My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer
now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but
actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the
end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I
know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think
I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve
been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of
one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite
being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But
then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by
and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much
better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and
hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before
fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot
to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my
donors staying “calm.” I’ve developed a kind of instinct around
donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave
them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say,
and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.
Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers,
working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If
you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get
resentful-about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick
and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student-which is
enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they
say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own
kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates.
No wonder she has a great record. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m
sure you’ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it.
But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt
if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after
donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish,
remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for the
last six they’ve let me choose.
And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your
best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t
have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to
choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s
no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped
feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d
never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to
Ruth and Tommy after all those years?
But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who
I remember, and so in practice, I haven’t been choosing that much.
As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don’t have that deeper
link with the donor, and though I’ll miss being a carer, it feels
just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.
Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to
choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I
remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I
managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre
in Dover, all our differences-while they didn’t exactly
vanish-seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like
the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we
knew and remembered things no one else did. It’s ever since then, I
suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past,
and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.
There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave
Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so
much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It
had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as
a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham.
He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and
he must have known he wasn’t going to make it. He could hardly
breathe, but he looked towards me and said: “Hailsham. I bet that
was a beautiful place.” Then the next morning, when I was making
conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d
grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the
blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised
then how desperately he didn’t want reminded. Instead, he wanted to
hear about Hailsham.
So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to
know, and he’d lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking
through. He’d ask me about the big things and the little things.
About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests
under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that
took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its
nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art
Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he’d make me say
things over and over; things I’d told him only the day before, he’d
ask about like I’d never told him. “Did you have a sports pavilion?”
“Which guardian was your special favourite?” At first I thought this
was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough.
What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember
Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was
close to completing and so that’s what he was doing: getting me to
describe things to him, so they’d really sink in, so that maybe
during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the
exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and
what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood,
just how lucky we’d been-Tommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us.
* * *
Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind
me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see
part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a
valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a
hillside, and I’ll think: “Maybe that’s it! I’ve found it! This
actually is Hailsham!” Then I see it’s impossible and I go on
driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are
those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the
far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row
of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I
think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties,
which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep
looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day I’ll crash
the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving
through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a
cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car
and went back for a second look.
We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those
sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we
were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with
guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the
usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2-when we were
twelve, going on thirteen-the pavilion had become the place to hide
out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest
of Hailsham.
The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them
bothering each other-in the summer, a third group could hang about
out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the
place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing.
The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but
in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your
group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or
free period. I wasn’t exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose
it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.
Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and
benches-there’d be five of us, six if Jenny B. came along-and had a
good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen
when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss
something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with
laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a
while with your closest friends.
On the particular afternoon I’m now thinking of, we were standing up
on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave
us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys
from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was
bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day
because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface
of the grass.
Someone said we shouldn’t be so obvious about watching, but we
hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: “He doesn’t suspect a
thing. Look at him. He really doesn’t suspect a thing.”
When she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of
disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the
next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: “The idiot!”
And I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose
to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didn’t
come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not
because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet
again, but just because we’d heard about this latest plot and were
vaguely curious to watch it unfold. In those days, I don’t think
what the boys did amongst themselves went much deeper than that. For
Ruth, for the others, it was that detached, and the chances are
that’s how it was for me too.
Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong. Maybe even then, when I saw Tommy
rushing about that field, undisguised delight on his face to be
accepted back in the fold again, about to play the game at which he
so excelled, maybe I did feel a little stab of pain. What I do
remember is that I noticed Tommy was wearing the light blue polo
shirt he’d got in the Sales the previous month-the one he was so
proud of. I remember thinking: “He’s really stupid, playing football
in that. It’ll get ruined, then how’s he going to feel?” Out loud, I
said, to no one in particular: “Tommy’s got his shirt on. His
favourite polo shirt.”
I don’t think anyone heard me, because they were all laughing at
Laura-the big clown in our group-mimicking one after the other the
expressions that appeared on Tommy’s face as he ran, waved, called,
tackled. The other boys were all moving around the field in that
deliberately languorous way they have when they’re warming up, but
Tommy, in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt. I
said, louder this time: “He’s going to be so sick if he ruins that
shirt.” This time Ruth heard me, but she must have thought I’d meant
it as some kind of joke, because she laughed half-heartedly, then
made some quip of her own.
Then the boys had stopped kicking the ball about, and were standing
in a pack in the mud, their chests gently rising and falling as they
waited for the team picking to start. The two captains who emerged
were from Senior 3, though everyone knew Tommy was a better player
than any of that year. They tossed for first pick, then the one
who’d won stared at the group.
“Look at him,” someone behind me said. “He’s completely convinced
he’s going to be first pick. Just look at him!”
There was something comical about Tommy at that moment, something
that made you think, well, yes, if he’s going to be that daft, he
deserves what’s coming. The other boys were all pretending to
ignore the picking process, pretending they didn’t care where they
came in the order. Some were talking quietly to each other, some
re-tying their laces, others just staring down at their feet as they
trammelled the mud. But Tommy was looking eagerly at the Senior 3
boy, as though his name had already been called.
Laura kept up her performance all through the team-picking, doing
all the different expressions that went across Tommy’s face: the
bright eager one at the start; the puzzled concern when four picks
had gone by and he still hadn’t been chosen; the hurt and panic as
it began to dawn on him what was really going on. I didn’t keep
glancing round at Laura, though, because I was watching Tommy; I
only knew what she was doing because the others kept laughing and
egging her on. Then when Tommy was left standing alone, and the boys
all began sniggering, I heard Ruth say:
“It’s coming. Hold it. Seven seconds. Seven, six, five …”
She never got there. Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the
boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South
Playing Field. Tommy took a few strides after them-it was hard to
say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was
panicked at being left behind. In any case he soon stopped and stood
there, glaring after them, his face scarlet. Then he began to scream
and shout, a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults.
We’d all seen plenty of Tommy’s tantrums by then, so we came down
off our stools and spread ourselves around the room. We tried to
start up a conversation about something else, but there was Tommy
going on and on in the background, and although at first we just
rolled our eyes and tried to ignore it, in the end-probably a full
ten minutes after we’d first moved away-we were back up at the
windows again.
The other boys were now completely out of view, and Tommy was no
longer trying to direct his comments in any particular direction. He
was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind,
at the nearest fence post. Laura said he was maybe “rehearsing his
Shakespeare.” Someone else pointed out how each time he screamed
something he’d raise one foot off the ground, pointing it outwards,
“like a dog doing a pee.” Actually, I’d noticed the same foot
movement myself, but what had struck me was that each time he
stamped the foot back down again, flecks of mud flew up around his
shins. I thought again about his precious shirt, but he was too far
away for me to see if he’d got much mud on it.
“I suppose it is a bit cruel,” Ruth said, “the way they always work
him up like that. But it’s his own fault. If he learnt to keep his
cool, they’d leave him alone.”
“They’d still keep on at him,” Hannah said. “Graham K.’s temper’s
just as bad, but that only makes them all the more careful with
him. The reason they go for Tommy’s because he’s a layabout.”
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.
Continues…
Excerpted from Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Copyright © 2005 by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Kazuo Ishiguro
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
