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Authors: Kazuo Ishiguro

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Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition) (9 page)

BOOK: Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition)
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A good example is what happened the time Tommy got the gash on his elbow. It must have been just before my talk with him
by the pond; a time, I suppose, when Tommy was still coming out of that phase of being teased and taunted.

It wasn’t such a bad gash, and though he was sent to Crow Face to have it seen to, he was back almost straight away with a square of dressing plastered to his elbow. No one thought much about it until a couple of days later, when Tommy took off the dressing to reveal something at just that stage between sealing and still being an open wound. You could see bits of skin starting to bond, and soft red bits peeping up from underneath. We were in the middle of lunch, so everyone crowded round to go ‘urgh!’ Then Christopher H., from the year above, said with a dead straight face: ‘Pity it’s on that bit of the elbow. Just about anywhere else, it wouldn’t matter.’

Tommy looked worried – Christopher being someone he looked up to in those days – and asked what he meant. Christopher went on eating, then said nonchalantly:

‘Don’t you know? If it’s right on the elbow like that, it can
unzip
. All you have to do is bend your arm quickly. Not just that actual bit, the whole elbow, it can all unzip like a bag opening up. Thought you’d know that.’

I could hear Tommy complaining that Crow Face hadn’t warned him of anything of that sort, but Christopher shrugged and said: ‘She thought you knew, of course. Everyone knows.’

A number of people nearby murmured agreement. ‘You’ve got to keep your arm dead straight,’ someone else said. ‘Bending it at all’s really dangerous.’

The next day I could see Tommy going about with his arm held out very rigidly and looking worried. Everybody was laughing at him, and I was cross about that, but I had to admit, there was a funny side to it. Then towards the end of the afternoon as we were leaving the Art Room, he came up to me in the corridor and said: ‘Kath, can I just have a quick word?’

This was maybe a couple of weeks after the time I’d gone up to him in the playing field to remind him about his polo shirt, so it had got about we were special friends of some sort. All the same,
his coming up like that asking for a private talk was pretty embarrassing and threw me off balance. Maybe that partly explains why I wasn’t more helpful than I was.

‘I’m not too worried or anything,’ he began, once he’d got me aside. ‘But I wanted to play safe, that’s all. We should never take chances with our health. I need someone to help, Kath.’ He was, he explained, concerned about what he’d do in his sleep. He might easily bend his elbow in the night. ‘I have these dreams all the time where I’m fighting loads of Roman soldiers.’

When I quizzed him a bit, it became obvious all kinds of people – people who hadn’t been there that lunch-time – had been coming up to him to repeat Christopher H.’ s warning. In fact, it seemed a few had carried the joke further: Tommy had been told of a student who’d gone to sleep with a cut on the elbow just like his and woken up to find his whole upper arm and hand skele-tally exposed, the skin flopping about next to him ‘like one of those long gloves in
My Fair Lady
‘.

What Tommy was asking me now was to help tie a splint on the arm to keep it rigid through the night.

‘I don’t trust any of the others,’ he said, holding up a thick ruler he wanted to use. ‘They might deliberately do it so it comes undone in the night.’

He was looking at me in complete innocence and I didn’t know what to say. A part of me wanted badly to tell him what was going on, and I suppose I knew that to do anything else would be to betray the trust we’d built up since the moment I’d reminded him about his polo shirt. And for me to strap up his arm in a splint would have meant my becoming one of the main perpetrators of the joke. I still feel ashamed I didn’t tell him then. But you’ve got to remember I was still young, and that I only had a few seconds to decide. And when someone’s asking you to do something in such a pleading way, everything goes against saying no.

I suppose the main thing was that I didn’t want to upset him. Because I could see, for all his anxiety about his elbow, Tommy was touched by all the concern he believed had been shown him.
Of course, I knew he’d find out the truth sooner or later, but at that moment I just couldn’t tell him. The best I could do was to ask:

‘Did Crow Face tell you you had to do this?’

‘No. But imagine how angry she’d be if my elbow slipped out.’

I still feel bad about it, but I promised to strap his arm for him – in Room 14 half an hour before the night bell – and watched him go off grateful and reassured.

As it happened, I didn’t have to go through with it because Tommy found out first. It was around eight in the evening, I was coming down the main staircase, and heard a burst of laughter rising up the stairwell from the ground floor. My heart sank because I knew immediately it was to do with Tommy. I paused on the first-floor landing and looked over the rail just as Tommy came out of the billiards room with thunderous footsteps. I remember thinking: ‘At least he’s not shouting.’ And he didn’t, the whole time he went to the cloakroom, got his things and left the main house. And all that time, laughter kept coming from the open doorway of the billiards room, and voices yelling things like: ‘If you lose your temper, your elbow will
definitely
pop out!’

