‘Madame’s probably not a bad person, even though she’s creepy. So when she saw you dancing like that, holding your baby, she thought it was really tragic, how you couldn’t have babies. That’s why she started crying.’
‘But Tommy,’ I pointed out, ‘how could she have known the song had anything to do with people having babies? How could she have known the pillow I was holding was supposed to be a baby? That was only in my head.’
Tommy thought about this, then said only half jokingly: ‘Maybe Madame can read minds. She’s strange. Maybe she can see right inside you. It wouldn’t surprise me.’
This gave us both a little chill, and though we giggled, we didn’t say any more about it.
The tape disappeared a couple of months after the incident with Madame. I never linked the two events at the time and I’ve no reason to link them now. I was in the dorm one night, just before lights-out, and was rummaging through my collection chest to pass the time until the others came back from the bathroom. It’s odd but when it first dawned on me the tape wasn’t there any more, my main thought was that I mustn’t give away how panicked I was. I can remember actually making a point of humming absent-mindedly while I went on searching. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t know how to explain it: these were my closest friends in that room with me and yet I didn’t want them to know how upset I was about my tape going missing.
I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that – little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time – like somehow we were letting the side down.
Anyway, once I was quite sure the tape was gone, I asked each of the others in the dorm, very casually, if they’d seen it. I wasn’t yet completely distraught because there was just the chance I’d left it in the billiards room; otherwise my hope was that someone had borrowed it and would give it back in the morning.
Well, the tape didn’t turn up the next day and I’ve still no idea what happened to it. The truth is, I suppose, there was far more thieving going on at Hailsham than we – or the guardians – ever wanted to admit. But the reason I’m going into all this now is to explain about Ruth and how she reacted. What you have to remember is that I lost my tape less than a month after that time Midge had quizzed Ruth in the Art Room about her pencil case and I’d come to the rescue. Ever since, as I told you, Ruth had been looking out for something nice to do for me in return, and the tape disappearing gave her a real opportunity. You could even say it wasn’t until after my tape vanished that things got back to normal with us – maybe for the first time since that rainy morning I’d mentioned the Sales Register to her under the eaves of the main house.
The night I first noticed the tape had gone, I’d made sure to ask everyone about it, and that of course had included Ruth. Looking back, I can see how she must have realised, then and there, exactly what losing the tape meant to me, and at the same time, how important it was for me there was no fuss. So she’d replied that night with a distracted shrug and gone on with what she was doing. But the next morning, when I was coming back from the bathroom, I could hear her – in a casual voice like it wasn’t anything much – asking Hannah if she was sure she hadn’t seen my tape.
Then maybe a fortnight later, when I’d long reconciled myself to having truly lost my tape, she came and found me during the lunch break. It was one of the first really good days of spring that year, and I’d been sitting on the grass talking with a couple of the older girls. When Ruth came up and asked if I wanted to go for a little stroll, it was obvious she had something particular on her mind. So I left the older girls and followed her to the edge of the North Playing Field, then up the north hill, until we were standing there by the wooden fence looking down on the sweep of green dotted with clusters of students. There was a strong breeze at the top of the hill, and I remember being surprised by it because I hadn’t noticed it down on the grass. We stood there looking over the grounds for a while, then she held out a little bag to me. When I took it, I could tell there was a cassette tape inside and my heart leapt. But Ruth said immediately:
‘Kathy, it’s not your one. The one you lost. I tried to find it for you, but it’s really gone.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Gone to Norfolk.’
We both laughed. Then I took the tape out of the bag with a disappointed air, and I’m not sure the disappointment wasn’t still there on my face while I examined it.
I was holding something called Twenty Classic Dance Tunes. When I played it later, I discovered it was orchestra stuff for ballroom dancing. Of course, the moment she was giving it to me, I didn’t know what sort of music it was, but I did know it wasn’t anything like Judy Bridgewater. Then again, almost immediately, I saw how Ruth wasn’t to know that – how to Ruth, who didn’t know the first thing about music, this tape might easily make up for the one I’d lost. And suddenly I felt the disappointment ebbing away and being replaced by a real happiness. We didn’t do things like hug each other much at Hailsham. But I squeezed one of her hands in both mine when I thanked her. She said: ‘I found it at the last Sale. I just thought it’s the sort of thing you’d like.’ And I said that, yes, it was exactly the sort of thing.
