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

stoic sensibility. ‘I can’t complain,’ was her mantra in those days. She ran her fingers over the dome of her belly as though to remind herself.

OSIP monitored her nutritional intake during pregnancy. She had had to log each meal, every snack, through her goSphere as well as a daily walk and relaxation exercises. She had to drink a certain amount of water each day so she filled two canisters in the morning and slowly emptied them, sip by sip, as the day wore on. It was overwhelming to me, that every morsel that passed her lips, the number of steps that she took in a day, were all watched over by OSIP. Every move she made was rigorously scrutinised; was it the right thing to do, was it safe for the baby? And what more could she do more that would be of benefit?

Physiological births were much preferred, caesareans performed only in an emergency. Evie told me that she’d learnt that this was because vaginal births had health advantages for the baby. She was constantly monitoring her posture to help the baby get into the best position for birth and this, on top of her new, growing body shape meant she moved with a sort of hunched anxiety that never left her.

She’d been told there was a 30 per cent chance of the induction being successful and that on average women could go through the process eight to nine times. I had to clamp my lips together to stop myself from asking the obvious: what percentage of those babies are extracted? We were never told those figures.

In the months Evie was pregnant a report revolved around the Spheres about a spike in the number of miscarriages. Evie pounced upon it. She wondered aloud if it was something the mother was or wasn’t doing; was it linked to food consumption, level of stress, amount of exercise, or lack of it. She darted from one to the other as though to pick apart the problem and when I gently suggested that none of those things caused miscarriages, it was as though I had not spoken.

We didn’t speak of the number of induction cycles they had been through, the pain she had endured to get to this point. It was better to concentrate on where she was now, that she was actually pregnant, that her baby was coming. Although the pregnancy was so fraught with Evie trying to ‘do the right thing’ that at times it was as if she was slipping away somehow, lost in the numbers and statistics, submerged in the advice and the monitoring. I wondered if she felt this way too.

Her life was punctuated with midwife appointments and OSIP checks. She saw different midwives at first but by the middle of the pregnancy, she was assigned a midwife who would see her to the birth. I asked what she was like, and when Evie didn’t meet my eye and mumbled something generic about them being fine, I was sure that it was a bigger problem than she was letting on. I asked Seb once when she was out of the room and his face flushed.

‘It’s not a big deal. Evie thinks,’ his voice lowered, ‘that the midwife doesn’t like her. But she’s being oversensitive. It’s OK, really it is.’

I tried to ask Evie about it again but she wouldn’t be drawn into talking about it.

We were all living close to the edge. Dad rang me most days leading up to the due date, not to talk about anything in particular, just to make contact. We would chat about his allotment for a few moments before the conversation turned inevitably to Evie and the unborn baby. I couldn’t remember us ever speaking so much in my life.

‘Have you heard from Evie today?’ Dad would ask me each time we spoke.

‘Why don’t you call her?’ I asked him on one of the consecutive phone conversations.

‘I don’t want to keep badgering her. She needs to rest, not have to keep answering the phone to me.’

‘I’m sure she’d like to hear from you, Dad.’

‘No, no,’ he said, decided. ‘She’ll get in touch if she wants to. It’s best if I ask you how she’s getting on.’

Afterwards, I would call Evie to ask her to call Dad. I was pondering the slight absurdity of this circle as I hung up on Dad again, when my goSphere lit up with Seb’s face.

‘Evie’s been taken into hospital,’ he said. ‘She’s gone into labour early. I’m going there now. I’ll call when there’s news.’

And then he was gone, so quickly that I felt as though I had only imagined the phone call. I rang Dad back, who had more questions than I could answer, and then all that was left to do was to wait.

‘Please don’t let anything be wrong. Please let Evie be well.’

I chanted it. Saying it out loud made it stronger, somehow. She was thirty-six weeks gone. My mind quickly tried to summon my knowledge about this period in the pregnancy from Evie drilling herself about each stage of development. I comforted myself by remembering that by thirty-six weeks, the baby’s lungs should have developed enough so they could breathe independently.

I tried to work. I was listening to more of Jonah’s conversations with his daughter. I had decided that I wanted to bring even more about their relationship into the life document. Some of the drafts I’d sent off had been approved and so I lost myself in old videos of Jonah with a pint-sized daughter driving along the coast. There was a spot on a tidal island close to where they lived that they returned to frequently. I wrote this place into the new piece and was pleased with how it turned out – it was nostalgic, private but relatable. Somehow the night passed by.

The next morning, we were summoned to Evie’s hospital with five short words. He’s here! E well. Come!

Dad and I went together. It took us a while to find