Dark Lullaby E-Book

Polly Ho-Yen

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 426

Beschreibung

For fans of Black Mirror and The Handmaid's Tale, in Dark Lullaby a mother desperately tries to keep her family together in a society where parenting standards are strictly monitored."This gripping thriller has everything: beautiful writing, shedloads of tension, family drama. It made me grateful for my fragile freedoms."Emily Koch, author of If I Die Before I WakeThe world is suffering an infertility crisis, the last natural birth was over twenty years ago and now the only way to conceive is through a painful fertility treatment. Any children born are strictly monitored, and if you are deemed an unfit parent then your child is extracted. After witnessing so many struggling to conceive – and then keep – their babies, Kit thought she didn't want children. But then she meets Thomas and they have a baby girl, Mimi. Soon the small mistakes build up and suddenly Kit is faced with the possibility of losing her daughter, and she is forced to ask herself how far she will go to keep her family together.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for Dark Lullaby

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Praise for Dark Lullaby

‘With fabulous world-building and a plot so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it, Dark Lullaby is a Handmaid’s Tale for the modern world, about the ways our human need for love can serve as both society’s salvation, and its undoing.’Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors

‘This gripping thriller has everything: beautiful writing, shedloads of tension, family drama. It made me grateful for my fragile freedoms.’Emily Koch, author of If I Die Before I Wake

‘Dark Lullaby is hard-hitting, mournful and deeply affecting, reading like the offspring of Never Let Me Go and 1984, and it addresses universal fears about early parenthood without providing easy answers. I raced through it and when I’d finished, it made me hug my own children tight.’Tim Major, author of Hope Island

‘A heart-wrenching and beautifully told novel, absolutely compelling, and scarily plausible. This is the best kind of speculative fiction: thoughtful, committed, alert to the outlines of a possible near-future, that inhabits your mind long after reading. One of the most important books to be published this year.’Marian Womack, author of The Golden Key

‘An expertly crafted exploration of love and loss, with a truly haunting conclusion. Intimate, often poetic prose shines bright through the encroaching dread. Bleak, beautiful and bittersweet at every turn. I loved it.’Martyn Ford, author of Every Missing Thing

‘Polly Ho-Yen masterfully balances eerie, dream-like prose with a distressingly realistic portrayal of a world where reproductive right has become reproductive responsibility. To be a parent is to live with your heart outside your body and, through smart world-building, memorable characters and sharp insight, Dark Lullaby perfectly encapsulates the power and terror of that love.’Dave Rudden, author of The Wintertime Paradox

‘Dark Lullaby is a gripping story of love and desperation, of intimate and social structures, of sisterhood and motherhood that rings true as a bell. I devoured it.’Deirdre Sullivan, author of Perfectly Preventable Deaths

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Dark LullabyPrint edition ISBN: 9781789094251E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094268

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UPwww.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 202110 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Polly Ho-Yen 2021. All Rights Reserved.

Polly Ho-Yen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Dan

I scarce believe my love to be so pure

As I had thought it was,

Because it doth endure

Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;

Methinks I lied all winter when I swore

My love was infinite, if spring make it more.

from ‘Love’s Growth’ by John Donne

OSIP stands for the Office of Standards in Parenting.

IPS refers to an ‘insufficient parenting standard’.

Induction is the process of fertility treatments a woman undertakes to conceive a child.

Extraction is the process of a child being removed from the care of their biological parent or parents if the standard of care is deemed insufficient by OSIP.

Out is an unofficial term referring to a person viewed as one of ‘OSIP’s Un-Tapped’.

THEN

The last time that I saw Mimi she was almost one.

We decided to celebrate her birthday early, just Thomas and myself, along with Thomas’s mother Santa, the only parent we had left between us.

I’d made a cake out of little more than pure oats, butter and maple syrup; Mimi had just been diagnosed with an intolerance to gluten and I was now vigilant to the point of obsessive over any crumb that passed her lips since I had received the last IPS.

I suppose that as we sat down around our small table that night in November we were thinking of how little time we had left with her. We did not speak of it. We simply lost ourselves in my pathetic, flattened offering of a cake, with the electric candle that Thomas had bought especially sitting crookedly on top.

There was a part of me that knew then.

That very morning, I’d buried my face into the wispy fuzz that settled on the crown of her head after she napped. ‘Her little halo,’ Thomas called it, bouncing a hand upon its golden springiness. I knew it then, at that moment: We don’thave long left together. But it was such an awful thought, one so singed with pain, so full of blackness, an emptiness like no other, that I didn’t dare examine it. I shoved it away desperately and whispered, ‘Happy birthday, darling girl,’ into the silkiness of her tiny ear.

We gathered closer together as we began to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, pulled towards each other as though the little hard light from the candle’s bulb gave off something like warmth. We sounded weary. The words no longer bore any promise; they only seemed to spell out our shortcomings. Happy birthday, dear Mimi.

