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Authors: Kazuo Ishiguro

Tags: #Psychological, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #General

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BOOK: Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition)
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Then everyone was talking at once, about how Tommy never even tried to be creative, about how he hadn’t even put anything in for the Spring Exchange. I suppose the truth was, by that stage, each of us was secretly wishing a guardian would come from the house and take him away. And although we hadn’t had any part
in this latest plan to rile Tommy, we
had
taken out ringside seats, and we were starting to feel guilty. But there was no sign of a guardian, so we just kept swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got. Then when Ruth looked at her watch and said even though we still had time, we should get back to the main house, nobody argued.

Tommy was still going strong as we came out of the pavilion. The house was over to our left, and since Tommy was standing in the field straight ahead of us, there was no need to go anywhere near him. In any case, he was facing the other way and didn’t seem to register us at all. All the same, as my friends set off along the edge of the field, I started to drift over towards him. I knew this would puzzle the others, but I kept going – even when I heard Ruth’s urgent whisper to me to come back.

I suppose Tommy wasn’t used to being disturbed during his rages, because his first response when I came up to him was to stare at me for a second, then carry on as before. It
was
like he was doing Shakespeare and I’d come up onto the stage in the middle of his performance. Even when I said: ‘Tommy, your nice shirt. You’ll get it all messed up,’ there was no sign of him having heard me.

So I reached forward and put a hand on his arm. Afterwards, the others thought he’d meant to do it, but I was pretty sure it was unintentional. His arms were still flailing about, and he wasn’t to know I was about to put out my hand. Anyway, as he threw up his arm, he knocked my hand aside and hit the side of my face. It didn’t hurt at all, but I let out a gasp, and so did most of the girls behind me.

That’s when at last Tommy seemed to become aware of me, of the others, of himself, of the fact that he was there in that field, behaving the way he had been, and stared at me a bit stupidly.

‘Tommy,’ I said, quite sternly. ‘There’s mud all over your shirt.’

‘So what?’ he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. ‘It’ll come off. If you can’t get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.’

He went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily: ‘It’s nothing to do with you anyway.’

He seemed to regret immediately this last remark and looked at me sheepishly, as though expecting me to say something comforting back to him. But I’d had enough of him by now, particularly with the girls watching – and for all I knew, any number of others from the windows of the main house. So I turned away with a shrug and rejoined my friends.

Ruth put an arm around my shoulders as we walked away. ‘At least you got him to pipe down,’ she said. ‘Are you okay? Mad animal.’

This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong; but my memory of it is that my approaching Tommy that afternoon was part of a phase I was going through around that time – something to do with compulsively setting myself challenges – and I’d more or less forgotten all about it when Tommy stopped me a few days later.

I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical almost every week – usually up in Room 18 at the very top of the house – with stern Nurse Trisha, or Crow Face, as we called her. That sunny morning a crowd of us was going up the central staircase to be examined by her, while another lot she’d just finished with was on its way down. So the stairwell was filled with echoing noise, and I was climbing the steps head down, just following the heels of the person in front, when a voice near me went: ‘Kath!’

Tommy, who was in the stream coming down, had stopped dead on the stairs with a big open smile that immediately irritated me. A few years earlier maybe, if we ran into someone we were pleased to see, we’d put on that sort of look. But we were thirteen by then, and this was a boy running into a girl in a really public situation. I felt like saying: ‘Tommy, why don’t you grow up?’ But I stopped myself, and said instead: ‘Tommy, you’re holding everyone up. And so am I.’

He glanced upwards and sure enough the flight above was already grinding to a halt. For a second he looked panicked, then he squeezed himself right into the wall next to me, so it was just about possible for people to push past. Then he said:

‘Kath, I’ve been looking all over for you. I meant to say sorry. I mean, I’m really, really sorry. I honestly didn’t mean to hit you the other day. I wouldn’t dream of hitting a girl, and even if I did,
I’d never want to hit
you
. I’m really, really sorry.’

‘It’s okay. An accident, that’s all.’ I gave him a nod and made to move away. But Tommy said brightly:

‘The shirt’s all right now. It all washed out.’

‘That’s good.’

‘It didn’t hurt, did it? When I hit you?’

‘Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot. Even Crow Face might notice it. That’s if I ever get up there.’

‘But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I’m awfully sorry. I am, honestly.’

At last I gave him a smile and said with no irony: ‘Look, Tommy, it was an accident and it’s now one hundred per cent forgotten. I don’t hold it against you one tiny bit.’

He still looked unsure, but now some older students were pushing behind him, telling him to move. He gave me a quick smile and patted my shoulder, like he might do to a younger boy, and pushed his way into the flow. Then, as I began to climb, I heard him shout from below: ‘See you, Kath!’

I’d found the whole thing mildly embarrassing, but it didn’t lead to any teasing or gossip; and I must admit, if it hadn’t been for that encounter on the stairs, I probably wouldn’t have taken the interest I did in Tommy’s problems over the next several weeks.

