Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [93]
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