‘I don’t want us to fight again, Kath. But I’ve been wanting to ask you this a lot. I mean, don’t you get tired of being a carer? All the rest of us, we became donors ages ago. You’ve been doing it for years. Don’t you sometimes wish, Kath, they’d hurry up and send you your notice?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. Anyway, it’s important there are good carers. And I’m a good carer.’
‘But is it really that important? Okay, it’s really nice to have a good carer. But in the end, is it really so important? The donors will all donate, just the same, and then they’ll complete.’
‘Of course it’s important. A good carer makes a big difference to what a donor’s life’s actually like.’
‘But all this rushing about you do. All this getting exhausted and being by yourself. I’ve been watching you. It’s wearing you out. You must do, Kath, you must sometimes wish they’d tell you you can stop. I don’t know why you don’t have a word with them, ask them why it’s been so long.’ Then when I kept quiet, he said: ‘I’m just saying, that’s all. Let’s not fight again.’
I put my head on his shoulder and said: ‘Yeah, well. Maybe it won’t be for much longer anyway. But for now, I have to keep going. Even if you don’t want me around, there are others who do.’
‘I suppose you’re right, Kath. You are a really good carer. You’d be the perfect one for me too if you weren’t you.’ He did a laugh and put his arm round me, though we kept sitting side by side. Then he said: ‘I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.’
When he said this, I remembered the way I’d held onto him that night in the wind-swept field on the way back from Littlehampton. I don’t know if he was thinking about that too, or if he was still thinking about his rivers and strong currents. In any case, we went on sitting like that on the side of the bed for a long time, lost in our thoughts. Then in the end I said to him:
‘I’m sorry I blew up at you earlier. I’ll talk to them. I’ll try and see to it you get someone really good.’
‘It’s a shame, Kath,’ he said again. And I don’t think we talked any more about it that morning.
I remember the few weeks that came after that – the last few weeks before the new carer took over - as being surprisingly tranquil. Maybe Tommy and I were making a special effort to be nice to each other, but the time seemed to slip by in an almost carefree way. You might think there would have been an air of unreality about us being like that, but it didn’t seem strange at the time. I was quite busy with a couple of my other donors in North Wales and that kept me from the Kingsfield more than I’d have wanted, but I still managed to come in three or four times a week. The weather grew colder, but stayed dry and often sunny, and we whiled away the hours in his room, sometimes having sex, more often just talking, or with Tommy listening to me read. Once or twice, Tommy even brought out his notebook and doodled away for new animal ideas while I read from the bed.
Then I came in one day and it was the last time. I arrived just after one o’clock on a crisp December afternoon. I went up to his room, half expecting some change – I don’t know what. Maybe I thought he’d have put up decorations in his room or something. But of course, everything was as normal, and all in all, that was a relief. Tommy didn’t look any different either, but when we started talking, it was hard to pretend this was just another visit. Then again, we’d talked over so much in the previous weeks, it wasn’t as though we had anything in particular we had to get through. And I think we were reluctant to start any new conversation we’d regret not being able to finish properly. That’s why there was a kind of emptiness to our talk that day.
Just once, though, after I’d been wandering aimlessly around his room for a while, I did ask him:
‘Tommy, are you glad Ruth completed before finding out everything we did in the end?’
He was lying on the bed, and went on staring at the ceiling for a while before saying: ‘Funny, because I was thinking about the same thing the other day. What you’ve got to remember about Ruth, when it came to things like that, she was always different to us. You and me, right from the start, even when we were little, we were always trying to find things out. Remember, Kath, all those secret talks we used to have? But Ruth wasn’t like that. She always wanted to believe in things. That was Ruth. So yeah, in a way, I think it’s best the way it happened.’ Then he added: ‘Of course, what we found out, Miss Emily, all of that, it doesn’t change anything about Ruth. She wanted the best for us at the end. She really wanted the best for us.’
I didn’t want to get into a big discussion about Ruth at that stage, so I just agreed with him. But now I’ve had more time to think about it, I’m not so sure how I feel. A part of me keeps wishing we’d somehow been able to share everything we discovered with Ruth. Okay, maybe it would have made her feel bad; made her see whatever damage she’d once done to us couldn’t be repaired as easily as she’d hoped. And maybe, if I’m honest, that’s a small part of my wishing she knew it all before she completed. But in the end, I think it’s about something else, something much more than my feeling vengeful and mean-spirited. Because as Tommy said, she wanted the best for us at the end, and though she said that day in the car I’d never forgive her, she was wrong about that. I’ve got no anger left for her now. When I say I wish she’d found out the whole score, it’s more because I feel sad at the idea of her finishing up different from me and Tommy. The way it is, it’s like there’s a line with us on one side and Ruth on the other, and when all’s said and done, I feel sad about that, and I think she would too if she could see it.
