Jealousy and shame
Text 1: Roadie, by Stephen Garrity
An original short story extract.
Ollie carried the bass amp in from the van because Rob said he could come if he carried things. It was heavier than it looked, and it banged against his shins all the way across the car park of the Railway Arms, and when he finally set it down on the little stage, which was really just a raised bit of carpet with a sticky floor, nobody said thank you.
Rob was nineteen. Rob had a band called Static Weather and a girlfriend called Jess, and tonight Rob had a gig, a real one, with a poster in the window with his name on it, spelled wrong. Ollie was fourteen and had a guitar he could play four chords on, and a poster of somebody else’s band on his bedroom wall.
He stood at the back by the fruit machine while the pub filled up. He found that he was hoping, in a small, mean, hidden part of himself, that something would go wrong. A string could snap. Rob’s voice could crack on the high bit of the second song, the way it sometimes did through the bedroom wall. People might drift out to the beer garden, and Rob would come home quiet, and things would be the way they were.
Nothing went wrong. They were good. They were better than good. On the third song the whole pub went still, even the old men at the bar, and Jess shut her eyes and swayed, and Rob looked out over the crowd, looking for somebody, and found Ollie, and grinned.
Ollie clapped harder than anyone when it finished, his palms stinging. He clapped so hard that he hoped nobody could see his face. On the way home, carrying the amp back to the van in the dark, he was glad of the weight. It gave him something to blame for the ache.
Text 2: Paper Crown, by Alison Brereton
An original short story extract.
By two o’clock the kitchen was full of steam and my mother had stopped asking me if she could help. She was sitting at the table with Priya, my brother’s wife, shelling chestnuts into a blue bowl, and they were laughing about something I had missed.
I had been cooking since seven. I had brined the turkey for two days in a cool box in the garage, and I had made the cranberry sauce from scratch and labelled the jar. My mother had looked at the label and said, “Very professional,” in the voice she has always used for my school reports.
Priya had brought crackers. That was all. Shop crackers, the cheap kind. And my mother had pulled one with her before they had even taken their coats off and had worn the paper crown ever since, a lopsided green crown, tilted over one eye, and she had not taken it off even to drink her tea.
My mother does not wear paper crowns. In forty-one years I had never once seen her wear a paper crown.
I stirred the gravy. Priya said something in a low voice and my mother threw her head back and laughed, really laughed, the sound coming out of her as if it had been waiting a long time. I turned up the heat. I was thinking about the crown, and about how easy Priya made it look, and I did not notice the smell until the gravy had caught and blackened on the bottom of the pan.
“Oh, love,” said my mother, getting up at last. “Shall I help?”
I said no. I said it too quickly, and too loud, and both of them looked at me, and I saw Priya see it, and I would have given anything, the turkey, the labelled jar, all of it, for her not to have seen.
‘Both texts present jealousy as something the characters are ashamed of.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
120 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 3.3 Section A: Reading meaning and effects – skills, covering 3.3.2 Analyse and compare use of language, 3.3.3 Draw inferences and justify with evidence, 3.3.4 Interpret meanings and effects across texts, and 3.3.7 Evaluate form and structure. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.