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

‘That’s me,’ I exclaimed.

Thomas nodded. ‘It was after we first met. First ever met. At Evie and Seb’s.’

‘Really? You painted this after that?’

‘That very night. Smelling of burnt sausages.’

It was like the final piercing of the arrow, the killing shot.

‘I love you,’ I told him. It was too early to say the words, even though it was how I felt. I remembered coldly how they’d lost their lustre with Roger, and how I didn’t want to say them aloud to Thomas and not mean it, fully, completely and utterly. I didn’t want them to become haggard with time, shapeless with familiarity.

‘I bloody hope so,’ Thomas said back. ‘I mean… I love you too. But I think you knew that. Without me having to say.’ He kissed me lightly on the lips and then left me in front of the portrait he had made of me.

I couldn’t stop examining it. I ran my fingers over the ridges the paint made. I traced the line of my face that Thomas had captured, my eyes never leaving the shape of the profile, as though she might disappear if I turned away.

NOW

I try to feed Mimi. My breasts have filled again. I wonder if it might wake her but she doesn’t latch, her eyelids remain glued shut, her mouth sealed. I try again but her chin just bumps gently off my body, missing the vital connection. I want to keep trying although part of me realises that it’s pointless, and as I place her in the back of the car, the frustration stays with me. I keep missing the seatbelt fastening. It takes me several tries before it clicks.

I tuck my coat around Mimi’s sleeping body once more and as I do my mind fills with all of the violations I’m committing. As if they are real, the IPSs I’d be given flash before me.

I realise that I am trying not to think about Thomas. Not when I finally held our daughter to me, not as I drive away with her lying behind me like a secret. I don’t want to think about him being at the building – I don’t want to think about him being close by.

I find that it’s difficult to piece his face together. The longer I drive, the more he seems like a character from a dream that I have difficulty remembering. I can see his shades of light and dark, but cannot pin him down into hard lines; clear, defined shapes.

My husband.

I look at him so little now.

I don’t see him properly, face to face. Eye to eye. Not since Mimi went, or maybe even before that.

It’s not because he looks like Mimi. It’s not that he reminds me of her too much. There are, of course, gestures they share, the way they rub their eyes when tired, the very specific shape that their mouth makes when they yawn, the curled position when they sleep, that only I, a studier, a lover, a mother could know about. That mundane, sacred knowledge of which I am the only expert.

It’s because I worry that if we search each other’s faces for too long, we will find nothing left of the love we once had. We will be forced to accept that it has fled.

I think Thomas feels the same.

He doesn’t demand it either, he ducks away from my eyeline too. I believe that we are both just waiting, keeping our heads down, and so perhaps a seed of our love will grow again, coiling new roots around the carcass of what we once were. And perhaps that waiting, that refusal to leave until something changes, something grows, perhaps that is love to us now.

THEN

It was the day after one of our first dates, where we seemed to spend the whole dinner marvelling at each other rather than actually eating food. I had been working or putting up a good pretence of working at a life document for one of my newer clients. I’d rewatched some videos so many times that, watching them again, I knew exactly what was going to happen, just before it did. It felt like some sort of forecasting, made from the very safest of positions.

Then I turned to some old files of Jonah’s that I wanted to revisit. There was the phone call that I’d listened to, all that time ago, on the day that Evie and Seb were beginning induction, saved into his daughter’s file. They had been speaking but Jonah had ended the call out of the blue. There had been noise interference and so I hadn’t been able to understand what Genevieve was telling him.

I listened to it a few times in a row without trying to clear it up at all. I tried to zone into that other sound that just covered their words. The dog’s paws clacking, the static whir of a workSphere, disjointed words, the hasty goodbye. What was I missing?

It was an audio call, which wasn’t unusual for Jonah, although video calls were generally more common for most of my clients. Sometimes it helped to see their faces during phone conversations – particularly with family members and close friends. It all helped ‘to paint a picture’, as I was repeatedly told during my training all those years ago.

I spotted a tiny face icon in the corner of the file as it played. I touched it and the visuals opened up from the jagged peaks and troughs of the audiograph to the faces of both Jonah and Genevieve filling the screen. As they spoke I could see that neither of them were looking at the screen.

The audio-graph footage had recorded the visuals even though it had not been a video call. I was catching them both unaware as they were speaking. Very few clients turned their cameras on like this, although it was an option. I’d never known Jonah to do it before.

Genevieve was reading a manual about dog training in her