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‘Ah, here’s the cleaner,’ says Mummy, ‘she’ll be company for you. Tomorrow’s the weekend, so I’ll see you on Monday.’
She opens the glass door to our Box with a klyak, and then goes out of the door to our room, making another boom. We can hear the cleaner outside our Box, banging her bucket about, but we can’t see her through all the white swirls painted over the glass. When she comes into the Box to clean, we see it’s Nasty Nastya.
‘What are you looking so glum about?’ she says, splishing her mop in the water. She’s flipped her mask up because Nastya doesn’t care if we get her germs and die.
‘Mummy’s gone home all weekend, is what,’ says Masha, all low.
‘She’s not your yobinny mummy. Your mummy probably went mad as soon as she saw you two freaks. Or died giving birth to you. That there, who’s just left, is one of the staff. And you’re one of the sick. She works here, you morons. Mummy indeed …’
I put my hands over my ears.
‘She is our yobinny mummy!’ shouts Masha.
‘Don’t you swear at me, you little mutant, or I’ll knock you senseless with the sharp end of this mop!’ We go all crunched into the corner of the cot then, and don’t say anything else because she did really hit Masha once, and she cried for hours. And Nastya said she’d do something much much worse, if we told on her.
When she’s gone, we come out of the corner of the cot into the middle.
‘She is our mummy anyway,’ says Masha. ‘Nastya’s lying like mad, she is, because she’s mean.’
I sniff. ‘Of course she’s our mummy,’ I say.
Supper time and bedtime in the Box
Then one of our nannies comes into our room with our bucket of food. She puts it down with a clang on the floor outside the Box, and we both reach up with our noses, and smell to see what she’s brought. It’s our Guess-the-Food-and-Nanny game. We can’t see her, but the smell comes bouncing over the glass wall and into our noses, and it’s whoever guesses first.
‘Fish soup!’ Masha laughs. ‘And Aunty Dusya!’
I love it when Masha laughs; it comes bubbling up inside me and then I can’t stop laughing.
‘Fish soup it is, you little bed bugs,’ calls Aunty Dusya from outside the Box. Then she clicks open the glass door and comes in with our bowl, all smiling in her eyes.
‘Open up.’ We both put our heads between the bars with our mouths wide open, to get all the soup one by one spoonful each.
‘Nyet!! – she’s getting the fish eyes, I saw, I saw!’
‘Now hush, Masha – as if I pick out the nice bits for her.’
‘You do, you do – I can see, I can!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ It’s hard to hear Aunty Dusya because she’s got her mask on, like everyone. Except Mummy, who’s got the same bugs as us. And Nastya, when she’s being mean. ‘And stop gobbling it down, Masha, like a starving orphan, or you’ll be sick again. Yolki palki! I don’t know any child at all for being sick as often as you. You’re as thin as a rat.’
‘I’m thinner than a rat,’ says Masha. ‘And Dasha’s fat as a fat fly, so I should get the popping eyes!’
I don’t know what a rat is. We don’t have them in our Box.
‘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.
Having our heads shaved and dreaming on clouds
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.
Learning about being drowned and dead
‘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.
‘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.
Fighting to get single and then learning not to
‘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!’
