Revision

This section gives you a chance to illustrate your acquired skills of fiction analysis without any help. Here you are to come out with your own interpretation the way you see it.

From Come Together by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees

The clock display winks over from 08.40 to 08.46. The heating has been running at max for over an hour now, and I can only conclude that Catherine Bradshaw’s ID has been falsified and that rather than being born in Oxford, she was actually born in Bombay. In the summer. In a heatwave. Next to a furnace. At high noon. My iced water cheat has failed. With the summer sun beaming down on the closed windows and the radiators boiling, I might as well be locked in a sauna. Sweat bleeds from my brow. The pillow which props up my head has transformed into a hot-water bottle, the duvet into an electric blanket. Bradshaw, however, is playing it literary and metaphorically cool. Not one groan of discomfort. Not one request for the window to be opened, or water to be brought. Nothing but the regular pattern of her breathing, and the relaxed expression of deep sleep on her face. The ice maiden.

From Man and Boy by Tony Parson

The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer’s ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.

My father was shot full of morphine and his skin no longer had the colour of living skin and, even with the oxygen mask, his lungs strained and heaved to take in a pitiful amount of air that simply wasn’t enough.

Sometimes the fog in the eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end.

‘I love you,” I told him, taking his hands, and saying those words that I had never said to him before.

And I told him because surely it could get no worse than his – but it did get worse, that’s the thing about cancer, it can always exceed your blackest moment.

So the next day I went back to that crowded ward, sat by his bed holding his hand, and – crying harder this time – I told my father again that I loved him.

From Man and Boy by Tony Parson

A child can change in a moment. You turn your back for a couple of seconds, and when you look again you find they have already grown into someone else.

I can remember seeing Pat smile properly for the first time. He was a little fat bald thing, Winston Churchill in a Babygro, howling because his first teeth were pushing through, so Gina rubbed some chocolate on his sore gums and he immediately stopped crying and grinned up at us – this big, wide, gummy grin – as if we had just revealed the best secret in the world.

And I can remember him walking for the first time. He was holding himself up by the rail of his little yellow plastic stroller, swaying from side to side as if he were caught in a stiff breeze, as was his custom, when without warning he suddenly took off, his fat little legs sticking out of his disposable nappy and pumping furiously to keep up with the stroller’s spinning blue wheels.

He bombed off out of the room and Gina laughed and said he looked as though he was going to be late for the office again.

But I can’t remember when his games changed. I don’t know when all his toddler’s games of fire engines and Postman Pat videos gave way to his obsession with star Wars. That was one of the changes which happened when I wasn’t looking.

One minute his head was full of talking animals, the next it was all Death Stars, stormtroopers and light sabres.

If we let him, he would watch the three Star Wars films on video all day and all night. But we didn’t let him – or rather Gina didn’t let him – so when the television was turned off, he spent hours playing with his collection of Star Wars figures and grey plastic spaceships, or bouncing on the sofa, brandishing his light sabre, muttering scraps of George Lucas storylines to himself.

It seemed like only the day before yesterday when nothing gave him more pleasure than his collection of farmyard animals – or ‘aminals’, as Pat called them. He would sit in his bubble bath, a little blond angel with subs on his head, parading his cows, sheep and horses along the side of the tub, mooing and baaing until the water turned cold.

“I’m taking me bath,” he would announce. “I need me aminals.”

Now his aminals were collecting dust in some forgotten corner of his bedroom while he played his endless games of intergalactic good and evil.

They were a lot like the games I could remember from my own childhood. And sometimes Pat fantasises of brave knights, evil warlords and captured princesses sounded like echoes from a past that was long gone, as if he were trying to recover something precious that had already been lost forever.