I saw a few of the incidents myself. But mostly I heard about them, and when I did, I quizzed people until I’d got a more or less full account. There were more temper tantrums, like the time Tommy was supposed to have heaved over two desks in Room 14, spilling all the contents on the floor, while the rest of the class, having escaped on to the landing, barricaded the door to stop him coming out. There was the time Mr Christopher had had to pin back his arms to stop him attacking Reggie D. during football practice. Everyone could see, too, when the Senior 2 boys went on their fields run, Tommy was the only one without a running partner. He was a good runner, and would quickly open up ten, fifteen yards between him and the rest, maybe thinking this would disguise the fact that no one wanted to run with him. Then there
were rumours almost every day of pranks that had been played on him. A lot of these were the usual stuff – weird things in his bed, a worm in his cereal – but some of it sounded pointlessly nasty: like the time someone cleaned a toilet with his toothbrush so it was waiting for him with shit all over the bristles. His size and strength – and I suppose that temper – meant no one tried actual physical bullying, but from what I remember, for a couple of months at least, these incidents kept coming. I thought sooner or later someone would start saying it had gone too far, but it just kept on, and no one said anything.

I tried to bring it up once myself, in the dorm after lights-out. In the Seniors, we were down to six per dorm, so it was just our little group, and we often had our most intimate conversations lying in the dark before we fell asleep. You could talk about things there you wouldn’t dream of talking about any other place, not even in the pavilion. So one night I brought up Tommy. I didn’t say much; I just summed up what had been happening to him and said it wasn’t really very fair. When I’d finished, there was a funny sort of silence hanging in the dark, and I realised everyone was waiting for Ruth’s response – which was usually what happened whenever something a bit awkward came up. I kept waiting, then I heard a sigh from Ruth’s side of the room, and she said:

‘You’ve got a point, Kathy. It’s not nice. But if he wants it to stop, he’s got to change his own attitude. He didn’t have a thing for the Spring Exchange. And has he got anything for next month? I bet he hasn’t.’

I should explain a bit here about the Exchanges we had at Hailsham. Four times a year – spring, summer, autumn, winter – we had a kind of big exhibition-cum-sale of all the things we’d been creating in the three months since the last Exchange. Paintings, drawings, pottery; all sorts of ‘sculptures’ made from whatever was the craze of the day – bashed-up cans, maybe, or bottle tops stuck onto cardboard. For each thing you put in, you were paid in Exchange Tokens – the guardians decided how many your particular masterpiece merited – and then on the day
of the Exchange you went along with your tokens and ‘bought’ the stuff you liked. The rule was you could only buy work done by students in your own year, but that still gave us plenty to choose from, since most of us could get pretty prolific over a three-month period.

Looking back now, I can see why the Exchanges became so important to us. For a start, they were our only means, aside from the Sales – the Sales were something else, which I’ll come to later – of building up a collection of personal possessions. If, say, you wanted to decorate the walls around your bed, or wanted something to carry around in your bag and place on your desk from room to room, then you could find it at the Exchange. I can see now, too, how the Exchanges had a more subtle effect on us all. If you think about it, being dependent on each other to produce the stuff that might become your private treasures – that’s bound to do things to your relationships. The Tommy business was typical. A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at ‘creating’.

Ruth and I often found ourselves remembering these things a few years ago, when I was caring for her down at the recovery centre in Dover.

‘It’s all part of what made Hailsham so special,’ she said once. ‘The way we were encouraged to value each other’s work.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘But sometimes, when I think about the Exchanges now, a lot of it seems a bit odd. The poetry, for instance. I remember we were allowed to hand in poems, instead of a drawing or a painting. And the strange thing was, we all thought that was fine, we thought that made sense.’

‘Why shouldn’t it? Poetry’s important.’

‘But we’re talking about nine-year-old stuff, funny little lines, all misspelt, in exercise books. We’d spend our precious tokens on an exercise book full of that stuff rather than on something really nice for around our beds. If we were so keen on a person’s poetry, why didn’t we just borrow it and copy it down ourselves any old afternoon? But you remember how it was. An Exchange
would come along and we’d be standing there torn between Susie K.’s poems and those giraffes Jackie used to make.’

‘Jackie’s giraffes,’ Ruth said with a laugh. ‘They were so beautiful. I used to have one.’

We were having this conversation on a fine summer evening, sitting out on the little balcony of her recovery room. It was a few months after her first donation, and now she was over the worst of it, I’d always time my evening visits so that we’d be able to spend a half hour or so out there, watching the sun go down over the rooftops. You could see lots of aerials and satellite dishes, and sometimes, right over in the distance, a glistening line that was the sea. I’d bring mineral water and biscuits, and we’d sit there talking about anything that came into our heads. The centre Ruth was in that time, it’s one of my favourites, and I wouldn’t mind at all if that’s where I ended up. The recovery rooms are small, but they’re well-designed and comfortable. Everything – the walls, the floor – has been done in gleaming white tiles, which the centre keeps so clean when you first go in it’s almost like entering a hall of mirrors. Of course, you don’t exactly see yourself reflected back loads of times, but you almost think you do. When you lift an arm, or when someone sits up in bed, you can feel this pale, shadowy movement all around you in the tiles. Anyway, Ruth’s room at that centre, it also had these big glass sliding panels, so she could easily see the outside from her bed. Even with her head on the pillow she’d see a big lot of sky, and if it was warm enough, she could get all the fresh air she wanted by stepping out onto the balcony. I loved visiting her there, loved those meandering talks we had, through the summer to the early autumn, sitting on that balcony together, talking about Hailsham, the Cottages, whatever else drifted into our thoughts.

‘What I’m saying,’ I went on, ‘is that when we were that age, when we were eleven, say, we really weren’t interested in each other’s poems at all. But remember, someone like Christy? Christy had this great reputation for poetry, and we all looked up to her for it. Even you, Ruth, you didn’t dare boss Christy around. All because we thought she was great at poetry. But we didn’t
know a thing about poetry. We didn’t care about it. It’s strange.’

But Ruth didn’t get my point – or maybe she was deliberately avoiding it. Maybe she was determined to remember us all as more sophisticated than we were. Or maybe she could sense where my talk was leading, and didn’t want us to go that way. Anyway, she let out a long sigh and said:

‘We all thought Christy’s poems were so good. But I wonder how they’d look to us now. I wish we had some here, I’d love to see what we’d think.’ Then she laughed and said: ‘I
have
still got some poems by Peter B. But that was much later, when we were in Senior 4. I must have fancied him. I can’t think why else I’d have bought his poems. They’re just hysterically daft. Takes himself so seriously. But Christy, she was good, I remember she was. It’s funny, she went right off poems when she started her painting. And she was nowhere near as good at that.’

But let me get back to Tommy. What Ruth said that time in our dorm after lights-out, about how Tommy had brought all his problems on himself, probably summed up what most people at Hailsham thought at that time. But it was when she said what she did that it occurred to me, as I lay there, that this whole notion of his deliberately not trying was one that had been doing the rounds from as far back as the Juniors. And it came home to me, with a kind of chill, that Tommy had been going through what he’d been going through not just for weeks or months, but for years.

Tommy and I talked about all this not so long ago, and his own account of how his troubles began confirmed what I was thinking that night. According to him, it had all started one afternoon in one of Miss Geraldine’s art classes. Until that day, Tommy told me, he’d always quite enjoyed painting. But then that day in Miss Geraldine’s class, Tommy had done this particular watercolour – of an elephant standing in some tall grass – and that was what started it all off. He’d done it, he claimed, as a kind of joke. I quizzed him a lot on this point and I suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don’t have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a
laugh, or because you want to see if it’ll cause a stir. And when you’re asked to explain it afterwards, it doesn’t seem to make any sense. We’ve all done things like that. Tommy didn’t quite put it this way, but I’m sure that’s how it happened.

Anyway, he did his elephant, which was exactly the sort of picture a kid three years younger might have done. It took him no more than twenty minutes and it got a laugh, sure enough, though not quite the sort he’d expected. Even so, it might not have led to anything – and this is a big irony, I suppose – if Miss Geraldine hadn’t been taking the class that day.

Miss Geraldine was everyone’s favourite guardian when we were that age. She was gentle, soft-spoken, and always comforted you when you needed it, even when you’d done something bad, or been told off by another guardian. If she ever had to tell you off herself, then for days afterwards she’d give you lots of extra attention, like she owed you something. It was unlucky for Tommy that it was Miss Geraldine taking art that day and not, say, Mr Robert or Miss Emily herself – the head guardian – who often took art. Had it been either of those two, Tommy would have got a bit of a telling off, he could have done his smirk, and the worst the others would have thought was that it was a feeble joke. He might even have had some students think him a right clown. But Miss Geraldine being Miss Geraldine, it didn’t go that way. Instead, she did her best to look at the picture with kindness and understanding. And probably guessing Tommy was in danger of getting stick from the others, she went too far the other way, actually finding things to praise, pointing them out to the class. That was how the resentment started.

‘After we left the room,’ Tommy remembered, ‘that’s when I first heard them talking. And they didn’t care I could hear.’

My guess is that from some time before he did that elephant, Tommy had had the feeling he wasn’t keeping up – that his painting in particular was like that of students much younger than him – and he’d been covering up the best he could by doing deliberately childish pictures. But after the elephant painting, the whole thing had been brought into the open, and now everyone was
watching to see what he did next. It seems he did make an effort for a while, but he’d no sooner have started on something, there’d be sneers and giggles all around him. In fact, the harder he tried, the more laughable his efforts turned out. So before long Tommy had gone back to his original defence, producing work that seemed deliberately childish, work that said he couldn’t care less. From there, the thing had got deeper and deeper.

BOOK: Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition)
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