meant. Christopher went on eating, then said nonchalantly:
“Don’t you know? If it’s right on the elbow like that, it can
I could hear Tommy complaining that Crow Face hadn’t warned him of anything of that sort, but Christopher shrugged and said: “She thought you knew, of course. Everyone knows.”
A number of people nearby murmured agreement. “You’ve got to keep your arm dead straight,” someone else said. “Bending it at all’s really dangerous.”
The next day I could see Tommy going about with his arm held out very rigidly and looking worried. Everybody was laughing at him, and I was cross about that, but I had to admit, there was a funny side to it. Then towards the end of the afternoon as we were leaving the Art Room, he came up to me in the corridor and said: “Kath, can I just have a quick word?”
This was maybe a couple of weeks after the time I’d gone up to him in the playing field to remind him about his polo shirt, so it had got about we were special friends of some sort. All the same, his coming up like that asking for a private talk was pretty embarrassing and threw me off balance. Maybe that partly explains why I wasn’t more helpful than I was.
“I’m not too worried or anything,” he began, once he’d got me aside. “But I wanted to play safe, that’s all. We should never take chances with our health. I need someone to help, Kath.” He was, he explained, concerned about what he’d do in his sleep. He might easily bend his elbow in the night. “I have these dreams all the time where I’m fighting loads of Roman soldiers.”
When I quizzed him a bit, it became obvious all kinds of people—people who hadn’t been there that lunch- time—had been coming up to him to repeat Christopher H.’s warning. In fact, it seemed a few had carried the joke further: Tommy had been told of a student who’d gone to sleep with a cut on the elbow just like his and woken up to find his whole upper arm and hand skeletally exposed, the skin flopping about next to him “like one of those long gloves in
What Tommy was asking me now was to help tie a splint on the arm to keep it rigid through the night.
“I don’t trust any of the others,” he said, holding up a thick ruler he wanted to use. “They might deliberately do it so it comes undone in the night.”
He was looking at me in complete innocence and I didn’t know what to say. A part of me wanted badly to tell him what was going on, and I suppose I knew that to do anything else would be to betray the trust we’d built up since the moment I’d reminded him about his polo shirt. And for me to strap up his arm in a splint would have meant my becoming one of the main perpetrators of the joke. I still feel ashamed I didn’t tell him then. But you’ve got to remember I was still young, and that I only had a few seconds to decide. And when someone’s asking you to do something in such a pleading way, everything goes against saying no.
I suppose the main thing was that I didn’t want to upset him. Because I could see, for all his anxiety about his elbow, Tommy was touched by all the concern he believed had been shown him. Of course, I knew he’d find out the truth sooner or later, but at that moment I just couldn’t tell him. The best I could do was to ask:
“Did Crow Face tell you you had to do this?”
“No. But imagine how angry she’d be if my elbow slipped out.”
I still feel bad about it, but I promised to strap his arm for him—in Room 14 half an hour before the night bell—and watched him go off grateful and reassured.
As it happened, I didn’t have to go through with it because Tommy found out first. It was around eight in the evening, I was coming down the main staircase, and heard a burst of laughter rising up the stairwell from the ground floor. My heart sank because I knew immediately it was to do with Tommy. I paused on the first-floor landing and looked over the rail just as Tommy came out of the billiards room with thunderous footsteps. I remember thinking: “At least he’s not shouting.” And he didn’t, the whole time he went to the cloakroom, got his things and left the main house. And all that time, laughter kept coming from the open doorway of the billiards room, and voices yelling things like: “If you lose your temper, your elbow will
I thought about following him out into the evening and catching up with him before he got to his dorm hut, but then I remembered how I’d promised to put his arm in a splint for the night, and didn’t move. I just kept saying to myself: “At least he didn’t have a tantrum. At least he kept hold of that temper.”
But I’ve gone off a bit. The reason I was talking about all this was because the idea of things “unzipping” carried over from Tommy’s elbow to become a running joke among us about the donations. The idea was that when the time came, you’d be able just to unzip a bit of yourself, a kidney or something would slide out, and you’d hand it over. It wasn’t something we found so funny in itself; it was more a way of putting each other off our food. You unzipped your liver, say, and dumped it on someone’s plate, that sort of thing. I remember once Gary B., who had this unbelievable appetite, coming back with a third helping of pudding, and virtually the whole table “unzipping” bits of themselves and piling it all over Gary’s bowl, while he went on determinedly stuffing himself.
Tommy never liked it much when the unzipping stuff came up again, but by then the days of his being teased were past and no one connected the joke with him any more. It was just done to get a laugh, to put someone off their dinner—and, I suppose, as some way of acknowledging what was in front of us. And this was my original point. By that time in our lives, we no longer shrank from the subject of donations as we’d have done a year or two earlier; but neither did we think about it very seriously, or discuss it. All that business about “unzipping,” that was typical of the way the whole subject impinged on us when we were thirteen.
So I’d say Miss Lucy had it about right when she said, a couple of years later, that we’d been “told and not told.” And what’s more, now I think about it, I’d say what Miss Lucy said to us that afternoon led to a real shift in our attitudes. It was after that day, jokes about donations faded away, and we started to think properly about things. If anything, the donations went back to being a subject to be avoided, but not in the way it had been when we were younger. This time round it wasn’t awkward or embarrassing any more; just sombre and serious.
“It’s funny,” Tommy said to me when we were remembering it all again a few years ago. “None of us stopped to think about how
“But you can’t blame us,” I said. “We’d been taught to think about each other, but never about the guardians. The idea the guardians had differences between them, that never occurred to us.”
“But we were old enough,” Tommy said. “By that age, it
I knew straight away what he meant. He was talking about the morning early in our last summer at Hailsham, when I’d stumbled across her up in Room 22. Thinking about it now, I’d say Tommy had a point. After that moment it should have been clear, even to us, how troubled Miss Lucy had become. But as he said, we never considered anything from her viewpoint, and it never occurred to us to say or do anything to support her.
Chapter Eight
Many of us had turned sixteen by then. It was a morning of brilliant sunshine and we’d all just come down to the courtyard after a lesson in the main house, when I remembered something I’d left in the classroom. So I went back up to the third floor and that’s how the thing with Miss Lucy happened.
In those days I had this secret game. When I found myself alone, I’d stop and look for a view—out of a window, say, or through a doorway into a room—any view so long as there were no people in it. I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others. To make this work, you had to get yourself into a sort of dream, and shut off all the stray noises and voices. Usually you had to be pretty patient too: if, say, you were focusing from a window on one particular bit of the playing field, you could wait ages for those couple of seconds when there wasn’t anyone at all in your frame. Anyway, that was what I was doing that morning after I’d fetched whatever it was I’d left in the classroom and come back out onto the third-floor landing.
