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getting really worked up about this yourself now.’
    I laughed, because he was right: I’d been frowning, completely lost in my thoughts. The fact was, my mind was going in variousdirections at once. And Tommy’s account of his talk with Miss Lucy had reminded me of something, perhaps a whole series of things, little incidents from the past to do with Miss Lucy that had puzzled me at the time.
    ‘It’s just that …’ I stopped and sighed. ‘I can’t quite put it right, not even to myself. But all this, what you’re saying, it sort of fits with a lot of other things that are puzzling. I keep thinking about all these things. Like why Madame comes and takes away our best pictures. What’s that for exactly?’
    ‘It’s for the Gallery.’
    ‘But what is her gallery? She keeps coming here and taking away our best work. She must have stacks of it by now. I asked Miss Geraldine once how long Madame’s been coming here, and she said for as long as Hailsham’s been here. What is this gallery? Why should she have a gallery of things done by us?’
    ‘Maybe she sells them. Outside, out there, they sell everything.’
    I shook my head. ‘That can’t be it. It’s got something to do with what Miss Lucy said to you. About us, about how one day we’ll start giving donations. I don’t know why, but I’ve had this feeling for some time now, that it’s all linked in, though I can’t figure out how. I’ll have to go now, Tommy. Let’s not tell anyone yet, about what we’ve been saying.’
    ‘No. And don’t tell anyone about Miss Lucy.’
    ‘But will you tell me if she says anything else to you like that?’
    Tommy nodded, then glanced around him again. ‘Like you say, you’d better go, Kath. Someone’s going to hear us soon.’
    The gallery Tommy and I were discussing was something we’d all of us grown up with. Everyone talked about it as though it existed, though in truth none of us knew for sure that it did. I’m sure I was pretty typical in not being able to remember how or when I’d first heard about it. Certainly, it hadn’t been from the guardians: they never mentioned the Gallery, and there was an unspoken rule that we should never even raise the subject in their presence.
    I’d suppose now it was something passed down through the different generations of Hailsham students. I remember a timewhen I could only have been five or six, sitting at a low table beside Amanda C., our hands clammy with modelling clay. I can’t remember if there were other children with us, or which guardian was in charge. All I remember is Amanda C. – who was a year older than me – looking at what I was making and exclaiming: ‘That’s really, really good, Kathy! That’s so good! I bet that’ll get in the Gallery!’
    I must by then have already known about the Gallery, because I remember the excitement and pride when she said that – and then the next moment, thinking to myself: ‘That’s ridiculous. None of us are good enough for the Gallery yet.’
    As we got older, we went on talking about the Gallery. If you wanted to praise someone’s work, you’d say: ‘That’s good enough for the Gallery.’ And after we discovered irony, whenever we came across any laughably bad work, we’d go: ‘Oh yes! Straight to the Gallery with that one!’
    But did we really believe in the Gallery? Today, I’m not sure. As I’ve said, we never mentioned it to the guardians and looking back, it seems to me this was a rule we imposed on ourselves, as much as anything the guardians had decided. There’s an instance I can remember from when we were about eleven. We were in Room 7 on a sunny winter’s morning. We’d just finished Mr Roger’s class, and a few of us had stayed on to chat with him. We were sitting up on our desks, and I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but Mr Roger, as usual, was making us laugh and laugh. Then Carole H. had said, through her giggles: ‘You might even get it picked for the