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

OK and then said had I tried the library in the South East quarter if I needed any extra help.’

‘So she didn’t mention formula at all?’

‘Well – not in words as such… When I first went, I wasn’t even sure what would happen.’ Evie looked a little lost. ‘Would you go? I would do it myself but I can’t go back there again, just in case…’

Evie told me where to go. The library in the South East quarter was located in a room in a local hospital. Since books had been uploaded on to the Sphere network, libraries no longer took up whole buildings. They had been shuffled into small rooms, tucked into corners of public buildings and were often run by volunteers, as this one was.

When I arrived, the place struck me as strange in a way I couldn’t quite identify.

The young woman behind the desk seemed at first to have been expecting someone else, but then her features quickly rearranged and she shot me a small, tight smile. Her hair was cut so close to her skull that I could see the exact shape of her head, every bump and every line. She wore an oversized dress and ankle boots. There were still some books on a shelf. And lots of OSIP pamphlets, they took up a whole wall. It would not have taken me more than a minute to walk around the entire room. There was an older man sitting at one of the tables, hunched over something. For a moment, perhaps because I was nervous about being there, I tried to give the impression that I was just browsing, just popping in. I walked over to the books, yellow, faded paperbacks with pages that curled at their corners. I shot a glance and saw that the man was doing a jigsaw; the outer frame of it was almost fully completed.

I glanced back over at the woman. She was biting her fingers, her eyes on the door. In that moment, in the way she gnawed at her knuckle, she appeared even younger than she had before. Then she sensed my gaze. Her hand dropped from her mouth and she met my eye.

‘Are you OK there?’ she said.

‘Umm, someone asked me to come for them,’ I said. I kept my voice low even though, in the quiet of the room, the man sitting at the jigsaw would have been able to hear me. Then it struck me why the room was so odd: there were no Spheres ticking over. It was still, quiet and peaceful without them.

‘She said I should show you this card.’ I handed over a library card. It had nothing on it that identified Evie, just a long number and the emblem for the library.

The woman examined it, made a note of the number, and then passed it back to me.

‘Come back tomorrow. We don’t have any today. It won’t be me here but we’ll have what you need. Don’t forget a bag. Bring the card again. And we only take cash.’

‘How much?’ I asked, although Evie had already given me money to cover it. She’d told me that they just accepted what people could afford but I wanted to check in case things had changed.

‘It’s a pay-what-you-can kind of thing.’

The next day I returned and, as she had told me, the young woman was not there; it was a much older woman. She wore bangles that chimed every time she moved her wrists. She was sitting with the man who was still silently contemplating the jigsaw puzzle.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked me.

‘I think so. I came here yesterday—’

‘Have you got your card?’ she asked.

I handed it over and she glanced at the number and then handed it back to me.

‘How much do you need? You can have a maximum of eight hundred grams today.’

‘I guess eight hundred, then, and we’ll see how we go.’

‘Give me your bag and I’ll put it in.’ I handed over the shabby rucksack I’d brought along and she disappeared through a door into what looked like a large storage cupboard. When she reappeared, the rucksack was reassuringly bulky. I handed over the money, which she took without counting.

‘Thank you,’ she said with a brisk smile and a ring to her tone that seemed to mask what had just happened.

Only when I got home did I inspect the contents of the rucksack. Inside was an unlabelled glass jar of creamily white powder. It could have been a type of flour, perhaps. There was nothing to distinguish it from something completely innocent.

I kept it in a work bag I would carry around with me always and so if there came a day when Jakob was hungry and distressed we could make up a bottle from this stash as well as his breast milk feeds.

‘Do you know any more about what happens with the people at the library?’ I asked Evie.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘And I don’t want to.’

Evie asked me not to tell Seb about this arrangement.

He was more rattled by the IPS than he’d admit. He’d joke about OSIP when we were together at their house and then he would laugh loudly, the sound of his booming chuckle ringing out conspicuously so you felt its vibrations. He would hold his hands out expansively as though he were giving a speech, and grab you by the elbow or shoulder to labour a punchline. But his joking did not reach his eyes, which were permanently glazed with worry.

‘How do you think she’s doing?’ he asked me in a low tone one evening when Evie had gone to tend to Jakob’s cries.

‘Evie? As well as can be expected. How are you doing?’

‘Me? Well, you know, I feel completely powerless and I hate it. That’s how I am. But I wanted to ask you about it because I just worry that Evie feels more responsible about all this than me. What with the breastfeeding being hard and then because she thought that formula milk