Never Let Me Go (Movie Tie-In Edition) (21 page)

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.’

‘How did it get there?’ I asked.

‘How do I know? Maybe they wanted to dump it, whoever owned it. Or maybe sometime, when everything was flooded, it just drifted in and got itself beached. Who knows? It’s supposed to be this old fishing boat. With a little cabin for a couple of fishermen to squeeze into when it’s stormy.’

The next few times I came to see her, she always managed to bring up the boat again. Then one afternoon, when she began telling me how one of the other donors at the centre had been taken by her carer to see it, I said to her:

‘Look, it’s not particularly near, you know. It would take an hour, maybe an hour and a half to drive.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting anything. I know you’ve got other donors to worry about.’

‘But you’d like to see it. You’d like to see this boat, wouldn’t you, Ruth?’

‘I suppose so. I suppose I would. You spend day after day in this place. Yeah, it’d be good to see something like that.’

‘And do you suppose’ – I said this gently, without a hint of
sarcasm – ‘if we’re driving all that way, we should think about calling in on Tommy? Seeing his centre’s just down the road from where this boat’s meant to be?’

Ruth’s face didn’t show anything at first. ‘I suppose we could think about it,’ she said. Then she laughed and added: ‘Honest, Kathy, that wasn’t the only reason I’ve been going on about the boat. I do want to see it, for its own sake. All this time in and out of hospital. Then cooped up here. Things like that matter more than they once did. But all right, I did know. I knew Tommy was at the Kingsfield centre.’

‘Are you sure you want to see him?’

‘Yes,’ she said, no hesitation, looking straight at me. ‘Yes, I do.’ Then she said quietly: ‘I haven’t seen that boy for a long time. Not since the Cottages.’

Then, at last, we talked about Tommy. We didn’t go into things in a big way and I didn’t learn much I didn’t know already. But I think we both felt better we’d finally brought him up. Ruth told me how, by the time she left the Cottages the autumn after me, she and Tommy had more or less drifted apart.

‘Since we were going different places to do our training anyway,’ she said, ‘it didn’t seem worth it, to split up properly. So we just stayed together until I left.’

And at that stage, we didn’t say much more about it than that.

As for the trip out to see the boat, I neither agreed nor disagreed to it, that first time we discussed it. But over the next couple of weeks, Ruth kept bringing it up, and our plans somehow grew firmer, until in the end, I sent a message to Tommy’s carer through a contact, saying that unless we heard from Tommy telling us not to, we’d show up at the Kingsfield on a particular afternoon the following week.

I’d hardly ever been to the Kingsfield in those days, so Ruth and I had to consult the map a number of times on the way and we still arrived several minutes late. It’s not very well-appointed as recovery centres go, and if it wasn’t for the associations it now has for me, it’s not somewhere I’d look forward to visiting. It’s out of the way and awkward to get to, and yet when you’re there, there’s no real sense of peace and quiet. You can always hear traffic on the big roads beyond the fencing, and there’s a general feeling they never properly finished converting the place. A lot of the donors’ rooms you can’t get to with a wheelchair, or else they’re too stuffy or too draughty. There aren’t nearly enough bathrooms and the ones there are are hard to keep clean, get freezing in winter and are generally too far from the donors’ rooms. The Kingsfield, in other words, falls way short of a place like Ruth’s centre in Dover, with its gleaming tiles and double-glazed windows that seal at the twist of a handle.

Later on, after the Kingsfield became the familiar and precious place it did, I was in one of the admin buildings and came across a framed black-and-white photo of the place the way it was before it was converted, when it was still a holiday camp for ordinary families. The picture was probably taken in the late fifties or early sixties, and shows a big rectangular swimming pool with all these happy people – children, parents – splashing about having a great time. It’s concrete all around the pool, but people have set up deck chairs and sun loungers, and they’ve got large parasols to keep them in the shade. When I first saw this, it took me a while to realise I was looking at what the donors now call ‘the Square’ – the place where you drive in when you first arrive at the centre. Of course, the pool’s filled in now, but the outline’s still there, and they’ve left standing at one end – an example of this
unfinished atmosphere – the metal frame for the high diving board. It was only when I saw the photo it occurred to me what the frame was and why it was there, and today, each time I see it, I can’t help picturing a swimmer taking a dive off the top only to crash into the cement.

I might not have easily recognised the Square in the photo, except for the white bunker-like two-storey buildings in the background, on all three visible sides of the pool area. That must have been where the families had their holiday apartments, and though I’d guess the interiors have changed a lot, the outsides look much the same. In some ways, I suppose, the Square today isn’t so different to what the pool was back then. It’s the social hub of the place, where donors come out of their rooms for a bit of air and a chat. There are a few wooden picnic benches around the Square, but – especially when the sun’s too hot, or it’s raining – the donors prefer to gather under the overhanging flat roof of the recreation hall at the far end behind the old diving board frame.

