Never Let Me Go, Chapters 18-20

And sooner or later a donor doesn’t make it, even though, say, it’s only the second donation and no one anticipated complications.

I try not to make a nuisance of myself, but I’ve figured out how to get my voice heard when I have to.

A lot of it was about her, how exhausted she’d been, how difficult one of her donors was, how much she loathed this nurse or that doctor.

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.

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.

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.

Or if we did manage to keep up a conversation, the longer we went on, the more stilted and guarded it became.

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.

I said this without any malice, and really hadn’t intended anything by it.

While I stood there trying to decipher the person’s handwriting, I was suddenly conscious of Ruth and Tommy standing behind me, not talking, waiting almost like children to be told which way to go.

In the old days, it was inconceivable she’d have let something like that happen without striking back.

Her breathing was getting quite laboured, and as we walked together, she’d now and then lurch into me.

We were surrounded by silence and when we started to move towards the boat, you could hear the squelch under our shoes.

Following my example, Tommy and Ruth made their way to another tree trunk, hollow and more emaciated than mine, a short way behind to my left.

I know it’s not supposed to work that way, but I reckon that’s what it was.

There was even a sort of hope, I thought, that when the poster appeared, it would be perfectly innocuous—something that reminded us of Hailsham, something like that.

I’m not saying I was elated or anything like that.

Just every now and then, Ruth would allude to it.

It was one of those little islands of lucidity donors sometimes get to in the midst of their ghastly battles, and she looked at me, just for that moment, and although she didn’t speak, I knew what her look meant.

A lot of it was really relaxed, almost idyllic.

But my worry was that it would show somehow, in a kind of lack of intimacy.

Then one day we were up in his room with several minutes to kill before we set off for some checks, and I noticed something odd coming into his manner: something coy and deliberate which made me think he was after some sex.

At the least, I could see, he was showing me he hadn’t forgotten, even though we’d hardly discussed anything openly; he was telling me he wasn’t complacent, and that he was busy getting on with his part of the preparations.

But that wasn’t all I felt looking at those peculiar frogs that day.

So that feeling came again, even though I tried to keep it out: that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we were now thinking and planning.