Never Let Me Go, Chapters 2-3

I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical almost every week—usually up in Room 18 at the very top of the house—with stern Nurse Trisha, or Crow Face, as we called her.

At last I gave him a smile and said with no irony: “Look, Tommy, it was an accident and it’s now one hundred percent forgotten.

There were more temper tantrums, like the time Tommy was supposed to have heaved over two desks in Room 14, spilling all the contents on the floor, while the rest of the class, having escaped onto the landing, barricaded the door to stop him coming out.

For each thing you put in, you were paid in Exchange Tokens—the guardians decided how many your particular masterpiece merited—and then on the day of the Exchange you went along with your tokens and “bought” the stuff you liked.

I can see now, too, how the Exchanges had a more subtle effect on us all.

If we were so keen on a person’s poetry, why didn’t we just borrow it and copy it down ourselves any old afternoon?

You could see lots of aerials and satellite dishes, and sometimes, right over in the distance, a glistening line that was the sea.

Had it been either of those two, Tommy would have got a bit of a telling off, he could have done his smirk, and the worst the others would have thought was that it was a feeble joke.

It seems he did make an effort for a while, but he’d no sooner have started on something, there’d be sneers and giggles all around him.

At first it wasn’t so relentless.

Then gradually, people got bored and the pranks became more half-hearted, until one day it struck me there hadn’t been any for over a week.

I was pleased about all these developments, but also mystified.

I was mystified, and decided to probe him a bit the next time we could talk in private.

The chance came along before long, when I was lining up for lunch and spotted him a few places ahead in the queue.

It was something to do with the acoustics in the Great Hall; all the hubbub and the high ceilings meant that so long as you lowered your voices, stood quite close, and made sure your neighbours were deep in their own chat, you had a fair chance of not being overheard.

He said this completely without sarcasm.

I could see he was bewildered and crestfallen, but after the months I’d spent worrying about him, I felt betrayed, and didn’t care how he felt.

Anyway, once you came out to the pond, you’d find a tranquil atmosphere waiting, with ducks and bulrushes and pond-weed.

It wasn’t, though, a good place for a discreet conversation—not nearly as good as the lunch queue.

It was only in the Seniors, really, we’d started to appreciate her brisk style.

But as they were walking from the house towards the Orangery—where the guardians had their living quarters—Tommy began to get an inkling this was something different.

I remember a time when I could only have been five or six, sitting at a low table beside Amanda C., our hands clammy with modelling clay.

We called her “Madame” because she was French or Belgian—there was a dispute as to which—and that was what the guardians always called her.

This usually went on for at least a fortnight, by the end of which four or five items from each Junior and Senior year would have ended up in the billiards room.

A car was a rarity, and the sight of one in the distance was sometimes enough to cause bedlam during a class.

We were in Room 9—on the first floor at the front of the house—and when the whisper went around, poor Mr. Frank, who was trying to teach us spelling, couldn’t understand why we’d suddenly got so restless.

The plan we’d come up with to test Ruth’s theory was very simple: we—the six of us in on it—would lie in wait for Madame somewhere, then “swarm out” all around her, all at once.

We had a hurried conference out on the landing, then followed the rest of the class down the stairs and loitered just inside the main doorway.

At a signal from Ruth we all sauntered out, moving straight for her, but like we were all in a dream.

And I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her.