Question 4 (AQA GCSE English Language): Exam Questions

Ove does something with his eyebrows.

"Ah, of course," he splutters. "Because you have to buy it as an 'extra,' don't you?"

No, what I mean is that the computer doesn't have a separate keyboard. You control everything from the screen."

Ove shakes his head in disbelief, as if he's just witnessed the sales assistant walking around the counter and licking the glass-fronted display cabinet.

"But I have to have a keyboard. You do understand that?”

The young man sighs deeply, as if patiently counting to ten.

"Okay. I understand. In that case I don't think you should go for this computer. I think you should buy something like a MacBook instead."

"A MacBook?" Ove says, far from convinced. "Is that one of those blessed 'eReaders' everyone's talking about?"

"No. A MacBook is a ... it's a ... laptop, with a keyboard."

"Okay!" Ove hisses. He looks around the shop for a moment. "So are they any good, then?"

The sales assistant looks down at the counter in a way that seems to reveal a fiercely yet barely controlled desire to begin clawing his own face. Then he suddenly brightens, flashing an energetic smile.

"You know what? Let me see if my colleague has finished with his customer, so he can come and give you a demonstration."

Ove checks his watch and grudgingly agrees, reminding the assistant that some people have better things to do than stand around all day waiting. The assistant gives him a quick nod, then disappears and comes back after a few moments with a colleague. The colleague looks very happy, as people do when they have not been working for a sufficient stretch of time as sales assistants.

"Hi, how can I help you?"

Ove drills his police-flashlight finger into the counter.

"I want a computer!"

The colleague no longer looks quite as happy. He gives the first sales assistant an insinuating glance as if to say he 'II pay him back for this.

ln the meantime the first sales assistant mutters, "I can't take anymore, I'm going for lunch."

"Lunch," snorts Ove. "That's the only thing people care about nowadays."

"I'm sorry?" says the colleague and turns around.

“Lunch!'" He sneers, then tosses the box onto the counter and swiftly walks out.

Followed by the driver and her luggage (for the hotel gave no sign of life), she battled with revolving doors and almost lurched into the hushed vestibule. The receptionist was coldly kind, as if she were working in a nursing-home, and one for deranged patients at that. 'What a day!' she said. The taxi-driver, lumbering in with the suitcases, seemed alien in this muffled place, and was at once taken over by the porter. Mrs Palfrey opened her handbag and carefully picked out coins. Everything she did was unhurried, almost authoritative. She had always known how to behave. Even as a bride, in strange, alarming conditions in Burma, she had been magnificent, calm - when (for instance) she was rowed across floods to her new home; unruffled, finding it more than damp, with a snake wound round the banisters to greet her. She had straightened her back and given herself a good talking-to, as she had this afternoon in the train.

When the porter had put down her suitcases and gone, she thought that prisoners must feel as she did now, the first time they are left in their cell, first turning to the window, then facing about to stare at the closed door: after that, counting the paces from wall to wall. She envisaged this briskly.

From the window she could see - could see only - a white brick wall down which dirty rain slithered, and a cast-iron fire-escape, which was rather graceful. She tried to see that it was graceful. The outlook - especially on this darkening afternoon - was daunting; but the backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can't be expected to provide a view, she knew. The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it.

The bed looked rather high, and the carpet was worn, but not threadbare. Roses could be made out. A comer fireplace was boarded up, but still had a hearth before it of peacock-blue tiles. The radiator gave off a dry, scorched smell and subdued noises. Heavy wooden knobs to the drawers of the chest, she noted. It was more like a maid's bedroom.

Then, in a loud, clear voice he made a sudden announcement: ''The council and I have arrived at a decision." The chief paused as if to find the strength to voice his next words. ''We are going to have to leave the old ones behind."

His eyes quickly scanned the crowd for reactions. But the hunger and cold had taken their toll, and The People did not seem to be shocked. Many expected this to happen, and some thought it for the best. In those days, leaving the old behind in times of starvation was not an unknown act, although in this band it was happening for the first time. The starkness of the primitive land seemed to demand it, as the people, to survive, were forced to imitate some of the ways of the animals. Like the younger, more able wolves who shun the old leader of the pack, these people would leave the old behind so that they could move faster without the extra burden.

The older woman, Ch'idzigyaak, had a daughter and a grandson among the group. The chief looked into the crowd for them and saw that they, too, had shown no reaction. Greatly relieved that the unpleasant announcement had been made without incident, the chief instructed everyone to pack immediately. Meanwhile, this brave man who was their leader could not bring himself to look at the two old women, for he did not feel so strong now.