I still have it now. I don’t play it much because the music has nothing to do with anything. It’s an object, like a brooch or a ring, and especially now Ruth has gone, it’s become one of my most precious possessions.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I want to move on now to our last years at Hailsham. I’m talking about the period from when we were thirteen to when we left at sixteen. In my memory my life at Hailsham falls into two distinct chunks: this last era, and everything that came before. The earlier years – the ones I’ve just been telling you about – they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can’t help feeling a sort of glow. But those last years feel different. They weren’t unhappy exactly – I’ve got plenty of memories I treasure from them – but they were more serious, and in some ways darker. Maybe I’ve exaggerated it in my mind, but I’ve got an impression of things changing rapidly around then, like day moving into night.
That talk with Tommy beside the pond: I think of it now as a kind of marker between the two eras. Not that anything significant started to happen immediately afterwards; but for me at least, that conversation was a turning point. I definitely started to look at everything differently. Where before I’d have backed away from awkward stuff, I began instead, more and more, to ask questions, if not out loud, at least within myself.
In particular, that conversation got me looking at Miss Lucy in a new light. I watched her carefully whenever I could, not just from curiosity, but because I now saw her as the most likely source of important clues. And that’s how it was, over the next year or two, I came to notice various odd little things she said or did that my friends missed altogether.
There was the time, for example, maybe a few weeks after the talk by the pond, when Miss Lucy was taking us for English. We’d been looking at some poetry, but had somehow drifted onto talking about soldiers in World War Two being kept in prison camps. One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence. This might have been intended as a serious point, but the rest of us thought it pretty funny. We were all laughing and talking at once, and then Laura – typical of her – got up on her seat and did a hysterical impersonation of someone reaching out and getting electrocuted. For a moment things got riotous, with everyone shouting and mimicking touching electric fences.
I went on watching Miss Lucy through all this and I could see, just for a second, a ghostly expression come over her face as she wa
tched the class in front of her. Then – I kept watching carefully – she pulled herself together, smiled and said: ‘It’s just as well the fences at Hailsham aren’t electrified. You get terrible accidents sometimes.’
She said this quite softly, and because people were still shouting, she was more or less drowned out. But I heard her clearly enough. ‘You get terrible accidents sometimes.’ What accidents? Where? But no one picked her up on it, and we went back to discussing our poem.
There were other little incidents like that, and before long I came to see Miss Lucy as being not quite like the other guardians. It’s even possible I began to realise, right back then, the nature of her worries and frustrations. But that’s probably going too far; chances are, at the time, I noticed all these things without knowing what on earth to make of them. And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later – particularly what happened that day at the pavilion while we were sheltering from the downpour.
We were fifteen by then, already into our last year at Hailsham. We’d been in the pavilion getting ready for a game of rounders. The boys were going through a phase of ‘enjoying’ rounders in order to flirt with us, so there were over thirty of us that afternoon. The downpour had started while we were changing, and we found ourselves gathering on the veranda – which was sheltered by the pavilion roof – while we waited for it to stop. But the rain kept going, and when the last of us had emerged, the veranda was pretty crowded, with everyone milling around restlessly. I remember Laura was demonstrating to me an especially disgusting way of blowing your nose for when you really wanted to put off a boy.
Miss Lucy was the only guardian present. She was leaning over the rail at the front, peering into the rain like she was trying to see right across the playing field. I was watching her as carefully as ever in those days, and even as I was laughing at Laura, I was stealing glances at Miss Lucy’s back. I remember wondering if there wasn’t something a bit odd about her posture, the way her head was bent down just a little too far so she looked like a crouching animal waiting to pounce. And the way she was leaning forward over the rail meant drops from the overhanging gutter were only just missing her – but she seemed to show no sign of caring. I remember actually convincing myself there was nothing unusual in all this – that she was simply anxious for the rain to stop – and turning my attention back to what Laura was saying. Then a few minutes later, when I’d forgotten all about Miss Lucy and was laughing my head off at something, I suddenly realised things had gone quiet around us, and that Miss Lucy was speaking.
She was standing at the same spot as before, but she’d turned to face us now, so her back was against the rail, and the rainy sky behind her.
