Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen (the gingerbread man read aloud TXT) 📗

of where to live within the narrow bands of areas available was reduced even further. Men did not face these same penalties; enough sperm was donated voluntarily that there wasn’t a shortage, there was no demand on their bodies.

I prickled with rage each month as I struggled to get by on my paltry salary in my dank flat. Protests were met with the same resolute message: only women could go through induction and those who did deserved to be rewarded; they didn’t care that the penalties for opting out felt more like a punishment than rewards for opting in.

Then there were the opinion pieces and films that labelled all outs as ‘selfish, egoistic maniacs, who are sabotaging the survival of our species,’ as one reporter put it.

But the items about outs were in fact just a fraction of what they produced. OSIP filled the Spheres with stories and articles, case studies and statistics. There were many, many articles dedicated to the joy and benefits of having children, details of how you could claim financial incentives if you signed up, new developments coming every day in their fertility treatments. OSIP did everything they could to force women down the path of induction. Though it wasn’t illegal to be an out, it felt that way a lot of the time.

‘Can’t you turn that thing off?’ Dad would say each time the films started up. He didn’t come round to visit me that often. We both found it difficult. His face would crumple with disgust at my workSphere as though he had just tasted milk that was sour.

‘You know I can’t,’ I’d say, through clenched teeth, quietly so only I could hear the words reverberating around my own head.

‘How do you stand it?’ my father would continue. He’d turn his back to my workSphere, or leave the room if he could. I didn’t tell him that you got used to it after a while, that over time you stopped hearing the voices.

He avoided them by rarely going out other than to his allotment. The Spheres were found in public places only, though by that I mean every place: train stations and bus stops, cafes and parks, shops and cinemas, gyms and swimming pools. Anywhere that was not a home. They had not made it into every one of those. Yet.

There appeared to be more each day as though they were living creatures, reproducing at a rate that we could never keep up with. The globular balls of information that never shut down, that you could approach from any angle, from any direction and its screen would align with your eyeline. They had no back, they had no end.

Evie and I had elected to have the workSpheres in our homes and the goSpheres that we carried with us at all times. Most people did. They were so much more advanced than any other computer that it wasn’t really a choice, but a necessity.

‘You should get rid of it,’ Dad would persist, ignoring the fact that I had not responded. ‘It’s not healthy having it start up like this. It’s like giving someone a key to your front door – they could walk in at any time.’

It was the same back-and-forth we always had when he came round. We’d repeated it so often, I would find myself waiting for the moment when he would start to complain about the workSphere, my shoulders tensing before he’d even spoken.

‘I’d never have one,’ he’d gripe.

* * *

Dad never questioned me about being an out. Not like Evie.

She made a point of raising it with me, circling the issue each time before going in for the kill.

‘You shouldn’t close yourself off to it, Kit.’

‘Off to what?’

‘Induction,’ Evie replied quickly, making the word sound smaller than it was.

We were lying on the carpet, side by side, in her sitting room. Dinner plates discarded, half-drunk wine glasses within reach.

This was before. Before Jakob. Before any of it.

We lay next to each other as we did when we were younger, when Dad started letting us sleep in the same bedroom. After our mother died, when I was three and Evie five, it was almost every night. Mum had died very suddenly from a brain tumour not long after our youngest sister, Maia, had passed away when she was still a baby. There’d been complications since Maia was born although I didn’t know the details; Dad didn’t like to talk about Mum or Maia. In truth, I couldn’t recall either of them clearly; Evie was what I remembered.

We’d always lay out our sleeping bags on the floor next to each other when we became too big to fit in a single bed side by side, talking into the night.

I stared up at the ceiling as we spoke, the shadows blurred in the warm half-light cast by the lamp. I realised when I was older that I found it difficult to confide in people when I was looking directly at them because I was so used to those night-time talks with Evie. Words flowed easily between us when we stared at the space of the ceiling above us.

‘Don’t you want to be a mum?’ I didn’t need to see Evie’s face to picture her heart-shaped face lighting up as she spoke. She was a careful, practical person, one who took care of every part of her appearance: her nails were always cut in neat squares and polished, her dark hair shiny, brushed and parted just to one side, but beneath the layers of sensibility, she was a dreamer.

Women were encouraged to go through induction as many times as they could and Evie had seriously considered going through it alone when she was twenty-two. I hadn’t tried to hide my relief when she told me she’d changed her mind and decided to wait to find a partner to parent with. In the years since then, she’d been dating continuously through the OSIP Partner Centres to try to find her mate. Dating through the Partner Centres