The chief understood why The People who cared for the old women did not raise objections. In these hard times, many of the men became frustrated and were angered easily, and one wrong thing said or done could cause an uproar and make matters worse. So it was that the weak and beaten members of the tribe kept what dismay they felt to themselves, for they knew that the cold could bring on a wave of panic followed by cruelty and brutality among people fighting for survival.

In the many years the women had been with the band, the chief had come to feel affection for them. Now, he wanted to be away as quickly as possible so that the two old women could not look at him and make him feel worse than he had ever felt in his life.

The two women sat old and small before the campfire with their chins held up proudly, disguising their shock. In their younger days they had seen very old people left behind, but they never expected such a fate.

The little girls who lived up in the attic were sisters, only thirteen months apart in age. They were never told to go to bed before midnight or reminded to brush their teeth. No one cared if their clothes were wrinkled or if they spit on the street. All the while these little girls were growing up, they were allowed to sleep with their shoes on and draw funny faces on their bedroom walls with black crayons. The could drink cold Dr Peppers for breakfast, if that was what they craved, or eat marshmallow pies for dinner. They could climb onto the roof and sit perched on the slate peak, leaning back as far as possible, in order to spy the first star. There they would stay on windy March nights or humid August evenings, whispering, arguing over whether it was feasible for even the smallest wish to ever come true.

The girls were being raised by their aunts, who, as much as they might have wanted to, simply couldn’t turn their nieces away. The children, after all, were orphans whose careless parents were so much in love they failed to notice smoke emanating from the walls of the bungalow where they’d gone to enjoy a second honeymoon, after leaving the girls home with a baby-sitter. No wonder the sisters always shared a bed during storms; they were both terrified of thunder and could never speak above a whisper once the sky began to rumble. When they did finally doze off, their arms wrapped around each other, they often had the exact same dreams. There were times when they could complete each other’s sentences; certainly each could close her eyes and guess what the other most desired for dessert on any given day.

I was hoping the hyena would stay under the tarpaulin. I was disappointed. Nearly immediately it leapt over the zebra and onto the stern bench. There it turned on itself a few times, whimpering and hesitating. I wondered what it was going to do next. The answer came quickly: it brought its head low and ran around the zebra in a circle, transforming the stern bench, the side benches and the cross bench just beyond the tarpaulin into a twenty-five-foot indoor track. It did one lap-two-three-four-five-and-onwards, non-stop, till I lost count. And the whole time, lap after lap, it went yip yip yip yip yip in a high-pitched way.

My reaction, once again, was very slow. I was seized by fear and could only watch. The beast was going at a good clip, and it was no small animal. The beating of its legs against the benches made the whole boat shake, and its claws were loudly clicking on their surface. Each time it came from the stern I tensed. It was hair-raising enough to see the thing racing my way; worse still was the fear that it would keep going straight.

After a number of laps it stopped short at the stern bench and crouched, directing its gaze downwards, to the space below the tarpaulin. It lifted its eyes and rested them upon me. The look was nearly the typical look of a hyena — blank and frank, jaw hanging open, big ears sticking up rigidly, eyes bright and black. I prepared for my end. For nothing. It started running in circles again.

When an animal decides to do something, it can do it for a very long time. All morning the hyena ran in circles going yip yip yip yip yip. Every time the hyena paused at the stern bench, my heart jumped. And as much as I wanted to direct my attention to the horizon, to where my salvation lay, it kept straying back to this maniacal beast.

Things ended in typical hyena fashion. It stopped at the stern and started producing deep groans interrupted by fits of heavy panting. I pushed myself away on the oar till only the tips of my feet were holding on to the boat. The animal hacked and coughed. Abruptly it vomited. A gush landed behind the zebra. The hyena dropped into what it had just produced. It stayed there, shaking and whining and turning around on itself, exploring the furthest confines of animal anguish. It did not move from the restricted space for the rest of the day.

He smelt something sweet, heady, as they walked into a compound, and was sure it came from the white flowers clustered on the bushes at the entrance. The bushes were shaped like slender hills. The lawn glistened. Butterflies hovered overhead. 

‘I told Master you will learn everything very fast’ his aunty said. Ugwu nodded attentively although she had already told him the story of how his good fortune came about: while she was sweeping the corridor in the Mathematics Department a week ago, she heard Master say that he needed a houseboy to do his cleaning, and she immediately said she could help, speaking before his typist or office messenger could offer to bring someone. 

‘I will learn fast, Aunty,’ Ugwu said. He was staring at the car in the garage; a strip of metal ran around its blue body like a necklace. 

‘Remember, what you will answer whenever he calls you is Yes, sah!’ 

‘Yes, sah!’ Ugwu repeated. 

