Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [121]
I’d feel a similar little prickle of resentment each time he told me I didn’t understand something or other because I wasn’t yet a donor. But apart from one particular time, which I’ll come to in a moment, a little prickle was all it was. Usually he’d say these things to me half-jokingly, almost affectionately. And even when there was something more to it, like the time he told me to stop taking his dirty washing to the laundry because he could do it himself, it hardly amounted to a row. That time, I’d asked him:
“What difference does it make, which one of us takes the towels down? I’m going out that way anyway.”
To which he’d shaken his head and said: “Look, Kath, I’ll sort out my own things. If you were a donor, you’d see.”
Okay, it did niggle, but it was something I could forget easily enough. But as I say, there was this one time he brought it up, about my not being a donor, that really riled me.
It happened about a week after the notice came for his fourth donation. We’d been expecting it and had already talked it through a lot. In fact, we’d had some of our most intimate conversations since the Littlehampton trip discussing the fourth donation. I’ve known donors to react in all sorts of ways to their fourth donation. Some want to talk about it all the time, endlessly and pointlessly. Others will only joke about it, while others refuse to discuss it at all. And then there’s this odd tendency among donors to treat a fourth donation as something worthy of congratulations. A donor “on a fourth,” even one who’s been pretty unpopular up till then, is treated with special respect. Even the doctors and nurses play up to this: a donor on a fourth will go in for a check and be greeted by whitecoats smiling and shaking their hand. Well, Tommy and I, we talked about all of this, sometimes jokingly, other times seriously and carefully. We discussed all the different ways people tried to handle it, and which ways made the best sense. Once, lying side by side on the bed with the dark coming on, he said:
“You know why it is, Kath, why everyone worries so much about the fourth? It’s because they’re not sure they’ll really complete. If you knew for certain you’d complete, it would be easier. But they never tell us for sure.”
I’d been wondering for a while if this would come up, and I’d been thinking about how I’d respond. But when it did, I couldn’t find much to say. So I just said: “It’s just a lot of rubbish, Tommy. Just talk, wild talk. It’s not even worth thinking about.”
But Tommy would have known I had nothing to back up my words. He’d have known, too, he was raising questions to which even the doctors had no certain answers. You’ll have heard the same talk. How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off. It’s horror movie stuff, and most of the time people don’t want to think about it. Not the whitecoats, not the carers—and usually not the donors. But now and again, a donor will bring it up, as Tommy did that evening, and I wish now we’d talked about it. As it was, after I dismissed it as rubbish, we both shrank back from the whole territory. At least, though, I knew it was on Tommy’s mind after that, and I was glad he’d at least confided in me that far. What I’m saying is that all in all I was under the impression we were dealing with the fourth donation pretty well together, and that’s why I was so knocked off balance by what he came out with that day we walked around the field.
THE KINGSFIELD DOESN’T HAVE