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

‘Time to walk now, Meems,’ I say. She’s still sleepy, the drug they gave her still in effect, and so I bundle her up to me. She stirs a little, utters a mumbling sound that makes me ache for her. There’s the sharp, needling sensation of my milk letting down in response to her being close to me.

I need to feed her, and myself. I’d thought that the ravenous hunger I’d had in spikes during pregnancy would pass once I had her, I didn’t realise how much fuel I’d need for breastfeeding. In the early days, I was eating with an intensity I’d not encountered before, desperately trying to replace the calories that I was passing on to her.

The makeshift nappy I made for her has already soaked through. I hold her even more closely and start to walk along the canal path. It’s pretty and unreal, like something out of a brochure or an advertisement on the Spheres.

A soft light bounces along the towpath. As Evie told me, there is no one else there – no other houses, and we don’t pass any walkers either. I’m glad, as I’m exposed out here on the path. I’m very aware that Mimi’s not wearing enough. I try to wrap my coat around her and though she doesn’t seem cold pressed up close to me, my eyes wander guiltily from side to side.

If we meet an enforcer now, everything will be over.

I won’t be able to explain why neither of us is wearing our bands. There’s no doubt that we would be stopped because of what Mimi is wearing, and indeed what I look like. I’m still wearing my pyjamas underneath my coat; I haven’t showered or brushed my hair or teeth. I don’t want to know what I look like.

I can’t be sure if we turned the right way down the canal. If we don’t come to a house soon then we will have to turn back in the opposite direction. I examine Mimi to see how she is faring from being outside. Her cheeks are blossoming pink, her eyelids still sunk closed. I’m guessing that she has not been out at all from the flat that I took her from – did she wonder what had happened? Did she think we had deserted her?

I ask her now: ‘Meems, what did you do in the flat? The one with the other children, with the man and the woman?’

I stroke a finger on a cheek.

‘It looks like you were given enough to eat. Did they take care of you? Were you all right?’

Mimi’s face crumples for a moment in her sleep.

‘You know that you were only there with them, we were only apart so we could all be together again – you, me… and Daddy.’

‘Think of the bigger picture,’ I hear Thomas’s voice ringing out in my head. ‘It’s painful now, but it means that we can have a future. We can be together.’

He must have almost driven himself hoarse repeating those words to me. Because I never wanted to be parted from her, not for a single second.

THEN

Evie said that she had to see me. Alone. Right away.

‘I’ll come to you,’ she said on the goSphere.

‘Are you bringing Jakob?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said shortly, and gave no other explanation.

We met at a coffee shop that was round the corner from our flat.

She was late arriving. I’d already drunk one of the strong coffees that came in a glass and the caffeine was teeming through my mind, reverberating against my skull. I couldn’t stop myself from doing a double-take when I saw her pulling open the door of the café. She was thinner than I’d ever seen her. She looked almost swamped in the clothes that she’d pulled on and her hair hung in dull, heavy ropes around her face. For a moment, I hadn’t recognised her.

‘What’s going on? It sounded like an emergency.’

‘I haven’t been completely honest with you,’ Evie said. ‘There’s something you need to know. We decided not to tell anyone until we got to this point, I’m not sure why but we did. Anyway, we’re there now, we’re at the point where we have to tell people.’

‘What is it? You’re talking in riddles.’

‘OSIP,’ she said, dropping her voice. ‘We’ve had another four IPSs.’ She poured her coffee down her throat as though it were a strong whisky that could numb her.

‘So you have five,’ I said.

‘So we have five. And if we get two more then, then…’ She tilted the glass as far it would go until it was quite empty.

She let the words settle, permeate.

‘You need to come and spend some time with Jakob. Just in case.’

I couldn’t speak. The coffee I’d drunk hung in my stomach, all of a sudden it made me feel nauseous. My mind was a blur. I imagined Jakob going, what it would to do to Evie. I briefly wondered if this was the reason why I had felt a little disconnected from Evie recently. She’d been keeping this all in, perhaps even to shield me from it.

‘I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it’s a real possibility now,’ Evie said. She was speaking quickly but then she stopped, as though she’d run out of words, the wind gone from her. She didn’t need to say it; Jakob was only five months old, a huge distance before he’d reach his first birthday and the system would reset.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

Evie tried to smile but her mouth wouldn’t make the right shape, it twisted awkwardly, falsely. ‘I’m… terrible, actually.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘What good would it do?’ But then she launched into a string of dialogue. She spoke fast, as though the words were running out from her, escaping a captor. ‘I can’t sleep any more. I just don’t sleep. And then all day I feel half asleep, I keep making mistakes, I can’t hold on to