‘No, no, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to interrupt you,’ she was saying, and I could see she was talking to two boys sitting on the benches immediately in front of her. Her voice wasn’t exactly strange, but she was speaking very loudly, in the sort of voice she’d use to announce something to the lot of us, and that was why we’d all gone quiet. ‘No, Peter, I’m going to have to stop you. I can’t listen to you any more and keep silent.’
Then she raised her gaze to include the rest of us and took a deep breath. ‘All right, you can hear this, it’s for all of you. It’s time someone spelt it out.’
We waited while she kept staring at us. Later, some people said they’d thought she was going to give us a big telling-off; others that she was about to announce a new rule on how we played rounders. But I knew before she said another word it would be something more.
‘Boys, you must forgive me for listening. But you were right behind me, so I couldn’t help it. Peter, why don’t you tell the others what you were saying to Gordon just now?’
Peter J. looked bewildered and I could see him getting ready his injured innocence face. But then Miss Lucy said again, this time much more gently:
‘Peter, go on. Please tell the others what you were just saying.’
Peter shrugged. ‘We were just talking about what it would feel like if we became actors. What sort of life it would be.’
‘Yes,’ Miss Lucy said, ‘and you were saying to Gordon you’d have to go to America to stand the best chance.’
Peter J. shrugged again and muttered quietly: ‘Yes, Miss Lucy.’
But Miss Lucy was now moving her gaze over the lot of us. ‘I know you don’t mean any harm. But there’s just too much talk like this. I hear it all the time, it’s been allowed to go on, and it’s not right.’ I could see more drops coming off the gutter and landing on her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘If no one else will talk to you,’ she continued, ‘then I will. The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I’m not. If you’re going to have decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. So you’re not to talk that way any more. You’ll be leaving Hailsham before long, and it’s not so far off, the day you’ll be preparing for your first donations. You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.’
Then she went silent, but my impression was that she was continuing to say things inside her head, because for some time her gaze kept roving over us, going from face to face just as if she were still speaking to us. We were all pretty relieved when she turned to look out over the playing field again.
‘It’s not so bad now,’ she said, even though the rain was as steady as ever. ‘Let’s just go out there. Then maybe the sun will come out too.’
I think that was all she said. When I was discussing it with Ruth a few years ago at the centre in Dover, she claimed Miss Lucy had told us a lot more; that she’d explained how before donations we’d all spend some time first as carers, about the usual sequence of the donations, the recovery centres and so on – but I’m pretty sure she didn’t. Okay, she probably intended to when she began talking. But my guess is once she’d set off, once she’d seen the puzzled, uncomfortable faces in front of her, she realised the impossibility of completing what she’d started.
It’s hard to say clearly what sort of impact Miss Lucy’s outburst at the pavilion made. Word got round fast enough, but the talk mostly focused on Miss Lucy herself rather than on what she’d been trying to tell us. Some students thought she’d lost her marbles for a moment; others that she’d been asked to say what she had by Miss Emily and the other guardians; there were even some who’d actually been there and who thought Miss Lucy had been telling us off for being too rowdy on the veranda. But as I say there was surprisingly little discussion about what she’d said. If it did come up, people tended to say: ‘Well so what? We already knew all that.’
But that had been Miss Lucy’s point exactly. We’d been ‘told and not told’, as she’d put it. A few years ago, when Tommy and I were going over it all again, and I reminded him of Miss Lucy’s ‘told and not told’ idea, he came up with a theory.
Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.
It’s a bit too much like a conspiracy theory for me ?
?? I don’t think our guardians were that crafty – but there’s probably something in it. Certainly, it feels like I always knew about donations in some vague way, even as early as six or seven. And it’s curious, when we were older and the guardians were giving us those talks, nothing came as a complete surprise. It was like we’d heard everything somewhere before.
One thing that occurs to me now is that when the guardians first started giving us proper lectures about sex, they tended to run them together with talk about the donations. At that age – again, I’m talking of around thirteen – we were all pretty worried and excited about sex, and naturally would have pushed the other stuff into the background. In other words, it’s possible the guardians managed to smuggle into our heads a lot of the basic facts about our futures.
Now to be fair, it was probably natural to run these two subjects together. If, say, they were telling us how we’d have to be very careful to avoid diseases when we had sex, it would have been odd not to mention how much more important this was for us than for normal people outside. And that, of course, would bring us onto the donations.