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

could be lucrative; there were financial incentives attached if you signed up to them and an even bigger payout if you did conceive with a Partner Centre match.

‘I’m just not sure I could do it,’ I replied. I’d seen the way it had already taken over my sister’s life before she’d even properly begun the process. As Evie was registered to start induction as soon as she found a suitable partner, she regularly had gynaecological appointments and medical examinations. On top of the Partner Centre matches, her life rotated around induction already.

‘Of course you could,’ Evie said. ‘And then you could finally afford to move out of your building.’ The population had shrunk so much that we lived in concentrated sections in the remaining cities and where you lived within a quarter depended on your salary and housing credits. I was predictably in the lower bracket for both.

‘I don’t mind living there.’

‘That’s not what I heard you say to Dad the other day.’ Though I tried to downplay it to Evie, for the very reason that she would bring up induction, my flat was tiny, falling apart and fetid, no matter how much I cleaned or tended to it. Mould spread over the walls during the winter, and in the summer, it was like living in an airless tank. I’d never been able to get rid of the mice that scampered from flat to flat, finding holes upon holes within the walls in their own private labyrinth. But I didn’t have the credits needed to move and I’d resigned myself to it.

‘And, you know, induction’s much, much safer than it was,’ Evie parroted. ‘I saw a piece this morning on the Spheres…’

Her voice dropped as I stood and started to clatter our plates and glasses into a pile.

‘Kit. If you can’t talk to me to me about this, who can you?’

‘It’s not just about the induction, though, is it?’

We never had an idea of the actual number of children that were extracted. It simply wasn’t spoken about in those terms. OSIP released statistics annually which flooded the Spheres with figures concerning children’s welfare and well-being – ‘a 21 per cent rise in children’s safety at home with a 15 per cent rise in safety out of the home.’ But there was nothing on how many families had their children taken from them.

And induction didn’t work for more and more women. However OSIP spun it, however many studies they released, they couldn’t hide the danger. The cocktail of drugs you had to take made most women very sick and to some was fatal. Evie’s friend from school, Tola, died when she underwent induction just before she turned twenty. I’d gone with Evie to her funeral. It had been as awful as I imagined it would be. The service had been crowded, people standing in the aisles because there weren’t enough seats. Her parents, white-faced throughout it all, seemed unable to speak to anyone there. Evie had grasped my hand so tightly I wondered if she was worried she might fall.

Not even a year later, we heard that Flo, another member of Evie’s class had died through induction. And six months after that, it was Connie. I remember that it was the second time Connie had been through it, her first child had been extracted early on.

They were not the last funerals we’d go to.

Sometimes when I remembered Tola or when I’d spot an old school photo of Evie’s that Dad still had pinned up on his board, a mass of smiling faces, I’d question how it was that we were able to bear such loss. I’d wonder at the numbness I felt hardening within me when the same thing happened to someone I went to school with, or dad’s neighbours’ daughter, or the cousin of a friend. The list grew and grew. And so when I’d hear about another OSIP requirement coming out, there’d be a part of me that would think, fair enough, it made sense that OSIP monitored each child’s welfare so strictly. Every child born had been fought for, every child was precious. It was almost as though I could see the shadows of all those women who had sacrificed everything when I saw any child. And so if parenting standards weren’t met, extraction of the child for their own protection was the next logical step. I knew that.

It didn’t stop people going through induction and becoming parents, but not everyone, like me, signed up for it.

NOW

I start to feel cold. My hands are numb from clenching the steering wheel. If I take them off the wheel then they will stay in the same shape: hunched, useless claws.

But I can’t stop driving. I’ve learnt the route, the roads to take, the ones to avoid, and so I can almost see the journey criss-crossing in front of me, as though I have already made it before. You didn’t hear about people being on the run like we were, not on the Spheres. The man we met with told us that. He was small, bald, older than us, not someone that I would have ever expected to be part of any kind of resistance. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a pulpit.

The custodians didn’t want it getting out, he told me, that people were trying to escape OSIP. But OSIP will be looking for you, of course. It can be done, though, he said. It can be done. It’s all a matter of preparation.

I reported our conversation back to Thomas and I saw him mouthing those words as though he were trying to convince himself.

I try not to notice the bare skin where my wristband for Mimi once sat. It highlights the permanent sensation that I am forgetting something. I feel naked, exposed, without it. We’d had to leave the house as soon as they’d removed our bands; it was the last thing that happened before we’d walked out of the front door, stumbling over