Santa’s singing rang out louder than Thomas and I combined, the off-key notes covering our faltering voices. She was dressed in her usual style, a gold and orange scarf hanging loosely off her shoulders, a skirt that matched her lips in its ruddiness, her dark hair flecked with a few errant silver strands pulled back from her face with a printed headscarf. Thomas and I were like shadows in comparison: grey, blurred, just behind her.

Her rose-red smile was fixed upon her beloved and only granddaughter. I remember thinking that she was making the most of these last moments, filling them with colour and light in the same way that she approached her canvases, her life. She had dressed that day with especial care, in the richer hues of her wardrobe, to offset the gloom, the sadness that had flooded through our life and carried us along with it. I tried to fix a smile on my face but I could feel it hanging there, a slipping mask.

Hap – py Birth – day to – you. Why does the tune slow as you sing it? The last few notes stretched on, awkwardly, until Santa started clapping, which made us all join in too. I looked at my daughter, at the centre of us, and wondered what I always wondered: had we created a world in which she was happy, in which she was safe?

Mimi sat perfectly straight in her chair. It had grown with her through her first year, being some sort of elegant Nordic-inspired design that could be made smaller or bigger depending on its sitter’s proportions. I insisted on it when I was pregnant with her, had coveted it in one of the OHs, the ‘Outstanding Homes’, which we had visited during the induction, despite myself.

Before we visited the OHs, Thomas and I had a frank conversation about money and how having stuff would not make us better parents. Love was the answer, we told ourselves, not stuff. And yet, as soon as I saw the chair, its honey-coloured wood and gently curving lines, I vowed to have it for her. I could already picture our daughter sitting upon it at dinnertime, completing the triangle. It was hers before her eyes were open, before she felt the breath of the world upon her skin, and long before she was ready to sit up or feed herself.

‘Blow it out, Meems!’ Santa bellowed. ‘Make a wish!’

Mimi was entranced by the candlelight – but then her eyes darted to me.

‘Blow it out, my darling!’ I said and I leant in close to her. ‘This is what we do on our birthdays.’ I ballooned my cheeks comically.

Then Thomas joined in too and in those moments, as we clowned and laughed and pretended to blow out the candle together, I think we forgot. I think we forgot what had brought us together a full twenty-two days before the date of her first birthday.

Mimi studied our faces and for a moment it looked like she was going to copy us and fill her bud-like cheeks and blow down on the plastic stump of light.

‘You can do it, Mimi!’ I called out in a burst. I was reminded of a long-distant memory of myself sitting in Mimi’s place, my sister Evie next to me. A birthday cake directly ahead, safe and sure in my absolute belief in everything that my sister did and told me. ‘Make a wish! You can do it, Kit!’ she’d yelled to me, desperately, as I had to Mimi, as though she could not contain it. I remembered thinking that I must do it because Evie had told me to; that it must come true for she had told me it would. But in those few moments I’d already blown the candle out and forgotten to wish for anything.

Mimi’s mouth unfolded into an open grin, and there, right there in her eyes, I saw it.

Pure delight.

Her brown eyes seemed to blossom, grow larger, and the light of the candle danced in her pupils. Or was it a light from within her? I let myself revel in it and I thought for that moment: Yes. Yes, my daughter is happy. Yes, all is right in the world. And no, there is nothing, not any one thing that I would ask for more than this single moment of her happiness.

She leant towards the blinking light of the LED candle as though she really did understand that she should blow it out.

‘Switch it off,’ I hissed. For a second longer that it should have, its bulb remained obstinately bright. I was mildly aware of Thomas’s panic beside me; he had been pressing and was now striking the remote that controlled the candle. Quite suddenly, the bulb went out.

I remembered again the candle that I’d blown out on the birthday when I’d forgotten to make a wish. Its wavering flame glowed and as I blew, it bent away from me until it diminished to nothing. Its smoke had streamed from the wick and the scent of it, though acrid and sharp, I’d liked and savoured. But I dismissed the memory: it wasn’t worth the risk to give Mimi a real candle on her birthday cake, however soft the light it cast.

I reached a hand out towards Thomas, feeling for the first time that day waves of contentment inside me. As though he’d had just the same thought, his hand was swinging towards mine and our fingers met in mid-air and clasped together fiercely. Mimi was triumphant now, toothy and innocent; her mouth gaped open with the thrill of it all.

It was then, just then, that we heard the rapping at the door.

NOW

There’s a knock on the car window; it jolts me awake.

I notice the crick in my neck from sleeping with my head to one side, the blaring lights of the charging station, the slight hum of activity tracing the air.

Thomas’s face shifts into focus, his eyes wide and searching. He mouths a question to me through the window: Want anything?

I shake my head and he turns away. I watch the quick rhythm of his steps as he crosses the forecourt. We can’t stop here for long.

I’m still not quite awake and for those few moments I forget what we’ve done, forget why we’re here. Then I turn to the back seat, suddenly, viciously. I whip my head round so that it jars, even though I know what I will find when I look back there.

