Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
First Page:
My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve 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. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t
necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve 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 I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for
a fact they’ve 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 “agitated,” even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe Iam boasting now. But it means a
lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying “calm.” I’ve
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, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good
and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about
my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham
student—which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s 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. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m sure you’ve heard
it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it. But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose,
and I doubt if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in
every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for
the last six they’ve let me choose.
And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the
end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to
choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as
long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d 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
haven’t been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don’t have that deeper
link with the donor, and though I’ll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come
the end of the year.
