The Clever One, by Shaheen Akhtar

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Yasmin came back from Edinburgh with her hair cut short and a new way of holding a mug, both hands round it, as if every drink were a hot one and every kitchen were cold.

‘You look different,’ I said.

‘I am different.’ She smiled when she said it, to show it was a joke, but it was not entirely a joke, and we both knew that. She was twenty. I was fifteen, and I had kept her side of the bedroom exactly as she left it in October, down to the lipstick-blotted tissue on the windowsill, which I had moved once to dust and then put back.

For the first three days she was wonderful. She brought Mum a scarf from a shop near the castle and Dad a book about Scottish lighthouses he would never read. She sat on the end of my bed at night and told me about a girl in her halls who kept a snake in a hatbox and a lecturer who wore his slippers to the library. She used words I had never heard her use. Problematic. Discourse. Once, at dinner, she said that the whole idea of a nine-to-five job was a construct, and Dad put down his fork and looked at her the way he looked at the gas bill.

On the fourth day she stopped getting up.

Not completely. She came down in the afternoons in Dad’s old dressing gown and sat at the kitchen table with the mug held in both hands and looked out at the yard. When the phone rang she flinched. When Mum asked about her exams she said, ‘Fine, fine, they went fine,’ too quickly, like someone shutting a door with their foot.

I found the letter on the Saturday, because I was looking for a cassette she had borrowed without asking. It was in the pocket of her denim jacket, folded into a square so small it was almost a cube. I did not read it all. I read the university crest at the top, and the word regret, and the word withdrawn, and then I folded it back up exactly as it had been.

She was on the back step when I went out. It was dusk, and the streetlights were coming on along Manningham Lane one after another, like somebody walking towards us with a match.

‘You’ve been in my jacket,’ she said, without turning.

I sat down beside her. I did not say anything. I had imagined, all those months, that when she came home she would tell me everything, the way she used to, lying on her back in the dark and talking to the ceiling.

After a while she put her arm round me, which she had not done since I was small. It was cold out there, and she was shaking a little, and I could not tell which of us was holding the other up.

‘Don’t tell them yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. I just need to be the clever one for a few more days.’

What impressions does the writer create of Yasmin? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.