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

pass his lips when he thinks I’m not listening. He could tell them about the bottles of pills on the small glass shelf in the bathroom. Another extension of me I have left behind.

I would have to change cars if that happened. Change my appearance – hack off my hair that’s grown longer than it’s been since I was a child. Bleach it brassy in a public toilet? Find some dark glasses that dwarf my cheeks and shield my eyes?

But he won’t contact the police. He can’t. They will already be searching for us.

I push my foot down harder on the accelerator and the car speeds up, the landscape blurs as it races past me.

I savour being alone. I turn to the passenger seat next to me – steel-coloured and empty – and experience something like a rush of happiness, though it is not so uncomplicated, that no one’s there.

Part of it’s down to wanting to be able to remember freely. For too long, I didn’t realise that Thomas noticed when I was remembering. I didn’t know that my arms were moving, rearranging themselves to hold her in an empty embrace. I would murmur sentences under my breath. I’d tilt my face to the side as I did when I used to speak to her.

‘Stop it, Kit,’ he said one day when I was quite lost in a memory.

‘Stop what?’

‘Doing what you’re doing. Pretending she is still here.’

I wasn’t pretending, though; I knew that she was gone. What I was doing was remembering, reliving something that happened so keenly that my body literally went through the motions. The whole of me ached for her. My breasts became swollen with milk, solid and hard. Each time I pumped to keep up my supply, I tried to block out the rhythmic drone of the breast pump and imagined I was feeding Mimi. It’s advice I was given to help me produce more milk – to think of your baby – but in fact it was impossible for me not to imagine her as the bottle would fill, drop by drop, like tears falling. I had to tip it all away, the milk that was still warm from my body. I would pour it into the sink, run the taps and watch it drain down the plughole in a diluted white swirl.

My breasts grow heavier as I drive; it’s almost as though they could become separate entities to me. I’ve left my pump behind and so I will have to hand express before they become engorged, before the burn of pain sets in. Part of me likes this, this physicality of being a mother that I carry with me; a memory of Mimi that lives on in my body – tangible and real.

In those first empty moments after they took her, I poured over all the photos and videos I had of her stored on my goSphere. I trawled through the gallery, greedily swiping at the next image, the next clip, until Thomas told me it was time to go. I knew that I had to leave the goSphere behind but I hadn’t quite prepared myself for not being able to take those digital albums we’d made of her with us. After that, I would spend time lost in my own imagination, conjuring her from memory to recreate moments we had once shared together.

I often thought back to a particular rainy day. It was so wet I had dressed her in some puffy waterproof all-in-one suit and by the time I had finished and pulled up the hood, all I could see was a tiny circle of her face. Only the very top of her mouth, her nose and eyes were visible.

I would remember reaching out with one finger and pressing the red tip of her nose and making a silly sound, something like a trumpet or a horn or a beep. That was what Thomas had seen me doing: reaching out with a pointed finger to touch the air in front of me, to touch her nose as if she was still before me, the faint sound of a trumpet lingering on my lips.

‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ I said.

‘Kit,’ Thomas said, with a sigh. ‘Your face changes. You’re imagining her again.’

I didn’t have any rebuke, but from then on, I always made sure that when I wanted to remember Mimi, I was alone.

Now, in the car, I luxuriate in the absence of others. It makes me realise how long it’s been since I’ve been truly alone. Thomas has always been within reach since she went.

Maybe he is afraid of what I would do if I was left alone.

Maybe I am, too.

THEN

They had a name for people like me.

Outs, they’d call us.

OSIP’s UnTapped. Women who chose not to go through induction. There was no name or stigma for men who chose not to become fathers.

Of course to undergo induction, I didn’t have to be in a couple. OSIP supported single women alongside homosexual couples, heterosexual couples, all with the same zeal.

From time to time, there’d be a piece about the sorry state of the outs cropping up over the Spheres. It usually centred on an interview, riddled with regret, with a woman who did not, and now could not, have children.

Typically, they ended with computer-generated images of chubby, unsmiling toddlers: projections of what the woman’s children would look like if they’d ever existed. Whilst there was some likeness to their ‘mothers’, these imaginary casts were always given the same eyes: doleful, beseeching stares that followed you around the room.

Then there were the more factual pieces about outs; the higher tax rates you faced if you elected not to go through induction, they grew year on year from when a woman reached twenty and kept on rising. This, coupled with the growing salary restrictions meant it would be almost impossible to sustain being an out if the figures continued in the same trend. Housing credits were minimal and so the choice