Free Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Page A

fell easily within them. Still, I hated it when Ruth hinted in this way. I was never sure, of course, if she was telling the truth, but since she wasn’t actually “telling” it, only hinting, it was never possible to challenge her. So each time it happened, I’d have to let it go, biting my lip and hoping the moment would pass quickly.
    Sometimes I’d see from the way a conversation was moving that one of these moments was coming, and I’d brace myself. Even then, it would always hit me with some force, so that for several minutes I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything going on around me. But on that winter morning in Room 5, it had come at me straight out of the blue. Even after I’d seen the pencil case, the idea of a guardian giving a present like that was so beyond the bounds, I hadn’t seen it coming at all. So once Ruth had said what she’d said, I wasn’t able, in my usual way, to let the emotional flurry just pass. I just stared at her, making no attempt to disguise my anger. Ruth, perhaps seeing danger, said to me quickly in a stage whisper: “Not a word!” and smiled again. But I couldn’t return the smile and went on glaring at her. Then luckily the guardian arrived and the class started.
    I was never the sort of kid who brooded over things for hours on end. I’ve got that way a bit these days, but that’s the work I do and the long hours of quiet when I’m driving across these empty fields. I wasn’t like, say, Laura, who for all her clowning around could worry for days, weeks even, about some little thing someone said to her. But after that morning in Room 5, I did go around in a bit of a trance. I’d drift off in the middle of conversations; whole lessons went by with me not knowing what was going on. I was determined Ruth shouldn’t get away with it this time, but for a long while I wasn’t doing anything constructive about it; just playing fantastic scenes in my head where I’d expose her and force her to admit she’d made it up. I even had one hazy fantasy where Miss Geraldine herself heard about it and gave Ruth a complete dressing-down in front of everyone.
    After days of this I started to think more solidly. If the pencil case hadn’t come from Miss Geraldine, where had it come from? She might have got it from another student, but that was unlikely. If it had belonged to anyone else first, even someone years above us, a gorgeous item like that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Ruth would never risk a story like hers knowing the pencil case had already knocked around Hailsham. Almost certainly she’d found it at a Sale. Here, too, Ruth ran the risk of others having seen it before she’d bought it. But if—as sometimes happened, though it wasn’t really allowed—she’d heard about the pencil case coming in and reserved it with one of the monitors before the Sale opened, she could then be reasonably confident hardly anyone had seen it.
    Unfortunately for Ruth, though, there were registers kept of everything bought at the Sales, along with a record of who’d done the buying. While these registers weren’t easily obtainable—the monitors took them back to Miss Emily’s office after each Sale—they weren’t top secret either. If I hung around a monitor at the next Sale, it wouldn’t be difficult to browse through the pages.
    So I had the outlines of a plan, and I think I went on refining it for several days before it occurred to me it wasn’t actually necessary to carry out all the steps. Provided I was right about the pencil case coming from a Sale, all I had to do was bluff.
    That was how Ruth and I came to have our conversation under the eaves. There was fog and drizzle that day. The two of us were walking from the dorm huts perhaps towards the pavilion, I’m not sure. Anyway, as we were crossing the courtyard, the rain suddenly got heavier and since we were in no hurry, we tucked ourselves in under the eaves of the main house, a little to one side of the front