Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Hey, wrong fucking sister, moron!’ Masha slaps Petya’s hand off my leg. ‘Oooh, wait, it’s working, it’s working, it’s fucking working!’ She waves her hands in the air. ‘I’m drunk! Whoop whoop! Have some more, Shipwreck!’ She gives me the bottle and this time I tip it back and drink it myself.

‘Your hair’s soft, Dasha, all soft,’ says Slava. I don’t think the other two can hear him. Just me. He has dimples like Yuri Gagarin, but Slava is a million times better looking than Gagarin. His eyes are shining and they’re looking right into mine, so there’s only his eyes in all the world. He reaches round Masha to touch my hair.

‘Oi! Keep your greasy hands off of her!’ Masha slaps his hand. ‘She’s not a fucking tar barrel that you can get all stuck to her. She’s mine, see. All mine.’ The bottle’s finished. Petya’s on the floor and Slava’s staring at Masha now, like he wants to slap her back, right across her face. ‘C’mon you, c’mon, Sheep,’ she says to me in a distant voice. ‘Back to the Home Front. Back to the dorm. C’mon. I’m fucking getting out of here. I’ve fucking had enough. You’re mine. All mine.’

And then I think I fall over too…

We miss our lessons in the morning, saying we’re sick, which we are. Sick as dogs. But I don’t care a bit because now I know for sure that Slava actually likes me. He kept looking at me all the time, and tried to touch my hair last night. I can’t believe it; I just can’t believe someone like Slava actually likes me. But he must, mustn’t he? Yes. He said my hair was soft. He wasn’t touching Masha’s hair; he was touching mine , and looking at me. I lie in bed with my hands under my head just thinking over and over about what it would feel like if he kissed me on the cheek – like Petya kissed Masha. And if he kissed me, he’d be my boyfriend, and then maybe we could go to his village and meet his mother. At the weekends. And maybe go on a boat on the pond… or maybe…

‘Hey, you!’ Masha’s sitting up and kicking my leg. ‘Get up.’

I manage to get myself up, and sit on the edge of the bed. My head’s still going round and round. It’s so strange. She opens our side cupboard and takes out some blunt scissors she found in the skip. She’s got all sorts of stuff from the skip in there, like bent needles and glue pots and leather cut-offs from the cobbler’s workshop. Or old nail varnish which she can’t open.

But now she just wants the scissors.

‘C’mon.’

‘Where are we going, Mash?’

‘You’ll see.’ We go down all the dark corridors because there’s still no electricity, and out into the courtyard. She makes for the secret place where we meet Olessya behind the laundry room, but Olessya’s not there. No one’s there.

‘Stand still,’ she says, and gives me the scissors. ‘You cut my hair off and then I’ll cut yours. Cut it short though, like a boy. It gets in the way.’ She shoves the scissors into my hand but I just stand staring at her, not understanding a thing. Why? ‘Well, go on then, start cutting,’ she says, all sharp and sniffy. ‘Really short.’ I look at the scissors in my hand, as if they’re a knife or something, and she’s asked me to saw us in half. I can’t let her cut off my hair. It’s all long and dark and silky, and Masha brushes it for me, or plaits it, and then I plait hers. I love my hair. Slava loves it. I can’t.

‘ Davai! ’ she says angrily. ‘Go on!’

I lift my hand and start cutting. Snip, snip . With every cut I tell myself over and over that she’s right. Masha’s always right. We spend ages washing and brushing it. I don’t know what I’d do without Mashinka. Snip. It’s thanks to her that we’re here and not buried in a hospital ward all our lives. Snip . It’s always getting knotted anyway. Snip . I cut right down at the roots, so it’s all sticking up. She runs her hand over her head, then nods.

‘OK. Now you.’ I bow my head as she starts cutting. I watch all my shiny hair fall silently over our feet, and my stupid tears fall silently too, and make it even shinier. When she’s finished, she blows in my face but the hair’s all stuck to my wet cheeks, so she wipes it off with the palm of her hand, then she wipes my nose with her sleeve. She pushes all our hair under the fence, with the tip of her boot, and we go into the food hall for lunch.

Everyone goes all quiet when we walk in. Olessya opens her mouth and then closes it again. ‘What?’ says Slava, and shakes his head a bit, like he can’t believe his eyes. As if my hair was the only thing he liked about me. And it probably was. ‘What…?’ he half asks again.

Masha looks at me quickly, waiting for me to speak. ‘It g-got in the way,’ I explain. ‘So we decided to c-cut it short.’

It turned out Slava didn’t mind at all. He said it showed off my face, neck and ears.

‘What about my ears, Peanut?’ Masha had said. ‘If hers are little seashells, what are mine? Sea monsters?’

‘Yeah, yours are great big conches, which hear every wicked whisper. Your ears are scary.’ They have this banter back and forth, him and Masha. I’m glad, because if she doesn’t like someone, we don’t go near them, but Slava jokes with her all the time. He still hasn’t kissed me, or tried to touch me, and it’s spring now. But he looks at me. He looks at me like he’s trying to talk to me just through his eyes. Perhaps he doesn’t try to do anything more, like kiss me, because he knows that Masha might get angry again, and then we wouldn’t be able to hang out together at all. So it’s been six months since we got drunk that time, and we haven’t got drunk since. Masha started running around with Vanya after that, but he’s a Reject. He doesn’t have any money for wine.

We’re hanging over the wall now, which runs all round the school, looking into a neighbour’s back yard where this little girl, Manya, lives. She’s only six, but we lie here when it’s warm, watching her play, like two salted fish laid out to dry. Manya chatters to us all the time when she comes out, so we’re just waiting to see if she’ll be out today. She can’t see we’re Together. She tells us about all these crazy things, like how she has a dragon inside the house, who’s a pet but hides in a cupboard, and how the dragon taught her how to do a magic whistle, which brings all the little lizards out of their cracks to listen. She says there’s hundreds of them, all different colours and sizes, who come wriggling out when she does this whistle. But when Masha asked her to show us, she said the dragon would burn the house down with fire if she did.

We’ve both got our cheeks on the warm wall. It’s nice to be warm after the winter. There wasn’t any snow, but it was colder than in SNIP, because quite a lot of the time the heating or hot water went off so we froze like blue icicles in our bed.

I don’t know what Masha’s thinking about, I never do – maybe she doesn’t think about much at all – but I’m thinking about Slava’s essay. I think about that a lot when Masha’s not talking or running. It was in our Russian class. We were asked to write an essay called My Best Friend . I wrote about Olessya. I wrote that she likes me and understands me, and seems to know things about me I hardly know myself. She knows what I’m thinking when even Masha doesn’t. Masha wrote about Vanya, who can run like a rat. She didn’t write that he scrumps apples from the neighbours’ garden for her, and got bitten on his bottom by their dog once. Everyone thinks he’s got rabies now and keeps away. Except Masha. We’re not supposed to go over the wall, but Vanya does. When the teacher pointed to Slava, he said his essay was about Dasha Krivoshlyapova. I couldn’t believe it, I really couldn’t. I think I know it pretty much by heart from that one reading in class.