Dark Lullaby Polly Ho-Yen (drm ebook reader .txt) 📖

even Evie raised her eyebrows. She asked if perhaps the relationship was moving too fast.

All I could answer was yes, it was, but it still absolutely felt like something I had to do. I moved into his flat, which was far bigger than mine; I would never have been able to afford a place like it on my own with my capped salary and housing credits.

‘Kit’s in love,’ Seb said, almost petulantly, walking past with Jakob in his arms. ‘Remember that?’

Evie ignored the jibe, dismissing him wearily with a wave of her hand.

I didn’t want to ask how things were between them. I had the sense that there was something they weren’t telling me. They’d begun sniping at each other more and more. Seb was usually the one to start the exchanges. It was often so quick and underhand, I was reminded of those old movies where two adversaries are talking calmly, then suddenly they draw daggers on each other and begin to fight.

I spent less and less time with them. Partly because of Thomas, partly because of the tension between them and the small but unshakeable feeling that Evie and I were not quite connecting, somehow. Each time I saw Jakob he’d grown so much more that he almost seemed to be different baby to that first, tiny sleep-filled face I’d held in the hospital.

His cheeks ballooned, somewhat comically, like a caricature. His forehead deepened, widened, and he developed a slightly worried expression that would cross his face each time he encountered something new. I’d cry out in surprise watching him grasp at the toys set in a wooden bar across his bouncer. The last time I’d seen him he hadn’t known that the toys were there but now he reached for them, studied them, explored the texture of them in his palm.

‘Yes, he’s starting doing that now,’ Evie would say busily, as though she didn’t see it as the miracle that I did. She was distracted, expressing milk into bottles or putting on another wash of baby-grows that had once been too large for Jakob and were now too snug. Evie, too, was changing. Sometimes when I remembered how she used to be, in her life before Jakob, working into the night, talking through her cases, she didn’t seem like the same person in front of me now who was so singularly wedded to home-making.

I’d grow silent and in those moments would often imagine how Dad would have loved to have watched Jakob change, every phase. He would have studied each detail as though he were watching a seedling unfurling and his watchfulness could somehow coach its growth along.

‘I wish Dad—’ I’d start to say but I’d stop myself when I’d see the look that cast over Evie’s face. Every other emotion had quite fallen away; all that was left was a sinkhole of pain and loss. I felt it too then, within myself.

Getting together with Thomas so soon after Dad’s death troubled me sometimes. I wondered if the many aspects of grief – the shock, the disbelief and then the ache, the persistent ache that he was gone – had poured themselves into the ferocity of my love for Thomas.

But other times, especially when I was with Evie and Jakob, the grief would open inside me. It was as though I touched something in a certain place and it would overwhelm me: an ever-extending, multiplying expanse, infinitely growing, infinitely painful. Then I would be certain that my grief for our father was on its own, it lived and breathed quite separately to any other emotion, and it would rear up in a single beat if I let it.

We were selling his flat – although Evie had in fact done everything. She’d taken her responsibility as the eldest seriously; she insisted on handling the finances and the division of his estate. She said it was the least she could do after she had missed the funeral.

Jakob’s weight wasn’t a problem now. His belly grew distended and globe-like, his neck fell in soft folds, his legs were reassuringly squashy and chubby. Sometimes Evie showed me the graph that the health visitors would fill in that showed his weight rising in a line that swooped upwards, angular, like the wing of a swallow.

There had been no more IPSs since they’d contested his weight gain on the day of Dad’s funeral.

At least, there had been none that Evie had spoken to me about.

NOW

During one of the last times that we spoke, Evie had told me one detail about the house they were moving to.

It was a stilted, uncomfortable conversation through our workSpheres, built out of silence, repetition and interruptions. It was as though we couldn’t bear to hear the other speak and so our words tumbled on top of one another’s, struggling to be heard.

‘It’s just off the canal,’ she’d said. ‘Our only neighbour is the boatyard that’s a ten-minute walk away.’ The house was out of the quarters. Now she was part of OSIP, doing work that I didn’t ask her about, she was ranked much higher in housing credits, high enough that she could live beyond the quarters’ boundaries now if she chose to, although not in the elite areas where the XC children were raised.

I’d taken her tone to be boastful and hadn’t been able to resist saying in reply, ‘I suppose when you can’t get on with other people then having no neighbours is a benefit.’

Evie was stunned into silence for a moment before she bit back: ‘I was trying to help you, Kit. If you can’t see that then you’re going to have a nasty awakening. I was helping you.’

‘You think you were,’ I snapped. ‘That’s a pretty convenient way of seeing the damage you do, if you ask me.’

‘You can’t resist giving your opinion on everything, can you? The world according to Kit.’

‘Evie,’ I said. I had tried to take a breath. ‘Evie.’

But she had already hung up.

* * *

The car makes