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

to be the best parent you can be,’ Susannah said. She entwined her fingers with Maeve’s tightly. ‘Only through extraction can children be provided for best.’

She sought out agreement with a softly painted-on smile.

I stared down at my lap as though I were thinking hard about her contribution, trying not to let my face reveal how I truly felt, as I could hear Reynard respond.

Thomas and I had a pact to try not to make eye contact in these sessions, which I swiftly broke as I heard Reynard praising Susannah for ‘that insightful comment’. Though a woman called Pamela was speaking now, Reynard saw my side glance to Thomas and interrupted her.

‘Kit, would you like to share something?’

I had the urge to say ‘no’ but no one can dodge a direct question from an enforcer.

‘I suppose I wonder…’ I started to piece together a sentence that would try to convey at least a fraction of what I felt. ‘I wonder if there might be ways other than extraction that would…’

I could feel Thomas tense besides me.

Susannah’s voice rang out straightaway. ‘A way other than extraction?’

‘Maybe extractions can put parents off,’ a very timid woman called Patrice suggested. She spoke as I imagined a mouse would, a tiny squeaking voice that I strained to hear.

As if she had not spoken, Susannah continued, ‘The parenting standards are here for a reason. They should be honoured and upheld and, if they put people off, then that’s no bad thing.’

‘Do you not think that it could be a little intimidating, though?’ I asked.

‘Surely induction is the bigger concern,’ Susannah quipped back. ‘Whether your body responds to the drugs or how it responds to them. What the effects might be.’

‘Now that’s an interesting point,’ Reynard said. ‘And one which, of course, you’ve all confronted. The process of induction does not come without risk. But despite the scare-mongering out there, we’re going to examine some actual figures that show it’s far safer than most people realise.’

From then, we were lost in a blaze of statistics about induction that made my head swim.

After a training day, Thomas and I would come home, and not talk to each other for a few hours. I was afraid that if we did start to speak then we would slowly unpick everything that we had built up so far, undo the distance that we had already come.

We never spoke about quitting, although there was a couple who did after only the first few weeks. The rest of us all noticed their absence. Susannah made a point of asking where they were and so one of the enforcers told us that they had withdrawn.

‘I’ve heard that if you withdraw that you can never try again,’ Susannah said.

‘No, that’s not true,’ another enforcer said, an older woman called Sally, frowning a little. ‘And there are some studies that indicate that when couples come back after withdrawing they are more successful in meeting standards than first-time couples.’

‘It hardly shows commitment, though, does it?’ Susannah said, bristling.

‘She wants to be an enforcer, herself, don’t you think?’ a tiny voice whispered into my ear. It was Patrice, who barely spoke. Her eyes danced a little as we giggled as loudly as we dared but she quickly looked away from me as we felt Susannah’s eyes upon us.

‘Do you have an opinion on this, Kit? Patrice?’ Susannah asked us.

‘It’s interesting to hear the findings of the new studies,’ I said back quickly. ‘We wondered if there are plans to do more, in the long-term?’

Sally started to talk about the studies in what felt like an endless way. I nodded and made noises at the right times but I wasn’t listening. Patrice had disappeared to the other side of the room, as far as she could possibly be from me. And Susannah fixed me with a sort of look that reminded me of a cat stalking its prey, a stare that didn’t waver, but glowed with anticipation.

* * *

There was a huge amount we were given to learn, as Evie had once told me, but nothing could distract me from what was happening to my body.

I could sense the medication inside me, like lead weights that I was always carrying. Not only physically, in my ovaries, which were being stimulated, hyper-stimulated, and growing larger by the day, but in the way my mind was ragged, torn almost.

I was splitting into pieces. There’s no other way of describing it. It was the oddest but most visceral sensation, as though I was somehow leaving parts of my brain scattered outside of myself as I went about my day. Each night, there seemed to be less of what made me ‘me’.

I would swing into a mood before I realised what was happening. I simply could not keep track of my emotions. And in much the same way, my body would flush with heat and be taken over by the sensation.

I had daily scans to check the progress of my ovaries. I could see them, picture them, being inflated like two balloons, larger and larger they grew, tighter and tighter it felt. But I wasn’t responding ‘in the right way’, I needed a higher dose, and then another. The nausea that never left me was the easiest part.

I tried to lose myself in the learning, although my brain was sluggish and foggy. I’d left life documenting now. I wondered if I would miss it but I couldn’t imagine being able to write and the induction learning took all of my energy. We’d convinced ourselves that it would shield us from extraction if I ever got to the point where I actually became pregnant.

We made notes, and then notes of our notes, distilling everything down to just a few words that we hoped would trigger everything else.

Evie came round when we were trying to memorise the order in which the phonic alphabet should be taught. I tried hard to push out the information that was restlessly knocking around my mind as I made