Never let me go / Kazuo Ishiguro.
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Record details
- ISBN: 0739317989 :
- Physical Description: 8 audio discs (9 hr.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
- Publisher: New York : Random House Audio, [2005]
- Copyright: ℗2005
Content descriptions
General Note: | Unabridged. Compact disc. |
Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Rosalyn Landor. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Women > Fiction. England > Fiction. Cloning > Fiction. Organ donors > Fiction. Donation of organs, tissues, etc. > Fiction. |
Genre: | Psychological fiction. Science fiction. Audiobooks. |
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- 2 of 2 copies available at Evergreen Indiana.
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Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
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Hussey-Mayfield Mem. PL - Zionsville | CD FIC ISHIGURO (Text) | 33946002307358 | Adult Fiction Audiobooks | Available | - |
Whiting PL - Whiting | CD SFFIC ISH (Text) | 51735011002150 | Adult department--Audiobooks | Available | - |
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My name is Kathy H. Iâm thirty-one years old, and Iâve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. Thatâll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isnât necessarily because they think Iâm fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers whoâve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So Iâm not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact theyâve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as âagitated,â even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying âcalm.â Iâve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.
Anyway, Iâm not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and donât get half the credit. If youâre one of them, I can understand how you might get resentfulâabout my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And Iâm a Hailsham studentâwhich is enough by itself sometimes to get peopleâs backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. Iâve heard it said enough, so Iâm sure youâve heard it plenty more, and maybe thereâs something in it. But Iâm not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if Iâll be the last. And anyway, Iâve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, Iâll have done twelve years of this, and itâs only for the last six theyâve let me choose.
And why shouldnât they? Carers arenât machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You donât have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. Thatâs natural. Thereâs no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if Iâd stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if Iâd never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?
But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I havenât been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you donât have that deeper link with the donor, and though Iâll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.
Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differencesâwhile they didnât exactly vanishâseemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that weâd grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. Itâs ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.
There have been times over the years when Iâve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when Iâve told myself I shouldnât look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. Heâd just come through his third donation, it hadnât gone well, and he must have known he wasnât going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: âHailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.â Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where heâd grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didnât want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.
So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and heâd lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. Heâd ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes heâd make me say things over and over; things Iâd told him only the day before, heâd ask about like Iâd never told him. âDid you have a sports pavilion?â âWhich guardian was your special favourite?â At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so thatâs what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so theyâd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky weâd beenâTommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us.
.
Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside, and Iâll think: âMaybe thatâs it! Iâve found it! This actually is Hailsham!â Then I see itâs impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties, which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day Iâll crash the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car and went back for a second look.
We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2âwhen we were twelve, going on thirteenâthe pavilion had become the place to hide out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest of Hailsham.
The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each otherâin the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing. The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or free period. I wasnât exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.
Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and benchesâthereâd be five of us, six if Jenny B. came alongâand had a good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a while with your closest friends.
On the particular afternoon Iâm now thinking of, we were standing up on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface of the grass.
Someone said we shouldnât be so obvious about watching, but we hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: âHe doesnât suspect a thing. Look at him. He really doesnât suspect a thing.â
When she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: âThe idiot!â
And I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didnât come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again, but just because weâd heard about this latest plot and were vaguely curious to watch it unfold. In those days, I donât think what the boys did amongst themselves went much deeper than that. For Ruth, for the others, it was that detached, and the chances are thatâs how it was for me too.
Or maybe Iâm remembering it wrong. Maybe even then, when I saw Tommy rushing about that field, undisguised delight on his face to be accepted back in the fold again, about to play the game at which he so excelled, maybe I did feel a little stab of pain. What I do remember is that I noticed Tommy was wearing the light blue polo shirt heâd got in the Sales the previous monthâthe one he was so proud of. I remember thinking: âHeâs really stupid, playing football in that. Itâll get ruined, then howâs he going to feel?â Out loud, I said, to no one in particular: âTommyâs got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.â
I donât think anyone heard me, because they were all laughing at Lauraâthe big clown in our groupâmimicking one after the other the expressions that appeared on Tommyâs face as he ran, waved, called, tackled. The other boys were all moving around the field in that deliberately languorous way they have when theyâre warming up, but Tommy, in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt. I said, louder this time: âHeâs going to be so sick if he ruins that shirt.â This time Ruth heard me, but she must have thought Iâd meant it as some kind of joke, because she laughed half-heartedly, then made some quip of her own.