The grey seats are empty; the seatbelts hang redundant.

I turn back to the front, deflated. I can see the top of Thomas’s head past the buckets of half-dead flowers, the glowing Spheres that revolve above. He’s eyeing something on one of the shelves as though he is about to pick it up but then he straightens, turns towards the sign for the toilets and disappears from view.

A car pulls up in the bay beside us. A man driving, a woman sitting in the back. I sense some unease between them; he wrings his hands as they speak, then rubs his temples in long upward sweeps. She’s crouched over, curved like the branch of an old tree. Then I glimpse the outline of the car seat next to her. That’s why she’s sitting in the back.

I crane my neck to see if I can spot the baby. We haven’t seen any children since we left home and I realise right then that I’m holding on to a hunger to see one. A tiny, new face slumped over in sleep, a toddler taking tottering steps; I’m flooded with an urgent need to see proof of their existence before me.

The woman catches my eye and I turn away quickly, pretending instead to be watching the Spheres as they change over. When I glance back, she is still staring at me, as is the man. They wonder what interest I have in them. They suspect perhaps that I’m not merely looking at them but watching them, inspecting them, judging them.

In the next moment, they pull away without charging their vehicle. Their car moves forwards in lurching jolts, taking the corner a little too sharply, a little too quickly. I wish I could tell them there’s no need for them to go but there’s another part of me that’s glad they’re suspicious, that wants to urge them to be on their guard, always.

I hunch my shoulders, my back stiff from travelling for so long. I want to release it, this pain that lines my spine, but I carry it with me, it is ingrained.

The Spheres turn over again. They crackle with another news story and I scan them, wanting to be distracted from myself, from my own thoughts that also revolve and rotate in an endless cycle. I yawn noisily, my eyelids beginning to droop.

That’s when I see it.

I am branded by it. I feel it, like a pressure on my chest that’s increasing, a heavy lump in my throat that grows and engorges. Everything I thought I knew drops away.

I see it, over and over, after the Spheres have changed again and moved on to quoting statistics.

I see it as Thomas walks back towards the car and I flick my eyes closed and let my head loll back, as though I’ve fallen back into a dream.

I see it as I hear the rustle of something he bought being stashed in the glove compartment.

He traces a finger across my cheek, believing me asleep again.

His kiss brushes the side of my head.

I hear him say, ‘I love you.’

But I don’t react. I pretend I’m asleep; I play dead.

All I can think of is what I have just seen.

There’s nothing left for him.

THEN

It was at Jakob’s naming ceremony where we first met.

An extended group of family and friends filled Evie and Seb’s narrow strip of garden, drinking a particularly sharp homemade lemonade and waiting for the barbecue to be lit.

Jakob was wearing a babygrow printed with orange lions and had spent the entire afternoon asleep in Evie’s arms. Each time Evie and Jakob walked down the garden, Seb just behind them, always close by, the crowd automatically parted to let them through, their voices dipping to a respectful silence. It gave an odd solemnity to the informal gathering.

He didn’t quite fill the babygrow. At four weeks old, he still seemed so small that I wondered why they’d planned the naming ceremony for so soon after the birth, until Evie had told me that OSIP could use public engagements as a tool to assess how new parents were coping. There was a balance to be met, she explained to me, between social isolation and protective isolation, for the physical health of the baby.

Whispers crept around me as I weaved through the crowd.

She’s looking well, isn’t she – considering what she went through…

How many inductions did they do in the end?

I heard she almost didn’t make it.

I could only half hear them and when I turned, I couldn’t see who had been speaking. An image of Evie flashed in my mind, pale and lost, almost disappearing into the hospital bed that held her. I shook my head, dispelling the image.

An older woman who I didn’t recognise kept staring at Jakob long after they had passed her. She didn’t seem to realise that her arms were reaching towards them, as though she were imagining she was cradling him. But in the following moment, the man next to her started speaking in a loud, braying voice and her arms collapsed to her sides.

‘I mean, who could have predicted it?’ he said. ‘We used to worry about nuclear weapons, overpopulation, climate change… but not this. Not infertility. And still no one can explain why it’s happened.’

‘I heard something the other day about it being down to pollution, a theory about microplastics,’ the older woman replied. She spoke quite slowly, as though wearied just by putting the sentence together.

‘But if it were something like that, wouldn’t it have got better now that pollution has dropped? We’ve been at 99.98 per cent infertility rate for years now.’

‘It was just something I heard,’ she replied, in the same tired tone.

Dad stood a little back from everyone else, hunched over, inspecting the flowerbeds, one hand in his pocket, the other holding on to his glass awkwardly. He was wearing a coat even though everyone around him was in T-shirts and thin cotton shirts. I knew he felt particularly uncomfortable when the talk turned to infertility, which it often did. He might bolt at any moment. I made my way over but before I could reach him, I was halted by the soft chiming sound of a glass struck with a spoon.

