Never Let Me Go, Chapters 6-9

I did my best, meanwhile, to take any opportunity to imply to Ruth she had a special place in Miss Geraldine’s heart.

I just came in before Midge or anyone else had the chance to notice Ruth was in a curious quandary.

Now, for much the same reasons I’d not been able to talk openly to Ruth about what I’d done to her over the Sales Register business, she of course wasn’t able to thank me for the way I’d intervened with Midge.

But now the tape machine in my car’s got so dodgy, I don’t dare play it in that.

Not long ago, when Tommy and I were reminiscing about all of this, he thought we’d never really believed in the notion, that it was a joke right from the start.

But my memory of it—and Ruth remembered it the same way—is that at the beginning, we believed in Norfolk in the most literal way; that just as lorries came to Hailsham with our food and stuff for our Sales, there was some similar operation going on, except on a grander scale, with vehicles moving all over England, delivering anything left behind in fields and trains to this place called Norfolk.

This time round it wasn’t awkward or embarrassing any more; just sombre and serious.

Or maybe I’d just got complacent by then.

The door was almost half open—it was a sort of rule we couldn’t close dorm doors completely except for when we were sleeping—but Madame hadn’t nearly come up to the threshold.

I wasn’t ashamed exactly: but it was a bit like that earlier time, when we’d all waylaid Madame in the courtyard as she got out of her car.

This was in those days following our conversation by the pond when he’d first confided in me about Miss Lucy; the days during which—as I see it—we started off our whole thing of wondering and asking questions about ourselves that we kept going between us through the years.

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.

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.

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.

And suddenly I felt the disappointment ebbing away and being replaced by a real happiness.

For a moment things got riotous, with everyone shouting and mimicking touching electric fences.

Peter J. looked bewildered and I could see him getting ready his injured innocence face.

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.

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.

We watched in complete astonishment as she put the skeleton through various contortions, thrusting her pointer around without the slightest self-consciousness.

It must have been just before my talk with him by the pond; a time, I suppose, when Tommy was still coming out of that phase of being teased and taunted.

Christopher went on eating, then said nonchalantly:

And for me to strap up his arm in a splint would have meant my becoming one of the main perpetrators of the joke.

All that business about “unzipping,” that was typical of the way the whole subject impinged on us when we were thirteen.

I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others.

When he took the calendar, there was still a smile on his features, but as he flicked through I could see something closing off inside him.

We all cracked up at this because the idea of having sex with Mr. Chris seemed absurd, as well as completely sick-making.

We were using charcoal, and because someone had commandeered all the easels, we were having to work with our boards propped up on our laps.

I saw Harry fleetingly a couple of years ago at the recovery centre in Wiltshire.

Negligible.