Introduction:  The following novel in installments could, I suppose, be classified as fan fiction. After reading Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian work Never Let Me Go, I couldn't let go of his melancholy and moving premise. I bought a signed copy of his book, and reread it whenever the solemn mood struck. But that wasn't enough. I began writing a sequel to Never Let Me Go, but was unable to get permission to try to have it published. Here it is, with occasional interludes of other musings that keep me awake at night.                                      

                                   WE KNEW, BUT WE DIDN'T KNOW

                                                   by Grace Millman

CHAPTER ONE

 

I was Kathy H’s carer after her last donation. That was to be my final posting. We spent five weeks together before she completed. She was one of the oldest donor’s in the entire United Kingdom — 34 years. That made her somewhat of an urban legend, that and the fact that she was supposedly the last Hailsham donor. And me? I was 25, but I felt tired and old and far too knowing and unknowing.

Like all of us, I’d heard so much about Hailsham over the years. To us, it was Camelot, a kingdom of incomprehensible beauty, so when I first saw Kathy, I was disappointed by how ordinary she looked. She didn’t look exactly old, but rather wan and bent and tired. Her eyes were a pale blue and her hair what is unflatteringly referred to as ditchwater blond. Still, she had a lovely, soft smile that curved upward slowly. Her lips were full and naturally rosy. Her voice was soft and deep.

The surgical-recovery complex was named Windmere Heights. The building itself still exists, but it’s been used as a community centre for the elderly for the past six years. I showed my pass to the receptionist in the nursing station on the third floor. The third floor was restricted to third or fourth time donors. It was more of a hospice than intensive care unit. Kathy was sitting up in bed bushing her long fine hair with a pink plastic brush. When I approached her bedside, she smiled that sweet, slow smile of hers.

“I never thought I would make it to donation number three. And now look at me. I may even be recovering.”

“Yes, you did start donating really late. You gave so many of us hope. We thought if donations could be deferred long enough, they might be avoided altogether. That’s really why I tried so hard to be a Class A carer.”

“And your name is?”

“Sophie. Sophie A. I’ve wanted to meet you for the longest time, Kathy. I’m your new carer.”

“I suppose that’s one way to phrase it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We both know that you’re my last carer, Sophie, and that is why I hope we get on famously. I’m truly interested in your early situation. I was always too fearful to ask about the other schools, and everyone seemed to want to make my memories of Hailsham their own, but I’ve become very curious about what life was like for the rest of you.”

“Would you like me to start right now? I can tell you about Ingersoll, which wasn’t a proper boarding school. It was more of a holding centre. We did have lessons and classes, though, but they were about subjects like cleanliness, donor ethics, time management, physical fitness and such. In fact, our centre’s motto was a George Bernard Shaw quotation:

 

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”

 

Kathy began to snicker, and at that moment a piped Muzak tune based tinnily on ‘Like A Bridge Over Troubled Water’ fused with her laughter.

“We’re like that muzak,” I remarked. I couldn’t help myself.

Kathy added, “I’ve often wondered why they don’t play real music in places where real people work.” And then she said something that I didn’t understand at all. ”This tune really takes me back, all the way back to Bridgewater.”

 

I wanted to ask her what she meant, but I could tell by her voice and her posture that she was getting tired, so I turned off the harsh light attached to her headboard. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk about Hailsham and Ingersoll,” I murmured, but she was either sleeping or pretending to be. On the walk back to my flat, I realised that Kathy, despite her fame, wasn’t going to get a reprieve. If she managed to recover from this donation, she would be scheduled for another. It was precisely then that I understood that none of the good rumours were true, and in all likelihood, most of the bad ones were.

At Ingersoll, there was no expression of adult affection toward the boarders. We had instructors and monitors, and policy forbade both signs of tenderness and harshness. There was one instructor, Miss Veronique, who was always very gentle and patient with us. I remember once when we were forming a queue outside of her ethics class, her fingers lightly brushed my shoulder. The touch was as light as moth wings, but the shock of it burned through the thick fabric of my winter tunic. Miss Veronique didn’t last long; she disappeared after her first Fall-Winter semester.

Ingersoll was a drab, squat cement building with inner passageway connecting Blocks A, B and C. The dorms were in Block B, and there were fifteen beds to a room. Each of us had a narrow cot, plastic bedside table and metal locker. The lockers didn’t come equipped with locks. A spirit of comradery was not encouraged, but neither was it entirely quashed. Throughout my years there, I had two best mates: Sylvia D and Carla C. I know what they say about threesomes: Two’s company; three’s a crowd. But it was never like that with Sylvia, Carla and me. For as long as I can recall, we had a tacit pact to have one another’s backs and that’s how it was.

We must have made a funny-looking trio. Sylvia was a tall, thin girl, Carla was short and compact and I was smack dab in the middle. Sylvia was a ginger, Carla had short, thick chestnut-honey hair and I was a brunette. If I had to say which one of us was the leader, I’d pick Carla, but it wasn’t fixed in stone or anything like that. On the few occasions when I’ve talked about our little triad to others, I’ve been told that I’m describing it as more idyllic than it could possibly have been. I’ve been told there must have been rows and squabbles among us, but if there were, I don’t remember them. I’m quite sure that’s because of Miss Veronique’s cinema lessons. Although there were no television sets at Ingersoll, we did watch documentaries and even a few movies in various classes, particularly Miss Veronique’s.

Miss Veronique was a rose-gold mystery. She wore her platinum-dyed hair long and straight, and she had the prettiest clothes in alluring fabrics of silk, velvet and supple suede. She always wore the same shade of shimmering lipstick, which I thought looked like a golden rose or a rosy gold. There was a rumour that Miss Veronique showed us so many movies because she was lazy and that’s why she was sacked, but I never believed that.

I now see that her choices of films were approved by the administration for their propaganda value, but she was motivated by something else entirely. On one level, she wanted to convince us that kindness toward one another was crucial to our well-being. But on a deeper value, I now realise that she may have been trying to show us that solidarity, a collective spirit, was our only hope.

The movies we watched all made life at Ingersoll look like a rose garden, and I’m sure that’s why they were permitted. We saw Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Blade Runner and several documentaries about Nazi-occupied Europe. The documentaries were even more unbelievable than the sci-fi films, but Miss Veronique said, you must remember girls; truth is often stranger and more alarming than fiction.”

 

I still think about snippets of those films just about every day, especially one. This was a black and white documentary filmed by Nazi photographers inside the Warsaw Ghetto. I think it was called A Film Unfinished, or An Unfinished Film, or maybe simply The Ghetto. I was incredulous that humans could torment other humans so brutally and cheerfully.

“But that’s exactly the point,” Miss Veronique explained. “To the Nazis, the Jews weren’t humans, they were diseased sub-humans and they had to be exterminated for the greater good.” We all commented on the unsanitary living conditions, the obvious starvation, the  everyday death in the streets. Miss Veronique listened attentively to everything we said and she answered our myriad questions as best she could. But just as the dismissal bell rang, she raised her left hand to get our attention, and I remember her saying something very much like this: “But you see, girls. The Nazis didn’t win; they lost. And the Jews soon got their own country although they live happily and productively in most other countries as well. But what I really want to say is that the ones who survived couldn’t have done it alone. They had to love and be loved. And if their parents and siblings were dead, they created new families: a neighbour, a former teacher, someone they used to know only casually. Your family can include anyone you want it to, provided they wish to be included.”