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

It was bright and sunny but stingingly cold. I remember wishing I’d worn gloves; I gripped the handlebars of the pushchair tightly to warm my hands. We walked as a triangle, Mimi at its point, myself and Thomas side by side, almost pressed into one another. I found that I was holding my breath whenever someone passed, and only when they had walked past us did I let myself breathe again.

We were almost there. I could see the glossy black of Marina’s front door. A car door opened and closed. I sped up as we neared the house, I wanted to be inside there now, be contained by its walls. Thomas was almost jogging alongside to keep up.

‘You can stop there,’ a voice said. I didn’t even realise that they were speaking to us and only realised when, once we carried on, I heard, ‘I said, stop.’

The winter sun shone brightly into my eyes so I could not see the enforcer clearly, or his badge, although I was now sure that it was one. I started running through checklists in my head of what they could possibly accuse us of. I looked at Mimi, who dreamt on. My eyes checked over her body, taking in her hat, still snugly planted over her head, her outside suit encasing her. She smiled in her sleep and then she shifted to one side and her face was quite still and slack.

The enforcer leant back on his heels and dug his hands into his pockets. When he looked up, I saw a sort of wolfish grin on his face for just the briefest of moments before it vanished so completely, I had to wonder if I’d imagined it. I recognised that smile, those teeth that were ever so slightly narrowed. The pale salmon lips and widened cheeks.

‘Roger,’ I said, quietly. The boyfriend I’d had before Thomas who I’d told I’d never have children.

He ignored me and showed us his ID. A picture of him that looked like he was trying to contain laughter, overlain with the blue, symmetrical lines of an embossed OSIP logo.

‘So, how long have you been walking for today, folks?’ he said. He spoke more to Thomas than me.

Roger asked us if we knew what the temperature was that day and how many miles we had covered. How long exactly we had been outside. He checked on what Mimi was wearing and so he woke her and she, flustered and disturbed, started to cry. She would not stop when I comforted her and so I took her out of her pushchair to hold her.

In her snowsuit, she felt slippery and bulky and I struggled to hold her comfortably, and all the time I could feel myself getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

‘I’m sorry to do this,’ Roger said. ‘Looks like I’m going to have to issue you with an IPS this morning. You’ve been out in cold temperatures way over the prescribed time for a child this age.’

Thomas asked where we would find this information; we were unaware of it in all of our time in induction.

‘I’ll make sure you are sent the information,’ Roger said, with a swipe. Our goSpheres chimed. ‘What I suggest is you get indoors as soon as you can,’ he said. ‘Do you know someone close by?’

He had followed us here. Waiting until the very last minute before he revealed himself. I was sure that he knew somehow that this was where we were heading to, that he knew that we had almost made it.

He scanned my band, then Mimi’s and turned to leave us, but he turned back again before he went.

‘Take care now,’ he said. This time, he just spoke to me.

We had run out of places that felt safe. The spaces that had once felt so normal to us were now contaminated; I had no desire to return to any of them. Breathlessness flooded through me when I imagined being back in any of them. We stopped taking Mimi to swimming lessons or to the swings. We didn’t go to visit Santa any more. We wouldn’t eat out, in fact, we wouldn’t go out if we could help it.

In those months, we were prisoners. Our world was shrinking to the size of the walls of our house. We reached the point where we rarely left home with Mimi and one of us would venture out alone to get whatever it was that we needed; we no longer moved as a tribe of three. I’d usually be the one who would wait at home with her. I ticked off the minutes that Thomas was out, drawing the curtains, checking the chain on the door, ushering Mimi into one of the bedrooms that didn’t share a wall with the corridor.

I didn’t want anyone to know we were there alone.

But despite our best efforts, despite hiding away we’d somehow, effortlessly almost, reached our eighth IPS. Only one more was needed for extraction, unless we could last out the few weeks until Mimi turned one.

This meant one thing: we were no longer safe in our home.

They could visit us at any time, on any day.

All that was left to do was to wait for them to arrive.

* * *

We all woke late on our last day together. The sun was already high and the blue, unblemished sky stretched out before us like another land to explore, vast, clear and borderless.

We’d been trying to feed Mimi formula, provided by the library, trying our best to prepare her for when we’d be parted and she’d no longer be able to have breast milk from me or expressed in a bottle. We tried giving it to her just slightly warm, like how she’d take expressed milk but after just a mouthful she pursed her lips shut and refused to take a sip more.

‘What if she does this with them?’

‘She won’t have the choice,’ Thomas said and then, more gently,