Masha sticks her tongue out at me. ‘You stink.’
‘Girls!’ Mummy puts down her pencil and stares at us over the bars, all cross.
We don’t say anything for a bit, while she goes back to writing. Skritch. Skritch.
‘Sing us the lullaby, Mummy – bye-oo bye-ooshki – sing that again,’ says Masha.
‘Not now.’
Skritch. Skritch.
‘What you writing, Mummy?’
‘None of your business, Masha.’
‘Yes, but what you writing?’
No answer.
Masha squashes her face through the bars of the cot. ‘When can we have those all-colours bricks back to play with? The all-colours ones?’
‘What’s the point of that, when Dasha builds them and you just knock them down?’ Mummy doesn’t even look up.
‘That’s because she likes building, and I like knocking.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Can I draw, then?’
‘You mean scribble.’
‘I can draw our Box, I can, and I can draw you with your stethoscope too.’
A bell rings from outside the door to our room, and Mummy closes her book. A bit of grey hair falls down so she pushes it behind her ear with her pencil.
‘Well, it’s five o’clock. Time for me to go home.’
‘Can we come home with you, Mummy?’ I say. ‘Can we? Now it’s five clock?’
‘No, Dashinka. How many times do I have to tell you that this hospital is your home.’
‘Is your home a hospital too? Another one?’
‘No. I live in a flat. Outside. You live in this cot, in a glass box, all safe and sound.’
‘But all children go home with their mummies, the nannies told us so.’
‘The nannies should talk less.’ She stands up. ‘You know exactly how lucky you are to be cared for and fed in here. Don’t you?’ We both nod. ‘Right, then.’ She gets up to kiss us on top of our heads. One kiss, two kisses. ‘Be good.’ I push my hand through the cot to hold on to her white coat, but she pulls it away all sharp, so I bang my wrist. I suck on where the bang is.
The door to the room opens. Boom.
‘Ah, here’s the cleaner,’ says Mummy, ‘she’ll be company for you. Tomorrow’s the weekend, so I’ll see you on Monday.’
She opens the glass door to our Box with a klyak, and then goes out of the door to our room, making another boom. We can hear the cleaner outside our Box, banging her bucket about, but we can’t see her through all the white swirls painted over the glass. When she comes into the Box to clean, we see it’s Nasty Nastya.
‘What are you looking so glum about?’ she says, splishing her mop in the water. She’s flipped her mask up because Nastya doesn’t care if we get her germs and die.
‘Mummy’s gone home all weekend, is what,’ says Masha, all low.
‘She’s not your yobinny mummy. Your mummy probably went mad as soon as she saw you two freaks. Or died giving birth to you. That there, who’s just left, is one of the staff. And you’re one of the sick. She works here, you morons. Mummy indeed …’
I put my hands over my ears.
‘She is our yobinny mummy!’ shouts Masha.
‘Don’t you swear at me, you little mutant, or I’ll knock you senseless with the sharp end of this mop!’ We go all crunched into the corner of the cot then, and don’t say anything else because she did really hit Masha once, and she cried for hours. And Nastya said she’d do something much much worse, if we told on her.
When she’s gone, we come out of the corner of the cot into the middle.
‘She is our mummy anyway,’ says Masha. ‘Nastya’s lying like mad, she is, because she’s mean.’
I sniff. ‘Of course she’s our mummy,’ I say.
Supper time and bedtime in the Box
Then one of our nannies comes into our room with our bucket of food. She puts it down with a clang on the floor outside the Box, and we both reach up with our noses, and smell to see what she’s brought. It’s our Guess-the-Food-and-Nanny game. We can’t see her, but the smell comes bouncing over the glass wall and into our noses, and it’s whoever guesses first.
‘Fish soup!’ Masha laughs. ‘And Aunty Dusya!’
I love it when Masha laughs; it comes bubbling up inside me and then I can’t stop laughing.
‘Fish soup it is, you little bed bugs,’ calls Aunty Dusya from outside the Box. Then she clicks open the glass door and comes in with our bowl, all smiling in her eyes.
‘Open up.’ We both put our heads between the bars with our mouths wide open, to get all the soup one by one spoonful each.
‘Nyet!! – she’s getting the fish eyes, I saw, I saw!’
‘Now hush, Masha – as if I pick out the nice bits for her.’
‘You do, you do – I can see, I can!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ It’s hard to hear Aunty Dusya because she’s got her mask on, like everyone. Except Mummy, who’s got the same bugs as us. And Nastya, when she’s being mean. ‘And stop gobbling it down, Masha, like a starving orphan, or you’ll be sick again. Yolki palki! I don’t know any child at all for being sick as often as you. You’re as thin as a rat.’
‘I’m thinner than a rat,’ says Masha. ‘And Dasha’s fat as a fat fly, so I should get the popping eyes!’
I don’t know what a rat is. We don’t have them in our Box.
‘What’s a rat?’ I ask.
‘Oooh, it’s a little animal with a twitching nose and bright eyes, that always asks questions. Here’s your bread.’
‘I want white bread, not black bread,’ says Masha, taking it anyway.
‘You’ll be asking for caviar next. Be grateful for what you get.’ We’re always being told to be grateful. Every single day. Grateful is being thankful for being looked after all the time. ‘I’ll come back in half an hour to clean you up, and then lights out.’
Masha stuffs her bread into her mouth all in one, so her cheeks blow out, and looks up at the ceiling as she chews. We know all our nannies’ names off by heart. And all our cleaners’ too. And all our doctors’. Aunty Dusya says only special people can see us as we’re a Big Secret. She says it has it in black writing on the door. I don’t know why we’re a Big Secret. Maybe all children are Big Secrets? Masha doesn’t know either.
I love black bread because it’s soft and juicy, and fills me all up in my tummy. I have to stuff it all in my mouth, though, because if I didn’t, Masha would take it.
Aunty Dusya comes back to wash us after we’ve done a poo and a pee in our nappy, and gives us a nice new one.
‘I’m scared of the cockroaches, Aunty Dusya.’
‘Nonsense, Dashinka, there aren’t any cockroaches.’
‘Yes, there is!’ Masha shouts and points up. ‘See that crackle up there?’
‘Well, there is a small crack in the ceiling