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

small, overcrowded shed until it stopped. And I listened then in a way I never had before. I listened to the rainfall and found myself falling in love with it, the sound of it hitting the ground and pattering upon the roof.

I’m not one who believes in ghosts or the afterlife, but I took particular pleasure in imagining Dad’s hands guiding my own as I gardened. Boring a hole in the black, clinging compost and dropping in the seed that looked like little more than a fleck of dust. It really felt like he was there with me. Sometimes I realised I was listening for something else amid the quiet: the sound of his voice. It was during one of these times that I thought I had the most brilliant idea for the funeral, one that finally seemed worthy of my father, and called Evie immediately to tell her.

‘I’ve finally worked out what we should do for flowers,’ I told her. ‘We won’t have any.’

‘What, and have a donation for a heart charity?’

‘Well, we could do that but what I meant was that instead of having flowers on the casket we would decorate it with allotment-grown vegetables. Don’t you think Dad would like that?’

‘Kit,’ she said, hesitating a little before deciding that brutality was called for. ‘That’s a terrible idea.’

They were carnations in the end. Floating pink and white puffballs that waved gaily on their silver stalks. They were too trivial, too bouncy, but what did it really matter? He couldn’t see them.

Evie and Seb received a second IPS the day before the funeral. This one arrived in the post in a nondescript white envelope with a typed address. It looked very different to the first, handwritten form they’d been handed, and as we inspected it, we wondered if it had been spat out from a computer and never been touched by a human hand.

In stark capitals, it listed Jakob’s weight as a cause for concern and, unlike the first, stated that the IPS could be contested within twenty-four hours if parents believed a weight increase had occurred and the child would be removed from their register of concern.

Evie rang to tell me while I was cooking food for the wake. In one of my fits of decision-making, I’d decided that I’d make quiches, but it was an idea that I was already regretting. The pastry was crumbling in my hands and I’d had to start again from scratch. The concept of finishing them seemed so impossible, so far away, that I almost missed Evie’s call, thinking better of my rebuttal of shop-bought food.

I was at the door, keys in hand, when her face flashed up on my workSphere, peering out of it desperately, as though she might be able to step through it into my sitting room if she tried hard enough.

‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what more I can do,’ Evie told me that morning.

‘But has his weight gone up?’ I asked. ‘Enough…’

‘I think so. We tried to weigh him here. He’s more than they say he is on the letter but they’re not the proper type of scales. Seb’s gone out to buy some OSIP-approved ones. We’re going to film weighing him live to OSIP when he gets back, and then tomorrow we have to take him to a clinic for a weigh-in. That’s the only way we can contest.’

‘But the funer—’

‘I know, I know. We’ll be there. We’ll come straight after the weigh-in. But you understand that we have to do this too.’

And so, at our father’s funeral, I stood grieving for him alone.

NOW

I’m not alone any more. Mimi is with me.

She’s stirring. She does not know where she is and she begins to cry immediately. It seems as though she woke up already crying.

‘It’s Mummy, my darling,’ I coo to her from the front of the car but then her snuffles quieten to nothing.

‘Mimi? Mimi?’ I can’t see any movement, I don’t hear any sound. I chide myself for not asking the couple when she last ate, when she last had milk, how long it had been since they’d changed her. I can’t be sure if she’s skirting on the edges of hunger or if it’s just tiredness or something else.

‘Stay there,’ I tell her. ‘Just hold on.’ I draw up to a run-down restaurant that squats at the side of the road. Never have I been so glad to see one.

I run round to the back door as soon as I stop the car and open up my arms to her.

‘Mimi,’ I cry. Her eyes flicker open for just a moment but then they close again.

A weight lifts within me as I circle my arms around her and cradle her body into mine. She is solid; she is here. I bury my face in the top of her head, my tears make wet patches on her thin hair, and I swipe them away: I want to see her clearly.

I simultaneously want to hold her as close to me as I can and gaze into her face.

It’s hard to let go but when I do, I clasp both hands around her cheeks and kiss the velvet mushroom top of her nose. But still she sleeps.

There’s not the smile of recognition, that look of delight which would take over her whole face each time she’d lock eyes with me after waking. Here, now, her face is heavy with slumber, her eyelids stay closed. I refuse to believe it. I imagine her eyes scrunching up into a giggle and my face responding to hers – my tears turning to laughter, to delight. It’s as though I am trying to will her to wakefulness. I pull my mouth into a silly shape, I balloon my cheeks and touch her nose with my own, which would have made her chuckle even louder – if she were awake.

When I cannot wake her, I hold her face in my hands and trace the curve