They were standing before the glass door. Ugwu held back from reaching out to touch the cement wall, to see how different it would feel from the mud walls of his mother’s hut that still bore the faint patterns of moulding fingers. For a brief moment, he wished he were back there now, in his mother’s hut, under the dim coolness of the thatch roof; or in his aunty’s hut, the only one in the village with a corrugated-iron roof. 

His aunty tapped on the glass. Ugwu could see the white curtains behind the door. A voice said, in English, ‘Yes? Come in.’ 

They took off their slippers before walking in. Ugwu had never seen a room so wide. Despite the brown sofas arranged in a semi-circle, the side tables between them, the shelves crammed with books, and the centre table with a vase of red and white plastic flowers, the room still seemed to have too much space. Master sat in an armchair, wearing a vest and a pair of shorts. He was not sitting upright but slanted, a book covering his face, as though oblivious that he had just asked people in. 

‘Good afternoon, sah! This is the child,’ Ugwu’s aunty said. 

Master looked up. He pulled off his glasses. ‘The child?’ 

‘The houseboy, sah. He will work hard,’ his aunty said. ‘He is a very good boy. Thank, sah!’

Master grunted in response, watching Ugwu and his aunty with a faintly distracted expression, as if their presence made it difficult for him to remember something important. Ugwu’s aunty patted Ugwu’s shoulder, whispered that he should do well, and turned to the door. 

Ugwu stood by the door, waiting.

A little girl was sitting back on her heels beside a clump of daisies that grew against the fence. She had her back to Rosie and was holding tight to the handle of a large wicker basket that stood on the ground beside her. Cara seemed unfazed by the girl’s presence and continued to move, engrossed, along the row of plants. Rosie bent forward to look through the clearest of the panes and peered closer. The child was small, maybe around eight or nine, although something in the tense hunch of her shoulders made her seem older. Her hair hung down her back in a matted, dusty-looking plait and she was wearing dressing-up clothes: an ankle-length dress and pinafore in washed-out greys and tans, like a home-made Cinderella* costume. 

Where on earth had she come from? She must be a neighbour’s child but how had she got in? The wooden fences that separated the gardens between each of the houses in the terrace were high – surely too high for a child to climb. 

The child glanced over her shoulder, back towards the houses, a quick, furtive movement as if she were scanning the upper windows of the row, afraid of being overlooked. Rosie caught a glimpse of her face, pale and drawn with anxiety, before the girl turned back and reached forward to quickly tuck a piece of trailing white cloth into the basket. Almost unconsciously, Rosie registered that the girl was left-handed like herself, and that there was something animal-like in her movements: quick, like the darting of a mouse or the flit of a sparrow, some small dun creature that moves fast to blend into the background.

Something wasn’t right here. She had seen distress in those eyes. 

Rosie turned away, dried her hands hurriedly and slipped on her flip-flops. She would go gently, raise no challenge about her being in the garden but say hello and try to find out what was the matter. Maybe if she pointed out that her mother would be worrying where she was, she could persuade the girl to let her take her home. 

But when she stepped outside, the child was gone. 

But at the edge of the slope, near the curtain of trees, she felt a small slab of snow slip from underneath her. It was like she’d been bucked, so she took the fall-line* to recover her balance. Before she’d dropped three hundred metres, the whisper of her skis was displaced by a rumble. 

Zoe saw at the periphery of her vision that Jake had come to a halt at the side of the piste and was looking back up the slope. Irritated by the false start they’d made, she etched a few turns before skidding to a halt and turning to look back at her husband. 

The rumble became louder. There was a pillar of what looked like grey smoke unfurling in silky banners at the head of the slope, like the heraldry of armies. It was beautiful. It made her smile. 

Then her smile iced over. Jake was speeding straight towards her. His face was rubberised and he mouthed something as he flew at her. 

‘Get to the side! To the side!’ 

She knew now that it was an avalanche. Jake slowed, batting at her with his ski pole. ‘Get into the trees! Hang on to a tree!’ 

The rumbling had become a roaring in her ears, drowning Jake’s words. She pushed herself down the fall-line, scrambling for traction, trying to accelerate away from the roaring cloud breaking behind her like a tsunami at sea. Jagged black cracks appeared in the snow in front of her. She angled her skis towards the side of the slope, heading for the trees, but it was too late. She saw Jake’s black suit go bundling past her as he was turned by the great mass of smoke and snow. Then she too was punched off her feet and carried through the air, twisting, spinning, turning in the white-out. She remembered something about spreading her arms around her head. For a few moments it was like being agitated inside a washing machine, turned head over heels a few times, until at last she was dumped heavily in a rib-cracking fall. Then there came a chattering noise, like the amplified jaws of a million termites chewing on wood. The noise itself filled her ears and muffled everything, and then there was silence, and the total whiteness faded to grey, and then to black.