That afternoon Ruth and I went to the Kingsfield, it was overcast and a bit chilly, and as we drove into the Square it was deserted except for a group of six or seven shadowy figures underneath that roof. As I brought the car to a stop somewhere over the old pool – which of course I didn’t know about then – one figure detached itself from the group and came towards us, and I saw it was Tommy. He had on a faded green track-suit top and looked about a stone heavier than when I’d last seen him.

Beside me Ruth, for a second, seemed to panic. ‘What do we do?’ she went. ‘Do we get out? No, no, let’s not get out. Don’t move, don’t move.’

I don’t know what I’d been intending to do, but when Ruth said this, for some reason, without really thinking about it, I just stepped out of the car. Ruth stayed where she was, and that was why, when Tommy came up to us, his gaze fell on me and why it was me he hugged first. I could smell a faint odour of something medical on him which I couldn’t identify. Then, though we hadn’t yet said anything to each other, we both sensed Ruth watching us from the car and pulled away.

There was a lot of sky reflected in the windscreen, so I couldn’t make her out very well. But I got the impression Ruth had on a serious, almost frozen look, like Tommy and I were people in a play she was watching. There was something odd about the look and it made me uneasy. Then Tommy was walking past me to the car. He opened a rear door, got into the back seat, and then it was my turn to watch them, inside the car, exchanging words, then polite little kisses on the cheeks.

Across the Square, the donors under the roof were also watching, and though I felt nothing hostile about them, I suddenly wanted to get out of there quickly. But I made myself take my time getting back into the car, so that Tommy and Ruth could have a little longer to themselves.

We began by driving through narrow, twisting lanes. Then we came out into open, featureless countryside and travelled on along a near-empty road. What I remember about that part of our trip to the boat was that for the first time in ages the sun started to shine weakly through the greyness; and whenever I glanced at Ruth beside me, she had on a quiet little smile. As for what we talked about, well, my memory is that we behaved much as if we’d been seeing each other regularly, and there was no need to talk about anything other than what we had immediately in front of us. I asked Tommy if he’d been to see the boat already, and he said no, he hadn’t, but a lot of the other donors at the centre had. He’d had a few opportunities, but hadn’t taken them.

‘I wasn’t
not
wanting to go,’ he said, leaning forward from the back. ‘I couldn’t be bothered really. I was going to go once, with a couple of others and their carers, but then I got a bit of bleeding and couldn’t go any more. That was ages ago now. I don’t get any trouble like that any more.’

Then a little further on, as we continued across the empty countryside, Ruth turned right round in her seat until she was facing Tommy, and just kept looking at him. She still had on her little smile, but said nothing, and I could see in my mirror Tommy looking distinctly uncomfortable. He kept looking out of the win
dow beside him, then back at her, then back out of the window again. After a while, without taking her gaze off him, Ruth started on a rambling anecdote about someone or other, a donor at her centre, someone we’d never heard of, and all the time she kept looking at Tommy, the gentle smile never leaving her face. Perhaps because I was getting bored by her anecdote, perhaps because I wanted to help Tommy out, I interrupted after a minute or so, saying:

‘Yeah, okay, we don’t need to hear every last thing about her.’

I said this without any malice, and really hadn’t intended anything by it. But even before Ruth paused, almost as I was still speaking, Tommy made a sudden laughing noise, a kind of explosion, a noise I’d never heard him make before. And he said:

‘That’s exactly what I was about to say. I lost track of it a while ago.’

My eyes were on the road, so I wasn’t sure if he’d addressed me or Ruth. In any case, Ruth stopped talking and slowly turned back in her seat until she was facing the front again. She didn’t seem particularly upset, but the smile had gone, and her eyes looked far away, fixed somewhere on the sky ahead of us. But I have to be honest: at that instant I wasn’t really thinking about Ruth. My heart had done a little leap, because in a single stroke, with that little laugh of agreement, it felt as though Tommy and I had come close together again after all the years.

I found the turning we needed around twenty minutes after we’d set off from the Kingsfield. We went down a narrow curving road shrouded by hedges, and parked beside a clump of sycamores. I led the way to where the woods began, but then, faced with three distinct paths through the trees, had to stop to consult the sheet of directions I’d brought with me. 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.

We entered the woods, and though it was pretty easy walking, I noticed Ruth’s breath coming less and less easily. Tommy, by contrast, didn’t seem to be experiencing any difficulty, though
there was a hint of a limp in his gait. Then we came to a barbed wire fence, which was tilted and rusted, the wire itself yanked all over the place. When Ruth saw it, she came to an abrupt halt.

‘Oh no,’ she said, anxiously. Then she turned to me: ‘You didn’t say anything about this. You didn’t say we had to get past barbed wire!’

‘It’s not going to be difficult,’ I said. ‘We can go under it. We just have to hold it for each other.’

