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

‘What? Now, I am one. What’s so wrong with that?’

‘You know how this can end. Is that really what you want? Will you be able to go through it all?’

‘Are you an enforcer now? Is that it?’

‘No, that’s not what this about. I’m talking to you as your sister.’

‘No, you’re not – you never would have treated me like this before. You’re not who you were, you’re not…’ As I spoke, as I stumbled on my own words, I realised that I had stumbled upon a truth. ‘You’re not my sister any more.’

Thomas arrived back at just that moment, balancing the three cups carefully in his hands, with a look of concentrated effort.

‘I’d better go,’ Evie said when she saw him.

‘Don’t go,’ Thomas said. ‘Stay for a drink.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said simply.

She didn’t offer any excuses. She had almost got to the door when she turned back to us.

‘I’m sorry if none of this is what you want to hear,’ she said to me. ‘It’s just that you really should have thought about extractions before…’

‘You’re saying we shouldn’t have had her,’ I said.

The words came slowly, heavily.

As if in answer, Evie turned and walked from the room.

I thought I could hear her footsteps clicking along the floor, long after she had left.

NOW

I can hear Jonah’s footsteps coming down the corridor.

He knocks gently on the bathroom door. ‘There’s clothes and a towel out here when you’re ready.’

Outside I find loose grey tracksuit bottoms, a shirt that’s cotton, worn and soft against my skin, a huge towel that has been folded many times.

The bathroom lights feel too bright.

As I take off my coat and peel off my stale pyjamas, I look towards the sharp mirror on the wall. I inspect every ragged detail of myself. My grey skin, my breasts sagging with the weight of useless milk. The shadows beneath my eyes are almost violet and my face is lined, haggard. My hair is matted and dull. Strands are coated in Mimi’s vomit and have hardened from it; they stick out in peaks.

But beneath it all, I catch my own gaze. My eyes are furiously bright; they are burning.

THEN

Mimi’s light eyes locked with mine.

‘You guys are pros,’ Santa told me as I guided Mimi’s mouth around the dark nub of my nipple.

It hadn’t felt terribly natural at first, breastfeeding, but Mimi took to it immediately, as though she were the teacher, I her pupil. Though there was something that riled me a little about the way she arched her mouth towards my breast hungrily, desperately, I followed her lead. Over time, the pain and discomfort had lessened and she latched on now with complete mastery.

‘Have you heard anything from OSIP?’ Santa asked, casually.

‘They come round to do home visits. We have another one this week. And there’s the usual examinations and sending data,’ I said as lightly as I could. I didn’t want to think too much about all that we had to do. ‘But the IPS numbers are holding steady – they are still at ten to be Unacceptable.’

Unbelievably, three months had gone by since that day in hospital. Every morning and every night, I said a sort of prayer that we would not receive an IPS, and there had been nothing.

Nothing yet.

‘It makes me feel guilty,’ I admitted. ‘We’ve just had the most enormous lot of luck. That’s all it is.’

‘You’re doing great,’ Santa reassured me. ‘Enjoy it.’

Sometimes I would catch myself remembering what it was like before we had her, that I would spend a day writing, scrubbing down calls to decipher a conversation, letting my mind linger on peculiarities and ideas. It felt like a distant land to me, somewhere attractive and hazy, too far away for me to see its details. I missed it but I also knew that there was no room for it now.

Though we’d been untouched by IPSs, we were monitored so closely in the early months that there were days when my head would be swimming with it. The appointments and the examinations, the sheer amount of information that we had to gather to hand over to OSIP, it all grew day by day. The procedures had changed since Evie had had Jakob; the monitoring had intensified.

On top of the work of caring for a newborn, I was crumbling underneath these constant pressures although I knew with certainty that I couldn’t let myself fall apart. I was the last pillar left, eroded, bleached, notched and withered, but still holding an enormous weight. Thomas helped as much as he could but now that he was the only one of us working, we’d naturally fallen into the pattern on weekdays of him only being around when Mimi had already been put to bed. I’d notice us mothers, waiting in queues for OSIP examinations, tapping feeding times into our goSpheres, attending classes and groups especially approved for language, social and emotional development, our heads buried, bowed towards our children. We didn’t have the time, the capacity, to look up. We couldn’t really see each other.

I was obsessed by Mimi and all that I needed to do around her, there was just no space left for anything else.

* * *

We were getting ready to leave Mimi for the first time. A close friend of Santa’s, Marina, was babysitting for us.

‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ I told her. ‘And we have our goSpheres with us. If there are any problems.’

I told myself that it would only be for a few hours.

I made myself remember that Marina was experienced and capable. Her son was grown-up now, he was our age. I knew Mimi would be safe in her care.

But I simply didn’t want to go. I did not want to leave my daughter, who had not been parted from me since the moment she had been conceived. Every iota of my energy had been dedicated to her since she’d been born and I