‘I know what you mean.’
It was that exchange, when we finally mentioned the closing of Hailsham, that suddenly brought us close again, and we hugged, quite spontaneously, not so much to comfort one another, but as a way of affirming Hailsham, the fact that it was still there in both our memories. Then I had to hurry off to my own car.
I’d first started hearing rumours about Hailsham closing a year or so before that meeting with Laura in the car park. I’d be talking to a donor or a carer and they’d bring it up in passing, like they expected me to know all about it. ‘You were at Hailsham, weren’t you? So is it really true?’ That sort of thing. Then one day I was coming out of a clinic in Suffolk and ran into Roger C., who’d been in the year below, and he told me with complete certainty it was about to happen. Hailsham was going to close any day and there were plans to sell the house and grounds to a hotel chain. I remember my first response when he told me this. I said: ‘But what’ll happen to all the students?’ Roger obviously thought I’d meant the ones still there, the little ones dependent on their guardians, and he put on a troubled face and began speculating how they’d have to be transferred to other houses around the country, even though some of these would be a far cry from Hailsham. But of course, that wasn’t what I’d meant. I’d meant us, all the students who’d grown up with me and were now spread across the country, carers and donors, all separated now but still somehow linked by the place we’d come from.
That same night, trying to get to sleep in an overnight, I kept thinking about something that had happened to me a few days earlier. I’d been in a seaside town in North Wales. It had been raining hard all morning, but after lunch, it had stopped and the sun had come out a bit. I was walking back to where I’d left my car, along one of those long straight seafront roads. There was hardly anyone else about, so I could see an unbroken line of wet paving stones stretching on in front of me. Then after a while a van pulled up, maybe thirty yards ahead of me, and a man got out dressed as a clown. He opened the back of the van and took out a bunch of helium balloons, about a dozen of them, and for a moment, he was holding the balloons in one hand, while he bent down and rummaged about in his vehicle with the other. As I came closer, I could see the balloons had faces and shaped ears, and they looked like a little tribe, bobbing in the air above their owner, waiting for him.
Then the clown straightened, closed up his van and started walking, in the same direction I was walking, several paces ahead of me, a small suitcase in one hand, the balloons in the other. The seafront continued long and straight, and I was walking behind him for what seemed like ages. Sometimes I felt awkward about it, and I even thought the clown might turn and say something. But since that was the way I had to go, there wasn’t much else I could do. So we just kept walking, the clown and me, on and on along the deserted pavement still wet from the morning, and all the time the balloons were bumping and grinning down at me. Every so often, I could see the man’s fist, where all the balloon strings converged, and I could see he had them securely twisted together and in a tight grip. Even so, I kept worrying that one of the strings would come unravelled and a single balloon would sail off up into that cloudy sky.
Lying awake that night after what Roger had told me, I kept seeing those balloons again. I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man’s fist. Once that happened, there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more. When he was telling me the news about Hailsham, Roger had made a remark, saying he supposed it wouldn’t make so much difference to the likes of us any more. And in certain ways, he might have been right. But it was unnerving, to think things weren’t still going on back there, just as always; that people like Miss Geraldine, say, weren’t leading groups of Juniors around the North Playing Field.
In the months after that talk with Roger, I kept thinking about it a lot, about Hailsham closing and all the implications. And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. It’s not that I started to panic, exactly. But it definitely felt like Hailsham’s going away had shifted everything around us. That’s why what Laura said to me that day, about my becoming Ruth’s carer, had such an impact on me, even though I’d stone-walled her at the time. It was almost like a part of me had already made that decision, and Laura’s words had simply pulled away a veil that had been covering it over.
I first turned up at Ruth’s recovery centre in Dover – the modern one with the white tiled walls – just a few weeks after that talk with Laura. It had been around two months since Ruth’s first donation – which, as Laura had said, hadn’t gone at all well. When I came into her room, she was sitting on the edge of her bed in her night-dress and gave me a big smile. She got up to give me a hug, but almost immediately sat down again. She told me I was looking better than ever, and that my hair suited me really well. I said nice things about her too, and for the next half hour or so, I think we were genuinely delighted to be with each other. We talked about all kinds of things – Hailsham, the Cottages, what we’d been doing since then – and it felt like we could talk and talk forever. In other words, it was a really encouraging start – better than I’d dared expect.
Even so, that first time, we didn’t say anything about the way we’d parted. Maybe if we’d tackled it at the start, things would have played out differently, who knows? As it was, we just skipped over it, and once we’d been talking for a while, it was as if we’d agreed to pretend none of that had ever happened.
That may have been fine as far as that first meeting was concerned. But once I officially became her carer, and I began to see her regularly, the sense of something not being right grew stronger and stronger. I developed a routine of coming in three or four times a week in the late afternoon, with mineral water and a packet of her favourite biscuits, and it should have been wonderful, but at the beginning it was anything but that. We’d start talking about something, something completely innocent, and for no obvious reason we’d come to a halt. Or if we did manage to keep up a conversation, the longer we went on, the more stilted and guarded it became.
