The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep. Juliet Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ Masha and me go running in, slipping and sliding on the wet tiles and jump with a swish and a plop into the very first tub. The girl runs in with us and jumps into ours too, squealing like anything.

      ‘Splash!’ laughs Masha and kicks her foot to splash the girl. ‘What’s your name? Besides Shit-Face?’

      ‘Lucia,’ she goes. ‘What’s yours? Besides Midget?’

      ‘Mashdash. I’m Masha and she’s Dasha, but we just get called Mashdash.’

      ‘All right then, Mashdash. I can hold my breath underwater longer than you. Ready?’ She holds her nose and so does Masha, but I don’t. I like floating, not getting all wet in my mouth and eyes and stuff. It makes me scared that I’ll never come up and get air again. Lucia goes down and blows loads of bubbles but Masha doesn’t, she just waits ’til Lucia starts coming up, then she ducks her head in and comes right back up again.

      ‘I won!’ she shouts. I laugh because Lucia doesn’t know she cheated. Masha’s funny.

      Aunty Mila comes to scrub us with a brush and soap and Masha goes miaow like a cat and tells her not to bother with me, as she wants double time. But Aunty Mila does me too and then she does Lucia and pulls Masha’s ear before she goes to the next bath to scrub them. I’m floating in the water like a fish in the sea or green seaweed, and I’m melting away until I’m nothing at all except water too. It’s like being all single in the water, like it’s just me floating away. I’ll be sucked down the plughole and swooshed right out to sea and then get washed up on a warm shore. And there’ll only be Pasha there but that won’t matter because there’ll be coconuts to live off and we’ll learn to climb the coconut trees and swim …

      Ding Ding! The bell goes to say our ten minutes is up, clanging like the fire alarm, and we have to get out, quick as anything, and run for our sheets to get dried with, while the next three jump into the bath.

      ‘What ward you in, Mashdash?’ asks Lucia.

      ‘None of them. We got an Isolated room,’ says Masha, because Lucia wasn’t talking to me.

      ‘Fuck you. Why? You infectious?’

      ‘Nah. We’re special. Not like you.’

      ‘Fuck you. I’m in Ward D. You a State kid or Family kid?’

      ‘State.’

      ‘Good. Family kids suck.’

      ‘Yeah. They suck. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, I want marmalade and oranges …’

      ‘Yeah, makes you sick. I’ll come see you tomorrow then.’ She’s dried herself in two seconds flat. Quicker even than us.

      ‘OK. Ask for Mashdash.’

      ‘See ya then.’

      ‘See ya.’ She hops really fast, back to the changing room, and then I see she’s got only one and a half legs.

      We make four wishes because we’re bored

      ‘She was all right,’ Masha says, stuffing a chunk of black bread into her mouth all at once when we’re back in our room. She stole it off the plate of a little kid in the canteen and hid it down our nappy for later. We get all our bread and food weighed out on scales by the gramme. I lie back on my pillow with my leg hanging over the bed and think a bit about what we’re going to do all day, now we don’t go to school any more. It only goes up to primary school in SNIP, so now we’re eleven, it’s stopped. Aunty Nadya has other kids to work on because we can walk, and run, and climb, and if we haven’t leaked in our nappy for more than an hour, we’re allowed to ride our red tricycle round the Physio hall as a treat. It’s Masha that leaks anyway, not me. She can’t be bothered to try not to. But I do. I squeeze down there like mad. Uncle Vasya bought us the red tricycle. Apart from Marusya, it’s the best present in the world.

      I try not to look at the chunk of spongy black bread because I’m starving. I know we get Fully Provided For, and I’m grateful, but I still always seem to be starving. There’s only a bit left now and Masha’s chewing away at it, looking out of the window. She never shares.

      I make a steeple with my fingers and press it against my nose. I miss not learning. It’s like I’ve only just started knowing things. It’s like opening a bag of all different sweets and trying a few, then having it taken away. It’s like when we were taken away from the Window.

      Galina Petrovna said I had Amazing Potential, and almost cried sort of, when we had our last day of schooling with her. I think she did cry, almost, although Masha said she didn’t. It’s nyelzya to borrow school books, but Aunty Nadya sometimes brings us picture books filled with coloured photos of sharp mountains like in the Altai, and blue lakes in Siberia, which are the deepest in the world, and of snow in Murmansk where it’s almost always night time even in the day time. I wish she’d leave the books for us when she’s gone, but she can’t, or they’d get taken, like Marusya was. You don’t get to keep your own things in an Institution.

      ‘D’you think Lucia will come tomorrow?’ I ask. I don’t usually make any of my own friends because Masha doesn’t like the sort of girls I like. I don’t care though, because they keep going away, so you have to keep saying goodbye as soon as you really get to like them. While we keep on just staying and staying.

      ‘Course she will.’

      ‘Mash …’ I lift myself up on my elbow because she’s lain down the other end of the bed now and is sucking her fingers. ‘We won’t get sent away will we? Like the Uneducables. To an orphanage? Now that we can’t study any more?’

      We’ve heard all about the orphanages for Uneducables from some of the other kids. You don’t even have to be that Defective to be classed as one, just a bit Defective like having a squint in one eye. They say you get tied to a cot all day, and not fed until sometimes you starve to death. I think that can’t be true because the grown-ups say Defectives are all cared for. But you never quite know …

      ‘Nyetooshki. We’re not morons, are we?’ She doesn’t lift her head from her pillow. I shake my head. There are three classes of Uneducables. There’s the Morons, the Cretins and then the Imbeciles, but I can’t tell the difference when they’re brought here for treatment, I really can’t. They all seem nice enough to me.

      ‘And anyway,’ says Masha, all muffled, ‘Anokhin needs us. You heard Aunty Nadya.’

      ‘Is she telling a lie though? Maybe she’s tricking us?’

      Grown-ups tell lies to make us feel better. Maybe Uneducables are tied up and starved to death …

      ‘He keeps coming back, doesn’t he? With his yobinny delegations to show us off.’ She yawns and then pretends like she’s catching bubbles in the air with her hands. Plyop, plyop plyop. She swallows them for wishes. I do the same. One wish for being adopted by Aunty Nadya and taken to live with her family. Second wish for getting Marusya back. Third wish for being a beautiful Lyuba non-leech with perfect spun gold hair and perfect cornflower-blue eyes and perfect rose-red lips just like all the strong peasant women in the posters everywhere, standing in fields of wheat. And the fourth wish is to be all on my own in the field of wheat. And for Masha being all on her own too but next to me so she can stay close by if she likes.

      Lucia СКАЧАТЬ