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

could not shake this mode of being. We were going to an art show of Santa’s. It was meant to be ‘fun’. Everyone had told me this, as the plan to leave Mimi for the evening had been formulated around me. I’d tried to explain that it was too soon, that Mimi wasn’t quite ready, that I definitely wasn’t, but I was damped down by their voices, their reasons and couldn’t make myself heard.

‘Ready to go,’ Thomas said, with a smile that I could not return. It was different for him, I reminded myself, he was used to leaving her when he went to work.

‘Let me check on her one last time,’ I said.

I let myself into her room. The peach-yellow light of her lamp was on, and I could see her outline in the crib. Tiny movements of her arms as she tested what way they could go, the sensation they made. She was cooing at something. I didn’t dare go over to her for I was sure if I saw her face, I would never be able to leave.

There was something about the way Thomas took my hand as we walked across the road to the Tube that irked me. As though he were hurrying me on or something.

‘It doesn’t start till seven, don’t pull at me,’ I said aloud, grumpiness taking over my tone. It kept happening since Mimi was born, I would think something and then realise that I had spoken it aloud.

We arrived late, though, when Santa was halfway through giving a speech. She had stood upon a chair so she could see everyone and when saw us slip in, she stopped what she was saying and blew us a kiss.

‘My son, my daughter-in-law have just arrived,’ she said to the crowd, in way of an apology for her breaking off, ‘having put to bed my three-month-old granddaughter!’

There was a whoop from the back of the room. And a whistle that shrieked into the air. The crowd around us were clapping, united in their applause.

They looked at Santa and then back at us. Shiny, smiling faces that for those moments seemed indistinguishable from each other.

‘What an entrance,’ Thomas whispered into my ear.

He didn’t notice though, like I did, the few people who were not applauding.

The people that looked at us, with a pursed and judgmental stare.

The people who were thinking, why weren’t we home with our daughter.

The people who might be enforcers.

NOW

I’m not an enforcer, Kit.

I remember those words as I come downstairs, hair wet, my skin smelling of soap. He’d neither denied nor confirmed his connection to OSIP but he had admitted that: I’m not an enforcer, Kit.

I find him in the kitchen; he is cooking. He likes cooking; I know this about him.

I watch him for a moment before he realises that I am there. He looks at what’s inside the saucepan on the hob. Then he adds a splash of amber-coloured olive oil, a pinch of salt crystals that he crushes into a powder between his thumb and forefinger.

He moves quickly and bends down to a cupboard for a box of pasta, which he measures out on scales. He is methodical and measured in all that he does, I know this too. He turns to me then.

‘You must be famished,’ he says. ‘You look like you haven’t eaten properly in a month.’

I murmur something. Not an answer, not an agreement. I don’t even realise that it’s her name I’m saying aloud.

‘Mimi.’ Her name feels like it’s a petal on my lips.

‘Eat first. Then we’ll talk,’ he says.

He pours me a glass of sparkling water from a bottle in the fridge and nudges a small bowl of oversized olives towards me. His eyes are bright, a curious colour somewhere in between grey and green, not dissimilar to the shiny olives.

‘Eat,’ he says again.

‘But OSIP—’ I start to say.

‘Then there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?’

‘But you said you could help me.’

‘You want to keep her. You want to know how you can keep her,’ Jonah says slowly.

‘Of course. I’d do – I’d do anything.’ My voice sounds cracked. I wonder if I look how I sound. ‘My sister sent me here. She said she learnt something. Something that she would not tell me, something that got her son back… from them. And you, you’re connected to them somehow, aren’t you? I mean not directly, not openly – but I saw you reading some OSIP documents once…’

Jonah is making a study of me. His grey eyes are fixed upon my face. I gaze right back at him as though it’s a test. Then he says again, ‘Eat first,’ and turns down the heat on the pasta so the water does not boil over.

I try to sit on one of the stools. I sit on one hand and the other I hold over my mouth because, like the boiling water, I feel that everything is about to bubble furiously and overspill. How can I wait here calmly when I don’t know whether this man will help us? But I’m very aware that he’s the last person I have to turn to – I have nowhere else I can run, no other possibilities. I can’t annoy him or aggravate him. I can’t harass or harangue. All I can do is stuff my fist into my mouth to stop me from yelling. All I can do is to sit on my hand to stop me from running away.

Jonah adds cream, pepper and smoked salmon to the pasta when it is done. He scatters pointed rocket leaves into the bowl and passes it over to me along with a fork.

I can’t imagine how I will eat it all but once I start, like with the bottle of water, I find my appetite. I find that I need it. Then no forkful can hold enough. I stuff in large quantities that fill my mouth and so I have to chew hard to make it