Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Hey, Mashdash! Get a life!’

We jump and come unstuck from the window. It’s Lucia. She’s found us! She’s got freckles and green eyes like Pippi Longstocking. She goes over to our bed, drops her crutches and starts bouncing on it.

‘The Administrator here’s a right bitch. Confiscates everything but your heart. I had a grass-snake skin, all curled up small, and she found it and tore it in half right before my eyes.’

‘She’d tear your heart out too and stamp it with Property of SNIP like everything else in here if she could,’ says Masha, going back over to the bed. ‘She’d have a thousand hearts in a five-litre jar in the freezer in the kitchens. And eat one a night.’

We laugh at that. But I think I might, maybe, hold on to my chest at night now, in case she comes in with a knife. Masha says the strangest things, it gives me nightmares sometimes. And our Administrator really is the meanest person in the world. She hates us more than she hates anyone else. Sometimes I think it’s her who took Marusya, not the night nurse. Masha thinks so too. She says she’ll get revenge for me.

‘I reckon she’s an American agent,’ says Masha. ‘I’m watching her so I can denounce her.’

‘Yes! And if she is one and we denounce her, we might get a medal!’ I say excitedly, and they both look at me like I’ve said something stupid, then look away.

Lucia lies back and does a bicycle with her leg in the air and then tips herself over so it’s resting up on the wall, and she’s all upside down.

‘What’re you in here for?’ asks Masha.

‘New leg. I was in an orphanage. I wasn’t a congenital, I was healthy as anything, my stupid mum just didn’t like me. But I ran away from there and got my leg all chewed off by a mad dog. So after that I got sent to an orphanage for Defectives. That sucked even more. It’s much better here in SNIP. You get fed and the staff treat you like people.’

‘Did it chew your leg right off?’ I can’t stop myself from asking. ‘The mad dog?’

‘Stupid question,’ says Masha. ‘She’s still got half left.’

‘Well, it didn’t exactly chew it off. It got hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I got found five days later by the militia, all delirious with fever. They sent me back to the orphanage, but by then my leg had got all stinky and had to be cut off.’

Her voice is all squashed upside-downy as she reaches higher and higher with her leg and then falls off the bed sideways and we all laugh.

‘How come you’ve got to stay here for so long?’ she asks, picking herself up. ‘Most of the kids here have legs and arms missing, but you’ve still got all yours.’

‘We’re some sort of Big Secret, so we can’t ever leave here,’ says Masha.

Lucia sits up and hugs her leg up to her chin looking all interested. ‘A Secret? No shit. Why?’

‘Because, we’re Together.’

‘What’s so secret about that?’

‘Dunno.’ Masha shrugs. ‘Maybe we’re a secret experiment. Maybe the scientists joined us together. I haven’t seen anyone else Together, not ever. Have you seen anyone else Together?’

‘Nope. But then you haven’t seen anyone with a leg bitten off by a dog either, have you? Doesn’t make me a Secret. Don’t they tell you why?’

‘No. They don’t tell us anything.’

‘S’pose they know best. Better not to know,’ she says, and balls one fist into her eye, rubbing it. ‘Does your head in, knowing does. Anyway, you’re lucky. It’s healthy here. You get two hundred grammes of bread a day – and butter and meat. We get shit-all, and they pump us full of injected crap to keep us quiet.’

‘Do they tie you to the bed too?’ I ask, thinking of the Uneducables.

‘Yeah, sometimes. Or tie you up in a sheet so you can’t move. It sucks. Wish I was a Secret like you two and could live here.’

She unthreads a shoelace from my boot, which is tucked under the bed, puts the middle bit between her teeth and gives me both ends behind her head. ‘I’m a pony. Click click.’ I laugh and pull the reins. She throws her head up and down and whinnies and we all laugh some more as she rears up and paws in the air. Then after a bit she looks round the empty room. ‘Don’t you have any toys or books or stuff? If you really live here, don’t you get your own stuff?’

‘ Nyetooshki ,’ says Masha. ‘It’d get nicked. If it’s not screwed down or stamped with an SNIP stamp, it gets nicked.’

‘Same with us in the orphanage. My mum brings me stupid books, when she should bring lard or cooked potatoes. Books get nicked by the staff as soon as you look at them, to sell on.’

‘At least your mummy visits,’ I say.

Masha rolls her eyes. ‘Ignore my moron here. She’s obsessed with mums, right?’ I bite my bottom lip. I kept waiting for Mummy after she didn’t come that tomorrow time and so in the end, Aunty Nadya told us that she wasn’t our real mummy at all. She said she was only one of the staff. She says our real mummy is in Moscow, because we were born here and that she probably couldn’t cope with the two of us as she was too busy working. So now I write letters to my real mummy every week telling her what we’re doing and how we’re getting along. Because everyone wants a mummy, don’t they? Whoever she is… Aunty Nadya says she doesn’t know if Mummy actually properly rejected us, so she takes them and posts them for me. I always put a return address in big capital letters at the top, but she hasn’t written back yet. I’ve been writing for years and years. Masha says Aunty Nadya just pretends to post them, because she can’t tell us anything at all about our mummy, however much I ask. Lydia Mikhailovna says to Banish her from my Mind. One of the nannies says she went mad, and another one says she died having us. But I believe Aunty Nadya when she says that Mummy is just really busy.

‘Yeah,’ says Lucia, rolling on to her stomach, ‘my mum didn’t sign the rejection form when she gave me away.’ She gives a big yawn and stretches like a starfish. ‘Silly bitch. I could’ve been adopted if she’d like proper rejected me. If she’d signed the forms and stuff. Then I wouldn’t have had to run away and get my leg bitten off almost. She comes in every month and brings me shit-all, when all I want is black bread because I’m always fucking starving. Just my luck to be born to someone like her. She’s retarded.’

‘Why did she give you up if you were Healthy?’ I ask.

Lucia shrugs. ‘She was an alkasha , I s’pose. The militia make them send their kids to orphanages.’

That’s strange. Alcoholics normally have Uneducable kids, but Lucia’s as sharp as a knife. Our real mummy can’t have been an alkasha , because we’re sharp as knives too.

‘C’mon! Let’s go out into the grounds and knock over some kids who’re learning to walk,’ says Lucia, jumping off the bed and grabbing her crutches.

‘We can’t,’ says Masha. ‘We’re a Secret, remember?’

‘What? You’re too secret to even go into the grounds? Chort! That sucks to China and back. Well…’ she makes for the door. ‘I’m off. It’s stuffy as fuck in here. Can’t you open the window?’

‘ Nyet . They think we’ll fall out.’

‘That sucks too. All right. See ya.’

Once she’s gone, Masha’s eyes start getting black like they do, and she walks fast round the room, up and down and across and back again. I can feel her crossness at being stuck in here with nothing to do, growing up and up inside her. She thumps the wall.

‘Let’s play Who’s-What? ’ I say quickly. ‘Or pretend to be a fighter pilot… I’ll be the Fascist and you can be the Red.’