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

and chub of her cheeks, her tiny rosebud lips, the downy lobe of her ear. Every detail of her is miraculous; I can’t get enough of just gazing at her face.

She sleeps on.

But in the next moment her face screws up and she cries out, her eyes still closed.

‘What is it, darling?’ I croon. I check her all over and find her nappy is full and stinking. She’s still not awake. It was what Thomas and I used to call ‘a sleep squeak’ but I talk to her anyway as though she is listening to my every word. ‘Let’s go get you changed, there’ll be toilets in here,’ I tell her, although I don’t know what with. I’m completely unprepared.

There’s the too-strong smell of disinfectant in the air as I open the doors of the restaurant. A young girl wearing a uniform made up entirely of different shades of brown is mopping the floor in broad, bored strokes. The mop is too wet. Its head is grey from use, and hangs heavily, leaving a trail of splatters as she flings it with force from the bucket across the floor.

‘Excuse me, I need to use the toilets. Where are they?’ I ask.

The girl doesn’t stop mopping but she shrugs her head to the left and I spot the door.

I delight in all the mundane details of changing Mimi, although I have to improvise with toilet paper and towels. Every moment feels wildly precious. I chat to her nonsensically throughout, washing her thoroughly and carefully, hoping that changing her might pull her from her slumber.

When we come out, Mimi slumped over my shoulder, it is quiet but for the drone of the air conditioning, the rhythm of the mop drenching the floor and the Spheres that hang from the ceiling, suspended above me. I can’t stop myself from glancing towards them.

A report from OSIP drones on, a list of figures and statistics, one after the other, that all sound the same. A repetitive chain of information, each one indistinguishable from the next.

The figures flash across the screen, in a blue, softly edged font that I suppose has been chosen to look unaggressive. Then the screen flashes to a piece about XC babies.

I go to leave, but a movement through the window catches my eye. At first, I think there is nothing to see. It’s a patch of grass, a grey, dusty bush, next to the grey of a near empty car park. I can see the edge of my car in the corner, but there seems little to define the view.

Then, a flutter of wings and I see two eyes, shiny black balls, inquisitive and hungry, peering up at me. It’s a robin. His red breast is faded, almost orange, as though he is a little aged and there is something else about the straggly shape of his body that suggests he’s not in his prime.

He tilts his head to his side, in that way that birds do when they have spotted something, but this time it is as though it is me that he has spotted, that he has recognised me.

There was a robin that lived at Dad’s allotment who used to visit us for worms, so Dad would say. He lived in a hawthorn not far from Dad’s plot and over the years did not venture far from it.

The robin jumps forwards a few steps in quick, darting movements, a little closer to the window. He is very still, only moving in the smallest of twitches. He looks inanimate. Then, without warning, he flies off. My eyes cannot follow his path and I lose him.

But moments later he is back, by that grey little bush. He flies into the bush, once again, out of view. All I have to do is wait patiently for him to fly out again. This is his home and he will not go far from it.

Sure enough, moments later, I see him once more. I sense, though it’s impossible, that this little dance he’s doing, this forwards and backwards, his sharp darts and the speedy flurry of his wings, is a show, just for me.

I watch him until the waitress asks if I want a table. I shake my head and turn to leave.

Seeing that robin disappear one last time into his dusty bush, in that stale-smelling restaurant, makes me consider an alarming thought: where was home to me now?

And would I be able to find a way back to it?

THEN

I wanted to go home but Evie and Seb had still not arrived.

The wake had gone on for a couple of hours already and almost all the food had been eaten. My throat was dry and sore from talking too much.

I swayed on the spot, then the sound of a baby bleating made me stiffen.

‘I’m sorry,’ Evie mouthed over the heads of Dad’s allotment friends, who’d opened a bottle of whisky and had started making toasts in his name.

‘How did it go?’ I asked her when we reached each other.

‘I was just about to ask you the same thing.’

‘Did they throw the IPS out?’

Evie smiled at me sadly and her eyes filled with tears. She sniffed loudly. ‘Yes,’ she said, at last, as though she could not believe it to speak it.

‘Oh, Evie.’ We collapsed into one another.

‘How was it here?’ Evie asked, her voice muffled in my hair.

‘Oh, fine. Awful. I didn’t make the food in the end. I bought every last morsel. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ She laughed but wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘I’m just so glad it’s over. Not the funeral, I mean. You know what I mean.’ She touched a strand of my hair as though it were out of place. ‘I’m sorry we weren’t here. I can’t believe the timing.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s what Dad would have wanted.’

‘Still… I’m sorry. Do you want to take off? We can clear up. You look done in. This might go on for a while.’