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

THEN

We were caught in another reality – somewhere that felt far from life before, somewhere we could not escape.

I took a break from work and spent most of my time at Evie and Seb’s. My days were filled helping Evie with Jakob or sorting out Dad’s effects. In the evenings we gathered together, us three. For Seb and me, meals were little more than a few mouthfuls of toast or picking at a takeaway bought days before, but Evie was trying to boost her milk supply. We kept making up plates of food within reach of the one hand that wasn’t supporting Jakob’s head, refilling water bottles which she seemed to drain when we were looking the other way. She started using a breast pump when she wasn’t feeding, she’d heard that it could help increase milk production. She’d sit hooked up to a double pump, trying to eat, trying to drink, trying to take calming breaths and at the end of it all, she’d hold up the bottle that would hold only a centimetre or two of milk.

Her face would drop when she saw the meagre amount but she wouldn’t complain about the fact that after an hour, this was all there was. Jake would start to cry with hunger again and, without saying a word, she’d put the pump away and pull him towards her.

It felt at that time that we were only just surviving. We operated under a cyclical mixture of grief, anger and desperation.

Our conversations on those nights together inevitably circled around Dad. There seemed too much to organise: the funeral, the flat, the unpicking of his life from the small things like cancelling his subscriptions, to the question of what we should do with his allotment. But beneath it all lurked the IPSs and our worries about Jakob and what OSIP would do next.

We rattled each other easily. One morning, just a few days after Dad’s death, I went to his flat for no reason other than just being drawn there. I wanted to feel close to him, to find some old photographs, search for any instances of his handwriting. But when I arrived there, I heard the sound of movement behind the door.

‘Evie?’ I called out.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. She rushed out to meet me, a little red-faced. I couldn’t tell if she had been crying or whether it was something else.

‘No reason,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to be here.’

‘I’m going through Dad’s stuff,’ she said.

‘I’ll help,’ I offered.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean – it’s sort of my responsibility. As the oldest. I want to do it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes – but it’s all over the place. Do you mind coming back later? So I can concentrate? Jakey’s asleep but I’ve only got so long before he wakes up.’

‘Well – I suppose so. Listen, are you sure I can’t help? You being older than me doesn’t mean that you should do all the work.’

‘I don’t mind, honestly,’ Evie said. ‘I want to do it.’ There was something steely in her voice that stopped me asking again.

When I did return to Dad’s place later on, Evie had taken all of Dad’s paperwork with her – letters, photographs, documents, the lot.

I rang her immediately on my goSphere.

When she answered her face was turned away from the screen; she was speaking to Seb.

‘By watch him, I mean watch him. Watch him, or I’ll swear to God I’ll… Thank you,’ she said, her voice lined with sarcasm, before she turned to face me. ‘Kit? I haven’t got long. What’s up?’

‘I went round to Dad’s. You took almost everything.’

‘What? Some of his paperwork.’

‘All of it. All of his paperwork.’

‘I’m just going through everything for the solicitor. It makes more sense to do it here.’

‘Well, let me come and help.’

Evie raked a hand through her hair as though she were trying to pull out the strands and then her gaze wandered back towards Jakob.

‘Can we talk about this later? I’m sorry, Kit, this isn’t a good time,’ she said. ‘I can’t…’ But she never finished the sentence. ‘I’ll call you soon.’

She swiped the screen closed before I could answer.

I told myself it was because she was tired, it was all just down to her being under so much strain, but I couldn’t stop the lump in my throat building, the sudden sense of loneliness that swept around my shoulders in a whisper.

I resolved that I would try to help her as best I could; although she never did call me back about Dad’s documents or indeed mention them to me again, she willingly accepted my help preparing the house for any unexpected OSIP visits. We started with the formula milk; I could see that Evie didn’t want to throw it away and so I said that I could store what they had left and after that we set about cleaning, starting in the kitchen, as though we could exorcise its presence from our lives. Evie breastfed with a stubborn, grim determination but, as though he could taste the surliness in her milk, Jakob would break off from feeding often and start to wail. Nothing soothed him. Not more milk, not the usual rocking on a shoulder.

‘I think he’s hungry still,’ Evie would say beseechingly. She didn’t have to say another word; I understood what that meant.

After we’d used up the last of the milk that I’d been keeping for them, Evie asked me if I might be able to get hold of some more. It was not possible to find it in a shop, it was only prescribed through official channels, but Evie had found a means of getting it. There’d been no mum at a playgroup; it was all done through a library.

‘A library?’ I questioned dubiously. ‘Where did you hear that from?’

‘That was from another mum. When I was out one day. I was trying – failing – to breastfeed and she came over to me.’

‘What did she say exactly?’

‘She just asked if I was