Seb stood in front of us all, his drink raised, ready. He nodded to someone at the back, easily able to see over the crowd, he was so much taller than anyone else there. His hair had grown just a tiny bit too long. I imagined Evie trying to tame it before the party began.

‘Just a couple of words,’ he started to say. He smiled easily, raising his shoulders and spreading his arms out as if to say that it couldn’t be helped. ‘I’m not going to be long, I promised Evie that.’

They exchanged a conspiratorial look, Evie’s eyes flashing dark with affection.

‘I just wanted to say, when Evie and I decided to start induction together, we had no idea how it might all end.’

I couldn’t stop my attention drifting from Seb to Evie, as he spoke. She stood a little stiffly next to him, holding Jakob closely to her but I imagined that if her hands were free, her fingers would be lightly fidgeting with the fabric of her dress. I could tell she didn’t really want Seb to give a speech.

I saw her flinch slightly as he said, ‘induction’, and she stared determinedly down at Jakob, as though she could lose herself in his face. We’d known the word from an early age, we were taught it at school; I could still hear the faceless voice from the videos we were shown, word for word, in my ear: ‘Induction is the only way to narrow in on that tiny band of still viable eggs and sperm.’ My head would swim with the diagrams of ovaries and embryos and phrases like ‘intensive egg harvesting’ which had sounded frightening even then, before I truly understood what it would mean for us.

I remember Evie and I, as teenagers, trying to make sense of it, in that piecemeal way when what you’re trying to grasp feels just too big, too alien, to comprehend. It only dawned on me slowly that this was about our own bodies, that those distant-looking diagrams were in fact part of us.

As we grew older, Evie spoke about induction with increasing authority but when she was actually going through it, her expertise turned jaded. ‘It’s just a numbers game,’ she said to me wearily as she came to the end of yet another failed cycle and was about to start another. She didn’t want to talk about how the drug combinations that were used to stimulate ovaries could often cause them to over-respond, causing blood clots, permanent organ damage, heart attacks. I didn’t remember that detail from school. When Evie started induction, I had looked it up for myself; I’d read her drug notes when she wasn’t looking. Seeing the facts in an innocuous little font had made me feel entirely numb. I didn’t want to believe that it could be true. I’d buried it inside and a sick feeling, an uneasiness, had not left me since. I forced myself to look back to Seb as though I could dispel the shadow from my mind.

‘But I always, always – and I didn’t even tell Evie this – had a picture in my mind of us together sharing our child with the people who mean the most to us in the world. However tough things got, it was that picture that always kept me going. And now, being here, introducing you to Jakob, our beautiful son, right now, it’s a dream come—’

Suddenly, Seb’s voice was lost, cut off.

At first it appeared like he was laughing. There were a few nervous giggles as we watched his shoulders start to shake, his face creasing. But then he didn’t, or couldn’t, stop the silent quaking. We took in how his body dropped as though the strings that had been holding him upright and expansive had been severed in one cruel slash. Evie rushed towards him, concern set in lines across her face, and as she reached him we heard the unmistakable sound of a sob. It didn’t possibly sound like it could have come from the same man who’d begun the toast just moments before.

As if in echo, there was a collective moan, a united lament, in the garden. It almost sounded like disappointment. This was not how this was meant to end, it seemed to say. There was a rush of people who crowded in towards him behind Evie, while the rest of us hung back, awkwardly, trying not to stare but unable to stop our eyes from finding Seb’s tear-stricken face.

‘I’m all right, I’m all right.’ His words were almost lost in the noise of well-wishing and reassurances that surrounded him.

Someone, I can’t remember now who, raised his glass and shouted out, ‘To Evie and Seb, and to little Jakob!’ but those around shushed him. ‘Not now!’ I heard a vicious whisper. Everyone chatted in subdued voices afterwards as though anything louder than a staged whisper might be deemed inappropriate.

I went from group to group, refilling glasses, offering around bowls of crisps that everyone refused. Seb was so happy to be a father that he couldn’t keep control of his emotions was the party line. They were sleep-deprived with a newborn. Who is able to keep a handle on their emotions when you haven’t slept for longer than two hours at a stretch?

‘It won’t be long till the food’s ready,’ Evie trilled when the first of the guests appeared before her to say their goodbyes. The only person she’d let leave without a word was Dad, who’d made his exit almost as soon as Seb had spoken. Tears always had that effect on him.

Evie stood in front of the barbeque; holding a large silver kitchen knife in her hand that she was using to cut into the plastic packets of raw, pink sausages. It looked far too big, too murderous, for the job. She’d handed Jakob to an old work friend of hers, a matronly woman called Deborah, who sat in a deckchair not far away. Jakob slept without stirring on Deborah’s chest, although Evie’s eyes kept flitting back to him. I went to take the knife from her but before I could, a man I had never met before, with very short dark hair, put his hand over hers and gently took it.

