The Quality of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

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
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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