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

‘Kit?’ she asks quietly.

I nod, still breathless, still desperate. I whirl around the room, hunting for any trace of my daughter.

‘Please,’ the man says gently. ‘You must be calm. We must not raise suspicion – you know this.’

He speaks so quietly, he speaks as though we have already met, and maybe it is that which stops me from careering through the flat, knocking down everything in my path.

‘Where is she?’ I ask.

The woman takes a step towards me with her hand outstretched, almost in a shrug. ‘She is sleeping, of course,’ she says.

‘Can I see her?’ I gasp. ‘I need to see her.’

The woman takes my hand in hers – it surprises me with how cold it is in mine. She leads me to one of the doors and opens it a crack.

It’s dark in there and I can’t see anything for a moment. Then I make out a cot and a sleeping body within it, I rush past the woman, twist my hand out of her grasp. I run towards it.

Mimi has her back towards me and the blanket is wrapped almost over her head. I pull it back gently, internally chiding the couple for letting her cover her head with a blanket – I’d seen only a few days ago on the Spheres a piece about a child smothering themselves with a blanket in the night. Mimi had a sleeping bag at home in which she would never come to any danger.

But when I pull back the blanket, I am stunned. It’s not my girl, there’s not the fuzz of her wispy blonde hair. I am faced with a dark-haired boy, his hair cut so short that it makes him seem older than a baby.

‘She’s in that one.’ The woman points to the other side of the room.

I had not noticed when I rushed in, there is not just one cot in the room; there appear to be at least three.

I stumble in the direction that she pointed me in.

I pull back the covers.

THEN

She rocked his crib gently, back and forth, back and forth, intuitively. For the first time since Jakob had been born, I saw a shift had occurred within her.

I remembered my struggle to find the right words for her in hospital, the unease I’d felt. Believe, I’d told her. Seeing Evie now, it seemed to me that she did believe she was a mother. A good mother, one who was capable, who tried, who loved. And because she thought this of herself, she embodied it.

They were back home now. Their small house was transformed. Every patch of space was covered with Jakob’s things; muslin cloths, soft toys, the angular black bouncer that dominated the sitting room. It was akin to the light covering of a first snow; fresh flakes that settled where they fell, one by one, until they covered the entire ground, turning everything to white.

‘Everyone’s different,’ she said. ‘And so I guess that’s why it can be so confusing. And annoying. I can’t tell you how many times someone’s told me what’s worked like a charm for them and which has had just no effect for me at all. They thought it was tongue-tie but when we went for the appointment they said it wasn’t that. But, finally, I read about using a formula top-up and now his weight is up. It’s up, up, up!’ she said with a flourish. ‘And you’ll never guess who I ran into at the clinic?’ She didn’t pause for an answer. ‘Roger! He asked after you. He said something, now what was it? He said: whatever happened between you, he hopes you’re happy…’

I pulled a face to make light of the comment although there was something about it that felt jagged. Roger was the last person I had been in a relationship with, but we had broken up when he had pushed me to start induction.

‘I know, I know,’ Evie spoke quickly. I only vaguely noticed that she had barely stopped talking since I arrived. ‘But he seemed genuine, like he meant it. And then he told me that he’d started working for OSIP, that he was really loving it. I made my excuses to go then. I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about him, do you?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Tell me more about Jakey.’ Evie launched into the intricacies of the new feeding plan for Jakob; the fluctuations in his weight, the advice from the health visitors and lactation consultants. She spoke feverishly about his sleeping and how that combined with feeding. Through it all she described that though she’d felt the shadow of extraction around her, she could only keep moving steadily forwards to stay out of its reach.

I tried to follow everything she was saying, prickly and bothered by the mention of Roger; the message he’d passed to me, the fact that he was now working for OSIP. Once he’d had the idea that he wanted to have a child, he’d become fixated on us starting induction. I’d broken up with him as quickly as I could when I realised where he was heading. I remembered the way his eyes had hardened in our last few wretched conversations, how his tone had turned so cold and angry. He blamed me entirely, said that I’d led him on, on purpose.

I drove my mind back to Evie who, not noticing my distraction, continued to list every detail of Jakob’s days and nights in relation to the multiples of OSIP standards. It reminded me of the way that she would talk about the legal cases she was working on before she’d had Jakob. There would be an enormous amount of information from all different sources that she would distil down to one single course of action, the irrefutable most logical way of doing things. But by the way her eyes glazed as she spoke I could see this was a practised speech, and I wondered