Then the boys had stopped kicking the ball about, and were standing in a pack in the mud, their chests gently rising and falling as they waited for the team picking to start. The two captains who emerged were from Senior 3, though everyone knew Tommy was a better player than any of that year. They tossed for first pick, then the one whoâd won stared at the group.
âLook at him,â someone behind me said. âHeâs completely convinced heâs going to be first pick. Just look at him!â
There was something comical about Tommy at that moment, something that made you think, well, yes, if heâs going to be that daft, he deserves whatâs coming. The other boys were all pre- tending to ignore the picking process, pretending they didnât care where they came in the order. Some were talking quietly to each other, some re-tying their laces, others just staring down at their feet as they trammelled the mud. But Tommy was looking eagerly at the Senior 3 boy, as though his name had already been called.
Laura kept up her performance all through the team-picking, doing all the different expressions that went across Tommyâs face: the bright eager one at the start; the puzzled concern when four picks had gone by and he still hadnât been chosen; the hurt and panic as it began to dawn on him what was really going on. I didnât keep glancing round at Laura, though, because I was watching Tommy; I only knew what she was doing because the others kept laughing and egging her on. Then when Tommy was left standing alone, and the boys all began sniggering, I heard Ruth say:
âItâs coming. Hold it. Seven seconds. Seven, six, five . . .â
She never got there. Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South Playing Field. Tommy took a few strides after themâit was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind. In any case he soon stopped and stood there, glaring after them, his face scarlet. Then he began to scream and shout, a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults.
Weâd all seen plenty of Tommyâs tantrums by then, so we came down off our stools and spread ourselves around the room. We tried to start up a conversation about something else, but there was Tommy going on and on in the background, and although at first we just rolled our eyes and tried to ignore it, in the endâprobably a full ten minutes after weâd first moved awayâwe were back up at the windows again.
The other boys were now completely out of view, and Tommy was no longer trying to direct his comments in any particular direction. He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post. Laura said he was maybe ârehearsing his Shakespeare.â Someone else pointed out how each time he screamed something heâd raise one foot off the ground, pointing it outwards, âlike a dog doing a pee.â Actually, Iâd noticed the same foot movement myself, but what had struck me was that each time he stamped the foot back down again, flecks of mud flew up around his shins. I thought again about his precious shirt, but he was too far away for me to see if heâd got much mud on it.
âI suppose it is a bit cruel,â Ruth said, âthe way they always work him up like that. But itâs his own fault. If he learnt to keep his cool, theyâd leave him alone.â
âTheyâd still keep on at him,â Hannah said. âGraham K.âs temperâs just as bad, but that only makes them all the more care- ful with him. The reason they go for Tommyâs because heâs a layabout.â
Then everyone was talking at once, about how Tommy never even tried to be creative, about how he hadnât even put anything in for the Spring Exchange. I suppose the truth was, by that stage, each of us was secretly wishing a guardian would come from the house and take him away. And although we hadnât had any part in this latest plan to rile Tommy, we had taken out ringside seats, and we were starting to feel guilty. But there was no sign of a guardian, so we just kept swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got. Then when Ruth looked at her watch and said even though we still had time, we should get back to the main house, nobody argued.
Tommy was still going strong as we came out of the pavilion. The house was over to our left, and since Tommy was standing in the field straight ahead of us, there was no need to go anywhere near him. In any case, he was facing the other way and didnât seem to register us at all. All the same, as my friends set off along the edge of the field, I started to drift over towards him. I knew this would puzzle the others, but I kept goingâeven when I heard Ruthâs urgent whisper to me to come back.
I suppose Tommy wasnât used to being disturbed during his rages, because his first response when I came up to him was to stare at me for a second, then carry on as before. It was like he was doing Shakespeare and Iâd come up onto the stage in the middle of his performance. Even when I said: âTommy, your nice shirt. Youâll get it all messed up,â there was no sign of him having heard me.
So I reached forward and put a hand on his arm. Afterwards, the others thought heâd meant to do it, but I was pretty sure it was unintentional. His arms were still flailing about, and he wasnât to know I was about to put out my hand. Anyway, as he threw up his arm, he knocked my hand aside and hit the side of my face. It didnât hurt at all, but I let out a gasp, and so did most of the girls behind me.
Thatâs when at last Tommy seemed to become aware of me, of the others, of himself, of the fact that he was there in that field, behaving the way he had been, and stared at me a bit stupidly.
âTommy,â I said, quite sternly. âThereâs mud all over your shirt.â
âSo what?â he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.
