The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton Page B

shot the pipeline was a regular drunken criminal, nothing more. But they were afraid of the usual type of terrorist attack too, by people who probably looked a lot like him. He’d heard there were plans to set up checkpoints along the Dalton Highway and a special anti-terrorist task force, to safeguard one of America’s most valuable infrastructures. What would they make of him, an Afghan refugee, at one of their checkpoints? The only thing he’d ever blown up was a balloon, but would they trust him on that? He’d already learned not to go out and about with a backpack or wearing a puffy jacket.
    ‘Do you know why the pipe’s really high like that?’ Ruby asked him on her machine. Running along next to them, the pipeline was raised high up on stilts. He saw her smile and knew she was enjoying the role of quizmaster with the answer in her pocket; his boys were the same.
    ‘No, I don’t. Do you?’
    ‘It’s so caribou can go underneath,’ she said, ‘when they migrate, so they can
    use the same path they always have for thousands of years.’
    No spy satellites or checkpoints for caribou, Adeeb thought.
    ‘But Dad says that fracking can make some birds migrate the wrong way and they get lost. No one knows really why that happens yet.’
    ‘That’s very sad.’
    ‘Yes.’
    She stared out of the window, her huge green eyes just visible from the little light in the cab; as if she was entranced.
    ‘It’s amazing out there, isn’t it?’ she said.
    If he hadn’t seen her eyes he would have thought she was joking.
    ‘Truthfully, I’m not that keen on it,’ he said. If it were up to him he’d give it back to the Russians for nothing.
    ‘There aren’t enough colours for me here,’ he continued. ‘You know when I was listening to Chopin earlier?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It helps me to imagine I’m somewhere else.’
    ‘With blossom?’
    ‘Yes. And other places too.’ He’d been training himself to find beautiful images in his new home of Oregon. ‘On sunny days we go to the park and there are oak trees, not like the short little trees out here, but giants. When the sun goes down in the summer the top leaves go from green to yellow, like they’re turning to gold.’
    Mum said I can’t tell Mr Azizi where we really want to go. She promised me she’d tell him herself, soon. So I’ll tell him about my trees, as he’s told me about his.
    ‘In the summer,’ I say on Voice Magic, ‘it’s still light outside when I go to bed. There’s these trees outside my window. I don’t know what kind, but they’re really high and their branches touch each other. You can’t see their trunks and you can’t see their tops, just the middles. All these branches are covered with leaves. Sometimes I imagine it’s not air between their branches but water and I’m swimming through them, twisting and sliding through sunny passages of leaves.’
    I’ve never told anyone about tree-swimming before, but he told me about his oak trees and I think it might be the same kind of feeling. And it’s nice to think of them, our summery green trees, because it’s really weird being in darkness all the time.
    There’s new words on my screen: ‘What is your favourite music?’
    No one has EVER asked me that question. Like it would be the stupidest question in the world. Maybe he means drum music, or the glockenspiel.
    ‘Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto,’ I say. ‘Brahms and the Beatles.’
    Voice Magic recognises the names because I’ve said them before, but just to me not anyone else.
    Mr Azizi nods. Like he’s not one bit surprised.
    ‘How about getting some sleep?’ he asks me. ‘You look tired out.’
    I really, really want to go to sleep. Like sleep is right behind me about to kidnap me by putting a big heavy blanket over my head and dragging me off.
    ‘I’ll take care of your mum for you,’ he says; so I nod and close my eyes, but I’m too jumpy to sleep, even though I’m being kidnapped with a heavy