Then one afternoon, I was coming down her corridor to see her and heard someone in the shower room opposite her door. I guessed it was Ruth in there, so I let myself into her room, and was standing waiting for her, looking at the view from her window over all the rooftops. About five minutes passed, then she came in wrapped in a towel. Now to be fair, she wasn’t expecting me for another hour, and I suppose we all feel a bit vulnerable after a shower with just a towel on. Even so, the look of alarm that went across her face took me aback. I have to explain this a bit. Of course, I was expecting her to be a little surprised. But the thing was, after she’d taken it in and seen it was me, there was a clear second, maybe more, when she went on looking at me if not with fear, then with a real wariness. It was like she’d been waiting and waiting for me to do something to her, and she thought the time had now come.
The look was gone the next instant and we just carried on as usual, but that incident gave us both a jolt. It made me realise Ruth didn’t trust me, and for all I know, maybe she herself hadn’t fully realised it until that moment. In any case, after that day, the atmosphere got even worse. It was like we’d let something out into the open, and far from clearing the air, it had made us more aware than ever of everything that had come between us. It got to the stage where before I went in to see her, I’d sit in my car for several minutes working myself up for the ordeal. After one particular session, when we did all the checks on her in stony silence, then afterwards just sat there in more silence, I was about ready to report to them that it hadn’t worked out, that I should stop being Ruth’s carer. But then everything changed again, and that was because of the boat.
God knows how these things work. Sometimes it?
??s a particular joke, sometimes a rumour. It travels from centre to centre, right the way across the country in a matter of days, and suddenly every donor’s talking about it. Well, this time it was to do with this boat. I’d first heard about it from a couple of my donors up in North Wales. Then a few days later, Ruth too started telling me about it. I was just relieved we’d found something to talk about, and encouraged her to go on.
‘This boy on the next floor,’ she said. ‘His carer’s actually been to see it. He says it’s not far from the road, so anyone can get to it without much bother. This boat, it’s just sitting there, stranded in the marshes.’
‘How did it get there?’ I asked.
‘How do I know? Maybe they wanted to dump it, whoever owned it. Or maybe sometime, when everything was flooded, it just drifted in and got itself beached. Who knows? It’s supposed to be this old fishing boat. With a little cabin for a couple of fishermen to squeeze into when it’s stormy.’
The next few times I came to see her, she always managed to bring up the boat again. Then one afternoon, when she began telling me how one of the other donors at the centre had been taken by her carer to see it, I said to her:
‘Look, it’s not particularly near, you know. It would take an hour, maybe an hour and a half to drive.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting anything. I know you’ve got other donors to worry about.’
‘But you’d like to see it. You’d like to see this boat, wouldn’t you, Ruth?’
‘I suppose so. I suppose I would. You spend day after day in this place. Yeah, it’d be good to see something like that.’
‘And do you suppose’ – I said this gently, without a hint of sarcasm – ‘if we’re driving all that way, we should think about calling in on Tommy? Seeing his centre’s just down the road from where this boat’s meant to be?’
Ruth’s face didn’t show anything at first. ‘I suppose we could think about it,’ she said. Then she laughed and added: ‘Honest, Kathy, that wasn’t the only reason I’ve been going on about the boat. I do want to see it, for its own sake. All this time in and out of hospital. Then cooped up here. Things like that matter more than they once did. But all right, I did know. I knew Tommy was at the Kingsfield centre.’
‘Are you sure you want to see him?’
‘Yes,’ she said, no hesitation, looking straight at me. ‘Yes, I do.’ Then she said quietly: ‘I haven’t seen that boy for a long time. Not since the Cottages.’
Then, at last, we talked about Tommy. We didn’t go into things in a big way and I didn’t learn much I didn’t know already. But I think we both felt better we’d finally brought him up. Ruth told me how, by the time she left the Cottages the autumn after me, she and Tommy had more or less drifted apart.
‘Since we were going different places to do our training anyway,’ she said, ‘it didn’t seem worth it, to split up properly. So we just stayed together until I left.’
And at that stage, we didn’t say much more about it than that.
As for the trip out to see the boat, I neither agreed nor disagreed to it, that first time we discussed it. But over the next couple of weeks, Ruth kept bringing it up, and our plans somehow grew firmer, until in the end, I sent a message to Tommy’s carer through a contact, saying that unless we heard from Tommy telling us not to, we’d show up at the Kingsfield on a particular afternoon the following week.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I’d hardly ever been to the Kingsfield in those days, so Ruth and I had to consult the map a number of times on the way and we still arrived several minutes late. It’s not very well-appointed as recovery centres go, and if it wasn’t for the associations it now has for me, it’s not somewhere I’d look forward to visiting. It’s out of the way and awkward to get to, and yet when you’re there, there’s no real sense of peace and quiet. You can always hear traffic on the big roads beyond the fencing, and there’s a general feeling they never properly finished converting the place. A lot of the donors’ rooms you can’t get to with a wheelchair, or else they’re too stuffy or too draughty. There aren’t nearly enough bathrooms and the ones there are are hard to keep clean, get freezing in winter and are generally too far from the donors’ rooms. The Kingsfield, in other words, falls way short of a place like Ruth’s centre in Dover, with its gleaming tiles and double-glazed windows that seal at the twist of a handle.