âItâs nothing to worry about,â I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. âItâll come off. If you canât get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.â
He went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily: âItâs nothing to do with you anyway.â
He seemed to regret immediately this last remark and looked at me sheepishly, as though expecting me to say something comforting back to him. But Iâd had enough of him by now, particularly with the girls watchingâand for all I knew, any number of others from the windows of the main house. So I turned away with a shrug and rejoined my friends.
Ruth put an arm around my shoulders as we walked away. âAt least you got him to pipe down,â she said. âAre you okay? Mad animal.â
From the Hardcover edition.
Anyway, Iâm not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and donât get half the credit. If youâre one of them, I can understand how you might get resentfulâabout my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And Iâm a Hailsham studentâwhich is enough by itself sometimes to get peopleâs backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. Iâve heard it said enough, so Iâm sure youâve heard it plenty more, and maybe thereâs something in it. But Iâm not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if Iâll be the last. And anyway, Iâve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, Iâll have done twelve years of this, and itâs only for the last six theyâve let me choose.
And why shouldnât they? Carers arenât machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You donât have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. Thatâs natural. Thereâs no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if Iâd stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if Iâd never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?
But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I havenât been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you donât have that deeper link with the donor, and though Iâll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.
Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differencesâwhile they didnât exactly vanishâseemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that weâd grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. Itâs ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.
There have been times over the years when Iâve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when Iâve told myself I shouldnât look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. Heâd just come through his third donation, it hadnât gone well, and he must have known he wasnât going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: âHailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.â Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where heâd grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didnât want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.
So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and heâd lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. Heâd ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes heâd make me say things over and over; things Iâd told him only the day before, heâd ask about like Iâd never told him. âDid you have a sports pavilion?â âWhich guardian was your special favourite?â At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so thatâs what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so theyâd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky weâd beenâTommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us.
.
Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside, and Iâll think: âMaybe thatâs it! Iâve found it! This actually is Hailsham!â Then I see itâs impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties, which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day Iâll crash the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car and went back for a second look.
We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2âwhen we were twelve, going on thirteenâthe pavilion had become the place to hide out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest of Hailsham.
The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each otherâin the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing. The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or free period. I wasnât exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.
Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and benchesâthereâd be five of us, six if Jenny B. came alongâand had a good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a while with your closest friends.
On the particular afternoon Iâm now thinking of, we were standing up on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface of the grass.
Someone said we shouldnât be so obvious about watching, but we hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: âHe doesnât suspect a thing. Look at him. He really doesnât suspect a thing.â
When she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: âThe idiot!â
And I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didnât come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again, but just because weâd heard about this latest plot and were vaguely curious to watch it unfold. In those days, I donât think what the boys did amongst themselves went much deeper than that. For Ruth, for the others, it was that detached, and the chances are thatâs how it was for me too.
Or maybe Iâm remembering it wrong. Maybe even then, when I saw Tommy rushing about that field, undisguised delight on his face to be accepted back in the fold again, about to play the game at which he so excelled, maybe I did feel a little stab of pain. What I do remember is that I noticed Tommy was wearing the light blue polo shirt heâd got in the Sales the previous monthâthe one he was so proud of. I remember thinking: âHeâs really stupid, playing football in that. Itâll get ruined, then howâs he going to feel?â Out loud, I said, to no one in particular: âTommyâs got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.â
I donât think anyone heard me, because they were all laughing at Lauraâthe big clown in our groupâmimicking one after the other the expressions that appeared on Tommyâs face as he ran, waved, called, tackled. The other boys were all moving around the field in that deliberately languorous way they have when theyâre warming up, but Tommy, in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt. I said, louder this time: âHeâs going to be so sick if he ruins that shirt.â This time Ruth heard me, but she must have thought Iâd meant it as some kind of joke, because she laughed half-heartedly, then made some quip of her own.
Then the boys had stopped kicking the ball about, and were standing in a pack in the mud, their chests gently rising and falling as they waited for the team picking to start. The two captains who emerged were from Senior 3, though everyone knew Tommy was a better player than any of that year. They tossed for first pick, then the one whoâd won stared at the group.
âLook at him,â someone behind me said. âHeâs completely convinced heâs going to be first pick. Just look at him!â
There was something comical about Tommy at that moment, something that made you think, well, yes, if heâs going to be that daft, he deserves whatâs coming. The other boys were all pre- tending to ignore the picking process, pretending they didnât care where they came in the order. Some were talking quietly to each other, some re-tying their laces, others just staring down at their feet as they trammelled the mud. But Tommy was looking eagerly at the Senior 3 boy, as though his name had already been called.
