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

guests. Part of me wondered if we should have delayed or not told anyone at all. It didn’t seem the right time for those we loved most.

Not for Evie, who said she was coming but then left a message to say that she couldn’t make it on account of some kind of emergency she didn’t go into detail about.

Not for Santa, Thomas’s mother, who had just had a knee operation and had only recently come out of hospital. She walked with a limp for the day although she did not let this dampen her spirits.

We’d started having conversations that began with, ‘If we did get married then…’ and slowly, almost without our noticing, plans crept around us until they lay in front of us, fully formed and detailed. The idea of not being married didn’t bother me, but the idea of not being married to Thomas somehow did. If the convention had been climbing to the top of the highest building and screaming it out to the passersby below us, then that’s what we would have done. But instead, we made do with a wedding ceremony, two rings and a piece of paper.

I woke up on the morning of our wedding, already smiling. We’d dispensed with all the traditions and I immediately rolled over to wake Thomas who was still asleep beside me. I folded my body around his and held him until he woke.

‘We’re getting married today,’ I said out loud. It was as though I was testing it out. ‘You and me. Married.’

Thomas mumbled something into his pillow that I could not decipher but then he lifted his head with a jolt and turned over.

‘We are,’ he said. ‘We are getting married today. Are you having second thoughts?’ he asked, his eyebrows raised.

‘I want to do it,’ I said carefully, considering each word as I said it.

If we hadn’t got a phone call from Santa saying that she was on her way and did we want to meet her there earlier, we might have stayed like that until the very last minute when we had to get up.

We showered and dressed, as though it were any other day. I wore the same dress I had worn to Jakob’s naming ceremony on the day we had first met, Thomas wore his favourite shirt, and we were ready.

Santa was dressed in a beautiful gold and orange dress with a violent turquoise scarf like the breast of peacock flung over her shoulder. She was sitting in the café in an art gallery that was near to the town hall.

‘Hello, my darling,’ she said to Thomas, kissing him close and then holding him by the shoulders before her, as though to check it was really him. ‘And, hello, my darling.’ She turned and embraced me. The smell of her magnolia perfume was sweetly addictive and as I breathed her, I realised that beneath the perfume, under the fragrance of freshly washed hair, I could smell something of Thomas too, the same base tones of him.

‘Ready to get married?’ she asked us, with a mischievous grin.

We nodded, grinned back.

We drank cups of coffee while we waited for our time slot, and then Santa insisted we drink something stronger and we decided on three tangy orange Bellinis that matched Santa’s dress in hue.

‘It’s a good thing, if I spill no one will notice,’ she said merrily, holding the glass to her. ‘I’m so… so co-ordinated.’

The first time I met Santa we’d gone to see her for lunch over a weekend. She lived in the same quarter as Thomas, in one of the larger blocks close to the river.

I’d felt oddly nervous. I was overly worried that we were running late even though Thomas assured me it wouldn’t be a problem.

‘Darling!’ I’d heard Santa’s voice call out once we knocked. The door flew open in a flurry with Santa, small but large, reaching out for Thomas.

‘Kit!’ she’d called. She’d smiled at me warmly. ‘It’s such a pleasure to meet you.’

We’d dined for hours around a low table that was placed in the middle of the sitting room. Santa’s paintings were stacked all around us, leaning against walls, placed in a line against a cabinet, there was just a small path of floor space so you could get around the room.

‘It’s just something I’m trying,’ she’d said with a wave of her hand at the canvases that were filled with the same intense colours that Thomas favoured, only there were no faces, but shapes, abstract shapes, feelings.

Santa had served us endless little dishes of food. Hummus sprinkled with toasted pine nuts, pastry parcels of feta and spinach that were flamboyantly edged in curving waves. Tiny wedges of baklava, dark red cherries glossy in their bowl.

When we’d left, I’d been dazed by everything I’d consumed. Not just the food, or the place, but Santa herself.

‘She has that effect on people,’ Thomas had said as we walked away, and I’d tried to put it into words.

‘She’s wonderful.’

‘She is a special person. When I left home, I realised that people have a capacity for joy. And Mum, despite everything that has happened to her, protects hers fiercely. She enjoys her life. She makes it her business. It’s not a bad way to be.’

‘You mean your dad leaving?’ I’d asked gently.

‘Yes, that. Dad going how he did hit her hard. And her sister, Cecelia, died when she was in her early twenties. They were very close. She had cancer. It was sudden.’ Thomas had taken a deep breath as though he were going to say something else but it just turned into a sigh.

‘Did your mum always paint?’

‘She’s painted for as long as I can remember. She started young but then she stopped for a period, maybe when Cecelia died. And then well, the rest is history.’

Santa gave us a painting for our wedding, of course. It looked like a brother or sister to one of the pieces that she’d had sitting in a line against the cabinet that day.