Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen (ready to read books .txt) 📕

monitors around him. Evie sat hunched a little on the bed, her legs drawn up to her chest, hugging them tightly to her. It had been raining heavily since we arrived and so the windows of the hospital room were fogged with condensation, patterned with rivulets made by rainfall.

‘You tell them,’ Evie said to Seb. ‘I’m not sure I can think straight, let alone talk right now.’

‘We’re having a little trouble with—’ He broke off from speaking as Jakob suddenly clenched his fists in his sleep. Jakob turned his head abruptly to one side, contracted his legs a little, and then relaxed again. When he didn’t make any more movements, Seb started again. ‘We’re having a little trouble with breastfeeding,’ he said in a low voice. He looked guilty, almost furtive as he said it.

‘What he means is that I am having trouble with breastfeeding,’ Evie said.

Dad and I both started a chorus of reassurance. It’ll get better, we told them, you’ll get the help you need now. ‘Doesn’t he look well?’ Dad pointed out, as Jakob rested peacefully amongst us, oblivious to what surrounded him. But there was nothing we could say that would take away the strained expressions from their faces.

‘Hopefully it’ll get better,’ Evie ventured finally, with a brave sort of smile. Dad seemed more assured than me by this admission; he went off in search of some tea for us all, taking Seb with him. I gave Evie a long, hard hug as soon as they left the room. It felt as though she were dissolving in my arms.

She started to cry, in large gulping breaths that shook her body. I kept my arms encircled around her, holding on to her as she shuddered and quaked. It reminded me of the old tales of shape-shifters, where if their captor could hold on to them through their many forms, they would tell them some truth afterwards. Or reappear in their true form. I couldn’t remember the exact way the story went.

When she stopped crying, she started to laugh at the tears that still stained her cheeks. ‘I’ve got to pull myself together, Kit, haven’t I?’

‘Don’t forget that you’ve just given birth, you’re knackered, you have a new little person that you’d do anything for. I mean, yes, you do need to pull yourself together. But in the kindest possible way to yourself.’

‘I just keep wondering if—’

‘You’re wondering the worst,’ I finished for her. ‘And that’s perfectly natural. But you have to concentrate on the here and now. Not what might happen.’

‘I’m all over the place at the moment,’ Evie acknowledged.

‘What new mum isn’t?’

‘I have to be stronger than this. If we want to stand a chance, I have to be more… more than this.’

Evie wringed her hands frantically, as though she desperately wanted to shed the skin that she was in. Her eyes widened, in panic, as she spoke. ‘I’m not sure I can do this. I thought I could but what if I can’t?’

We had reached another dead end in a maze we were walking, the walls around us daunting, too high to see over, the passage to the centre too well-concealed. The room greyed before me. Without our talking, the shifting sound of the rain against the windows filled my head.

The rain surged, the wind billowed past the glass. I peered out at the downfall but instead of focusing on the torrents of water falling from the sky, I was drawn to our reflections, Evie’s and mine. The way our bodies seemed crumpled, Evie’s sitting up in bed and mine, standing. And there, between us, the angular outline of Jakob’s crib, where he slept on regardless.

‘Evie, I believe you can do this. Dad, Seb, too. You need to believe it now. For Jakob. But for yourself, for yourself as well.’

At that moment, Dad and Seb returned, clasping hot paper cups of steaming tea, bottles of apple juice and snacks. I grasped on to a cup, although the room wasn’t that cold really. Maybe out of comfort, or the need to hold on to something solid.

‘We’d better be going,’ Dad said when our cups were empty. They waved us off, steeling themselves for the night ahead.

We joined paths with other visiting relatives who, like us, stumbled through the hospital corridors towards the exit, with the sense of having left part of themselves behind.

NOW

The green exit sign at the end of the corridor flickers. The light shudders on and off before it dies completely.

I knock gently but soon my hands turn into fists and I pummel at the grey lacquer. It rattles the door and I hear people speaking inside, exclaiming surprise.

‘Please, please,’ I say through the door. ‘I’m here for M—’

Before I can say her name, the door is opened. I tumble inside.

I’m in a nice sort of home. Someone has made an effort to make it jolly even though the boxlike room is in itself uninspiring and carries the same claustrophobia as the long corridors of the building. There’s a jam jar full of twigs and branches, with gaudy baubles hanging from the wooden fingers. Masses of pictures hang on the wall; each one is vibrantly colourful and, hung together, they resemble a tapestry or quilt.

I take it all in – it’s surprising, the colour and the care transforming this narrow room – but I can’t see what I’ve come for. My gaze travels around the room for any sign of my daughter – one of her stripy socks that she peels from her feet at any opportunity, one of the colourful blocks she likes to tap on the hard wood of the floor.

‘Mimi,’ I manage to say, although all of a sudden it is hard to breathe.

The people before me look like a couple. She has long, dark hair tied in a low ponytail so loose that her hair spills on to her shoulders. The man is thin and neatly dressed. He has a ginger beard that is hard to spot