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

There was a relationship, once so full of hope and expectation that now hung together with the thinnest of threads. At any time, it seemed close to breaking.

There was blame that hung around unashamedly, like a dog that smelt with age and disease. It tripped us up. It didn’t give up.

And then there were the memories. The memories that were hardened to the physical, the photographs, the videos. Evie watched them over and over, and I was by her side. Seb and Thomas did not want to see them and I wondered if perhaps they relived Jakob in the way that I preferred: the feeling of the memory. A bounce of joy in my heart. The rush of expectation as I rounded the corner to their house each time I came to see him. The way my heart danced when he smiled.

In those days, it seemed that if you knocked Evie and Seb together, they would sound hollow. There was less of them.

Evie became harsher, more likely to lash out and sting, whilst Seb lost his edges. He would start a sentence but be unable to finish it. He would dither over the smallest of decisions.

I clung to Thomas in the days after. Sometimes we’d be walking side by side and I would suddenly feel as though I might fall, that my feet would fold in on themselves beneath me. I’d clutch on to Thomas for support, and though I thought it often, I did not fall, I stayed upright.

There were dreams. There were nightmares. But none were as real or as painful as the realisation on waking of what had come to pass, that Jakob was no longer with us and we might never see him again.

It was impossible to concentrate on anything other than the pain that rubbed inside us. I tried to work but listening to Jonah and his daughter made me only more bereft. Evie would never have these conversations with Jakob.

The Spheres sounded louder in those days. Their volumes ramped up. Was it because everything inside of us was quieter, stiller, emptier?

* * *

A week after Jakob’s extraction, late into the night, Evie rang. The sound of the call echoed through the empty flat and woke me.

She had already started speaking before I’d picked up. As soon as I swiped the workSphere to answer her, her face was filled the dome, close up to it, and her voice rang out into the room mid-sentence.

‘—where he is right now,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it, Kit. And will he remember us? Will we pass each other on a street one day? Will he know me? Will he remember?’

She didn’t need me to answer.

‘Of course he won’t remember me,’ she continued. ‘I’ll never know who he’ll turn into, who he’ll become, what will happen in his life. Sometimes I think, sometimes I wish… that I had been the one to die. Instead of Dad. I would never have known this. I wish I could have ended knowing that he was alive, that he was loved, and that was it. None of what has happened since.’

‘It’s so—’ I started to say but Evie carried on talking regardless.

‘I used to think that it just mattered that we tried. That we tried so fucking hard. But now I know that’s all bollocks. It didn’t matter one bit. He’s gone. My baby’s gone and I… I…’ Her words broke down into sobs and then cries and then a heavy silence of harsh, ragged breaths.

‘Evie, darling—’ Before I could say any more words, Evie turned quickly to a sound from behind her.

‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want me to talk about it. I’ve got to go.’ Her thin face disappeared and a news story about a new mushroom farm initiative appeared on the Sphere.

Rows upon rows of mushrooms filled the screen like a private army standing to attention. I imagined Evie now, hiding away from Seb who wouldn’t or couldn’t speak about what had happened. There was no right way to behave but it seemed a cruel joke that Evie and Seb had reacted in such opposite ways. What one did aggravated the other; they could not help but be at odds. When Evie was loud, abrasive almost, Seb retreated. But when Evie was quiet, and Seb tried to find a way to her, she turned fierce in protection of her privacy, craving space alone as she had never done before.

I swept the images of the mushroom farms away. The workSphere closed down to a silent black orb. I was about to get back into bed when I found myself swiping the screen back to life. I started to dig through my work files until I brought up that phone call I had flagged between Jonah and Genevieve where she told him that she had decided to start a family. I wanted to see again the files that Jonah had been looking at – the OSIP ones that he’d been flicking through.

But when I found the audio-graph of the call, I couldn’t see the face icon. I tried again and again, I even closed the file down and reopened it, but however much I searched I could not find a way to see the camera feed as I had before.

I was trying for the third time to reset the Sphere when an OSIP film took over the screen. Images of parents and children danced across the monitor as though they were on some sort of carousel. I gave up then and walked back to the bedroom.

‘How is she?’ Thomas asked, sitting up in bed.

‘As terrible as you’d imagine,’ I said. I stooped to climb under the covers, a tide of exhaustion overtaking me. ‘Let’s never have kids.’

‘Never,’ Thomas agreed and we tried to sleep through the muted sound of children’s laughter ringing out from my workSphere.

NOW

A workSphere whirs from its dormancy; I hear children’s voices.

I pause. I’m paralysed, although I can see it’s just an OSIP