Later on, after the Kingsfield became the familiar and precious place it did, I was in one of the admin buildings and came across a framed black-and-white photo of the place the way it was before it was converted, when it was still a holiday camp for ordinary families. The picture was probably taken in the late fifties or early sixties, and shows a big rectangular swimming pool with all these happy people – children, parents – splashing about having a great time. It’s concrete all around the pool, but people have set up deck chairs and sun loungers, and they’ve got large parasols to keep them in the shade. When I first saw this, it took me a while to realise I was looking at what the donors now call ‘the Square’ – the place where you drive in when you first arrive at the centre. Of course, the pool’s filled in now, but the outline’s still there, and they’ve left standing at one end – an example of this unfinished atmosphere – the metal frame for the high diving board. It was only when I saw the photo it occurred to me what the frame was and why it was there, and today, each time I see it, I can’t help picturing a swimmer taking a dive off the top only to crash into the cement.
I might not have easily recognised the Square in the photo, except for the white bunker-like two-storey buildings in the background, on all three visible sides of the pool area. That must have been where the families had their holiday apartments, and though I’d guess the interiors have changed a lot, the outsides look much the same. In some ways, I suppose, the Square today isn’t so different to what the pool was back then. It’s the social hub of the place, where donors come out of their rooms for a bit of air and a chat. There are a few wooden picnic benches around the Square, but – especially when the sun’s too hot, or it’s raining – the donors prefer to gather under the overhanging flat roof of the recreation hall at the far end behind the old diving board frame.
That afternoon Ruth and I went to the Kingsfield, it was overcast and a bit chilly, and as we drove into the Square it was deserted except for a group of six or seven shadowy figures underneath that roof. As I brought the car to a stop somewhere over the old pool – which of course I didn’t know about then – one figure detached itself from the group and came towards us, and I saw it was Tommy. He had on a faded green track-suit top and looked about a stone heavier than when I’d last seen him.
Beside me Ruth, for a second, seemed to panic. ‘What do we do?’ she went. ‘Do we get out? No, no, let’s not get out. Don’t move, don’t move.’
I don’t know what I’d been intending to do, but when Ruth said this, for some reason, without really thinking about it, I just stepped out of the car. Ruth stayed where she was, and that was why, when Tommy came up to us, his gaze fell on me and why it was me he hugged first. I could smell a faint odour of something medical on him which I couldn’t identify. Then, though we hadn’t yet said anything to each other, we both sensed Ruth watching us from the car and pulled away.
There was a lot of sky reflected in the windscreen, so I couldn’t make her out very well. But I got the impression Ruth had on a serious, almost frozen look, like Tommy and I were people in a play she was watching. There was something odd about the look and it made me uneasy. Then Tommy was walking past me to the car. He opened a rear door, got into the back seat, and then it was my turn to watch them, inside the car, exchanging words, then polite little kisses on the cheeks.
Across the Square, the donors under the roof were also watching, and though I felt nothing hostile about them, I suddenly wanted to get out of there quickly. But I made myself take my time getting back into the car, so that Tommy and Ruth could have a little longer to themselves.
We began by dri
ving through narrow, twisting lanes. Then we came out into open, featureless countryside and travelled on along a near-empty road. What I remember about that part of our trip to the boat was that for the first time in ages the sun started to shine weakly through the greyness; and whenever I glanced at Ruth beside me, she had on a quiet little smile. As for what we talked about, well, my memory is that we behaved much as if we’d been seeing each other regularly, and there was no need to talk about anything other than what we had immediately in front of us. I asked Tommy if he’d been to see the boat already, and he said no, he hadn’t, but a lot of the other donors at the centre had. He’d had a few opportunities, but hadn’t taken them.
‘I wasn’t not wanting to go,’ he said, leaning forward from the back. ‘I couldn’t be bothered really. I was going to go once, with a couple of others and their carers, but then I got a bit of bleeding and couldn’t go any more. That was ages ago now. I don’t get any trouble like that any more.’
Then a little further on, as we continued across the empty countryside, Ruth turned right round in her seat until she was facing Tommy, and just kept looking at him. She still had on her little smile, but said nothing, and I could see in my mirror Tommy looking distinctly uncomfortable. He kept looking out of the window beside him, then back at her, then back out of the window again. After a while, without taking her gaze off him, Ruth started on a rambling anecdote about someone or other, a donor at her centre, someone we’d never heard of, and all the time she kept looking at Tommy, the gentle smile never leaving her face. Perhaps because I was getting bored by her anecdote, perhaps because I wanted to help Tommy out, I interrupted after a minute or so, saying:
‘Yeah, okay, we don’t need to hear every last thing about her.’
I said this without any malice, and really hadn’t intended anything by it. But even before Ruth paused, almost as I was still speaking, Tommy made a sudden laughing noise, a kind of explosion, a noise I’d never heard him make before. And he said: