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

‘Jakey needed me so much. It scared me, I suppose. Feeling that. Feeling that life would never be the same again, that I wouldn’t be alone, not really, ever again. Because he’d always need me, or he might need me, at any time. I started thinking about what it was like before, before he was here. And I wanted it. There was a little bit of time when I thought that I wanted that freedom again. Without Jakob, without Seb even. To be just me, with no one else to worry about.

‘That makes me sound so selfish, doesn’t it? You’re wondering how could I possibly want that, but I did, Kit. There were moments when I wished I could undo things I’d done. Of course I was so happy that I’d had Jakey, I was, but there was darkness too. I wondered if I’d done the right thing, if I was going to be able to cope. I yearned for that freedom I had before, freedom I didn’t even realise I had until then.

‘And now, look at me… No Jakob. Soon, there’ll probably be no Seb. And it will be just me. Just like I wished for.’

NOW

I run to Mimi, I can’t be with her quickly enough.

Her body convulses with every heave. There’s vomit splashed across the white carpet in a comically large splatter.

‘Oh my darling, my darling,’ I sing to her, reaching to rub her back. I’m struck by how useless my words are, how violently her body shudders with each expelling.

Her eyes flicker open for a moment and she looks at me, astonished.

What happened? her eyes seem to ask me.

I rock her and she melds into me. She’s floppy, perhaps a little hot. I hold her head in my hands and try to examine her face, place my palm on her forehead, but she sinks into me, unable to hold her body upright. It’s like when she was a newborn again, her limbs beyond her control.

I survey the vomit over her shoulder; it’s creamily orange – spongy lumps scattered like an abstract pattern across the white of the floor.

Then Mimi jerks against me and before I can move her, she retches again. Her sick goes through the layers of my coat, Evie’s jumper, my pyjamas. It’s surprisingly warm; its stench makes me catch my breath.

‘Oh baby,’ I say again, pointlessly. I can’t help a shaving of dismay sliding into my voice and I try to conceal it. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘What’s making you sick, my darling?’

I think again of the medication that she was given. In my haste to leave I hadn’t found out its name, if it had any side effects. Or has she caught something from one of the other children that she was with? Perhaps one of them had just been ill.

Mimi shudders and heaves again.

THEN

A lashing feeling, not unlike nausea, filled me as I approached Evie and Seb’s house.

I hadn’t been back there since the night that Jakob was taken. Unbelievably, that was now almost two months ago.

I only realised it as I walked up to their jolly red front door, my hands clasping themselves into stiff fists, my breath turning shallow.

I wasn’t sure that I would be able to contain the sickness. I swallowed hard, aware of every little detail of my body; the way that sweat collected above my upper lip, a nagging sensation in my shoulders, a viscous lurch in my stomach.

Evie and I usually met up in the park or we spoke on our workSpheres or she’d come over to us. But when I hadn’t heard from her for a few days, when messages were continuing to go unanswered, I’d set off to her house, trying to dismiss the last time that I’d journeyed to Dad’s flat when he had stopped answering his phone.

I’d spent the morning processing more material for Jonah’s life document. Genevieve’s XC baby was in its final weeks of gestation. The gestation times for XCs worked very differently to babies in utero. They were longer than forty-two weeks as there was no birth or placenta degradation to consider and so the XC babies were born with greater organ maturity. The gestational periods were responsive to individual foetal development; her baby was now at forty-five weeks. The more I’d written about the new, upcoming arrival, the more I’d thought of Evie.

As I reached the front door, I put a hand out to steady me and then as soon as I touched the bright red paint, I wrenched my hand away as though it had been burnt, suddenly flashing back to the way the enforcers had knocked and hammered upon it.

I waited there while I calmed down. I could see into the living room from when I stood; Evie had left the blinds up. I could make out the shapes of Jakob’s things that still filled the floor of the sitting room; his bouncer, his toys, a playmat that was in the centre of the carpet. Everything was in its place, still and waiting, a museum without visitors, a library without readers. The only thing that was missing was the child it was all there for.

I knocked lightly on the door and then when no one came, again with more force. When still there was no answer, I bent down and called through the letterbox. It looked like the house was empty; there was a stillness in the air, almost a greyness to the things that had been left. It appeared as though it had not been disturbed for some time.

But then I heard a shuffle from upstairs. I called again, louder this time. It seemed as though my voice might knock things over.

Finally, a shadow appeared through the mottled glass semi-circle of the door and it opened.

Evie looked like she’d either never been to bed or hadn’t got up yet. She wore a mixture of