Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [102]
That was three days after her second donation, when they finally let me in to see her in the small hours of the morning. She was in a room by herself, and it looked like they’d done everything they could for her. It had become obvious to me by then, from the way the doctors, the co-ordinator, the nurses were behaving, that they didn’t think she was going to make it. Now I took one glance at her in that hospital bed under the dull light and recognised the look on her face, which I’d seen on donors often enough before. It was like she was willing her eyes to see right inside herself, so she could patrol and marshal all the better the separate areas of pain in her body—the way, maybe, an anxious carer might rush between three or four ailing donors in different parts of the country. She was, strictly speaking, still conscious, but she wasn’t accessible to me as I stood there beside her metal bed. All the same, I pulled up a chair and sat with her hand in both of mine, squeezing whenever another flood of pain made her twist away from me.
I stayed beside her like that for as long as they let me, three hours, maybe longer. And as I say, for almost all of that time, she was far away inside herself. But just once, as she was twisting herself in a way that seemed scarily unnatural, and I was on the verge of calling the nurses for more painkillers, just for a few seconds, no more, she looked straight at me and she knew exactly who I was. 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. So I said to her: “It’s okay, I’m going to do it, Ruth. I’m going to become Tommy’s carer as soon as I can.” I said it under my breath, because I didn’t think she’d hear the words anyway, even if I shouted them. But my hope was that with our gazes locked as they were for those few seconds, she’d read my expression exactly as I’d read hers. Then the moment was over, and she was away again. Of course, I’ll never know for sure, but I think she did understand. And even if she didn’t, what occurs to me now is that she probably knew all along, even before I did, that I’d become Tommy’s carer, and that we’d “give it a try,” just as she’d told us to in the car that day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I became Tommy’s carer almost a year to the day after that trip to see the boat. It wasn’t long after Tommy’s third donation, and though he was recovering well, he was still needing a lot of time to rest, and as it turned out, that wasn’t a bad way at all for us to start this new phase together. Before long, I was getting used to the Kingsfield, growing to like it even.
Most donors at the Kingsfield get their own room after third donation, and Tommy was given one of the largest singles in the centre. Some people assumed afterwards I’d fixed it for him, but that wasn’t the case; it was just luck, and anyway, it wasn’t that great a room. I think it had been a bathroom back in the holiday camp days, because the only window had frosted glass and was really high up near the ceiling. You could only look out by standing on a chair and holding open the pane, and then you only got a view down onto the dense shrubbery. The room was L-shaped, which meant they could get in, as well as the usual bed, chair and wardrobe, a little school desk with a lift-up lid—an item that proved a real bonus, as I’ll explain.
I don’t want to give the wrong idea about that period at the Kingsfield. A lot of it was really relaxed, almost idyllic. My usual time to arrive was after lunch, and I’d come up to find Tommy stretched out on the narrow bed—always fully clothed because he didn’t want to “be like a patient.” I’d sit in the chair and read