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

taken us so long to walk out that I’d left him there and gone on ahead because I was meeting friends for dinner.

‘Cheerio, love,’ he’d said, although his attention was elsewhere. As I’d left, I was aware of the gentle timbre of his voice that softly accompanied my footsteps. I let myself cry once more then, remembering that last time we’d been together, and parted. But they weren’t the gaping, widening sobs I’d shared with Evie on the goSphere, the tears came from remembering a happy, contented moment with someone I’d loved, someone who’d loved me.

I didn’t cry again that day. I was calm, almost distant, with the paramedics who took away Dad’s body. I answered their questions with precise detail. No, I hadn’t been aware that there was any heart disease in our family. Yes, I’d turned the body over. No, I hadn’t attempted CPR. Why? Because I knew that he was dead.

I didn’t break down when they left, wheeling his body off on a stretcher and covering it with blankets so he resembled nothing more than a few lumpy sacks.

I didn’t cry when I started leafing through one of our old photo albums that I found stacked upon Dad’s bookshelves. I smiled at the two-year-old me on Dad’s knee watching Evie twirling in front of us, and flicked through the many pages and pages documenting our life together. I only came close when I opened the fridge and saw the almost empty, organised shelves: three pale courgettes and a handful of French beans in the crisper, a shepherd’s pie ready meal for one on the centre shelf.

He’d always told us that after Mum died shepherd’s pie was the first thing that he had learnt to cook, and lucky for him that it was, because it was also one of the only things he could make that Evie and I would agree to eat.

When Evie arrived, rushing through the door with Jakob nestled into a car seat on her arm, I wondered why I had insisted that she come round straight away. It seemed absolutely critical at the time, but now, now that Dad’s body was taken, now that I realised the world hadn’t stopped spinning, all urgency had drained away.

‘I came as quickly as I could,’ she said, breathlessly, glancing around her with the air of wanting something to do. Moments later, she, too, deflated, walked around the flat much as I had, wandering, searching for something. Picking up odd things and placing them down again.

‘The paramedics suspect it was a heart attack but they’ll be able to tell us more in a little while. Once he’s been examined. But there’s not a rush because there’s no sign of wrong-doing or anything. It looked like he just collapsed.’

‘I checked my goSphere,’ Evie said. ‘We spoke just after midday – he happened to call just after the enforcers had left and so I ended up blurting it all out to him. But he was so supportive, he kept saying that we would be fine. I hate to think of him lying there. And neither of us knowing,’ she ended. I nodded. There had been a moment when I had been busy doing something – having dinner, listening to more of Jonah’s phone calls with his daughter; or perhaps I was asleep, listening to music or lying in the bath. There had been a moment when he was alive and a moment later when he was dead and I hadn’t known it.

‘I hope that he wasn’t in much pain,’ Evie said. She almost made it to the end of the sentence, but not quite. Her words faltered, her face crumpled.

We clung to one another.

It reminded me of those long nights after Mum had gone when I would creep into Evie’s bed and we would hide ourselves, every part of our bodies, under the duvet as though to mask our voices, to protect ourselves from forces unknown. It would become hot under there, our breath making the air stuffy and Evie would use one of her larger books to prop up the covers to make a sort of tent.

On those dark nights, talking side by side, our hands twisting around each other’s, it felt like the safest place that we could possibly be. Later, Dad would tell us how he had tried to move me back into my bed but even whilst sleeping, I would protest so much that he would give in and leave us there together, over-spilling, silently, indisputably together.

‘I suppose that we should talk about what to do,’ Evie said once we released one another. ‘With the funeral and… and everything.’

‘There’s time. Let’s not start any of that just yet. Anyway,’ I suddenly remembered, ‘tell me about the IPS. What happened?’

‘Oh, that,’ Evie said bitterly. Her face twisted with the recollection. ‘She just arrived at the front door. Like, out of nowhere. I had no idea what she wanted. I even offered her tea, for Christ’s sake.’

‘What did she look like?’ I asked sharply, the face of the female OSIP officer at Marie and Leo’s door flashing through my mind, her dull brown hair, her hard, scrutinising eyes.

‘Um, she was quite young. Pretty. Long, blonde hair. Not like the one we met in the car park. Almost the opposite of her. Skinny, well-dressed. She was very factual about it. She just said that she’d heard that we’d experienced problems regaining birth weight and I told her that we were OK now, his weight was in the correct centile. But then she asked me if we were using anything other than breast milk.’

Evie’s voice wavered and for a moment I felt as though I was reliving the conversation before me. Evie would have hesitated, as she was now, as the woman had questioned her. Her eyes darted to Jakob’s bag of things, the bottle of formula milk amongst the spare nappies and wipes and dummies.

‘I couldn’t lie. I knew exactly where she was going with it. But there was