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

can go right up to them being eighty, if you want to. I think I’m going to do it.’

Evie spoke in waves. She was either babbling, full of ideas, or silent, as though vocalising anything was far too great an effort.

Her face was white without its usual blush, her lips, flaky and dry. I tried to push the idea from my mind that she was almost unrecognisable; at the very same time as wanting to meet her gaze, I found it difficult to look at her.

We walked past the large oak tree that sat in the middle of the park and, as we had four times already, circled it before taking one of the paths that led away from it and would eventually bring us back again.

‘Have you gone back to the library?’ I asked. ‘Maybe someone there could help?’

Evie shook her head emphatically.

‘What does Seb say about everything?’

Evie laughed loudly, a hyena shriek, but as quickly as she started, she lapsed into silence.

‘Seb,’ she said slowly. He was an afterthought. Then she cackled again, harshly, sharply. ‘Seb wants us to try again.’

‘Well, maybe in time—’

‘Kit, no. Not you too. It’s not the same for him. It just doesn’t compare.’

Evie had not often let her guard slip before she’d had Jakob about how different the induction process was for her than for Seb.

‘He has no idea what it was really like. Going through it so many times. I was convinced at one point that my body was shutting down, that I was not going to recover, let alone have a baby. But that wasn’t the worst part. He didn’t have to give up every single part of himself. He didn’t have to carry it.’

‘What do you mean… Jakob?’

‘No, of course not. I mean that’s just another thing. No, I mean he didn’t carry the weight of the responsibility. It always came back to me. It always felt like I was the one who had to make it right. I was the one being judged. Even that first warning we had, do you remember? It was the way Seb was holding him but I hadn’t picked up on it. It was my fault.’

Her pace sped up a little as she spoke fast, without stopping, and so at the end of her sentence, she inhaled noisily, as though she had only just remembered that she needed to breathe.

‘Did you really feel that?’

‘Yes, absolutely. The responsibility always comes back to the mother in the end. You’ve always understood that or you wouldn’t have decided to be an Out, right?’

I grappled to reply. Had I truly realised that, I wondered. Or was I as conditioned as everyone else to accept that the mother had to take on the full weight of accountability?

‘You know how ridiculous this all is,’ she continued. ‘And you made the right decision. I wish that I could have decided that too.’

‘No, you don’t. You don’t. Or you would never have had Jakob.’

Evie bit her lip hard so the colour bleached from it. She muttered, repeating my own words back at me. ‘I would never have had Jakob, I would never have had Jakob.’

When Evie spoke again, it was as though she was talking through a filter. Like her voice was not her own but just a sound piece.

‘We got sent this letter about trying again. Maybe Seb wouldn’t have brought it up if we hadn’t received it. It’s all about how first extractions are common but that they lay the path for avoiding extractions in the future. If we try again in the next two months, they’ll award us more housing credits.’

I shook my head a little.

We’d walked to the end of a path, it forked in front of us.

‘Have you…’ I hardly dared think the words, let alone say them. But I persisted. ‘Have you found out if there’s any way of getting Jakob back? When Tia was extracted, I explored it a bit but I couldn’t find anything – have you looked?’

I didn’t tell Evie that I had been trawling through everything that I had on Jonah to see if I could find any other link between him and OSIP. I still returned to the phone call that had shown me the video of him flicking through the documents stamped with the OSIP logo, but I could never access the footage again.

I had nothing to prove it but I felt sure that he was somehow connected with OSIP. It brought OSIP just one step closer. I would do anything to help Evie and Seb. If there was anything I could do to get Jakob back, I would do it.

Genevieve’s XC baby, Jonah’s first grandchild, was in gestation. I hadn’t heard anything about it for a period since that first phone call, but suddenly it was announced. I got lost in the films and phone calls that leaked down to me now about how it was progressing, and all the details of the development of the foetus. After almost six months of gene therapy, their embryo was made. I worked these into Jonah’s life document and at the end of these sessions, I would find my face wet with tears.

‘I need to be alone right now,’ Evie said to me. Her face, her voice shutting down, blankness shifted across her features.

‘Do you want to go home?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she answered quickly. ‘I’m going to stay here for a while longer.’

‘Evie, I didn’t mean to upset you.’

She laughed again.

‘I’m sorry, Kit. I’m past upsetting now. It’s not you. I just want to be… by myself.’

‘OK,’ I said. I buried my hands in my pockets and began to walk away, but then I heard Evie’s voice ring out once more. It stopped me.

‘You know, just after he was born, I found it really hard. I couldn’t tell anyone. Not Seb. Not even you. Not after everything that we had gone through to get him. It seemed absurd. To find yourself not wanting something that you’ve wanted for so many years,