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

it’s… it’s probably, it’s probably the best thing that I can imagine.’ His face dissolved into a smile and for just that moment, the worry that he was carrying with him dissipated. ‘But I don’t want to let myself get carried away. There’re so many reasons why we decided we wouldn’t do it. We can’t forget that.’

We never did.

We looked for families everywhere. Walking along the street. In supermarkets and parks. Through the glazing of car windows. There weren’t many.

One day I tried to see if I could find any information on the Spheres about changes in IPS limits, but there was nothing. All that was left was anecdotal and I couldn’t ask anyone that I didn’t trust completely, a circle no bigger than Thomas now.

And then, as though there was someone watching our every move, who had heard our conversations, delved into the fabric of my daily thoughts, the IPS level was raised to ten.

You now would have to receive ten IPSs for a child to be extracted. Three more chances.

Thomas noted the news on the Spheres, raising his eyebrows at me. Almost hopefully.

That’s when I knew that our tiny family was going to grow, that we were going to try to have a child.

NOW

My XC baby. Evie’s goSphere blares out. The film interrupts the directions to the hospital.

I swing past other cars in the road.

A woman’s toothy grin fills the Sphere.

I talk to Mimi over the voices. I recognise that I do it to comfort myself, rather than her.

‘You’re going to be all right, my darling,’ I say. ‘We’re going to find a way to make you better.’

I continue to chatter to her and, as I drive, I try again to remember any detail from the flat about the drugs that they gave her, but I only draw blanks.

We are approaching the hospital. The green arrows are back now that the film has finished and project across the windscreen, urging me onwards. I turn into the hospital, drive the car right up to the entrance at an oblique angle and throw open the doors to reach for Mimi.

‘She’s been drugged,’ I tell the medical team that swarm around Mimi. ‘Something to keep her asleep, but she has been vomiting for the last hour or so. She’s becoming unresponsive.’

They have question after question for me: what was the name of the drug? How much had she taken? Has she reacted like this before?

With each uncertain answer I give, I’m failing her over and over.

I am in the room with her but she is almost out of sight as the doctors crowd around her, the monitors are attached, her skin is pricked for blood and a drip.

She is pale and limp, my daughter who can roar. I watch the heart monitors keenly but I cannot understand what they mean. All I have are the scraps of talk that I pick over like carrion.

‘Her heart rate’s slowing.’

‘More fluids.’

‘Have we got a line in yet?’

There is a slight pressure on my arm. At first I swipe it away but then it intensifies; I realise it’s someone holding on to me.

‘Can you come with me, please? We have some questions for you.’

I turn to see a man with a receding hairline, the letters of OSIP dangling round his neck. His eyes are creased with tiredness; he has the grey hue of exhaustion.

I take one last glimpse of Mimi, pricked with needles, encircled by tubes.

‘I love you,’ I mouth to her.

I imagine the words drifting over to her like balloons, landing gently, kissing the soft curve of her forehead.

Then I take a deep breath and with all the strength that I have left, I push past the enforcer, I take off down the corridor. I run and I run and though I am quite aware that I will get stopped, I run anyway.

When I reach the car, I stall for a second. I can’t believe that I’ve made it this far, I was sure that I would be caught. But I banish the thought; I think of something new.

I swerve from the hospital, from Mimi.

THEN

A mouth screaming.

Fists pumping.

Screaming.

Screaming.

Screaming.

I wake from a dream like this almost every night since we started induction.

It was Jakob alone.

It was Tia.

It was every baby.

It was our baby.

It was me.

All rolled into one.

We decided not to tell anyone about starting induction unless I became pregnant.

Thomas used to say, after we first got together, that we protect the ones we love most in the only way we know how. He had been working on a series of portraits he’d started on families, at the time, a parent with a child.

A father holding his daughter’s hand crossing a road. That portrait translated into a close-up of their fingers, clasped together tightly. They made such a knot, those fingers, that they became a new shape. Abstract and conjoined.

A mother nursing her baby. A light emitted from within them, somehow, bathing their foreheads, the mother’s arms in a circular embrace.

The baby we’d dreamed of, the baby we wanted to meet so badly, could we protect it? Could we honestly say we could? We were inching towards it, and we had to reach out to it.

Didn’t we?

Shouldn’t we?

I started the cycle of drugs. Injections twice a day, to begin with.

In one of our first group sessions, we had a discussion about whether you had an ethical right to have children. At first, everyone was reluctant to speak under the gaze of the enforcers. We twisted our fingers, only looking up to see if someone else would speak first. One of the enforcers, a man called Reynard, began to get impatient with us.

‘Tell me your thoughts, people,’ he urged.

There was a couple, Susannah and Maeve. They both had sandy, floppy hair, and large, spaniel eyes that fixed in the distance on an unknowable horizon as they talked.

‘One of the reasons that OSIP is so laudable is because it not only takes you through the fertility treatment but it helps you