Evie relinquished the job gratefully. She stepped away and peered around the crowded garden, searching for something or someone she could not find.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked her. ‘Can I do anything?’

Evie saw it was me and let her smile waver, falter.

‘It’s okay. I’m okay. It’s probably nothing…’

‘Tell me,’ I said simply, with a sisterly directness.

‘It’s Jakob. We got a warning from OSIP. Not an actual IPS, just a warning. But it shook us up. Especially Seb.’

‘When? What happened?’ OSIP had been around for as long as inductions had been implemented. Officers of OSIP, enforcers, monitored parenting, ensuring that the needs of every child born were met to the highest standard. The stories of neglect and abuse of the past were consigned to history; enforcers had far greater powers and reach than the Social Services that had preceded them. Now parents everywhere lived in fear of enforcers issuing them an IPS and ultimately extracting their child from their care.

‘It was nothing. We were just putting him back into the car after shopping for the food for today. Seb was getting the seat ready, I was holding Jakey, and then Seb said he was ready and so I passed Jakey to him and maybe because of the way Seb was standing, half in the car, he didn’t have him properly… that was when it happened.’

‘Did he drop him?’

‘No! Nothing like that. He just wasn’t supporting his neck fully. That was what the enforcer said.’

‘That’s nothing,’ I agreed. ‘Did you think it was okay?’

‘Well…’ Evie hesitated. ‘I suppose so. Until the enforcer came running up and pointed it out. I mean, I guess he could have been supporting his neck more.’

‘Put it out of your head,’ I said. ‘It was a one-off.’

‘I hope so,’ Evie said. ‘Seb blames himself, but like I said to him, I hadn’t noticed either. It was just as much my fault. The enforcer said that to me too. That I had been – what was the word she used? – complicit.’

‘What was she like – the enforcer?’

‘She looked like someone you would just walk past in the street, just like anybody else. Shortish hair, no make-up. A little bit… a little bit frumpy. I used to imagine that they would all wear suits and dark glasses, so you could see when one was close by, but you would have just walked straight past her. She was just normal, average.’

‘Imagine doing that job.’ I shivered. ‘Why would anyone do it?’

‘That was the thing. She was very worthy about it all. I could sense she really felt she was helping us when she pointed out how Seb was holding him. It was as though she was pleased with herself for noticing. Like she was doing us a favour.’

‘I suppose if it was just a warning and nothing will come of it, maybe she was, in a way. Now you know that you need to be super vigilant.’

‘Yes,’ Evie said and she smiled in a sad sort of way. ‘It’s going to be harder than I thought.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ I reassured her.

‘Maybe,’ Evie said. ‘Maybe not.’ She fiercely brushed away a tear that had started to trail down one of her cheeks.

‘Don’t think like that. Remember the inductions, everything you’ve learnt, everything you’ve been through. You’re a wonderful mum. And Seb’s so good with him. Jakey’s a lucky little boy.’

Evie swallowed hard. Her face flushed pink from trying to stop crying. There was the beginning of a rash visible upon her neck, creeping over her collarbone.

‘Stop it, you,’ she said gently.

‘Why don’t you go find Seb? I’ll help with the food.’ I gestured towards the dark-haired man who had taken the knife from her. He had emptied all the sausages out of their packets and made a rough pyramid with them on a plate and was now breaking up the foamy white block of a firelighter over the charcoal. ‘We’ll get these people fed. Who’s that guy at the barbecue?’

‘He works with Seb,’ Evie said. ‘Thomas.’

She looked like she was going to say something else but then thought better of it and instead a sound left her; a deflation, a sigh, a space.

NOW

Thomas sleeps next to me.

He lies on his side, facing the blank, white wall, a framed print of a blurry watercolour of a garden its only decoration. If he opened his eyes now, the first thing that he would see would be that painting.

Its shapes run into one another, dozy, green bushes that become flowers that become a person – a gardener wearing oversized boots and a floppy hat so that their face is obscured. It was chosen for being bland, innocuous, for its bleached-out colours, and wavering lines, but it offends me.

As though it is urging me to see life that way, through a haze, with soft edges. Out of focus and out of shape. To forget its prickle, stab and sting.

Thomas breathes steadily. I am sure he is sleeping deeply, although earlier I was also sure, until I moved and he shifted and turned and reached for me. We’re in the early hours of the morning but it could be the depths of the night. When we got here it was almost midnight, and then it took time for Thomas to settle. He wanted to talk and then took a while to drop off; he moved restlessly, kept turning over, his feet kicking out against the covers as though he were trying to escape it. Only now am I convinced that he is truly asleep.

I stretch one leg out of the bed and, when Thomas does not stir, ease the rest of me from under the white sheets. They are just a little scratchy from not being washed very often. I tread slowly out of the bedroom and on to the landing. Only when I am downstairs do I let myself take a breath.

These rooms are new to me, though I have planned this route in my head so many times since we arrived that I feel I know them well: I have turned the corner, tiptoed down the stairs and edged open the sitting-room door slowly again and again as I lie silently in bed, waiting for the right time to leave.

