The borrowed address

Mina wrote the address on the envelope three times. The first version sloped towards the corner. The second had the wrong postcode. On the third she used the ruler from her brother's pencil case and formed each letter separately. She had been given the address by the woman at the library, who said that the local magazine sometimes printed work by young writers. There was no guarantee. Mina understood that. She slid the pages inside, sealed the flap and put the envelope beneath her school books.

For four days it travelled to school and back without leaving the bag. On Monday she forgot a stamp. On Tuesday she had a stamp but no time. On Wednesday the rain might have damaged the paper. On Thursday the postbox stood directly in front of her, its red paint dry in the afternoon sun. She crossed to the other pavement. At home she told her brother that magazines took months to answer. He asked whether she had sent it. She said that there were different stages to these things.

On Friday she opened the envelope. The first sentence seemed too eager. She crossed it out and wrote a quieter one, then crossed that out too. At the bottom of the final page, her name looked less like a signature than a claim she could not support. She remembered the afternoon in the library when the woman had read the piece without speaking. Mina had taken the silence as disappointment, until the woman asked whether she had written anything else. Remembering this helped for a moment. Then she noticed a repeated word on page two.

Her brother came into the kitchen carrying a football with no air in it. He asked to borrow the pump. Mina pointed towards the cupboard and kept looking at the repeated word. He found the pump, fitted the needle and began working the handle. After a while he asked what she was waiting for. She said the story was not finished. He looked at the pages, then at the envelope. ‘How will you know?’ he asked. Mina began to answer, but could not find a rule that would make sense aloud.

The following morning she bought another envelope. She copied the address without a ruler and checked the postcode twice. At the postbox, she held the packet by one corner. It bent slightly before passing through the slot, and she had a sudden, useless wish to straighten it. Then it was gone. There was no sound except a car turning into the road. Mina stood there longer than she needed to. On the walk home, she began thinking of a different opening sentence. This time it belonged to a story she had not yet written.

Consider the whole passage. How does the writer structure the text to show Mina’s difficulty in sending her story and the significance of her eventual decision? You could consider the sequence of events, repetitions, shifts in focus, and the ending. Support your analysis with references to the passage.