‘It can’t be killed.’ Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed like a toy gun. ‘We were fools to come. This is impossible.’ 

‘Shut up!’ hissed Travis. 

‘Nightmare.’ 

‘Turn around,’ commanded Travis. ‘Walk quietly to the Machine. We’ll remit half your fee.’ 

‘I didn’t realize it would be this big,’ said Eckels. ‘I miscalculated, that’s all. And now I want out.’ 

‘It sees us!’ 

‘There’s the red paint on its chest.’ 

The Tyrant Lizard raised itself. Its armoured flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness. 

‘Get me out of here,’ said Eckels. ‘It was never like this before. I was always sure I’d come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I’ve met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of.’ 

‘Don’t run,’ said Lesperance. ‘Turn around. Hide in the Machine.’ 

‘Yes.’ Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness. 

‘Eckels!’ 

He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling. 

‘Not that way!’ 

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast’s mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun. 

The rifles cracked again, but their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile’s tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweller’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulder-stone eyes levelled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris. 

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.

This was an uncharacteristically gloomy train of thought, and Mr Fisher pushed it away. Not all his boys lacked imagination. Alistair Tibbet, for instance, even though he had obviously done part of his homework on the bus. An amiable boy, this Tibbet. Not a brilliant scholar by any means, but there was a spark in him which deserved attention. 

Mr Fisher took a deep breath and looked down at Tibbet’s exercise book, trying not to think of the snow outside and the five o’clock bus he was now almost certain to miss. Four books to go, he told himself; and then home; dinner; bed; the comforting small routine of a winter weekend. 

But, gradually sitting there in the warm classroom with the smell of chalk and floor polish in his nostrils, Mr Fisher began to experience a very strange sensation. It began as a tightening in his diaphragm, as if a long unused muscle had been brought into action. His breathing quickened, stopped, quickened again. He began to sweat. And when he reached the end of the story, Mr Fisher put down his red pen and went back to the beginning, re-reading every word very slowly and with meticulous care. 

This must be what a prospector feels when, discouraged and bankrupt and ready to go home, he takes off his boot and shakes out a nugget of gold the size of his fist. He read it again, critically this time, marking off the paragraphs with notes in red. A hope, which at first Mr Fisher had hardly dared to formulate, swelled in him and grew strong. He found himself beginning to smile. 

If anyone had asked him what Tibbet’s story was about, Mr Fisher might have been hard put to reply. There were themes he recognised, elements of plot which were vaguely familiar: an adventure – a quest, a child, a man. But to explain Tibbet’s story in these terms was as meaningless as trying to describe a loved one’s face in terms of nose, eyes, mouth. This was something new. Something entirely original. 

But there had been one other – a girl with beautiful red hair and a white skin and eyes the colour of that green ribbon shot with gold they had got from Paris last week. Rosabel had seen her carriage at the door; a man had come in with her, quite a young man, and so well dressed. 

‘What is it exactly that I want, Harry?’ she had said, as Rosabel took the pins out of her hat, untied her veil, and gave her a hand-mirror. 

‘You must have a black hat,’ he had answered, ‘a black hat with a feather that goes right round it and then round your neck and ties in a bow under your chin – and a decent-sized feather.’ 

The girl glanced at Rosabel laughingly. ‘Have you any hats like that?’ 

They had been very hard to please; Harry would demand the impossible, and Rosabel was almost in despair. Then she remembered the big, untouched box upstairs. 

‘Oh, one moment, Madam,’ she had said. ‘I think perhaps I can show you something that will please you better.’ She had run up, breathlessly, cut the cords, scattered the tissue paper, and yes, there was the very hat – rather large, soft, with a great, curled feather, and a black velvet rose, nothing else. They had been charmed. The girl had put it on and then handed it to Rosabel. 

‘Let me see how it looks on you,’ she said. 

Rosabel turned to the mirror and placed it on her brown hair, then faced them. 

‘Oh, Harry, isn't it adorable,’ the girl cried, ‘I must have that!’ She smiled again at Rosabel. ‘It suits you, beautifully.’ 

A sudden, ridiculous feeling of anger had seized Rosabel. She longed to throw the lovely, perishable thing in the girl's face, and bent over the hat, flushing. 

‘It's exquisitely finished off inside, Madam,’ she said. The girl swept out to her carriage, and left Harry to pay and bring the box with him. 

‘I shall go straight home and put it on before I come out to lunch with you,’ Rosabel heard her say.