Never Let Me Go

今天听到第八章……我忽然觉得这一段关于sex的内容真的很有意思……its so so soooooooo cute！

Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion—I can see it more clearly now—was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, Miss Emily’s talks, when she’d tell us how important it was not to be ashamed of our bodies, to “respect our physical needs,” how sex was “a very beautiful gift” as long as both people really wanted it. But when it came down to it, the guardians made it more or less impossible for any of us actually to do much without breaking rules. We couldn’t visit the boys’ dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially “out of bounds” in the evenings, as were the areas behind the sheds and the pavilion. And you didn’t want to do it in the fields even when it was warm enough, because you’d almost certainly discover afterwards you’d had an audience watching from the house passing around binoculars. In other words, for all the talk of sex being beautiful, we had the distinct impression we’d be in trouble if the guardians caught us at it.

KATH认为学生对于性的困惑，其实很大程度上源于监护人本身的困惑。监护人一方面告诉他们要“尊重生理需求”，将性描述为“一件非常美好的礼物”，只要是在双方都想要并且愿意的情况下……；但是另一方面，又对他们的行为有所限制，实际上学生们似乎不太可能有机会做爱。因此学生们会有一种想法，虽然性很美妙，但是被抓到之后就会惹上麻烦。可是事实上当监护人真的抓到学生在教室里做爱后，他们的态度却还是让学生们意外而困惑：

I say this, but the only real case I personally knew of like that was when Jenny C. and Rob D. got interrupted in Room 14. They were doing it after lunch, right there over one of the desks, and Mr. Jack had come in to get something. According to Jenny, Mr. Jack had turned red and gone right out again, but they’d been put off and had stopped. They’d more or less dressed themselves when Mr. Jack came back, just as though for the first time, and pretended to be surprised and shocked. “It’s very clear to me what you’ve been doing and it’s not appropriate,” he’d said, and told them both to go and see Miss Emily. But once they’d got to Miss Emily’s office, she’d told them she was on her way to an important meeting and didn’t have time to talk to them. “But you know you shouldn’t have been doing whatever you were doing, and I don’t expect you’ll do it again,” she’d said, before rushing out with her folders.

于是大家有了各种猜想，各种理论：有人认为监护人想要学生们做爱，只是学生们不应该在错误的时间进行。HANNAH认为让他们充分地做爱是监护人的职责，否则学生们的器官就不能很好地运作，不能成为合格的捐赠者。有人说监护人毕竟是“普通人”，虽然他们知道学生们不能生育，但是还是会担心。ANNETTE说学生们和对方做爱让监护人感到不舒服，因为监护人自己也想和学生做爱……（这一段太可爱太可爱了……）KATH认为RUTH的理论更加接近于真实情况：RUTH认为监护人们对学生所讲述的有关于性的东西，都是为了他们离开学校之后做准备。监护人们希望学生们在离开校园之后能够have sex properly，不染上疾病，但显然不想让他们在学校里做爱，因为他们害怕惹上麻烦。他们对待GAY SEX的态度，以及RUTH对此的理论也很有趣：

Gay sex, incidentally, was something we were even more confused about. For some reason, we called it “umbrella sex”; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were “an umbrella.” I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we definitely weren’t at all kind towards any signs of gay stuff. The boys especially could do the cruellest things. According to Ruth this was because quite a few of them had done things with each other when they’d been younger, before they’d realised what they were doing. So now they were ridiculously tense about it. I don’t know if she was right, but for sure, accusing someone of “getting all umbrella” could easily end in a fight.

gay sex让他们困惑，尤其是男生之间对待这个问题更加敏感，RUTH说是因为他们小时候在不懂的情况下都做过这样的事情（……）。学校里，大家都声称自己已经和某人做过爱，在这个年纪里，“你是否做过爱”突然变得和几年以前大家对待“你是否富有创造力”一样，似乎成了一种评判个人的指标。KATH就感到自己似乎落后了，尤其是她身边的两个朋友LAURA和RUTH（和TOMMY,QAQ）绝对都已经不再是处女。于是她也下定决心要脱处。

For all that, I’d been holding it off for ages, repeating to myself Miss Emily’s advice—“If you can’t find someone with whom you truly wish to share this experience, then don’t!” But around the spring of the year I’m talking about now, I started to think I wouldn’t mind having sex with a boy. Not just to see what it was like, but also because it occurred to me I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right. What I mean is, if Miss Emily was correct and sex was this really big deal between people, then I didn’t want to be doing it for the first time when it was really important how well it went.

…… So I’d chosen Harry, and I only delayed those couple of months because I wanted to make sure I’d be all right physically. Miss Emily had told us it could be painful and a big failure if you didn’t get wet enough and this was my one real worry. It wasn’t being ripped apart down there, which we often joked about, and was the secret fear of quite a few girls. I kept thinking, as long as I got wet quick enough, there’d be no problem, and I did it a lot on my own just to make sure.

KATH还是很紧张，不断地重读书中关于性的段落：

I realise this may sound like I was getting obsessive, but I remember I also spent a lot of time re-reading passages from books where people had sex, going over the lines again and again, trying to tease out clues. The trouble was, the books we had at Hailsham weren’t at all helpful. We had a lot of nineteenth-century stuff by Thomas Hardy and people like that, which was more or less useless. Some modern books, by people like Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble, had some sex in them, but it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details.

这一句实在是太可爱太好笑了

it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details.

当然书让RUTH很失望，可是电影也没帮上什么忙：

We’d got a video player in the billiards room a couple of years earlier, and by that spring had built up quite a good collection of movies. A lot of them had sex in them, but most scenes would end just as the sex was starting up, or else you’d only see their faces and their backs. And when there was a useful scene, it was difficult to see it more than fleetingly because there were usually twenty others in the room watching with you. We’d evolved this system where we called for particular favourite scenes to be played again—like, for instance, the moment the American jumps over the barbed wire on his bike in The Great Escape. There’d be a chant of: “Rewind! Rewind!” until someone got the remote and we’d see the portion again, sometimes three, four times. But I could hardly, by myself, start shouting for rewinds just to see sex scenes again.

但是最后她所做的这一系列准备都白费了……因为就在她终于准备好要和HARRY做爱的时候，RUTH和TOMMY分手了，于是一切都乱套了。

So I kept delaying week by week, while I went on preparing, until the summer came and I decided I was as ready as I’d ever be. By then, I was even feeling reasonably confident about it, and began dropping hints to Harry. Everything was going fine and according to plan, when Ruth and Tommy split up and it all got confused.

I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day; similar if not in the actual details, then inside, in the feelings. Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home. Not when you’re eight years old, and you’re all together in a place like Hailsham; when you’ve got guardians like the ones we had; when the gardeners and the delivery men joke and laugh with you and call you “sweetheart.” All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

"Back then, when you lost it, I used to think about it, in my head, what it would be like, if I found it and brought it to you. What you'd say, your face, all of that.""Poor creatures.""It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."