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

Thomas’s face shifts into focus, his eyes wide and searching. He mouths a question to me through the window: Want anything?

I shake my head and he turns away. I watch the quick rhythm of his steps as he crosses the forecourt. We can’t stop here for long.

I’m still not quite awake and for those few moments I forget what we’ve done, forget why we’re here. Then I turn to the back seat, suddenly, viciously. I whip my head round so that it jars, even though I know what I will find when I look back there.

The grey seats are empty; the seatbelts hang redundant.

I turn back to the front, deflated. I can see the top of Thomas’s head past the buckets of half-dead flowers, the glowing Spheres that revolve above. He’s eyeing something on one of the shelves as though he is about to pick it up but then he straightens, turns towards the sign for the toilets and disappears from view.

A car pulls up in the bay beside us. A man driving, a woman sitting in the back. I sense some unease between them; he wrings his hands as they speak, then rubs his temples in long upward sweeps. She’s crouched over, curved like the branch of an old tree. Then I glimpse the outline of the car seat next to her. That’s why she’s sitting in the back.

I crane my neck to see if I can spot the baby. We haven’t seen any children since we left home and I realise right then that I’m holding on to a hunger to see one. A tiny, new face slumped over in sleep, a toddler taking tottering steps; I’m flooded with an urgent need to see proof of their existence before me.

The woman catches my eye and I turn away quickly, pretending instead to be watching the Spheres as they change over. When I glance back, she is still staring at me, as is the man. They wonder what interest I have in them. They suspect perhaps that I’m not merely looking at them but watching them, inspecting them, judging them.

In the next moment, they pull away without charging their vehicle. Their car moves forwards in lurching jolts, taking the corner a little too sharply, a little too quickly. I wish I could tell them there’s no need for them to go but there’s another part of me that’s glad they’re suspicious, that wants to urge them to be on their guard, always.

I hunch my shoulders, my back stiff from travelling for so long. I want to release it, this pain that lines my spine, but I carry it with me, it is ingrained.

The Spheres turn over again. They crackle with another news story and I scan them, wanting to be distracted from myself, from my own thoughts that also revolve and rotate in an endless cycle. I yawn noisily, my eyelids beginning to droop.

That’s when I see it.

I am branded by it. I feel it, like a pressure on my chest that’s increasing, a heavy lump in my throat that grows and engorges. Everything I thought I knew drops away.

I see it, over and over, after the Spheres have changed again and moved on to quoting statistics.

I see it as Thomas walks back towards the car and I flick my eyes closed and let my head loll back, as though I’ve fallen back into a dream.

I see it as I hear the rustle of something he bought being stashed in the glove compartment.

He traces a finger across my cheek, believing me asleep again.

His kiss brushes the side of my head.

I hear him say, ‘I love you.’

But I don’t react. I pretend I’m asleep; I play dead.

All I can think of is what I have just seen.

There’s nothing left for him.

THEN

It was at Jakob’s naming ceremony where we first met.

An extended group of family and friends filled Evie and Seb’s narrow strip of garden, drinking a particularly sharp homemade lemonade and waiting for the barbecue to be lit.

Jakob was wearing a babygrow printed with orange lions and had spent the entire afternoon asleep in Evie’s arms. Each time Evie and Jakob walked down the garden, Seb just behind them, always close by, the crowd automatically parted to let them through, their voices dipping to a respectful silence. It gave an odd solemnity to the informal gathering.

He didn’t quite fill the babygrow. At four weeks old, he still seemed so small that I wondered why they’d planned the naming ceremony for so soon after the birth, until Evie had told me that OSIP could use public engagements as a tool to assess how new parents were coping. There was a balance to be met, she explained to me, between social isolation and protective isolation, for the physical health of the baby.

Whispers crept around me as I weaved through the crowd.

She’s looking well, isn’t she – considering what she went through…

How many inductions did they do in the end?

I heard she almost didn’t make it.

I could only half hear them and when I turned, I couldn’t see who had been speaking. An image of Evie flashed in my mind, pale and lost, almost disappearing into the hospital bed that held her. I shook my head, dispelling the image.

An older woman who I didn’t recognise kept staring at Jakob long after they had passed her. She didn’t seem to realise that her arms were reaching towards them, as though she were imagining she was cradling him. But in the following moment, the man next to her started speaking in a loud, braying voice and her arms collapsed to her sides.

‘I mean, who could have predicted it?’ he said. ‘We used to worry about nuclear weapons, overpopulation, climate change… but not this. Not infertility. And still no one can explain why it’s happened.’

‘I heard something the other day about it being down to pollution, a theory about microplastics,’ the older woman replied. She spoke quite slowly, as though wearied