Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [99]
“Since we’re on the subject of posters. There was one I noticed on the way out. It should be coming up again pretty soon. It’ll be on our side this time. It should come up any time now.”
“What’s it of?” Tommy asked.
“You’ll see. It’ll be coming up soon.”
I glanced at Ruth beside me. There was no anger in her eyes, just a kind of wariness. There was even a sort of hope, I thought, that when the poster appeared, it would be perfectly innocuous—something that reminded us of Hailsham, something like that. I could see all of this in her face, the way it didn’t quite settle on any one expression, but hovered tentatively. All the time, her gaze remained fixed in front of her.
I slowed down the car and pulled over, bumping up onto the rough grass verge.
“Why are we stopping, Kath?” Tommy asked.
“Because you can see it best from here. Any nearer, we have to look up at it too much.”
I could hear Tommy shifting behind us, trying to get a better view. Ruth didn’t move, and I wasn’t even sure she was looking at the poster at all.
“Okay, it’s not exactly the same,” I said after a moment. “But it reminded me. Open-plan office, smart smiling people.”
Ruth stayed silent, but Tommy said from the back: “I get it. You mean, like that place we went to that time.”
“Not only that,” I said. “It’s a lot like that ad. The one we found on the ground. You remember, Ruth?”
“I’m not sure I do,” she said quietly.
“Oh, come on. You remember. We found it in a magazine in some lane. Near a puddle. You were really taken by it. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”
“I think I do.” Ruth’s voice was now almost a whisper. A lorry went past, making our car wobble and, for a few seconds, obscuring our view of the hoarding. Ruth bowed her head, as though she hoped the lorry had removed the image forever, and when we could see it clearly again, she didn’t raise her gaze.
“It’s funny,” I said, “remembering it all now. Remember how you used to go on about it? How you’d one day work in an office like that one?”
“Oh yeah, that was why we went that day,” Tommy said, like he’d only that second remembered. “When we went to Norfolk. We went to find your possible. Working in an office.”
“Don’t you sometimes think,” I said to Ruth, “you should have looked into it more? All right, you’d have been the first. The first one any of us would have heard of getting to do something like that. But you might have done it. Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you’d tried?”
“How could I have tried?” Ruth’s voice was hardly audible. “It’s just something I once dreamt about. That’s all.”
“But if you’d at least looked into it. How do you know? They might have let you.”
“Yeah, Ruth,” Tommy said. “Maybe you should at least have tried. After going on about it so much. I think Kath’s got a point.”
“I didn’t go on about it, Tommy. At least, I don’t remember going on about it.”
“But Tommy’s right. You should at least have tried. Then you could see a poster like that one, and remember that’s what you wanted once, and that you at least looked into it . . .”
“How could I have looked into it?” For the first time, Ruth’s voice had hardened, but then she let out a sigh and looked down again. Then Tommy said:
“You kept talking like you might qualify for special treatment. And for all you know, you might have done. You should have asked at least.”
“Okay,” Ruth said. “You say I should have looked into it. How? Where would I have gone? There wasn’t a way to look into it.”
“Tommy’s right though,” I said. “If you believed yourself special, you should at least have asked. You should have gone to Madame and asked.”
As soon as I said this—as soon as I mentioned Madame—I realised I’d made a mistake. Ruth looked up at me and I saw something like triumph flash across her face. You see it in films sometimes, when one person’s pointing a gun at another person, and the one with the gun’s making the other one do all kinds of things. Then suddenly there’s a mistake, a tussle, and the gun’s with the second person.