When we arrived last night in darkness, Thomas explored every inch of the maisonette, throwing on light switch after light switch as he went, as though he could make it more welcoming and familiar. It’s another from the list of safe houses we’ve been to and each one has been as soulless as the last. A little too tidy, stiff sheets pulled across the bed sharply; none of the indents of life or character of love.

If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have left the festering heap of bedclothes in our bedroom at home. There, our curtains are lined with dust. Little, silvery moths circle the air, breeding somewhere, making a home in my stagnancy.

But now we are in this white, bright place.

Rooms with no memories.

Walls with no photographs.

I made a wall of photographs of our families when I was pregnant. Mimi squirmed and hiccupped inside me as I drilled holes, hung frames and dug out old photographs of Mum, Dad and Evie I’d forgotten I’d ever had. I couldn’t find any of Maia, my little sister who’d died as a young baby, although I have a memory of seeing one once – a tiny, wrinkled face, a bundle of white blanket. There was a recent one of Santa and Thomas; they were not looking at the camera but caught unawares, laughing, their heads dipped towards each other.

Our family was unusual in having both Evie and me; siblings were something of an anomaly. My parents, in an unbelievable lottery, happened to fall into that very rare sliver of the population who could conceive naturally. Only a few years before Evie was born, the infertility cases had begun to rise and by the time Mum was pregnant with us, almost everyone was undergoing induction if they wanted to have children.

Evie and I were atypical in that there were two of us but we were extraordinary in that we had been conceived naturally. I can’t remember when I first learnt the truth of it, although I have a memory of Dad telling us we shouldn’t talk about it. It made other people uncomfortable, he said.

Uncomfortable. I remember parroting the word back at him, stumbling over its syllables. I can’t recall how old I was at the time.

Pregnant with Mimi, I would stand by that wall of family photographs and trace a finger over the faces of my mother and father, hand in hand on their wedding day. They were so like any other newly married couple amongst their confetti petals, so remarkable and yet unremarkable in their joy. You would not be able to tell from that photograph the miracle that would befall them – that somehow, they would be able to conceive without help.

Then I would turn to the other pictures, telling Mimi who they were and what they were like. It became a constant in our day from when she was a newborn, standing by that wall and me repeating the same things to her, in a sing-song voice that I could not stop using even when I tried.

I can imagine those photographs clearly before me now as I stand before the beige blankness of the walls of this transitory place. And, as if by magic, I can see it all, I can transform this soulless room into the home Thomas and I made together. I can picture the view from the nursery window that faced out on to the mulberry tree we planted when we first moved in. We spent time, Mimi and I, examining its spindly branches that resembled long, thin fingers, beckoning to us. There was the quilted playmat with its jewel-coloured squares, which lay scattered with whatever toys held her interest at that time. My dad’s chair. Paintings by Thomas and Santa. All those little pieces that fitted together to make up our home, now abandoned.

Here, everything that we own is out of place. The bread and bananas and box of tea that Thomas bought in a fit of organisation sit in an uneasy pile on the polished, flecked worktop. The carton of milk stands in the middle of an empty fridge at a rakish angle as though trying to take up some more space, just because it can. My coat lies slung across the plumped, cherry-red sofa where I discarded it, crumpled and tatty against the furnishings.

I reach for my coat without thinking and button it securely over the T-shirt and worn-soft pyjama bottoms I’m wearing. With each button, I’m a little more together, a little more like a person who is standing in the morning, a day in front of them to do with as they choose.

With the last button done, I am covered, protected.

I shove my shoes on to my bare feet and pluck the car keys from where Thomas dropped them, scattered next to a fruit bowl that holds no fruit.

The day is mine.

And I am leaving.

THEN

He was standing slightly hunched, leaning intently over the barbeque.

Though we had never met, I found myself reaching out towards him, resting one of my hands gently upon the back of one of his shoulders.

The cotton of his shirt was cool beneath my palm.

‘Thomas?’

He turned slowly towards me and for a beat longer than it should have lasted, we stood there, wordless, our eyes searching each other’s faces as though they were landscapes to be viewed.

‘I’m Evie’s sister,’ I said, suddenly ridiculously, unaccountably, shy. ‘Kit,’ I managed to say, conscious as I always was of that word, sister. Sister, brother; words that were gradually becoming obsolete.

‘Kit,’ he repeated quietly as though committing the name to memory.

‘I’ve come to help – with the barbeque.’

‘Great, all I’ve managed to achieve so far is make a tower of sausages. And blindly hope I can get the coals lit before the crowd turns feral from hunger.’

‘Well there are two of us now. We can beat them back with…’ I surveyed the instruments before me and brandished the long metal tongs with a flourish.

‘I’ll take…’ Thomas peered over the detritus upon the table and selected a wooden spoon. ‘This could do a lot of damage – if wielded correctly.’

