It was just the way she said it, suddenly so false even an onlooker, if there’d been one, would have seen through it. I sighed with irritation and said:

“Ruth, don’t give me that. There’s no way you’ve forgotten.

You know that route was out of bounds.” Maybe it was a bit sharp, the way I said it. Anyway, Ruth didn’t back down. She continued pretending to remember nothing, and I got all the more irritated. And that was when she said:

“What does it matter anyway? What’s the rhubarb patch got to do with anything? Just get on with what you were saying.”

KAZUO ISHIGURO

After that I think we went back to talking in a more or less friendly way, and then before long we were making our way down the footpath in the half-light back to the Cottages. But the atmosphere never quite righted itself, and when we said our goodnights in front of the Black Barn, we parted without our usual little touches on the arms and shoulders.

IT WASN’T LONG AFTER THAT I made my decision, and once I’d made it, I never wavered. I just got up one morning and told Keffers I wanted to start my training to become a carer. It was surprisingly easy. He was walking across the yard, his Wellingtons covered in mud, grumbling to himself and holding a piece of piping. I went up and told him, and he just looked at me like I’d bothered him about more firewood. Then he mumbled something about coming to see him later that afternoon to go through the forms. It was that easy.

It took a little while after that, of course, but the whole thing had been set in motion, and I was suddenly looking at everything—the Cottages, everybody there—in a different light. I was now one of the ones leaving, and soon enough, everyone knew it. Maybe Ruth thought we’d be spending hours talking about my future; maybe she thought she’d have a big influence on NEVER LET ME GO

whether or not I changed my mind. But I kept a certain distance from her, just as I did from Tommy. We didn’t really talk properly again at the Cottages, and before I knew it, I was saying my goodbyes.

KAZUO ISHIGURO

PART THREE

NEVER LET ME GO

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For the most part being a carer’s suited me fine. You could even say it’s brought the best out of me. But some people just aren’t cut out for it, and for them the whole thing becomes a real struggle. They might start off positively enough, but then comes all that time spent so close to the pain and the worry. And sooner or later a donor doesn’t make it, even though, say, it’s only the second donation and no one anticipated complications. When a donor completes like that, out of the blue, it doesn’t make much difference what the nurses say to you afterwards, and neither does that letter saying how they’re sure you did all you could and to keep up the good work. For a while at least, you’re demoralised.

Some of us learn pretty quick how to deal with it. But others—like Laura, say—they never do.

Then there’s the solitude. You grow up surrounded by crowds of people, that’s all you’ve ever known, and suddenly you’re a carer. You spend hour after hour, on your own, driving across the country, centre to centre, hospital to hospital, sleeping in overnights, no one to talk to about your worries, no one to have a laugh with. Just now and again you run into a student you know—a carer or donor you recognise from the old days—but KAZUO ISHIGURO

there’s never much time. You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the travelling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.

I don’t claim I’ve been immune to all of this, but I’ve learnt to live with it. Some carers, though, their whole attitude lets them down. A lot of them, you can tell, are just going through the motions, waiting for the day they’re told they can stop and become donors. It really gets me, too, the way so many of them “shrink” the moment they step inside a hospital. They don’t know what to say to the whitecoats, they can’t make themselves speak up on behalf of their donor. No wonder they end up feeling frustrated and blaming themselves when things go wrong. I try not to make a nuisance of myself, but I’ve figured out how to get my voice heard when I have to. And when things go badly, of course I’m upset, but at least I can feel I’ve done all I could and keep things in perspective.

Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to a bit more companionship come the end of the year when I’m finished with all of this. But I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the NEVER LET ME GO

next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big grey sky and my daydreams for company. And if I’m in a town somewhere with several minutes to kill, I’ll enjoy myself wandering about looking in the shop windows. Here in my bedsit, I’ve got these four desk-lamps, each a different colour, but all the same design—they have these ribbed necks you can bend whichever way you want. So I might go looking for a shop with another lamp like that in its window—not to buy, but just to compare with my ones at home.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust. That’s the way it was the morning I was walking across the windswept car park of the service station and spotted Laura, sitting behind the wheel of one of the parked cars, looking vacantly towards the motorway. I was still some way away, and just for a second, even though we hadn’t met since the Cottages seven years before, I was tempted to ignore her and keep walking. An odd reaction, I know, considering she’d been one of my closest friends. As I say, it may have been partly because I didn’t like being bumped out of my daydreams. But also, I suppose, when I saw Laura slumped in her car like that, I saw immediately she’d become one of these carers I’ve just been KAZUO ISHIGURO

describing, and a part of me just didn’t want to find out much more about it.

But of course I did go to her. There was a chilly wind blowing against me as I walked over to her hatchback, parked away from the other vehicles. Laura was wearing a shapeless blue anorak, and her hair—a lot shorter than before—was sticking to her forehead. When I tapped on her window, she didn’t start, or even look surprised to see me after all that time. It was almost like she’d been sitting there waiting, if not for me precisely, then for someone more or less like me from the old days. And now I’d shown up, her first thought seemed to be: “At last!” Because I could see her shoulders move in a kind of sigh, then without further ado, she reached over to open the door for me.

We talked for about twenty minutes: I didn’t leave until the last possible moment. A lot of it was about her, how exhausted she’d been, how difficult one of her donors was, how much she loathed this nurse or that doctor. I waited to see a flash of the old Laura, with the mischievous grin and inevitable wisecrack, but none of that came. She talked faster than she used to, and although she seemed pleased to see me, I sometimes got the impression it wouldn’t have mattered much if it wasn’t me, but someone else, so long as she got to talk.

NEVER LET ME GO

Maybe we both felt there was something dangerous about bringing up the old days, because for ages we avoided any mention of them. In the end, though, we found ourselves talking about Ruth, who Laura had run into at a clinic a few years earlier, when Ruth was still a carer. I began quizzing her about how Ruth had been, but she was so unforthcoming, in the end I said to her:

“Look, you must have talked about something. ” Laura let out a long sigh. “You know how it gets,” she said.

“We were both in a hurry.” Then she added: “Anyway, we hadn’t parted the best of friends, back at the Cottages. So maybe we weren’t so delighted to see one another.”

“I didn’t realise you’d fallen out with her too,” I said.

She shrugged. “It wasn’t any big deal. You remember the way she was back then. If anything, after you left, she got worse.

You know, always telling everyone what to do. So I was keeping out of her way, that was all. We never had a big fight or anything.

So you haven’t seen her since then?”

“No. Funny, but I’ve never even glimpsed her.”

“Yeah, it’s funny. You’d think we’d all run into each other much more. I’ve seen Hannah a few times. And Michael H. too.” KAZUO ISHIGURO

Then she said: “I heard this rumour, that Ruth had a really bad first donation. Just a rumour, but I heard it more than once.”

“I heard that too,” I said.

“Poor Ruth.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then Laura asked: “Is it right, Kathy? That they let you choose your donors now?” She’d not asked in the accusing way people do sometimes, so I nodded and said: “Not every time. But I did well with a few donors, so yeah, I get to have a say every now and then.”

“If you can choose,” Laura said, “why don’t you become Ruth’s carer?”