Tommy’s imaginary animals

Tommy’s imaginary animals are a series of tiny, meticulously constructed creatures that Tommy draws in a notebook at The Cottages. They begin as private work, made partly in the hope that they might matter to the Gallery theory and partly because he enjoys making them. Their significance lies in that double purpose: the drawings give Tommy a form of creative expression that is his own, yet their possible value to Madame and the Gallery leaves them exposed to the same scrutiny and ridicule that once made art painful for him.

Origin and Private Practice

Tommy tells Kathy H. that he has been working on something in secret, without telling anyone, including Ruth. The drawings begin with an old children’s book whose back cover is missing, which he finds behind one of the sofas at The Cottages. He persuades Keffers to give him one of the small black notebooks in which he scribbles figures. By the time he describes the project to Kathy H., he has completed at least a dozen creatures.

The scale is a deliberate departure from Tommy’s earlier approach. The notebook’s small pages lead him to make the animals tiny, and he feels that this changes the work: instead of simply reducing the kind of pictures he made at Hailsham, he has to invent how each creature can protect itself and reach or fetch things. He describes the animals as seeming to come to life through the details required by their size. The idea of these needs is already important to the drawings before Kathy H. sees them; he is not merely filling the pages with fantastic shapes but considering how their imagined bodies might function.

Tommy’s excitement unsettles Kathy H. at first. Hearing him describe the project, she remembers the elephant-in-the-grass picture that began his difficulties at Hailsham and fears that the new work could again make him an object of mockery. She does not voice that fear, instead offering cautious encouragement. His work is initially known only to Tommy and Ruth, and his admission that Ruth has not been told about the animals reminds Kathy H. that their conversation began amid a wider strain between them.

Seeing the Drawings

A few weeks later, Tommy shows the animals to Kathy H. in the goosehouse. The place is being used for discarded furniture: broken tables and old fridges have been pushed against a wall, while Tommy has dragged a worn two-seater settee into the middle of the floor. He has been drawing there. His Wellingtons lie on their sides nearby, with his football socks showing, and he sits back on the settee as he invites her to look. Ruth has already seen the pages; Kathy H. is the first other person Tommy has shown them to.

Kathy H. expects smaller versions of the pictures the students made as children, and the actual drawings take her by surprise. At first she cannot readily identify them as animals. Their surfaces are crowded with the imagined inner workings of machines: tiny canals, tendons, screws, and wheels rendered with obsessive precision. Only when a page is held farther away does a creature such as an armadillo or a bird become recognizable. The shift between close inspection and distance is part of how the images work: what first appears to be an intricate mechanism resolves into an animal body.

Tommy calls this his second book and says that the first is not fit for anyone to see; it took him some time to get started. His casual manner does not conceal his anxiety about Kathy H.’s response. She hesitates before praising the drawings, partly because she worries that art could bring him trouble again and partly because the images differ so much from what the guardians taught at Hailsham that she does not know how to judge them. Yet the creatures begin to draw her in. Beneath their busy, metallic detail, she sees something sweet and vulnerable, and recalls Tommy’s concern about how they could defend themselves and reach things. Her response changes from guarded politeness to genuine approval, and Tommy’s smirk shows how much that approval matters to him.

Secrecy, Ruth, and the Gallery Theory

Tommy says that the animals are not only a means to an end: he likes drawing them. He is considering whether he should stop keeping the work secret, though he does not propose displaying every page to everyone. Kathy H. encourages him to let people know about it and tells him there is no reason to hide the drawings. For a moment, the exchange allows the animals to stand as a creative practice in their own right, rather than merely as evidence for someone else to assess.

That independence remains complicated by Tommy’s theory about the Gallery. When Ruth later presses him about why he has been making art, he insists that he is not drawing solely for that reason. But if the theory about the Gallery is correct, he says, he could try putting the animals forward. Ruth ridicules the idea that showing Madame his creatures could secure the result he hopes for. She then claims that Kathy H. also finds the animals laughable. Kathy H.’s first impulse is to deny it, but Ruth’s confident assertion makes her search her memory and recognize that her earlier response to Tommy had not been as sincere as he believed. The drawings thus become the focus of a second judgment: not just whether their strangeness will be accepted, but whether a friend’s reassurance can be trusted.

Ruth’s mockery does not establish that the animals lack value; instead, it exposes the precariousness of Tommy’s hope that the Gallery might recognize them. He believes the theory may be right, but his proposed use of the drawings remains tentative. The distinction he makes between liking the work and possibly submitting it matters: creative pleasure precedes, and does not depend entirely upon, its usefulness to the theory. The episode also recalls the danger Kathy H. associates with Tommy’s earlier picture at Hailsham, showing how his old vulnerability can shape the reception of a new and markedly different body of work.

Form and Significance

The animals combine imagined life with mechanical intricacy. Their minute canals, tendons, screws, and wheels make them look almost like devices when examined closely, while the more distant view reveals recognizable creatures. That contrast is not explained as a symbolic code in the story; it is a quality Kathy H. observes as she tries to understand drawings unlike the art she knows. Her impression of vulnerability, alongside Tommy’s attention to protection and practical reach, gives the creatures an imagined existence organized around bodily limits and needs.

The work also changes the terms on which Tommy approaches his own creativity. The childhood picture associated with his troubles at Hailsham had become a source of apprehension for Kathy H., who fears that this project could expose him to the same ridicule. The miniature animals are not simply a repetition of that earlier failure: their scale, construction, and attention to how a creature might live distinguish them from what she expects. Still, that difference cannot guarantee acceptance. Ruth’s intervention makes clear that the hope attached to Madame and the Gallery can turn private work into a public test, even as Tommy’s enjoyment of drawing gives the project a value beyond that test.

Tommy’s imaginary animals therefore remain suspended between secrecy and disclosure, pleasure and persuasion, vulnerable invention and anticipated judgment. Kathy H.’s response changes as she sees the drawings, while Ruth’s accusation reveals an earlier failure of candor between the friends. Through these shifts, the animals register not only Tommy’s new artistic method but also the social risks of showing work whose meaning and worth are still unsettled.