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 comes on Visiting Day
The next day – Horrible Visiting Day – is all warm and sunny. It’s spring time again and we’re looking out of the window at the other kids from SNIP playing in the 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