Tommy and I, we didn’t do any big farewell number that day. When it was time, he came down the stairs with me, which he didn’t usually do, and we walked across the Square together to the car. Because of the time of year, the sun was already setting behind the buildings. There were a few shadowy figures, as usual, under the overhanging roof, but the Square itself was empty. Tommy was silent all the way to the car. Then he did a little laugh and said:
‘You know, Kath, when I used to play football back at Hailsham. I had this secret thing I did. When I scored a goal, I’d turn round like this’ – he raised both arms up in triumph – ‘and I’d run back to my mates. I never went mad or anything, just ran back with my arms up, like this.’ He paused for a moment, his arms still in the air. Then he lowered them and smiled. ‘In my head, Kath, when I was running back, I always imagined I was splashing through water. Nothing deep, just up to the ankles at the most. That’s what I used to imagine, every time. Splash, splash, splash.’ He put his arms up again. ‘It felt really good. You’ve just scored, you turn, and then, splash, splash, splash.’ He looked at me and did another little laugh. ‘All this time, I never told a single soul.’
I laughed too and said: ‘You crazy kid, Tommy.’
After that, we kissed – just a small kiss – then I got into the car. Tommy kept standing there while I turned the thing round. Then as I pulled away, he smiled and waved. I watched him in my rearview, and he was standing there almost till the last moment. Right at the end, I saw him raise his hand again vaguely and turn away towards the overhanging roof. Then the Square had gone from the mirror.
I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them.
I suppose I lost Hailsham too. You still hear stories about some ex-Hailsham student trying to find it, or rather the place where it used to be. And the odd rumour will go round sometime
s about what Hailsham’s become these days – a hotel, a school, a ruin. Myself, for all the driving I do, I’ve never tried to find it. I’m not really interested in seeing it, whatever way it is now.
Mind you, though I say I never go looking for Hailsham, what I find is that sometimes, when I’m driving around, I suddenly think I’ve spotted some bit of it. I see a sports pavilion in the distance and I’m sure it’s ours. Or a row of poplars on the horizon next to a big woolly oak, and I’m convinced for a second I’m coming up to the South Playing Field from the other side. Once, on a grey morning, on a long stretch of road in Gloucestershire, I passed a broken-down car in a lay-by, and I was sure the girl standing in front of it, gazing emptily out towards the on-coming vehicles, was Susanna C., who’d been a couple of years above us and one of the Sales monitors. These moments hit me when I’m least expecting it, when I’m driving with something else entirely in my mind. So maybe at some level, I am on the lookout for Hailsham.
But as I say, I don’t go searching for it, and anyway, by the end of the year, I won’t be driving around like this any more. So the chances are I won’t ever come across it now, and on reflection, I’m glad that’s the way it’ll be. It’s like with my memories of Tommy and of Ruth. Once I’m able to have a quieter life, in whichever centre they send me to, I’ll have Hailsham with me, safely in my head, and that’ll be something no one can take away.
The only indulgent thing I did, just once, was a couple of weeks after I heard Tommy had completed, when I drove up to Norfolk, even though I had no real need to. I wasn’t after anything in particular and I didn’t go up as far as the coast. Maybe I just felt like looking at all those flat fields of nothing and the huge grey skies. At one stage I found myself on a road I’d never been on, and for about half an hour I didn’t know where I was and didn’t care. I went past field after flat, featureless field, with virtually no change except when occasionally a flock of birds, hearing my engine, flew up out of the furrows. Then at last I spotted a few trees in the distance, not far from the roadside, so I drove up to them, stopped and got out.
I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things breaking the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a sea-shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before finally coming up against these trees and these two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.
Author biography
Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize). He received an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.
by the same author
A PALE VIEW OF HILLS
AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
THE UNCONSOLED
WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS
Copyright
First published in 2005
by Faber and Faber Limited
3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU
This ebook edition first published in 2009
All rights reserved
© Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
The right of Kazuo Ishiguro to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978—0—571—24938—1 [epub edition]
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
(Series: # )
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