I thought about following him out into the evening and catching up with him before he got to his dorm hut, but then I remembered how I’d promised to put his arm in a splint for the night, and didn’t move. I just kept saying to myself: ‘At least he didn’t have a tantrum. At least he kept hold of that temper.’

But I’ve gone off a bit. The reason I was talking about all this was because the idea of things ‘unzipping’ carried over from Tommy’s elbow to become a running joke among us about the donations. The idea was that when the time came, you’d be able just to unzip a bit of yourself, a kidney or something would slide out, and you’d hand it over. It wasn’t something we found so funny in itself; it was more a way of putting each other off our food. You unzipped your liver, say, and dumped it on someone’s plate, that sort of thing. I remember once Gary B., who had this unbelievable appetite, coming back with a third helping of pudding, and virtually the whole table ‘unzipping’ bits of them
selves and piling it all over Gary’s bowl, while he went on determinedly stuffing himself.

Tommy never liked it much when the unzipping stuff came up again, but by then the days of his being teased were past and no one connected the joke with him any more. It was just done to get a laugh, to put someone off their dinner – and, I suppose, as some way of acknowledging what was in front of us. And this was my original point. By that time in our lives, we no longer shrank from the subject of donations as we’d have done a year or two earlier; but neither did we think about it very seriously, or discuss it. All that business about ‘unzipping’, that was typical of the way the whole subject impinged on us when we were thirteen.

So I’d say Miss Lucy had it about right when she said, a couple of years later, that we’d been ‘told and not told’. And what’s more, now I think about it, I’d say what Miss Lucy said to us that afternoon led to a real shift in our attitudes. It was after that day, jokes about donations faded away, and we started to think properly about things. If anything, the donations went back to being a subject to be avoided, but not in the way it had been when we were younger. This time round it wasn’t awkward or embarrassing any more; just sombre and serious.

‘It’s funny,’ Tommy said to me when we were remembering it all again a few years ago. ‘None of us stopped to think about how
she
felt, Miss Lucy herself. We never worried if she’d got into trouble, saying what she did to us. We were so selfish back then.’

‘But you can’t blame us,’ I said. ‘We’d been taught to think about each other, but never about the guardians. The idea the guardians had differences between them, that never occurred to us.’

‘But we were old enough,’ Tommy said. ‘By that age, it
should
have occurred to us. But it didn’t. We didn’t think about poor Miss Lucy at all. Not even after that time, you know, when you saw her.’

I knew straight away what he meant. He was talking about the morning early in our last summer at Hailsham, when I’d stumbled across her up in Room 22. Thinking about it now, I’d say
Tommy had a point. After that moment it should have been clear, even to us, how troubled Miss Lucy had become. But as he said, we never considered anything from her viewpoint, and it never occurred to us to say or do anything to support her.

Many of us had turned sixteen by then. It was a morning of brilliant sunshine and we’d all just come down to the courtyard after a lesson in the main house, when I remembered something I’d left in the classroom. So I went back up to the third floor and that’s how the thing with Miss Lucy happened.

In those days I had this secret game. When I found myself alone, I’d stop and look for a view – out of a window, say, or through a doorway into a room – any view so long as there were no people in it. I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others. To make this work, you had to get yourself into a sort of dream, and shut off all the stray noises and voices. Usually you had to be pretty patient too: if, say, you were focusing from a window on one particular bit of the playing field, you could wait ages for those couple of seconds when there wasn’t anyone at all in your frame. Anyway, that was what I was doing that morning after I’d fetched whatever it was I’d left in the classroom and come back out onto the third-floor landing.

I was keeping very still near a window looking down onto a section of the courtyard where I’d been standing only moments before. My friends had gone, and the courtyard was steadily emptying, so I was waiting for my trick to work, when I heard behind me what sounded like gas or steam escaping in sharp bursts.

It was a hissing noise that would go on for about ten seconds, pause, then come again. I wasn’t alarmed exactly, but since I seemed to be the only person around, I thought I’d better go and investigate.

I went across the landing towards the sound, along the corridor past the room I’d just been in, and down to Room 22, second from
the end. The door was partly open, and just as I came up to it, the hissing started up again with a new intensity. I don’t know what I expected to discover as I cautiously pushed the door, but I was properly surprised to find Miss Lucy.

Room 22 was hardly used for classes because it was so small and, even on a day like that one, hardly any light got in. The guardians sometimes went in there to mark our work or get on with reading. That morning the room was darker than ever because the blinds had been pulled almost all the way down. There were two tables pushed together for a group to sit around, but Miss Lucy was there alone near the back. I could see several loose sheets of dark, shiny paper scattered over the table in front of her. She herself was leaning over in concentration, forehead very low, arms up on the surface, scrawling furious lines over a page with a pencil. Underneath the heavy black lines I could see neat blue handwriting. As I watched, she went on scrubbing the pencil point over the paper, almost in the way we did shading in Art, except her movements were much more angry, as if she didn’t mind gouging right through the sheet. Then I realised, in the same instant, that this was the source of the odd noise, and that what I’d taken for dark shiny paper on the table had also, not long before, been pages of neat handwriting.

She was so lost in what she was doing, it took a while for her to realise I was there. When she looked up with a start, I could see her face was flushed, but there were no traces of tears. She stared at me, then put down her pencil.

‘Hello, young lady,’ she said, then took a deep breath. ‘What can I do for you?’

I think I turned away so I didn’t have to look at her or at the papers over the desk. I can’t remember if I said very much – if I explained about the noise and how I’d worried about it being gas. In any case, there was no proper conversation: she didn’t want me there and neither did I. I think I made some apology and went out, half expecting her to call me back. But she didn’t, and what I remember now is that I went down the staircase burning with shame and resentment. At that moment I wished more than any
thing that I hadn’t seen what I’d just seen, though if you’d asked me to define just what I was so upset about, I wouldn’t have been able to explain. Shame, as I say, had a lot to do with it, and also fury, though not exactly at Miss Lucy herself. I was very confused, and that’s probably why I didn’t say anything about it to my friends until much later.

After that morning I became convinced something else – perhaps something awful – lay around the corner to do with Miss Lucy, and I kept my eyes and ears open for it. But the days passed and I heard nothing. What I didn’t know at the time was that something pretty significant
had
happened only a few days after I’d seen her in Room 22 – something between Miss Lucy and Tommy that had left him upset and disorientated. There would have been a time not so much earlier when Tommy and I would have immediately reported to each other any news of this sort; but just around that summer, various things were going on which meant we weren’t talking so freely.

That’s why I didn’t hear about it for so long. Afterwards I could have kicked myself for not guessing, for not seeking Tommy out and getting it out of him. But as I’ve said, there was a lot going on around then, between Tommy and Ruth, a whole host of other stuff, and I’d put all the changes I’d noticed in him down to that.

It’s probably going too far to say Tommy’s whole act fell apart that summer, but there were times when I got seriously worried he was turning back into the awkward and changeable figure from several years before. Once, for instance, a few of us were going back from the pavilion towards the dorm huts and found ourselves walking behind Tommy and a couple of other boys. They were just a few paces ahead, and all of them – Tommy included – looked to be in good form, laughing and shoving each other. In fact, I’d say Laura, who was walking beside me, took her cue from the way the boys were larking about. The thing was, Tommy must have been sitting on the ground earlier, because there was a sizeable chunk of mud stuck on his rugby shirt near the small of his back. He was obviously unaware of it, and I don’t think his friends had seen it either or they’d surely have made
something of it. Anyway, Laura being Laura shouted out something like: ‘Tommy! You got poo-poo on your back! What have you been doing?’

She’d done this in a completely friendly way, and if some of the rest of us made a few noises too, it wasn’t anything more than the sort of thing students did the whole time. So it was a complete shock when Tommy came to a dead halt, wheeled round and stared at Laura with a face like thunder. We all stopped too – the boys looking as bewildered as we were – and for a few seconds I thought Tommy was going to blow for the first time in years. But then he abruptly stalked off, leaving us all swapping looks and shrugging.

Nearly as bad was the time I showed him Patricia C.’ s calendar. Patricia was two years below us but everyone was in awe of her drawing skills, and her stuff was always sought after at the Art Exchanges. I’d been particularly pleased with the calendar, which I’d managed to get at the last Exchange, because word had been going round about it from weeks before. It wasn’t anything like, say, Miss Emily’s flappy colour calendars of the English counties. Patricia’s calendar was tiny and dumpy, and for each month there was a stunning little pencil sketch of a scene from Hailsham life. I wish I still had it now, especially since in some of the pictures – like the ones for June and for September – you can make out the faces of particular students and guardians. It’s one of the things I lost when I left the Cottages, when my mind was elsewhere and I wasn’t being so careful what I took with me – but I’ll come to all that in its place. My point now is that Patricia’s calendar was a real catch, I was proud of it, and that’s why I wanted to show it to Tommy.

I’d spotted him standing in the late afternoon sunshine beside the big sycamore near the South Playing Field, and since my calendar was there in my bag – I’d been showing it off during our music lesson – I’d gone over to him.

He was absorbed in a football match involving some younger boys over in the next field and at this stage his mood seemed just fine, tranquil even. He smiled when I came up to him and we
chatted for a minute about nothing in particular. Then I said: ‘Tommy, look what I managed to get.’ I didn’t try to keep the triumph out of my voice, and I may even have gone ‘dah-dah!’ as I brought it out and handed it to him. When he took the calendar, there was still a smile on his features, but as he flicked through I could see something closing off inside him.

‘That Patricia,’ I began to say, but I could hear my own voice changing. ‘She’s so clever …’

But Tommy was already handing it back to me. Then without another word he marched past me off towards the main house.

This last incident should have given me a clue. If I’d thought about it with half a brain, I should have guessed Tommy’s recent moods had something to do with Miss Lucy and his old problems about ‘being creative’. But with everything else going on just at that time, I didn’t, as I say, think in these terms at all. I suppose I must have assumed those old problems had been left behind with our early teen years, and that only the big issues that now loomed so large could possibly preoccupy any of us.

So what had been going on? Well, for a start, Ruth and Tommy had had a serious bust-up. They’d been a couple for about six months by then; at least, that’s how long they’d been ‘public’ about it – walking around with arms around each other, that kind of thing. They were respected as a couple because they weren’t show-offs. Some others, Sylvia B. and Roger D., for example, could get stomach-churning, and you had to give them a chorus of vomiting noises just to keep them in order. But Ruth and Tommy never did anything gross in front of people, and if sometimes they cuddled or whatever, it felt like they were genuinely doing it for each other, not for an audience.

Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion – I can see it more clearly now – was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, Miss Emily’s talks, when she’d tell us how important it was not to be ashamed of our bodies, to ‘respect our physical needs’, how sex
was ‘a very beautiful gift’ as long as both people really wanted it. But when it came down to it, the guardians made it more or less impossible for any of us actually to do much without breaking rules. We couldn’t visit the boys’ dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially ‘out of bounds’ in the evenings, as were the areas behind the sheds and the pavilion. And you didn’t want to do it in the fields even when it was warm enough, because you’d almost certainly discover afterwards you’d had an audience watching from the house passing around binoculars. In other words, for all the talk of sex being beautiful, we had the distinct impression we’d be in trouble if the guardians caught us at it.

I say this, but the only real case I personally knew of like that was when Jenny C. and Rob D. got interrupted in Room 14. They were doing it after lunch, right there over one of the desks, and Mr Jack had come in to get something. According to Jenny, Mr Jack had turned red and gone right out again, but they’d been put off and had stopped. They’d more or less dressed themselves when Mr Jack came back, just as though for the first time, and pretended to be surprised and shocked.

‘It’s very clear to me what you’ve been doing and it’s not appropriate,’ he’d said, and told them both to go and see Miss Emily. But once they’d got to Miss Emily’s office, she’d told them she was on her way to an important meeting and didn’t have time to talk to them.

‘But you know you shouldn’t have been doing whatever you were doing, and I don’t expect you’ll do it again,’ she’d said, before rushing out with her folders.

Gay sex, incidentally, was something we were even more confused about. For some reason, we called it ‘umbrella sex’; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were ‘an umbrella’. I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we definitely weren’t at all kind towards any signs of gay stuff. The boys especially could do the cruellest things. According to Ruth this was because quite a few of them had done things with each other when they’d been younger, before they’d realised what they were
doing. So now they were ridiculously tense about it. I don’t know if she was right, but for sure, accusing someone of ‘getting all umbrella’ could easily end in a fight.

When we discussed all these things – as we did endlessly back then – we couldn’t decide whether or not the guardians wanted us to have sex or not. Some people thought they did, but that we kept trying to do it at all the wrong times. Hannah had the theory that it was their duty to make us have sex because otherwise we wouldn’t be good donors later on. According to her, things like your kidneys and pancreas didn’t work properly unless you kept having sex. Someone else said what we had to remember was that the guardians were ‘normals’. That’s why they were so odd about it; for them, sex was for when you wanted babies, and even though they knew, intellectually, that
we
couldn’t have babies, they still felt uneasy about us doing it because deep down they couldn’t quite believe we wouldn’t end up with babies.

Annette B. had another theory: that the guardians were uncomfortable about us having sex with each other because
they’d
then want to have sex with us. Mr Chris in particular, she said, looked at us girls in that way. Laura said that what Annette really meant was
she
wanted to have sex with Mr Chris. We all cracked up at this because the idea of having sex with Mr Chris seemed absurd, as well as completely sick-making.

The theory I think came closest was the one put forward by Ruth. ‘They’re telling us about sex for after we leave Hailsham,’ she said. ‘They want us to do it properly, with someone we like and without getting diseases. But they really mean it for after we leave. They don’t want us doing it here, because it’s too much hassle for them.’

My guess, anyway, is that there wasn’t nearly as much sex going on as people made out. A lot of snogging and touching up, maybe; and couples
hinting
they were having proper sex. But looking back, I wonder how much of it there really was. If everyone who claimed to be doing it really had been, then that’s all you’d have seen when you walked about Hailsham – couples going at it left, right and centre.

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