The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep. Juliet Butler

third leg waving above us like some scorpion or something. But now we’ve seen we’re all mashed up together and not like anything else on earth, I can’t forget. We hid in bed under the sheet for days and days after that. Aunty Nadya said, over and over, that we were beautiful, but she’s lying. It’s another of their Lies. The Healthies outside by the gate are right. That Nastya, the cleaner in the Pediatriya was right. The driver who took us there was right. We’re urodi. No one in the whole wide world looks as ugly as us. Olessya said some stuff about what matters is what’s on the inside, not the outside, but if we look like this on the outside, no one’s going to bother about what’s on the inside. They’ll just run right away screaming.

      In the end, Aunty Nadya said if it would make us feel any better we could have our third leg amputated as we don’t need it.

      So now the amputation’s all set for next week.

      Masha’s drawing a Nazi swastika in the ground with a metal shard. She shouldn’t. That’s treason or something. She’s crazy, Masha is. The others are laughing at one of the kids, who’s pulled a surgical glove on his head like a cockerel.

      ‘So, Mashdash,’ the kid says, taking it off with a snap, ‘you doing the amputation next week?’

      ‘Maybe,’ says Masha. Like there’s a choice now.

      ‘Well, you can hear them sawing through the bone,’ he says. ‘Karr, karr …’ and he goes like he’s sawing at his good leg with the shard of metal.

      ‘Fuck off, piss-face. They’ll give us anaesthetic. Knock us out.’

      ‘No they don’t! They don’t! Honest they don’t! It’s only local, right? So you’re in there with all the lights and the surgeons and you can see the saw and its sharp teeth and everything. All the time.’

      ‘Yeah, yeah – and the vibrations go all up your body to your head,’ says another kid, all excited to be making Masha cross, ‘and you can see them mopping up all the blood with towels, there’s loads and loads of blood, everything’s red. The whole room goes red, they just can’t get enough towels in there to mop it all up.’

      I put my hands over my ears to stop listening, but I can still hear them all.

      ‘There’s a shortage of anaesthetic, you might not even get any …’

      ‘… Uncle Styopa in our village got caught up in a crop mower and they just gave him a bottle of vodka. He passed out during the operation, but they didn’t know if it was the vodka or the pain!’ They’re laughing.

      ‘You can smell the blood above even the antiseptic,’ says one little kid.

      ‘Fuck off!’ shouts Masha, getting up. ‘Fuck off, the lot of you!’

      We get up to go.

      ‘Aunty Nadya said we’d have anaesthetic,’ I say as we go back inside.

      ‘Yeah, but she didn’t say it was only local. I’m not doing it if it’s only local. Fuck. I like my leg. It’s mine. Well … half of it is.’

      ‘I like it too. It balances us when we climb. How are we going to climb without it? Aunty Nadya says it’s like our tail.’

      Masha shrugs.

      ‘But they gave us general anaesthetic to have our appendix out, Mash, Remember?’

      ‘Yeah … in the end. But they weren’t going to give us anything to start off with – just tie us down.’

      I shiver. That was awful. I had a terrible pain in my stomach, which kept making Masha throw up. But she didn’t want to go to a hospital to be looked at because, whenever we do that, we end up with loads of doctors crawling all over us, poking every bit of us. Like maggots in meat, as Masha says. But we had such a high temperature that our SNIP night-duty doctor diagnosed appendicitis and Lydia Mikhailovna was called back in from her flat to take us to the Botkin Hospital. The pain was so bad it was making everything dizzy and black, but the doctors wouldn’t operate as they didn’t know how much novocaine to give us and thought they’d kill us by mistake. They wanted a signed form from Professor Popov, or Anokhin, that if we died, it wouldn’t be their fault. But Anokhin was in Amerika and Popov was at his country dacha so in the end they said the best thing to do was operate without any novocaine and just tie us down. We screamed and screamed then, at the very thought, like we were being tortured. Well, actually, it would have been torture – and Lydia Mikhailovna was screaming at the doctors that we had a burst appendix and would die anyway from blood sepsis if they didn’t operate with novocaine, and one of the nurses started screaming when she walked in and saw us screaming. So then Lydia Mikhailovna took us to the Usokovski Hospital instead, but no one would operate on us again, so in the end, she sent a driver to get the forms from Professor Popov in the country. It was early in the morning before they finally put us under. And Lydia Mikhailovna was still there, sitting right by our bed when we woke up, looking like death herself.

      So now, talking about it, we think she actually likes us.

      ‘Hey, I know,’ says Masha, ‘let’s go to Lydia Mikhailovna’s office, right now, like right now, and tell her we don’t want our leg off after all.’

      I nod happily, so we go running off and knock on her door and tell her.

      ‘No, it’s all arranged, girls. Next Wednesday. Amputation.’ Lydia Mikhailovna has her hand up in front of her.

      ‘P-Please, p-please, it’s our leg. We want to k-keep it!’

      ‘No, Dasha. And that’s final.’

      ‘But it will be general anaesthetic? Won’t it?’ asks Masha.

      Lydia Mikhailovna looks down at her desk and starts arranging papers. ‘No. It will be local. Doctor Anokhin will be present with his Medical Sciences film crew to observe your reactions, and Doctor Golubeva from the Brain Institute will be measuring your brain activity with her electroencephalogram helmets. They need you conscious.’ She doesn’t look up. ‘Scientists need you conscious to monitor reactions.’

      It’s the morning of the operation and I’m so scared I can’t see straight. Masha keeps thumping me and saying I’ll ruin it. Olessya’s sitting with us on the bed.

      ‘You won’t feel anything. Nothing at all,’ she’s saying to me in her low, quiet voice, which is like being stroked. ‘And the helmets are so painful anyway, you won’t even be thinking about your leg, will you? It won’t take long. You’ll be back here in a minute … we’ll play draughts.’

      I’m shaking all over though and sobbing. I think I’d rather die.

      ‘Stupid sheep! Bad enough to go through an operation, without having a fucking shipwreck by your side!’ Masha slaps me hard on the cheek.

      ‘Enough of that!’ Aunty Nadya’s walked in. ‘As if she isn’t in enough of a state as it is.’

      ‘Just needs some sense knocked into her,’ grumbles Masha.

      ‘Well, be that as it may, everything’s ready so come along, girls. We’ll have that leg off in a jiffy and you’ll look like new.’

      ‘Now?!! Nyetttt!’ I try to crawl back up the bed away from her, but Masha’s pulling the other way and Aunty Nadya’s pulling my hand and they half drag, half carry me down to the operating floor. I start screaming at the door to the theatre. They’re trying to take my hand out of Aunty Nadya’s and leave her behind and shut it. I scream and scream and don’t even feel Masha’s slaps and won’t let go of Aunty Nadya’s hand until they let her come in too.

      There’s bright hot lights everywhere and the room’s so full with doctors and cameras I hardly see Anokhin until they put us flat on the table, face down, and he looks into my face with his chocolatey eyes. There’s no room for Aunty Nadya round the table because of the surgeons, but I won’t let go of her hand so she has to crawl down under the operating table, still holding on to mine. Doctor Golubeva