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!’
‘Why though?’ I ask. ‘Why?’
‘Because … well … because all children are born like you, with … one leg each …’ She pulls her mask up higher, then she loosens the laces on her cap and does them up again tighter.
‘So all children are born stuck together, like us?’
‘Yes, yes, Dashinka. They’re all born together …’
‘And then what happens?’
‘Then … they … ahh … become single. Like grown-ups …’
‘So, do we grow another leg each, when we get single?’
‘When do we get single?’ asks Masha, trying to pull herself up on the top cot bar. ‘When? When? When do we get single?’
‘Now then, you two Miss Clever Clogs, you know you’re not allowed to ask questions …’
‘But when? When do we get single?’ Masha asks again. ‘Tomorrow?’
Aunty Dusya looks all round the Box for something she must have lost, and doesn’t look anywhere at us. Then she goes out with a klyak of the glass door, without saying anything at all.
‘I want to get single now,’ says Masha crossly, and grabs with both her hands on to the bars. I can see the black in her eyes that gets there when she’s angry. She snatches my hand, and twists my fingers all back, and starts shouting: ‘I want to get single now! Go away! Urod! Get off me! Get off!’
I get scared as anything when Masha is angry. She kicks and scratches and punches and pinches, and I kick and scratch too, to keep her away. But I know it won’t make us get single.
‘Girls! Girls!’ After we’ve been fighting for hours and hours, Aunty Shura runs back in the Box, but she screams when she sees us, and I look, and see all red blood on us, but I keep kicking and punching to keep Masha away, and Shura runs out again.
She comes back with Mummy, who pulls at us both, and tells the nurse to tie us up to one and the other end of the cot with bandages. Masha hates being tied up all the time, so she starts shouting with bad, Nastya swear words, and so Mummy stuffs a bandage in her mouth too.
‘You two will kill yourselves if you carry on fighting like this,’ she says, leaning over us with her eyes all screwed up small and angry. ‘Do you understand? You’re black and blue from fighting all the time, but one day, one of you could die.’
She leans right into me then. ‘Do you want to die, Dasha?’
I shake my head. I really, really don’t want to die. I hate being hungry. And I hate the dark. So I decide then and there that I’ll do something which will make sure we never die.
I won’t ever, ever fight back again.
Looking out of the window to the real Outside
The next day Mummy comes back into the Box.
‘What you are, is bored,’ she says. She puts her notebook down on her chair. She’s with a nurse. ‘You need some fun.’
‘Oooh, can we have Jellyfish back?’ asks Masha, sitting up on one arm, with her mouth open. Jellyfish has gold and yellow and black and blue patches on his hard back, and lots of dangly legs, which rattle and shake when he’s wound up with the key. He makes a buzz, and trembles and we only had him for once. For one day. He’s loads and loads of fun.
‘No. You know you’re not allowed toys. That’s only for the filming. But I’ll tell you what: as a treat, I’ll let you look right down out of the window at Moscow. Now that you’re not in the Laboratory so much, you have nothing to do, day in, day out.’
And then she does this wonderful, wonderful thing.
She gets the nurse to push our cot right over to the side of the Box, which is by the wall. Right under the Window.
‘Now then. Hold on to the top bar of your cot and pull yourselves up.’ Our legs don’t stand by themselves, but our arms do, so we keep pulling and pushing until our chins and arms are on the bottom of the Window.
And then we look out and round and down and up, and we can see all of the Outside at once. I can’t think at all for looking and laughing.
‘Well?’ she asks. But we’re so bursting to happy bits with looking and laughing, we can’t talk. It’s full as full can be of new things, moving and happening.
‘Those grey blocks across there and all down the street are like our hospital block,’ says Mummy. ‘We’re six floors up here, which means six windows up from the street. The black holes are windows, like this one. The little black things moving down there on all the white snow are people. And the bigger black things, going faster, are cars carrying people inside them …’
I’m still so bursting inside with happy bits I can’t hardly hear her talking.
‘Those orange sparks come from the trams on the tramlines – they’re the black lines in the snow. The trams carry lots of people. And all the red banners up there on the buildings have slogans, which help people to work harder and be happier.’ I don’t know a lot of the words she’s saying, but I have no breath to ask.
One side of a block is all covered from top to bottom with the face of a giant man with kind eyes and a big moustache, which turns up at the ends, and makes