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

‘Seb said we’d eat in about ten minutes.’

‘Sure,’ Evie said. ‘Can you tell him we’ll be back in for then?’

Thomas and I locked eyes for just a short moment. A flurry of unspoken messages passed between us.

As soon as Thomas had disappeared back up the garden, Evie took me by my elbow.

‘Seb blames me,’ she said again. ‘It’s written all over his face. Even if we get through the next few months without another IPS, I don’t see how we are going to get past this… this distance between us. You can see it on his face.’

We lingered outside for longer than we should have until Seb called out to us that dinner was on the table. It reminded me, not for the first time that night, of our childhood. Of stretching out seconds into minutes more of playtime. The games we played together that only we understood. Only this time, Seb’s voice replaced that of Dad’s beckoning us in. Only now, we weren’t playing games any longer.

Evie edged towards the kitchen, pausing in each shadow, picking her way through the strip of grass reluctantly, as though her home was the very last place that she wanted to be.

* * *

Seb had overcooked the salmon and so it was discoloured on the edges. It broke away in dry flakes on my fork.

After a few false starts at making conversation, Evie sat back in her chair, pushed the salmon around her plate in a desultory manner before placing her fork on the full plate, and set it away from her with a sense of finality. She was drawn to the workSphere showing Jakob’s face. It was set behind her at an angle and so she had to keep turning her head to catch a glimpse of it.

In the face of Evie’s prickly quiet, Seb talked, over loud. His laugh ricocheted around the room powerfully, as though it were a hand that was slapping you on the back, asking for your agreement.

Once Evie had pushed her plate away, she stood up and very slowly, deliberately, took the glass of sparkling water with her. When she returned, it was full of white wine, a comical amount, due to the huge swell of the glass.

Seb raised his eyebrows at her and then he shook his head, staring hard at the coil of silver salmon skin that he’d left in one neat pile on the side of his plate.

Evie raised her glass to Seb, in the smallest of movements, before taking a large mouthful. I watched her swallow, the ripple upon her throat. Then she took another and another. She drank with a force, with effort, as though it were medicine. Seb started to pile up our plates, hastily throwing them on top of each other. The china clashed together with dull, hard chimes.

Thomas and I looked all around us, at anywhere but the dinner table, the wine, the plates. There was the briefest of moments after that when Thomas and I were left alone. Evie had gone to check on Jakob and Seb went to retrieve the dessert that they’d left in the car by accident.

‘Please say we can leave soon?’ Thomas whispered. I nodded back at him in agreement before Seb came bustling back in, dumping a packaged box of profiteroles on the centre of table.

‘I’m not sure if they’ll be any good,’ Seb said. For that moment he appeared so vulnerable and worried that I wondered if he might begin to cry, but then Thomas and I both started in a lively chorus.

‘They look great.’ ‘Delicious,’ we chimed. Seb straightened, righted himself, and lost the ragged expression from his face.

Evie slipped back into the room, almost unnoticed, and wrapped her fingers around the glass of wine that was now almost empty.

When the first knock came, we almost missed hearing it. Seb had involved Thomas in recounting some work story to me. He’d given up trying to communicate with Evie, who had drawn her legs up, hugging her knees to her chest, her shoes balancing ostentatiously on the edge of the chair.

‘Did you hear that?’ Seb said.

The knock came again. A little louder this time.

‘Who can that be? At this time of night?’ Seb’s voice became a little higher.

‘It’s them,’ Evie said. ‘They’ve come for him.’ With every word she spoke, there seemed to be just a little less of her.

‘No,’ Seb said, standing. ‘It can’t be.’

He threw a worried glance at Jakob’s face that slept on, filling the workSphere with his dreamlike presence.

Suddenly, Seb gripped Evie’s wrist and he pulled her to standing. She almost fell because of the way she had been sitting. ‘If this is it,’ Seb said to her, ‘if that is them, then I want to spend these last minutes with Jakob.’

Urgency turned over in his voice.

They saw each other then, understood one another. Evie nodded and they both fled from the room, leaving Thomas and me alone at the dinner table, the sound of another insistent knock on the front door. It almost sounded gentle, unassuming. I wanted to believe that it was just a neighbour asking to borrow something, someone asking for directions, something entirely innocent. I was transported back to being in Marie and Leo’s flat, the knock at the door, the desperate hope it was anyone but OSIP.

‘Should we answer it?’ Thomas asked me.

‘Let’s see if they go away.’

‘Maybe they’re wrong about it being OSIP,’ Thomas said hopefully.

Evie and Seb were with Jakob now. They’d lifted him from his cot and so there was now a blank space in place of where he had been resting on the workSphere. I imagined him slumbering on in his parents’ arms as they encircled him; there was no safer place that he could be.

But now the knocking had turned to banging. I imagined a huge fist hammering upon the door. Thomas and I sat before the half-eaten bowls of profiteroles, unspeaking. Then there were voices. ‘Open up. Evie Moss? Sebastian Maybury? We know you’re