Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [32]
“Madame’s probably not a bad person, even though she’s creepy. So when she saw you dancing like that, holding your baby, she thought it was really tragic, how you couldn’t have babies. That’s why she started crying.”
“But Tommy,” I pointed out, “how could she have known the song had anything to do with people having babies? How could she have known the pillow I was holding was supposed to be a baby? That was only in my head.”
Tommy thought about this, then said only half jokingly: “Maybe Madame can read minds. She’s strange. Maybe she can see right inside you. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
This gave us both a little chill, and though we giggled, we didn’t say any more about it.
THE TAPE DISAPPEARED a couple of months after the incident with Madame. I never linked the two events at the time and I’ve no reason to link them now. I was in the dorm one night, just before lights-out, and was rummaging through my collection chest to pass the time until the others came back from the bathroom. It’s odd but when it first dawned on me the tape wasn’t there any more, my main thought was that I mustn’t give away how panicked I was. I can remember actually making a point of humming absent-mindedly while I went on searching. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t know how to explain it: these were my closest friends in that room with me and yet I didn’t want them to know how upset I was about my tape going missing.
I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that—little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time—like somehow we were letting the side down.
Anyway, once I was quite sure the tape was gone, I asked each of the others in the dorm, very casually, if they’d seen it. I wasn’t yet completely distraught because there was just the chance I’d left it in the billiards room; otherwise my hope was that someone had borrowed it and would give it back in the morning.
Well, the tape didn’t turn up the next day and I’ve still no idea what happened to it. The truth is, I suppose, there was far more thieving going on at Hailsham than we—or the guardians—ever wanted to admit. But the reason I’m going into all this now is to explain about Ruth and how she reacted. What you have to remember is that I lost my tape less than a month after that time Midge had quizzed Ruth in the Art Room about her pencil case and I’d come to the rescue. Ever since, as I told you, Ruth had been looking out for something nice to do for me in return, and the tape disappearing gave her a real opportunity. You could even say it wasn’t until after my tape vanished that things got back to normal with us—maybe for the first time since that rainy morning I’d mentioned the Sales Register to her under the eaves of the main house.
The night I first noticed the tape had gone, I’d made sure to ask everyone about it, and that of course had included Ruth. Looking back, I can see how she must have realised, then and there, exactly what losing the tape meant to me, and at the same time, how important it was for me there was no fuss. So she’d replied that night with a distracted shrug and gone on with what she was doing. But the next morning, when I was coming back from the bathroom, I could hear her—in a casual voice like it wasn’t anything much—asking Hannah if she was sure she hadn’t seen my tape.
Then maybe a fortnight later, when I’d long reconciled myself to having truly lost my tape, she came and found me during the lunch break. It was one of the first really good days of spring that year, and I’d been sitting on the grass talking with a couple of the older girls. When Ruth came up and asked if I