Juliet Butler: The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Shouldn’t have been left for decent people to have to look at day in, day out…’ I can still hear Nastya through my hands ‘…and when the scientists have finished with you here, they’ll drown you, like kittens, and put you in a bag and bury you in a black hole, where you’ll never get fed or cleaned again.’ She makes a big cross on her chest with her fingers, which is what lots of the nannies do with us.

I won’t think of the black hole, I’ll think of the blue sky and bouncing on the clouds. I keep my hands over my ears and nose, so I don’t hear or smell anything, and close my eyes tight, so I don’t see anything as well. Except clouds in my imaginings.

When she’s gone, Masha starts pulling me round and round the cot, and I count the bars to see if they’re still the same as all the ones on my fingers and our two feet (not counting the foot on our leg at the back because the toes are all squished on that one). We only know up to the number five because Aunty Dusya told us years and years ago that we were five years old, just like there are five fingers on my open hand. Now we’re six, but I don’t know when that happened. Maybe it was when Mummy brought us the wind-up Jellyfish to play with? Mummy says we don’t need to learn how to count or read or write anything, because she’ll do it for us.

‘What’s drowned?’ says Masha, stopping going round and round for a bit.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I think it makes you dead.’

‘What’s being made dead like?’

‘It’s like being in a black hole with nothing to eat.’

‘Let’s play Gastrics.’

‘ Nyetooshki. I never get to put the tube down you.’

‘That’s because I’m always the Staff and you’re always the Sick. Here.’ She gets a pretend tube out. ‘Open up. Down we go.’ I open my mouth but I’m starting to bubble laugh, because she always puts her finger in my mouth pretending it’s the tube and wiggles it, and I bubble laugh before she even does it.

‘ Molchee! Do as you’re told, young lady!’ she shouts, just like a nurse.

Then we both jump, as the door bangs open again.

‘Morning, my dollies! Now – what have I got for you today then?’

‘Aunty Shura!’ shouts Masha. Aunty Shura’s nice, too, so we can’t have done anything bad to her either. ‘It’s ground rice!’ says Masha pushing her nose in the air to catch the smell coming over the Box.

‘With butter!’ I shout, but I can’t smell it. I only hope it.

‘Yes, Dashinka, with butter,’ says Shura, and clicks open the door to the Box, carrying our bowl in her two hands.

She sits on a stool, and spoons a spoon of it into Masha’s open mouth, and a spoon into mine.

‘ Foo! It stinks of bleach in here,’ she says, wrinkling her nose. ‘Nastya overdoing it again. Enough to drown a sailor.’

‘What’s drown?’ I ask, keeping the ground rice stuck in the top of my mouth, so I don’t lose the taste when it goes down in me.

‘Hmm, it means when you’re in water and can’t breathe air.’

‘Do you get dead when you can’t breathe air?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘What’s getting dead like?’

‘Goodness! What silly questions.’

‘Is it like being in a hole and hungry all the time?’ I ask.

Her eyes crinkle up so I think she’s smiling, but I can’t see for sure under the mask. ‘Now, now. That’s quite enough. Mensha znaesh – krepcha speesh : the less you know, the sounder you sleep.’ It sounds like a lullaby, all shushy and soothing. And when she’s scraped the last little bit out of the bowl, she goes too. So we go back to crawling round the cot while I count off the bars on my fingers and toes.

‘Why have you got two legs all to yourself and we’ve got only one each, and an extra sticky-out one?’ I ask Aunty Shura, next time she comes in. But she pushes my hand away, because I’ve lifted up her skirt through the cot bars to see what’s there, and I can see, plain as plain, she’s got two legs all to herself.

‘Well I never!’

‘Why though?’ I ask. ‘Why?’

‘Because… well… because all children are born like you, with… one leg each…’ She pulls her mask up higher, then she loosens the laces on her cap and does them up again tighter.

‘So all children are born stuck together, like us?’

‘Yes, yes, Dashinka. They’re all born together…’

‘And then what happens?’

‘Then… they… ahh… become single. Like grown-ups…’

‘So, do we grow another leg each, when we get single?’

‘When do we get single?’ asks Masha, trying to pull herself up on the top cot bar. ‘When? When? When do we get single?’

‘Now then, you two Miss Clever Clogs, you know you’re not allowed to ask questions…’

‘But when? When do we get single?’ Masha asks again. ‘Tomorrow?’

Aunty Dusya looks all round the Box for something she must have lost, and doesn’t look anywhere at us. Then she goes out with a klyak of the glass door, without saying anything at all.

‘I want to get single now,’ says Masha crossly, and grabs with both her hands on to the bars. I can see the black in her eyes that gets there when she’s angry. She snatches my hand, and twists my fingers all back, and starts shouting: ‘I want to get single now! Go away! Urod! Get off me! Get off!’

I get scared as anything when Masha is angry. She kicks and scratches and punches and pinches, and I kick and scratch too, to keep her away. But I know it won’t make us get single.

‘Girls! Girls!’ After we’ve been fighting for hours and hours, Aunty Shura runs back in the Box, but she screams when she sees us, and I look, and see all red blood on us, but I keep kicking and punching to keep Masha away, and Shura runs out again.

She comes back with Mummy, who pulls at us both, and tells the nurse to tie us up to one and the other end of the cot with bandages. Masha hates being tied up all the time, so she starts shouting with bad, Nastya swear words, and so Mummy stuffs a bandage in her mouth too.

‘You two will kill yourselves if you carry on fighting like this,’ she says, leaning over us with her eyes all screwed up small and angry. ‘Do you understand? You’re black and blue from fighting all the time, but one day, one of you could die.’

She leans right into me then. ‘Do you want to die, Dasha?’

I shake my head. I really, really don’t want to die. I hate being hungry. And I hate the dark. So I decide then and there that I’ll do something which will make sure we never die.

I won’t ever, ever fight back again.

The next day Mummy comes back into the Box.

‘What you are, is bored,’ she says. She puts her notebook down on her chair. She’s with a nurse. ‘You need some fun.’

‘Oooh, can we have Jellyfish back?’ asks Masha, sitting up on one arm, with her mouth open. Jellyfish has gold and yellow and black and blue patches on his hard back, and lots of dangly legs, which rattle and shake when he’s wound up with the key. He makes a buzz, and trembles and we only had him for once. For one day. He’s loads and loads of fun.

‘No. You know you’re not allowed toys. That’s only for the filming. But I’ll tell you what: as a treat, I’ll let you look right down out of the window at Moscow. Now that you’re not in the Laboratory so much, you have nothing to do, day in, day out.’

And then she does this wonderful, wonderful thing.

She gets the nurse to push our cot right over to the side of the Box, which is by the wall. Right under the Window.