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

Jonah watches me eat with something like pride. He sits on the stool opposite mine.

I’m chasing down the last string of pasta when he speaks.

‘Do you think that you are a good mother?’

I stop myself. The fork clatters into the bowl.

I’ve come to accept over the last few months that it’s my fault that she was under threat of being taken from us. Every single IPS, I could unpick and find that it was me who was wanting. Every day we were given a new chance to do better but I squandered too many of them.

Considering the IPSs, I am not sure that I am a good mother. I’m programmed to doubt myself, to unravel my every action, to obsess about how I could be better. With every interaction with OSIP, I questioned myself more and more as to whether I was good enough.

Now, after all that has happened, I have little left to give. I am unsure of how to be.

Jonah continues to search my face. I can’t believe that he can wave a wand and wipe out all that has happened. Surely he won’t be able to erase the path that lies before my family? But he continues to seek something within me and though I feel I am at the end, that there is nowhere left to turn, I search inside myself; I speak.

‘I love her,’ I say. ‘I want to do the best I can for her. I want to teach her about the world, I want her to feel joy, and sadness too. I want her to feel. I want to protect her and I want to discuss things with her. I want to understand how her mind sees things. I want to see the person she’ll become. That’s all I know, now.’

Is that enough? Is that a good mother?

I had not stopped thinking about Mimi since the moment we handed her over to the people who would smuggle her out of the country, when she was taken from my sight.

Where is she now? I wondered. Is she still in the hospital? Has she been moved to an OSIP centre? Who was the person assigned to her care? Did they know that she adored ducks? Did they warm her milk gently so it could be considered cold but was the only way she’d have it?

Evie had been the only person I’d heard of who’d actually got their child back. There had been a few more videos popping up on the Spheres about this occurrence – reunited families in sunlit forests, smiles white and wide and polished – but Jakob was the only child outside the world of the Spheres I’d known to be returned.

I think of Mimi trussed up in a hospital bed, surrounded by strangers and wires and sterility. She must be scared. She must be wondering where I am.

‘How do you know who I am?’ I ask suddenly. ‘Life document clients believe it’s all done by computer.’

‘I’ve made it my business to learn everything about the people that come into my life,’ Jonah says. ‘When life documenting started, it didn’t take much digging to find out what was behind it. I’d almost left them when they found you. Like I said, I’ve been admiring of your work for some time.

‘You have an eye for detail. The time you saw me reading the OSIP documents is a good example. That phone call with Genevieve, the one where she told me she wanted to start a family. You heard that, didn’t you? And then you glimpsed documents I was reading, saw the OSIP logo?’

I nod, remembering the clicking of the young dog’s paws across the kitchen floor, the hum of the cooking on the stove.

‘I selected the wrong settings on my workSphere for the life document for a short period – I don’t think you would have noticed if it weren’t for that call. It turned the camera on. If it weren’t for Genevieve’s news, I wouldn’t have let that slip but well… here we are. I do want to help you, Kit. I’ve decided. I can help you keep your daughter.’

THEN

I happily lost hours to Mimi.

I became greedy in collecting details about her.

She was watchful like Thomas.

I liked to see what would interest her in the world. It would always be the smallest detail that I would never have guessed, I wouldn’t have spotted. The feel of the silver knob of a cupboard in the sitting room. A scuffed hole in the carpet fascinated her. When we were outside, her gaze shot upwards but when I looked up all I would see was empty sky, blank clouds that merged into a wall of white. But to Mimi, it was something spectacular, something to consider.

‘She’s just like you,’ strangers would tell me, peering into her pram; although to me she looked quite different.

She was easily quiet.

She liked it when it rained. Not being out in it, really, but the sound of it next to the window. She listened to it as though it were something physical in front of her that she could touch.

She could spend time by herself and she seemed to enjoy that just as much as playing with Thomas and me. She would look up every now and again to find me but before then she would be quite absorbed in her activity, steadied by its rhythm.

I was always there, watching and waiting, poised for when she was ready to play again.

She didn’t like to sleep. She fought against it each time I put her down. Writhing against her own tiredness before all of a sudden she would drop off in a beat.

What more can I tell you of her?

That she didn’t smile easily?

That she could tell when we were upset without us having said a word different?

That she would quickly find where the door was in a room.

That she wouldn’t take a bottle of expressed milk unless it was warmed ever so slightly.

She mesmerised me. I was unprepared