says is the same colour as my eyes so she can look at her ring when I’m not there and imagine my face really clearly, but Dad says it also means he was on a bit of a tight budget.
She doesn’t wear Dad’s wedding ring too because he wears his ring. I don’t understand. It’s like the floor of that plane is just soggy paper and I’m falling through it.
Mum is grabbing the man’s phone and snapping it shut and shoving it back at him. She bends down so that her face is close to mine. ‘Daddy takes off his ring when he’s working,’ she says. ‘Which is why a policeman found it. And now I’m keeping it safe for him.’ She’s mouth-speaking and signing at the same time. ‘Daddy is OK.’
The blond man is watching her sign and it’s like he’s stealing something from me.
Wheeling her suitcase with one hand and holding Ruby’s hand with the other, Yasmin walked away from the departure lounge along a long corridor towards the exit. Ruby was struggling to keep up, her suitcase tipping over on its wheels.
She must think of a plan. There had to be a plan. Had to be. If she couldn’t think of a plan would that be the moment someone would tell her to face facts? And who would that someone be? A policeman? Someone from England? As long as she was on her way to find him, Matt was alive. And it wasn’t some reactionary grief, fuelled by a need in her, but because if she stopped believing he was alive, if she let people and their facts crowd around her, he’d be left alone in the northern Arctic wilderness and wouldn’t survive.
Mum says that we need a team talk. Dad used to do our team talks till he came here then Mum took over. At home, Mum says she and Bosley are ‘Team Ruby’ and it’s a let it all out time, because it’s not good to keep things bottled up and I should have a good old cry if I want to (rather than risk crying in public, which she thinks is embarrassing too). And, when I do, Bosley wags his tail, bumping it against me, and it’s like he gives me some of his tail-wagging happiness. Sometimes Tripod is there instead of Bosley and he purrs with trembly happiness on my lap and that’s really nice too but usually it’s Bosley.
Mum says we’re going to go to a hotel, but I thought we were going to find Dad. She says that a good hotel is bound to have a sitter service. For a little bit
I don’t know what she’s talking about. And then I do and I say, ‘No!’ She’s never left me with a sitter before. I don’t want to be left with a sitter. She says it won’t be for very long. And she’ll make sure that the sitter is nice.
The blond man is right behind us and he’s been watching us sign. It’s like he’s been stealing but I didn’t even know. He must have run some of the way, because his face is all shiny and his blond hair has got dark sweaty streaks in it.
He comes in front of us so we can’t walk down the corridor any more. He’s staring at Mum, not saying anything, just doing that ‘OMG! she’s so GORGEOUS! I’m going to turn myself into a total dork by just staring at her’ thing. But they always look more dorkish by not saying anything for ages and ages. Mum never notices. ‘Mum’s romantic roadkill’, Dad calls it. ‘She’s a hit and run driver.’
‘No, she’s not, because she doesn’t even know she’s hit them,’ I say, defending Mum, which makes Dad laugh.
That sounds like they tease each other all the time, but they hardly ever do.
The blond man is speaking now, and I can see his lips.
‘I can help you find a good hotel here,’ he says.
‘We’re fine, thank you,’ Mum says. But she doesn’t mean the ‘thank you’.
She takes my hand and case and we walk along the corridor away from him.
But he’s coming too. He reaches out to touch her, like she knows him already, like she’s his wife or girlfriend, but she doesn’t let him because she doesn’t even like him.
‘You’ve never been here before,’ he says. ‘So you don’t know what places rip you off.’
Yasmin tried to get Ruby away from Silesian but he was blocking their path.
‘You need a sitter, right? I’ll look after the girl. Keep her safe for you.’
‘I said we’re fine.’
‘It’s no trouble. I live here in Fairbanks. Just a block away. Professional sitter service would be expensive. I’d be happy to do it for free.’ He took hold of her arm.