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

me tense. Something feels wrong; she’s too unresponsive. I rebuke myself silently for not finding out what drug they’d given her.

‘Let’s go see this building, then, shall we?’ I say. I force some jollity into my voice, making it sound like I am about to start singing a song.

THEN

We could hear raised voices through their door as soon as we arrived.

Thomas’s hand hesitated in the space before the doorbell.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s a terrible idea. But Evie said that they had to continue like normal. Otherwise everything would fall apart.’

‘Maybe we should have said we couldn’t come,’ Thomas suggested, blurting it out in a rush. ‘We could make up an excuse. It can be my fault.’

I raised my eyebrows at him sceptically. ‘I want to see Evie,’ I said.

They had received their sixth IPS that morning. Ironically, it had been in the very same car park that they had received that first warning, on the day of the naming ceremony, the first time Thomas and I had met.

‘And they’ve seen us now,’ I added as Evie’s face appeared at the window.

She’d blow-dried her hair and wore make-up as though she were going to work. She looked professional, groomed, but she couldn’t quite conceal the dark shadows under her eyes. Her blusher was a little too garish, oddly bright on the white of her cheeks.

‘Thomas, hi!’ She pulled him in and kissed him on the cheek. Her voice was a little too loud, just a shade too high-pitched. When she turned to me, we did not speak but a look passed between us. Evie’s face fell from her delighted, welcoming smile to grim weariness.

‘You didn’t have to have us round, you know,’ I told her, as we embraced.

‘I wanted to see you,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I needed to.’

She squeezed my palm to hers and we walked into their kitchen like that, hand in hand. I wondered how it was that we could swing from feeling so far away from each other to as close as we’d ever been. It reminded me of the little spats we’d had as children when we could turn on each other as quickly as the wind changed direction and just as quickly come back together.

‘Hi, Kit,’ Seb said, raising his hand in a wave. There was a very small moment when he might have come over to greet me, kiss me on the cheek as he usually would, but he noticed that Evie and I were holding hands and that seemed to stop him. A silence descended upon us all.

‘Jakob’s sleeping well,’ Thomas remarked, his voice filling the emptiness. He gestured towards Seb’s workSphere, which showed a link up to Jakob’s room. He was turned to his side, his face towards the camera so close up that I could see the flutter of his eyelids as he dreamed.

‘It’s a great angle,’ he continued as neither Evie, Seb nor I spoke up.

‘We have so many different cameras set up in there, we just change to the one that shows him best,’ Seb said. He made a couple of sweeping movements on the Spheres and so we toured around Jakob’s sleeping body from almost every angle.

He landed back on to the close-up of Jakob’s face. Once more, a silence descended upon us. His face was ghostly grey through the night-vision camera. Now and again, he would frown as though he were able to sense that we were all there watching him, and worrying.

‘Right,’ Evie said, in a ‘let’s get started’ sort of way. ‘Seb, can you sort out drinks. Kit, come with me and have a look at that patch in the garden we spoke about. Then we’ll eat.’

Everyone nodded mutely but no one moved until Evie pulled at my hand, directing me through the glass doors that led out on to their narrow garden. We’d spoken a few weeks ago about me helping her set up a veggie patch out there, since I’d taken over Dad’s allotment, but I hadn’t expected that she would want to talk about it now.

‘It’s this part here,’ Evie said, tugging me towards the end of the garden. ‘But I’m not sure if it gets enough sun. What do you reckon?’

‘Are we really doing this?’ I asked, gesturing to the forgotten patch of grass.

‘I made a huge deal with Seb about having to have you over to talk about the vegetable patch. We just need to be out here for a bit.’

‘Why’d you—’ But then I thought better of finishing my question.

‘He was saying that he wanted to cancel, after this morning, and I… I so wanted to see you that I just started going on about the vegetable patch. I said if OSIP found out about the vegetable patch it might stand in our favour.’

‘Evie… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh.’ It erupted out of me and then Evie was laughing alongside me. The sound of it bounced through the garden, but we both clasped our hands to our mouths as though the act of laughing was forbidden.

‘I know, I know, it’s ridiculous. We’ve just stopped speaking to each other properly. I can’t just tell him that I need to see my sister any more. I have to link it back to OSIP.’ Whenever she said their name, she dropped her voice, as though she were burying it under her breath. ‘If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry. I’d rather laugh. Although Seb, I’m sure, thinks I’m losing it. It’s just that I’d rather Jakob hear this sound. If it’s the last thing he hears while he’s still with us, I’d rather it be laughter.’

‘Do you want to talk about what happened this morning? We don’t have to go through it again if you’d rather not,’ I added quickly.

‘You know how it goes now. It’s like I can’t even remember what it was this time. I mean, I can, of course. But they’ve all just merged into one another. The breastfeeding