Laura kept up her performance all through the team-picking, doing all the different expressions that went across Tommyâs face: the bright eager one at the start; the puzzled concern when four picks had gone by and he still hadnât been chosen; the hurt and panic as it began to dawn on him what was really going on. I didnât keep glancing round at Laura, though, because I was watching Tommy; I only knew what she was doing because the others kept laughing and egging her on. Then when Tommy was left standing alone, and the boys all began sniggering, I heard Ruth say:
âItâs coming. Hold it. Seven seconds. Seven, six, five . . .â
She never got there. Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South Playing Field. Tommy took a few strides after themâit was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind. In any case he soon stopped and stood there, glaring after them, his face scarlet. Then he began to scream and shout, a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults.
Weâd all seen plenty of Tommyâs tantrums by then, so we came down off our stools and spread ourselves around the room. We tried to start up a conversation about something else, but there was Tommy going on and on in the background, and although at first we just rolled our eyes and tried to ignore it, in the endâprobably a full ten minutes after weâd first moved awayâwe were back up at the windows again.
The other boys were now completely out of view, and Tommy was no longer trying to direct his comments in any particular direction. He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post. Laura said he was maybe ârehearsing his Shakespeare.â Someone else pointed out how each time he screamed something heâd raise one foot off the ground, pointing it outwards, âlike a dog doing a pee.â Actually, Iâd noticed the same foot movement myself, but what had struck me was that each time he stamped the foot back down again, flecks of mud flew up around his shins. I thought again about his precious shirt, but he was too far away for me to see if heâd got much mud on it.
âI suppose it is a bit cruel,â Ruth said, âthe way they always work him up like that. But itâs his own fault. If he learnt to keep his cool, theyâd leave him alone.â
âTheyâd still keep on at him,â Hannah said. âGraham K.âs temperâs just as bad, but that only makes them all the more care- ful with him. The reason they go for Tommyâs because heâs a layabout.â
Then everyone was talking at once, about how Tommy never even tried to be creative, about how he hadnât even put anything in for the Spring Exchange. I suppose the truth was, by that stage, each of us was secretly wishing a guardian would come from the house and take him away. And although we hadnât had any part in this latest plan to rile Tommy, we had taken out ringside seats, and we were starting to feel guilty. But there was no sign of a guardian, so we just kept swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got. Then when Ruth looked at her watch and said even though we still had time, we should get back to the main house, nobody argued.
Tommy was still going strong as we came out of the pavilion. The house was over to our left, and since Tommy was standing in the field straight ahead of us, there was no need to go anywhere near him. In any case, he was facing the other way and didnât seem to register us at all. All the same, as my friends set off along the edge of the field, I started to drift over towards him. I knew this would puzzle the others, but I kept goingâeven when I heard Ruthâs urgent whisper to me to come back.
I suppose Tommy wasnât used to being disturbed during his rages, because his first response when I came up to him was to stare at me for a second, then carry on as before. It was like he was doing Shakespeare and Iâd come up onto the stage in the middle of his performance. Even when I said: âTommy, your nice shirt. Youâll get it all messed up,â there was no sign of him having heard me.
So I reached forward and put a hand on his arm. Afterwards, the others thought heâd meant to do it, but I was pretty sure it was unintentional. His arms were still flailing about, and he wasnât to know I was about to put out my hand. Anyway, as he threw up his arm, he knocked my hand aside and hit the side of my face. It didnât hurt at all, but I let out a gasp, and so did most of the girls behind me.
Thatâs when at last Tommy seemed to become aware of me, of the others, of himself, of the fact that he was there in that field, behaving the way he had been, and stared at me a bit stupidly.
âTommy,â I said, quite sternly. âThereâs mud all over your shirt.â
âSo what?â he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.
âItâs nothing to worry about,â I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. âItâll come off. If you canât get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.â
He went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily: âItâs nothing to do with you anyway.â
He seemed to regret immediately this last remark and looked at me sheepishly, as though expecting me to say something comforting back to him. But Iâd had enough of him by now, particularly with the girls watchingâand for all I knew, any number of others from the windows of the main house. So I turned away with a shrug and rejoined my friends.
Ruth put an arm around my shoulders as we walked away. âAt least you got him to pipe down,â she said. âAre you okay? Mad animal.â
From the Hardcover edition.