‘Well, time will tell if we have to use them.’ I glanced towards the people gathered in the garden, speaking sedately in small groups. ‘They look like a harmless bunch.’

Just then, voices carried towards us from the group closest to us.

‘Should have been done a long time ago,’ a small greying man said. I recognised him as an old family friend of Seb’s. He leant forwards as he spoke, in juddering, jittery movements. ‘The custodians realised we were headed towards this – they should have got on with it far sooner. If Torrent hadn’t died when he did, we would be in a far better position.’

I saw Thomas glance towards them.

‘Here we go,’ I murmured, without thinking.

The man continued to bellow.

‘If they’d brought in these measures say ten, fifteen years ago…’

‘But I’m not actually sure how many will want to start though. Young women—’ Evie’s work friend Deborah started to say, but he carried on talking regardless.

I had an impulse out of nowhere to interrupt him, to cut him short as he had done to Deborah. I wanted to say something clear and meaningful that would stop his overbearing tirade but when I opened my mouth to speak, there was nothing there. I had no answers.

It had been happening more and more, I’d noticed, when conversations turned to politics. There was something inside me, vehement and sure, wanting to escape and be heard but I simply couldn’t put words to it. I felt gagged although I was not entirely sure why.

I told myself that I didn’t know enough, which had some truth in it. I’d thought when I was younger that I could just ignore it all. I’d only ever known life under the custodians, their vision for how we would solve the problem of our rapidly shrinking population. I’d caught scraps here and there from my father about what it was like before – the elections and referendums, the debates and the polling. He always looked troubled when he mentioned it, like he still couldn’t quite grasp how we ended up here – a one-party state, a totalitarian government.

‘This could go on for a while,’ Thomas whispered back.

‘Do you think… what do you think… about the custodians?’

He turned to me. ‘Generally? That’s a big question. I’m afraid I don’t really have an answer. Maybe because there’s so much noise around it all.’ He frowned.

‘I feel like that,’ I admitted. ‘I want to say something about what’s happening – something that I actually believe, not just repeating someone else.’

‘That’s difficult when all we hear is the Spheres and the people talking about what they’ve heard on the Spheres.’

I nodded and then found myself opening up. ‘I don’t think I like the way they’ve handled things, but then I sort of understand it was an almost impossible problem. That we had to do something.’

I felt so acutely aware of how clumsy my words were, how vague, but Thomas nodded gently.

‘You can think both, though, can’t you?’ he said back quietly.

‘So many people seem so sure that they are what we needed, what we still need. I hear more from people talking about wanting them to go further. Like our friend over there.’ I motioned towards Seb’s family friend who was still trumpeting on.

‘We’re past encouraging now,’ he was saying. ‘Obligatory inductions will be next on the cards, mark my words. And it will go younger still. It has to, doesn’t it?’

Some heads bobbed in response and murmured in agreement. The woman who I’d watched reach out for Jakob stayed still, her lips sealed shut.

‘Did you hear the news?’ Thomas asked me in a low voice.

I nodded. That morning while I was running around my flat trying to get a stain out of the dress I wanted to wear, my workSphere had stirred and began blaring out a new announcement. I’d turned the hot tap to maximum hoping the sound of the water would drown out the words, but they reached me nonetheless. The minimum age for induction treatment had dropped from eighteen to sixteen. Girls aged sixteen would now be permitted, encouraged, to undergo fertility treatment. There’d been a graph showing the expected decrease in population if the number of inductions did not rise. The fall in production would mean shortages and expensive imports. A custodian spokesperson gave the short briefing, his features haggard, his face in folds.

‘It doesn’t feel right,’ I said and again was struck by the ineptitude of my remark. It didn’t run to how deeply I feared what this meant. Seb’s family friend was right; we were another step closer to inductions becoming obligatory for everyone. I felt it like a shadow falling around me that I could not possibly outrun.

Just then, a woman Evie and Seb had met at induction approached us. She cleared her throat quietly, impatiently.

‘Is the barbeque lit yet?’ she asked, pointedly eyeing the pile of sooty briquettes that were as cold as the stones on the ground. She had neat, bobbed hair, a staged look of concern mingled with annoyance.

I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Thomas raise his wooden spoon in readiness, and suppressing a giggle, I met the woman’s gaze levelly.

‘If it’s not lit are you planning on leaving?’

‘Well, no, of course not. I was just wondering because…’ She trailed off.

‘Because you’re hungry?’ I finished for her.

‘No, it’s not—’

‘Because you want to know what is happening?’

‘I just wondered… if I could help?’

‘The more the merrier!’ I exclaimed. ‘In fact, I was just about to get the salads out of the fridge for the table. Could you do that? It’s Jacqui, isn’t it? I’m Kit, Evie’s sister. And this is Thomas. Together, we are team food.’

Jacqui gave a shy sort of smile, that seemed to surprise even her, and turned towards the kitchen. Then she turned back again, ‘Anything else we need?’

