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.
Masha rolls her eyes. ‘Ignore my moron here. She’s obsessed with mums, right?’ I bite my bottom lip. I kept waiting for Mummy after she didn’t come that tomorrow time and so in the end, Aunty Nadya told us that she wasn’t our real mummy at all. She said she was only one of the staff. She says our real mummy is in Moscow, because we were born here and that she probably couldn’t cope with the two of us as she was too busy working. So now I write letters to my real mummy every week telling her what we’re doing and how we’re getting along. Because everyone wants a mummy, don’t they? Whoever she is … Aunty Nadya says she doesn’t know if Mummy actually properly rejected us, so she takes them and posts them for me. I always put a return address in big capital letters at the top, but she hasn’t written back yet. I’ve been writing for years and years. Masha says Aunty Nadya just pretends to post them, because she can’t tell us anything at all about our mummy, however much I ask. Lydia Mikhailovna says to Banish her from my Mind. One of the nannies says she went mad, and another one says she died having us. But I believe Aunty Nadya when she says that Mummy is just really busy.
‘Yeah,’ says Lucia, rolling on to her stomach, ‘my mum didn’t sign the rejection form when she gave me away.’ She gives a big yawn and stretches like a starfish. ‘Silly bitch. I could’ve been adopted if she’d like proper rejected me. If she’d signed the forms and stuff. Then I wouldn’t have had to run away and get my leg bitten off almost. She comes in every month and brings me shit-all, when all I want is black bread because I’m always fucking starving. Just my luck to be born to someone like her. She’s retarded.’
‘Why did she give you up if you were Healthy?’ I ask.
Lucia shrugs. ‘She was an alkasha, I s’pose. The militia make them send their kids to orphanages.’
That’s strange. Alcoholics normally have Uneducable kids, but Lucia’s as sharp as a knife. Our real mummy can’t have been an alkasha, because we’re sharp as knives too.
‘C’mon! Let’s go out into the grounds and knock over some kids who’re learning to walk,’ says Lucia, jumping off the bed and grabbing her crutches.
‘We can’t,’ says Masha. ‘We’re a Secret, remember?’
‘What? You’re too secret to even go into the grounds? Chort! That sucks to China and back. Well …’ she makes for the door. ‘I’m off. It’s stuffy as fuck in here. Can’t you open the window?’
‘Nyet. They think we’ll fall out.’
‘That sucks too. All right. See ya.’
Once she’s gone, Masha’s eyes start getting black like they do, and she walks fast round the room, up and down and across and back again. I can feel her crossness at being stuck in here with nothing to do, growing up and up inside her. She thumps the wall.
‘Let’s play Who’s-What?’ I say quickly. ‘Or pretend to be a fighter pilot … I’ll be the Fascist and you can be the Red.’
‘Shut up!!’ She keeps pacing up and down, up and down, getting tighter and tighter until I feel like I’m going to burst. ‘I want to go OUT! It’s because of you I can’t go out! Because you’re stuck to me. Get off! Get off me! I hate you – go away, I’ll kill you and then they’ll cut you off!’ Then she starts hitting me with her fists and pulling my hair and scratching my face and kicking me in my leg, so I do what I always do and lie back as far as I can with my hands over my face.
Poor Masha. The only time I can ever really go away from her is when I close my eyes and imagine it. But she can’t do that as well as I can. I don’t think she can even do it at all.
After ages and ages of being beaten up, she gets slower and then stops and turns over and puts her head right deep into her pillow. I’m trying to stop my nosebleed, cos the Administrator will kill me if I get blood on the sheets, so I push my pyjama sleeve right up my nostril. I can wash the sleeve out myself later. After a bit, when Masha’s gone to sleep, I decide to think of what I’m going to write in my next letter to Mummy. I’ll write: We hope you’re well. We’re well thank you. We haven’t been punished all week so far for being naughty. We get a bit bored so if you come and visit us that would be nice and you don’t have to stay long if you haven’t much time, and you don’t have to bring anything either. Your daughters, Masha and Dasha.
April 1961
We get the news about Yuri Gagarin and watch him on television
We’ve been moved into General Ward G now and the little kids are hiding under their beds because Masha’s telling them about how her father’s a Cannibal King in Africa. She says he’s got a bone through his nose, from one of the children he’s eaten up, and she’s told them he’s visiting her today.
‘He makes a soup out of them and spits their bones out,’ Masha’s saying, ‘and makes a necklace for each of his wives. When I was little, I burnt his soup and he took an axe and chopped me in two. That’s why I’m like this, and he’ll do the same to—’
‘Children! I have news for you!’ It’s Lydia Mikhailovna who’s just thrown open the doors. She hardly ever visits the wards so the kids all scream when the doors bang open, because they think it’s the Cannibal King come to visit with his axe.
‘What on earth are you all doing under there? Come out at once.’ She looks across at Masha and I think she’s going to be angry, but she’s not. She’s happy. Happier than I think I’ve ever seen her. ‘Tak! Everyone come along to the Room of Relaxation. I have an