Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

That same night, trying to get to sleep in an overnight, I kept thinking about something that had happened to me a few days earlier. I’d been in a seaside town in North Wales. It had been raining hard all morning, but after lunch, it had stopped and the sun had come out a bit. I was walking back to where I’d left my car, along one of those long straight seafront roads. There was hardly anyone else about, so I could see an unbroken line of wet paving stones stretching on in front of me. Then after a while a van pulled up, maybe thirty yards ahead of me, and a man got out dressed as a clown. 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. As I came closer, I could see the balloons had faces and shaped ears, and they looked like a little tribe, bobbing in the air above their owner, waiting for him.

Then the clown straightened, closed up his van and started walking, in the same direction I was walking, several paces ahead of me, a small suitcase in one hand, the balloons in the other. The seafront continued long and straight, and I was walking behind him for what seemed like ages. Sometimes I felt awkward about it, and I even thought the clown might turn and say something. But since that was the way I had to go, there wasn’t much else I could do. So we just kept walking, the clown and me, on and on along the deserted pavement still wet from the morning, and all the time the balloons were bumping and grinning down at me. Every so often, I could see the man’s fist, where all the balloon strings converged, and I could see he had them securely twisted together and in a tight grip. 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.

Lying awake that night after what Roger had told me, I kept seeing those balloons again. I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man’s fist. Once that happened, there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more. When he was telling me the news about Hailsham, Roger had made a remark, saying he supposed it wouldn’t make so much difference to the likes of us any more. And in certain ways, he might have been right. But it was unnerving, to think things weren’t still going on back there, just as always; that people like Miss Geraldine, say, weren’t leading groups of Juniors around the North Playing Field.

In the months after that talk with Roger, I kept thinking about it a lot, about Hailsham closing and all the implications. And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. It’s not that I started to panic, exactly. But it definitely felt like Hailsham’s going away had shifted everything around us. That’s why what Laura said to me that day, about my becoming Ruth’s carer, had such an impact on me, even though I’d stone-walled her at the time. It was almost like a part of me had already made that decision, and Laura’s words had simply pulled away a veil that had been covering it over.

I first turned up at Ruth’s recovery centre in Dover—the modern one with the white tiled walls—just a few weeks after that talk with Laura. It had been around two months since Ruth’s first donation—which, as Laura had said, hadn’t gone at all well. When I came into her room, she was sitting on the edge of her bed in her night-dress and gave me a big smile. She got up to give me a hug, but almost immediately sat down again. She told me I was looking better than ever, and that my hair suited me really well. I said nice things about her too, and for the next half hour or so, I think we were genuinely delighted to be with each other. We talked about all kinds of things—Hailsham, the Cottages, what we’d been doing since then—and it felt like we could talk and talk forever. In other words, it was a really encouraging start—better than I’d dared expect.

Even so, that first time, we didn’t say anything about the way we’d parted. Maybe if we’d tackled it at the start, things would have played out differently, who knows? As it was, we just skipped over it, and once we’d been talking for a while, it was as if we’d agreed to pretend none of that had ever happened.

That may have been fine as far as that first meeting was concerned. But once I officially became her carer, and I began to see her regularly, the sense of something not being right grew stronger and stronger. I developed a routine of coming in three or four times a week in the late afternoon, with mineral water and a packet of her favourite biscuits, and it should have been wonderful, but at the beginning it was anything but that. We’d start talking about something, something completely innocent, and for no obvious reason we’d come to a halt. Or if we did manage to keep up a conversation, the longer we went on, the more stilted and guarded it became.

Then one afternoon, I was coming down her corridor to see her and heard someone in the shower room opposite her door. I guessed it was Ruth in there, so I let myself into her room, and was standing waiting for her, looking at the view from her window over all the rooftops. About five minutes passed, then she came in wrapped in a towel. 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. Even so, the look of alarm that went across her face took me aback. I have to explain this a bit. Of course, I was expecting her to be a little surprised. But the thing was, after she’d taken it in and seen it was me, there was a clear second, maybe more, when she went on looking at me if not with fear, then with a real wariness. It was like she’d been waiting and waiting for me to do something to her, and she thought the time had now come.

The look was gone the next instant and we just carried on as usual, but that incident gave us both a jolt. It made me realise Ruth didn’t trust me, and for all I know, maybe she herself hadn’t fully realised it until that moment. In any case, after that day, the atmosphere got even worse. It was like we’d let something out into the open, and far from clearing the air, it had made us more aware than ever of everything that had come between us. It got to the stage where before I went in to see her, I’d sit in my car for several minutes working myself up for the ordeal. After one particular session, when we did all the checks on her in stony silence, then afterwards just sat there in more silence, I was about ready to report to them that it hadn’t worked out, that I should stop being Ruth’s carer. But then everything changed again, and that was because of the boat.

God knows how these things work. Sometimes it’s a particular joke, sometimes a rumour. It travels from centre to centre, right the way across the country in a matter of days, and suddenly every donor’s talking about it. Well, this time it was to do with this boat. I’d first heard about it from a couple of my donors up in North Wales. Then a few days later, Ruth too started telling me about it. I was just relieved we’d found something to talk about, and encouraged her to go on.

“This boy on the next floor,” she said. “His carer’s actually been to see it. He says it’s not far from the road, so anyone can get to it without much bother. This boat, it’s just sitting there, stranded in the marshes.”