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

‘But if it were something like that, wouldn’t it have got better now that pollution has dropped? We’ve been at 99.98 per cent infertility rate for years now.’

‘It was just something I heard,’ she replied, in the same tired tone.

Dad stood a little back from everyone else, hunched over, inspecting the flowerbeds, one hand in his pocket, the other holding on to his glass awkwardly. He was wearing a coat even though everyone around him was in T-shirts and thin cotton shirts. I knew he felt particularly uncomfortable when the talk turned to infertility, which it often did. He might bolt at any moment. I made my way over but before I could reach him, I was halted by the soft chiming sound of a glass struck with a spoon.

Seb stood in front of us all, his drink raised, ready. He nodded to someone at the back, easily able to see over the crowd, he was so much taller than anyone else there. His hair had grown just a tiny bit too long. I imagined Evie trying to tame it before the party began.

‘Just a couple of words,’ he started to say. He smiled easily, raising his shoulders and spreading his arms out as if to say that it couldn’t be helped. ‘I’m not going to be long, I promised Evie that.’

They exchanged a conspiratorial look, Evie’s eyes flashing dark with affection.

‘I just wanted to say, when Evie and I decided to start induction together, we had no idea how it might all end.’

I couldn’t stop my attention drifting from Seb to Evie, as he spoke. She stood a little stiffly next to him, holding Jakob closely to her but I imagined that if her hands were free, her fingers would be lightly fidgeting with the fabric of her dress. I could tell she didn’t really want Seb to give a speech.

I saw her flinch slightly as he said, ‘induction’, and she stared determinedly down at Jakob, as though she could lose herself in his face. We’d known the word from an early age, we were taught it at school; I could still hear the faceless voice from the videos we were shown, word for word, in my ear: ‘Induction is the only way to narrow in on that tiny band of still viable eggs and sperm.’ My head would swim with the diagrams of ovaries and embryos and phrases like ‘intensive egg harvesting’ which had sounded frightening even then, before I truly understood what it would mean for us.

I remember Evie and I, as teenagers, trying to make sense of it, in that piecemeal way when what you’re trying to grasp feels just too big, too alien, to comprehend. It only dawned on me slowly that this was about our own bodies, that those distant-looking diagrams were in fact part of us.

As we grew older, Evie spoke about induction with increasing authority but when she was actually going through it, her expertise turned jaded. ‘It’s just a numbers game,’ she said to me wearily as she came to the end of yet another failed cycle and was about to start another. She didn’t want to talk about how the drug combinations that were used to stimulate ovaries could often cause them to over-respond, causing blood clots, permanent organ damage, heart attacks. I didn’t remember that detail from school. When Evie started induction, I had looked it up for myself; I’d read her drug notes when she wasn’t looking. Seeing the facts in an innocuous little font had made me feel entirely numb. I didn’t want to believe that it could be true. I’d buried it inside and a sick feeling, an uneasiness, had not left me since. I forced myself to look back to Seb as though I could dispel the shadow from my mind.

‘But I always, always – and I didn’t even tell Evie this – had a picture in my mind of us together sharing our child with the people who mean the most to us in the world. However tough things got, it was that picture that always kept me going. And now, being here, introducing you to Jakob, our beautiful son, right now, it’s a dream come—’

Suddenly, Seb’s voice was lost, cut off.

At first it appeared like he was laughing. There were a few nervous giggles as we watched his shoulders start to shake, his face creasing. But then he didn’t, or couldn’t, stop the silent quaking. We took in how his body dropped as though the strings that had been holding him upright and expansive had been severed in one cruel slash. Evie rushed towards him, concern set in lines across her face, and as she reached him we heard the unmistakable sound of a sob. It didn’t possibly sound like it could have come from the same man who’d begun the toast just moments before.

As if in echo, there was a collective moan, a united lament, in the garden. It almost sounded like disappointment. This was not how this was meant to end, it seemed to say. There was a rush of people who crowded in towards him behind Evie, while the rest of us hung back, awkwardly, trying not to stare but unable to stop our eyes from finding Seb’s tear-stricken face.

‘I’m all right, I’m all right.’ His words were almost lost in the noise of well-wishing and reassurances that surrounded him.

Someone, I can’t remember now who, raised his glass and shouted out, ‘To Evie and Seb, and to little Jakob!’ but those around shushed him. ‘Not now!’ I heard a vicious whisper. Everyone chatted in subdued voices afterwards as though anything louder than a staged whisper might be deemed inappropriate.

I went from group to group, refilling glasses, offering around bowls of crisps that everyone refused. Seb was so happy to be a father that he couldn’t keep control of his emotions was the party line. They were sleep-deprived with a newborn. Who is able to keep