Juliet Butler: The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘What’s a rat?’ I ask.

‘Oooh, it’s a little animal with a twitching nose and bright eyes, that always asks questions. Here’s your bread.’

‘I want white bread, not black bread,’ says Masha, taking it anyway.

‘You’ll be asking for caviar next. Be grateful for what you get.’ We’re always being told to be grateful. Every single day. Grateful is being thankful for being looked after all the time. ‘I’ll come back in half an hour to clean you up, and then lights out.’

Masha stuffs her bread into her mouth all in one, so her cheeks blow out, and looks up at the ceiling as she chews. We know all our nannies’ names off by heart. And all our cleaners’ too. And all our doctors’. Aunty Dusya says only special people can see us as we’re a Big Secret. She says it has it in black writing on the door. I don’t know why we’re a Big Secret. Maybe all children are Big Secrets? Masha doesn’t know either.

I love black bread because it’s soft and juicy, and fills me all up in my tummy. I have to stuff it all in my mouth, though, because if I didn’t, Masha would take it.

Aunty Dusya comes back to wash us after we’ve done a poo and a pee in our nappy, and gives us a nice new one.

‘I’m scared of the cockroaches, Aunty Dusya.’

‘Nonsense, Dashinka, there aren’t any cockroaches.’

‘Yes, there is!’ Masha shouts and points up. ‘See that crackle up there?’

‘Well, there is a small crack in the ceiling…’

‘That’s where they come out when it’s dark, and they go skittle-scuttle across the ceiling, then drop down with a plop on top of Dasha, and then they skittle-scuttle across her too, and she screams until I squish them and they go crunch.’

Aunty Dusya looks up at the crackle then, and picks up the stinky bag with our nappy in.

‘Well, we used to have cockroaches, once upon a time, when you were babies, but not now. There are no cockroaches in the Paediatric Institute. Nyet. ’

She looks over at us, all cross and black, so I nod and nod like mad, and Masha pushes out her lip, like she does when she’s being told off, and twists the knot on our nappy with her fingers.

Then Aunty Dusya goes and leaves us alone, and the lights go off with a snap, and the door bangs shut with a boom.

I lie and listen hard, because when it’s dark is when they all come out.

‘I’ll squish them,’ says Masha in a hushy way. ‘You wake me and I’ll squish and squash and squelch them. I know all their names, I do… they’re scared of me… Yosha and Tosha and… Lyosha…’

After a bit I can feel she’s gone to sleep, but I can hear them all coming out and skittle-scuttling, so I reach out and hold her hand, which is all warm. Masha’s hand is always warm.

Skriip skriip. Aunty Dusya is doing Masha’s head with a long razor, and slapping her playfully when she wriggles. ‘Stop squirming, or I’ll slice your head right off!’

‘It hurts!’

‘It’ll hurt even more with no head, won’t it? Stop being so naughty! Dasha sits still for all her procedures, why can’t you?’

‘I’ll sit still,’ I say, quick as quick. ‘Do me. I like having my head razored. If we had hair, we’d get Eaten Alive by the tiny, white, jumpy cockroaches.’

‘Lice. That’s exactly right, Dashinka.’

‘But can you cut the top bit of my hair off too, and not leave this?’ I pull at the tuft they leave at the front.

‘You know we leave that to show you’re little girls, not little boys. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you were boys, now, would you?’

‘But everyone knows we’re little girls anyway. And Masha pulls mine when she’s cross.’

‘Like this,’ says Masha, and goes to pull it, but Aunty Dusya gives her another little slap and her mask goes all sucked into her mouth with breathing hard.

Dusya’s got a yellow something on today. I can see it peeking under the buttons of her white coat.

‘Why don’t we wear clothes like grown-ups? Do no children wear clothes?’ I ask.

‘Why would you need clothes, lying in a cot all day? Either that or in the laboratory… doctors need to see your bodies, don’t they? Besides, we need to keep changing your nappy because you leak; we can’t be undoing buckles and bows every five minutes.’ She pushes Masha flat on the plastic sheet of our cot, and starts on me. Skriip skriip. It tickles and I reach up to touch a bit of her yellow sleeve. It’s more like butter than egg yolk.

‘There. All done. Off you hop.’ We wiggle our bottom off the plastic sheet in our cot and she folds it up and then leaves us, wagging her head so her white cap bobbles.

‘ Foo! Foo! ’ Masha’s huffing and puffing because she’s got bits of cut hair in her nose, so I lean over and blow in her face, as close as I can get.

‘Get off!’ She slaps my nose.

‘ You get off!’

‘No, you !’ We start slapping at each other, and kicking our legs until she gets hers caught between the bars and howls. Then we stop.

Saturdays are good, because we don’t have to shut off like we do when Doctor Alexeyeva comes in to take us into the Laboratory. But Saturdays are bad, too, because Mummy isn’t here and there’s nothing to do.

I hold my hand up and look through all my fingers. That makes the room seem broken and different, it’s the only way to make it change. I look at the whirly swirls of white paint on the glass walls of the box, then I look up at the cockroach crackle in the ceiling, and it breaks up into lots of crackles, then I look up at the strip light, and my fingers turn pink, then I look at the window to see what colour it is on the Outside now. Sometimes it’s black or grey or has loud drops or a rattly wind trying to get in and take us away. It’s blue today and I smile out at it, and wait to see if there’ll be a little puffy cloud. Mummy says there are lots of other buildings like ours on the Outside, but we can’t see anything ever. Just sky.

‘A bird!’ Masha’s been lying back, looking up at the window all the time. ‘Saw a bird! You didn’t!’

I didn’t, she’s right, but we both stare at the window and stare and stare, as they sometimes come in lots of them. But not this time. I stare until my eyes prickle. Then I see a cloud instead, which is even better – we imagine being inside clouds and on them and making them into shapes by patting them. And they move and change, like nothing in our Box ever does.

‘I’d sit on that one up there, see? That one, and I’d ride all the way round the world and back,’ I say.

‘I’d shake and shake mine,’ says Masha, ‘until it rained on everyone in the world.’

‘I’d jump right into it, and bounce and bounce, and then slide off the end, down into the sea with the fishes.’

When we do imaginings of being on the Outside we’re not stuck together like we are in the Box. In imaginings you can be anything you want.

‘Well, urodi . Here I am, like it or not.’ On Sundays, our cleaner is always Nastya. She’s got a nose like a potato, and hands so thick they look like feet. We must have done something very bad to make her so mean to us, but I can’t remember what, and Masha can’t as well.

‘Urgh. You should have been drowned at birth.’ She’s got the mop and is splishing the water over the floor again, banging the washy mop head into the corners. Shlup, shlup . I put my hands over my ears and nose, because I can’t shut off with her, like I can with Doctor Alexeyeva. Masha sucks all her fingers in her mouth.