The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep. Juliet Butler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ grounds. Family kids aren’t congenital like us, because congenitals get taken away by the State when they’re babies and their parents sign rejection forms. We’re the Otkazniks – Rejects. Most of the family kids in here were born normal and have had an accident, like they’ve been run over by trains or cars. Tasha got blown up by a German hand grenade in a disused church. Petya climbed a telegraph pole and got electrocuted. They were here about two years ago. Or maybe three. Or even four. The years all get muddled now. I liked Tasha lots. She said she’d write but she didn’t. They never do … I don’t like it when people call us Otkazniks because no one knows for sure we were actually rejected.

      ‘I want to go out.’ Masha’s sticking her nose and her forehead and her flat hands up against the window, like they’re glued there. I can see her breath puffing shapes on the window, and I puff some too, then I quickly draw a smiley face in it, winking at me, before it disappears.

      I want to go out too, but we’re still a Secret so we can’t.

      ‘Let’s play Kamoo-Kak – Who’s-What?’ I say. We play that all the time. It’s when you have to think of a person and the questions are all different sorts:

      What sort of flower are they like? What sort of colour are they like? What sort of transport are they like? What sort of fruit are they like? What sort of animal are they like?

      I go first, and mine is daisy, yellow, bicycle, strawberry and bird, which Masha guesses as Galina Petrovna first off. I think I’ve done her before.

      We go back to pushing our noses against the window again. I can hear all the laughs and shouts from the corridor as the mummies come in and I stick my fingers in my ears. I hate Sundays. I look out of the window at the block opposite, and imagine that I’m the girl who lives there. I’ve called her Anya, and she’s got curly blonde hair and wears a white pinafore to school. She walks past the five shops called Bread, Vegetables, Meat, Wine and Clothes, with her school bag swinging on her shoulder, every morning, and then jumps on a tram to go to school. But not on Sunday. Aunty Nadya says there are playgrounds in all the back yards with slides and swings, so I imagine I’m Anya now, being given buckwheat porridge by her mummy this Sunday morning and then going out and whizzing down the slide over and over again with Pasha until neither of us can breathe so we sit in the sandpit and eat loads of chocolate instead.

      ‘Hey, Mashdash! Get a life!’

      We jump and come unstuck from the window. It’s Lucia. She’s found us! She’s got freckles and green eyes like Pippi Longstocking. She goes over to our bed, drops her crutches and starts bouncing on it.

      ‘The Administrator here’s a right bitch. Confiscates everything but your heart. I had a grass-snake skin, all curled up small, and she found it and tore it in half right before my eyes.’

      ‘She’d tear your heart out too and stamp it with Property of SNIP like everything else in here if she could,’ says Masha, going back over to the bed. ‘She’d have a thousand hearts in a five-litre jar in the freezer in the kitchens. And eat one a night.’

      We laugh at that. But I think I might, maybe, hold on to my chest at night now, in case she comes in with a knife. Masha says the strangest things, it gives me nightmares sometimes. And our Administrator really is the meanest person in the world. She hates us more than she hates anyone else. Sometimes I think it’s her who took Marusya, not the night nurse. Masha thinks so too. She says she’ll get revenge for me.

      ‘I reckon she’s an American agent,’ says Masha. ‘I’m watching her so I can denounce her.’

      ‘Yes! And if she is one and we denounce her, we might get a medal!’ I say excitedly, and they both look at me like I’ve said something stupid, then look away.

      Lucia lies back and does a bicycle with her leg in the air and then tips herself over so it’s resting up on the wall, and she’s all upside down.

      ‘What’re you in here for?’ asks Masha.

      ‘New leg. I was in an orphanage. I wasn’t a congenital, I was healthy as anything, my stupid mum just didn’t like me. But I ran away from there and got my leg all chewed off by a mad dog. So after that I got sent to an orphanage for Defectives. That sucked even more. It’s much better here in SNIP. You get fed and the staff treat you like people.’

      ‘Did it chew your leg right off?’ I can’t stop myself from asking. ‘The mad dog?’

      ‘Stupid question,’ says Masha. ‘She’s still got half left.’

      ‘Well, it didn’t exactly chew it off. It got hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I got found five days later by the militia, all delirious with fever. They sent me back to the orphanage, but by then my leg had got all stinky and had to be cut off.’

      Her voice is all squashed upside-downy as she reaches higher and higher with her leg and then falls off the bed sideways and we all laugh.

      ‘How come you’ve got to stay here for so long?’ she asks, picking herself up. ‘Most of the kids here have legs and arms missing, but you’ve still got all yours.’

      ‘We’re some sort of Big Secret, so we can’t ever leave here,’ says Masha.

      Lucia sits up and hugs her leg up to her chin looking all interested. ‘A Secret? No shit. Why?’

      ‘Because, we’re Together.’

      ‘What’s so secret about that?’

      ‘Dunno.’ Masha shrugs. ‘Maybe we’re a secret experiment. Maybe the scientists joined us together. I haven’t seen anyone else Together, not ever. Have you seen anyone else Together?’

      ‘Nope. But then you haven’t seen anyone with a leg bitten off by a dog either, have you? Doesn’t make me a Secret. Don’t they tell you why?’

      ‘No. They don’t tell us anything.’

      ‘S’pose they know best. Better not to know,’ she says, and balls one fist into her eye, rubbing it. ‘Does your head in, knowing does. Anyway, you’re lucky. It’s healthy here. You get two hundred grammes of bread a day – and butter and meat. We get shit-all, and they pump us full of injected crap to keep us quiet.’

      ‘Do they tie you to the bed too?’ I ask, thinking of the Uneducables.

      ‘Yeah, sometimes. Or tie you up in a sheet so you can’t move. It sucks. Wish I was a Secret like you two and could live here.’

      She unthreads a shoelace from my boot, which is tucked under the bed, puts the middle bit between her teeth and gives me both ends behind her head. ‘I’m a pony. Click click.’ I laugh and pull the reins. She throws her head up and down and whinnies and we all laugh some more as she rears up and paws in the air. Then after a bit she looks round the empty room. ‘Don’t you have any toys or books or stuff? If you really live here, don’t you get your own stuff?’

      ‘Nyetooshki,’ says Masha. ‘It’d get nicked. If it’s not screwed down or stamped with an SNIP stamp, it gets nicked.’

      ‘Same with us in the orphanage. My mum brings me stupid books, when she should bring lard or cooked potatoes. Books get nicked by the staff as soon as you look at them, to sell on.’

      ‘At least your mummy visits,’ I say.

СКАЧАТЬ