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

less than me but because, as he has told me over and over, he believes we are going through this now for the greater good. We live in agony now so we can live without it in our future.

I’ve tried to explain to him that I see the future as shadows, that I don’t believe in it, I don’t believe it will work. His face hardens when I speak like that. He believes that my lack of certainty is a lack of courage.

Perhaps he’s right. There is something elemental within me that cannot be without her, that knows with a cement certainty that if Mimi is with me then I can protect her.

It’s a ridiculous notion. Thomas has reminded me that Marie watched Tia being taken, he has retold the night we spent with Evie and Seb, but despite all of that hard memory, there is nothing firmer than my belief that I should be with my daughter.

Thomas would not believe me if I told him about what I saw on the Spheres when we stopped to recharge last night.

He’ll think that I’ve given myself an excuse to find her.

A part of me knows that I had to do this by myself because I can’t bear to face his disbelief.

THEN

‘I don’t miss it,’ Evie told me, wiping the edges of her mouth carefully with a balled-up tissue. Evie had left work since she had begun taking the induction drugs.

‘That’s good,’ I said. It was all I could say because she didn’t have any choice in the matter. Once you started induction, it became your full-time job.

She had been vomiting for the last week. Not from morning sickness; she wasn’t pregnant. It was the induction drugs that were turning her stomach. She was on the second round of fertility drugs now after being admitted to hospital following the first. The stomach pains she’d felt the day she’d come to visit me had worsened quickly and she’d been at risk of developing a blood clot.

She sipped on a glass of orange squash, something I hadn’t seen her drink since we were children.

‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘That’s better.’ She was doing such a good job of not showing how much she was suffering. ‘Drinking this always reminds me of Mum. She’d make us squash if we were sick.’

‘Did she?’ I asked hungrily. Evie remembered so much more about her than I did.

‘Yes, and toast cut into triangles.’

‘I can make you some if you like.’

‘Oh, no thanks,’ Evie replied, paling at the thought of food.

‘How do you feel about not going back?’ I asked, trying to distract her and take her back to what we had been speaking about. Even though she was not pregnant, her mind was busy preparing for the eventuality that she would be. Evie had worked so hard to get to where she was in her law firm, it was almost unbelievable that if she did get pregnant that she wouldn’t go back to it.

‘Oh, you know, it’ll be fine. I mean, I suppose it is a bit weird. I keep thinking that I’m just taking a break and I’ll be back again but… well, hopefully that won’t happen.’

‘How are you generally?’ I pressed.

‘Not… great. But I’m fine. Really, I am.’

Her eyes dulled as she spoke.

‘Where are you at in the induction cycle?’

Evie reeled off dates and other drugs that she had to start taking on top of what she was on now. There would be more waiting, more tests and scans. I felt as though I was lost in a maze, following her around sharp corners and disappearing bends, as she explained all that was to come.

‘Anyway,’ she finished, ‘it’s good to have all the learning to do to take your mind off the medical stuff.’

Their house had been taken over by induction manuals, and pages upon pages of notes both in Evie’s spidery letters and Seb’s more precise block capitals. Their Spheres were set to OSIP-approved documentaries that filled the rooms with the same monotone, bored-sounding voice.

Their living-room walls were postered with revision notes, all in different colours, intricate diagrams in places. Some parts were underlined heavily, other words highlighted angrily so that they screamed from the wall.

‘You can’t say you’re not committing to it,’ I said.

Evie nodded but then she doubled over, her body collapsing in on itself, and she ran to the bathroom.

NOW

The man gave us a number and a postcode: 918, NNW 1HW.

I took care to cover my tracks when I looked up the postcode. I used a workSphere in a shop to find the address, then I traced it on an old map that belonged to Dad and memorised its location. I’d found out the best route to avoid city border patrols, just in case. I don’t know whether Thomas did the same; I don’t believe he did. If he hasn’t, that might slow him down a little.

I say the number to myself whenever I’m anxious, when I cannot sleep.

NNW 1HW. 918. The digits loom in my mind unbidden now as they have throughout today, they are so etched upon me.

I am in front of 918 now, the numbers stuck on a grey door in diagonal dull silver shapes. I almost walked past it – each door’s so much like the one before it and the one after. This whole building is made up of so many identical flats, they remind me of the hexagons of a beehive.

I wish I could say that I was drawn to the door, that there was something magnetic about the bond with my child that led me here. But it’s just because this was the number that we’d been told, that I counted it out as I stalked through the corridor.

I raise my hand to the door, and knock. I’ve arrived.

THEN

Jakob Luke Maybury-Moss arrived at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon in mid-May.

Evie had revealed to me that she felt cumbersome and uncomfortable but mostly she hid this beneath a