‘Napkins,’ I said. ‘If you can find any. I think they are in one of the drawers in the middle of the dresser. Try the bottom one.’

‘Wow,’ Thomas said, as Jacqui disappeared purposefully into the house. ‘You have a gift. You bring out the best in people.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that. But most people want to help, given the opportunity. Actually,’ I confessed, ‘I was a little too hard on her. I didn’t mean to be, to be so… so sharp. It just came out, before I could stop myself.’

It was a part of me that I didn’t like to examine too closely, the way I could turn words into pointed claws that could leave a mark, a scar. I hadn’t been able to admit that to anyone else before and yet it felt good, right even, to confide.

‘You were just sharp enough. She was quite rude.’

‘Maybe. But I need to watch myself sometimes.’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘Also, she probably hasn’t had the easiest ride. Her inductions didn’t—’ I stopped myself abruptly and busied myself with placing the cubes of firelighters amongst the ovals of charcoal. My fingertips quickly dusted with black.

‘Do you know her, then?’ Thomas reached for the box of matches.

‘Not really, but Evie’s told me about her. She’s still going through it. Her sister, she has a sister who… has a son.’

I’d almost said ‘still has her son’.

‘How old?’ Thomas asked quickly.

‘He’s three, thereabouts.’

‘Out of the danger zone, then.’ He winced as the words left his mouth. Extractions were far more likely to happen when children were babies. If you passed through that stage, though extraction could still technically happen, your child would most likely remain with you. OSIP cited that early standards were a strong predicator of future parenting.

I tried to clean my fingers of the black of the charcoal, rubbing my hands together briskly, but it only made the dark grey stain more set. Another memory of Evie returned to me: crying, crumpled, after another failed induction. It made my head swim and I felt the weight of tears build just behind my own eyes.

‘Are you OK?’ Thomas asked.

I nodded but didn’t meet his gaze.

Thomas paused and then asked, ‘Do you think then that people have a right to be more rude depending on what has happened to them?’

I looked up at him then. ‘Well, yes – maybe they do.’

‘What about those people who’ve had, you know, a load of shit, and they are still cordial… pleasant to others.’

‘Those people are called saints.’

‘I disagree. We have a terrible tolerance for rude behaviour. It’s a choice when people act that way. They don’t have to. That’s why you’re my hero. You don’t stand for it.’

I wasn’t sure what to say but at that moment Thomas lit the match and the firelighters caught.

Half orange, half invisible flames licked their way round the coals and the warmth they cast off reached me.

NOW

Thomas won’t be able to ring me.

I left my phone, along with my wallet, in my bag back at the apartment, in my rush to leave. When we rid ourselves of our goSpheres, Thomas bought us old mobile phones so we would still have a way of contacting each other if we got separated. We were told that they would be able to trace us through our goSpheres and so they had to go.

Though he has no way of reaching me, and no way to follow, my eyes keep darting to the mirror, to the road that grows behind me.

I only remembered I left my bag behind as I kicked the car into gear and started to reverse away. I slammed down on the brakes as soon as I realised, my mind flashing to the bundles of cash stored within it. The door of the maisonette remained closed. Thomas was not running out after me. I could go back in, quietly, retrieve my bag and leave again. But something stopped me. Just the thought that Thomas might wake, that he might talk me out of what I was about to do. We’d recharged the phones the night before, the power level is still at the maximum. I reached into my coat pocket and found a few notes folded into rectangles there – enough money to fill up again if needed, enough not to risk me running into Thomas. I drove on, leaving my bag and its contents behind.

It’s very early in the morning and I haven’t seen another car but I can’t shift the idea of Thomas pursuing me. He won’t let me go easily.

He could tell the police to look for me. He might say to them that I haven’t been in my ‘right mind of late’ – a distant sort of phrase that I’ve heard pass his lips when he thinks I’m not listening. He could tell them about the bottles of pills on the small glass shelf in the bathroom. Another extension of me I have left behind.

I would have to change cars if that happened. Change my appearance – hack off my hair that’s grown longer than it’s been since I was a child. Bleach it brassy in a public toilet? Find some dark glasses that dwarf my cheeks and shield my eyes?

But he won’t contact the police. He can’t. They will already be searching for us.

I push my foot down harder on the accelerator and the car speeds up, the landscape blurs as it races past me.

I savour being alone. I turn to the passenger seat next to me – steel-coloured and empty – and experience something like a rush of happiness, though it is not so uncomplicated, that no one’s there.

Part of it’s down to wanting to be able to remember freely. For too long, I didn’t realise that Thomas noticed when I was remembering. I didn’t know that my arms were moving, rearranging themselves to hold her in an empty embrace. I would murmur sentences under my breath. I’d tilt my face to the side as I did when I used to speak to her.

‘Stop it, Kit,’ he said one day when I was quite lost in a memory.

‘Stop what?’

‘Doing what you’re doing. Pretending she is still here.’