But Ruth looked really upset and didn’t move. And it was then, as she stood there, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing, that Tommy seemed to become aware for the first time just how frail she was. Maybe he’d noticed before, and hadn’t wanted to take it in. But now he stared at her for a good few seconds. Then I think what happened next – though of course I can’t know for certain – was that the both of us, Tommy and I, we remembered what had happened in the car, when we’d more or less ganged up on her. And almost as an instinct, we both went to her. I took an arm, Tommy supported her elbow on the other side, and we began gently guiding her towards the fence.

I let go of Ruth only to pass through the fence myself. Then I held up the wire as high as I could, and Tommy and I both helped her through. It wasn’t so difficult for her in the end: it was more a confidence thing, and with us there for support, she seemed to lose her fear of the fence. On the other side, she actually made a go of helping me hold up the wire for Tommy. He came through without any bother, and Ruth said to him:

‘It’s only bending down like that. I’m sometimes not so clever at it.’

Tommy was looking sheepish, and I wondered if he was embarrassed by what had just happened, or if he was remembering again our ganging up on Ruth in the car. He nodded towards the trees in front of us and said:

‘I suppose it’s through that way. Is that right, Kath?’

I glanced at my sheet and began to lead the way again. Further into the trees, it grew quite dark and the ground became more and more marshy.

‘Hope we don’t get lost,’ I heard Ruth say to Tommy with a laugh, but I could see a clearing not far away. And now with time to reflect, I realised why I was so bothered by what had happened in the car. It wasn’t simply that we’d ganged up on Ruth: it was the way she’d just taken it. In the old days, it was inconceivable she’d have let something like that happen without striking back. As this point sunk in, I paused on the path, waited for Ruth and Tommy to catch up, and put my arm around Ruth’s shoulders.

This didn’t seem so soppy; it just looked like carer stuff, because by now there
was
something uncertain about her walk, and I wondered if I’d badly underestimated how weak she still was. Her breathing was getting quite laboured, and as we walked together, she’d now and then lurch into me. But then we were through the trees and into the clearing, and we could see the boat.

Actually, we hadn’t really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods we’d come through had ended, and now in front of us there was open marshland as far as we could see. The pale sky looked vast and you could see it reflected every so often in the patches of water breaking up the land. Not so long ago, the woods must have extended further, because you could see here and there ghostly dead trunks poking out of the soil, most of them broken off only a few feet up. And beyond the dead trunks, maybe sixty yards away, was the boat, sitting beached in the marshes under the weak sun.

‘Oh, it’s just like my friend said it was,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s really beautiful.’

We were surrounded by silence and when we started to move towards the boat, you could hear the squelch under our shoes. Before long I noticed my feet sinking beneath the tufts of grass, and called out: ‘Okay, this is as far as we can go.’

The other two, who were behind me, raised no objection, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Tommy was again holding Ruth by the arm. It was clear, though, this was just to steady her. I took long strides to the nearest dead tree trunk, where the soil was firmer, and held onto it for balance. Following my example, Tommy and Ruth made their way to another tree trunk, hol
low and more emaciated than mine, a short way behind to my left. They perched on either side of it and seemed to settle. Then we gazed at the beached boat. I could now see how its paint was cracking, and how the timber frames of the little cabin were crumbling away. It had once been painted a sky blue, but now looked almost white under the sky.

‘I wonder how it got here,’ I said. I’d raised my voice to let it get to the others and had expected an echo. But the sound was surprisingly close, like I was in a carpeted room.

Then I heard Tommy say behind me: ‘Maybe this is what Hailsham looks like now. Do you think?’

‘Why would it look like this?’ Ruth sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘It wouldn’t turn into marshland just because it’s closed.’

‘I suppose not. Wasn’t thinking. But I always see Hailsham being like this now. No logic to it. In fact, this is pretty close to the picture in my head. Except there’s no boat, of course. It wouldn’t be so bad, if it’s like this now.’

‘That’s funny,’ Ruth said, ‘because I was having this dream the other morning. I was dreaming I was up in Room 14. I knew the whole place had been shut down, but there I was, in Room 14, and I was looking out of the window and everything outside was flooded. Just like a giant lake. And I could see rubbish floating by under my window, empty drinks cartons, everything. But there wasn’t any sense of panic or anything like that. It was nice and tranquil, just like it is here. I knew I wasn’t in any danger, that it was only like that because it had closed down.’

‘You know,’ Tommy said, ‘Meg B. was at our centre for a while. She’s left now, gone up north somewhere for her third donation. I never heard how she got on. Have either of you heard?’

I shook my head, and when I didn’t hear Ruth say anything, turned to look at her. At first I thought she was still staring at the boat, but then I saw her gaze was on the vapour trail of a plane in the far distance, climbing slowly into the sky. Then she said: