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

on to my bare feet and pluck the car keys from where Thomas dropped them, scattered next to a fruit bowl that holds no fruit.

The day is mine.

And I am leaving.

THEN

He was standing slightly hunched, leaning intently over the barbeque.

Though we had never met, I found myself reaching out towards him, resting one of my hands gently upon the back of one of his shoulders.

The cotton of his shirt was cool beneath my palm.

‘Thomas?’

He turned slowly towards me and for a beat longer than it should have lasted, we stood there, wordless, our eyes searching each other’s faces as though they were landscapes to be viewed.

‘I’m Evie’s sister,’ I said, suddenly ridiculously, unaccountably, shy. ‘Kit,’ I managed to say, conscious as I always was of that word, sister. Sister, brother; words that were gradually becoming obsolete.

‘Kit,’ he repeated quietly as though committing the name to memory.

‘I’ve come to help – with the barbeque.’

‘Great, all I’ve managed to achieve so far is make a tower of sausages. And blindly hope I can get the coals lit before the crowd turns feral from hunger.’

‘Well there are two of us now. We can beat them back with…’ I surveyed the instruments before me and brandished the long metal tongs with a flourish.

‘I’ll take…’ Thomas peered over the detritus upon the table and selected a wooden spoon. ‘This could do a lot of damage – if wielded correctly.’

‘Well, time will tell if we have to use them.’ I glanced towards the people gathered in the garden, speaking sedately in small groups. ‘They look like a harmless bunch.’

Just then, voices carried towards us from the group closest to us.

‘Should have been done a long time ago,’ a small greying man said. I recognised him as an old family friend of Seb’s. He leant forwards as he spoke, in juddering, jittery movements. ‘The custodians realised we were headed towards this – they should have got on with it far sooner. If Torrent hadn’t died when he did, we would be in a far better position.’

I saw Thomas glance towards them.

‘Here we go,’ I murmured, without thinking.

The man continued to bellow.

‘If they’d brought in these measures say ten, fifteen years ago…’

‘But I’m not actually sure how many will want to start though. Young women—’ Evie’s work friend Deborah started to say, but he carried on talking regardless.

I had an impulse out of nowhere to interrupt him, to cut him short as he had done to Deborah. I wanted to say something clear and meaningful that would stop his overbearing tirade but when I opened my mouth to speak, there was nothing there. I had no answers.

It had been happening more and more, I’d noticed, when conversations turned to politics. There was something inside me, vehement and sure, wanting to escape and be heard but I simply couldn’t put words to it. I felt gagged although I was not entirely sure why.

I told myself that I didn’t know enough, which had some truth in it. I’d thought when I was younger that I could just ignore it all. I’d only ever known life under the custodians, their vision for how we would solve the problem of our rapidly shrinking population. I’d caught scraps here and there from my father about what it was like before – the elections and referendums, the debates and the polling. He always looked troubled when he mentioned it, like he still couldn’t quite grasp how we ended up here – a one-party state, a totalitarian government.

‘This could go on for a while,’ Thomas whispered back.

‘Do you think… what do you think… about the custodians?’

He turned to me. ‘Generally? That’s a big question. I’m afraid I don’t really have an answer. Maybe because there’s so much noise around it all.’ He frowned.

‘I feel like that,’ I admitted. ‘I want to say something about what’s happening – something that I actually believe, not just repeating someone else.’

‘That’s difficult when all we hear is the Spheres and the people talking about what they’ve heard on the Spheres.’

I nodded and then found myself opening up. ‘I don’t think I like the way they’ve handled things, but then I sort of understand it was an almost impossible problem. That we had to do something.’

I felt so acutely aware of how clumsy my words were, how vague, but Thomas nodded gently.

‘You can think both, though, can’t you?’ he said back quietly.

‘So many people seem so sure that they are what we needed, what we still need. I hear more from people talking about wanting them to go further. Like our friend over there.’ I motioned towards Seb’s family friend who was still trumpeting on.

‘We’re past encouraging now,’ he was saying. ‘Obligatory inductions will be next on the cards, mark my words. And it will go younger still. It has to, doesn’t it?’

Some heads bobbed in response and murmured in agreement. The woman who I’d watched reach out for Jakob stayed still, her lips sealed shut.

‘Did you hear the news?’ Thomas asked me in a low voice.

I nodded. That morning while I was running around my flat trying to get a stain out of the dress I wanted to wear, my workSphere had stirred and began blaring out a new announcement. I’d turned the hot tap to maximum hoping the sound of the water would drown out the words, but they reached me nonetheless. The minimum age for induction treatment had dropped from eighteen to sixteen. Girls aged sixteen would now be permitted, encouraged, to undergo fertility treatment. There’d been a graph showing the expected decrease in population if the number of inductions did not rise. The fall in production would mean shortages and expensive imports. A custodian spokesperson gave the short briefing, his features haggard, his face in folds.

‘It doesn’t feel right,’ I said and again was struck by the ineptitude of my remark. It didn’t run to how deeply I feared what this meant. Seb’s family friend was right; we were another step closer to