HL Paper 1 Section C

A versatile short story. This story is written in a way that could be altered on exam day to fit into a broad range of titles. Consider how the short story below could be adapted to fit a variety of essay titles below:

Write a short story in which setting/location is a significant feature (2008).
Write a short story in which the central character is faced with making an important decision (2009).
Write a short story in which a central character is either manipulated or is manipulative (2013).
Write a short story about a reunion (2013).
Write a short story in which a ghostly presence plays a significant part (2014).
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I keep myself hidden from sight. Silent. Obscured. There is a pond nearby; deeper than it is wide. In summer, children come here, and I watch them; silently watching as they swim and play.

I knew their grandmother, but despite this connection, it is the third boy in their trio that has caught my attention. Paul, they call him. He is taller than the twins; handsome, with blonde hair and blue eyes. They laugh as they try to outdo each other. Paul laughs loudest, but his clear eyes are red at the edges. Earlier, the twins suspected, he’d been crying. They were right. Crying had become somewhat of a pastime for Paul.

His father left when he was nine. It was a Wednesday night. Paul lay on the bathroom floor, his ear to the cold tiles, listening to his parents shout at each other in the room below. Then there was silence. The news came on. Even to this day those opening credits remind Paul of those words shouted by his mother: “You had sex with her!”

“Sex” was a concept nine year old Paul didn’t fully understand, but it was that word that resulted in his father leaving, never to come back. It was mum’s fault. Mum made dad leave. Everything was mum’s fault. It was mum’s fault Paul didn’t see his cousins, it was mum’s fault he couldn’t go on the school tour, and it was mum’s fault that Paul wasn’t going to the same secondary school as John and Danny.

“But St. Anne’s is a great school,” she argued.

“I want to go to the Comp.”

“You’ll do better at St. Anne’s.”

“None of my friends are going there.”

“So you’ll make new ones.”

“I don’t want new ones.”

John and Danny were both going to the Comprehensive school, and they laughed at Paul, especially when they found out he started school two days earlier than they did.

That St. Anne’s was an all-boys school, was another hilarious fact for the twins who had spent most of the summer talking about the things they were going to do with the girls in the Comprehensive. Even today, the word “sex” was used.

John and Danny laughed. Paul did too, but it was a fake laugh, to him there was nothing funny about that word. To him, it wasn’t a word associated with fun or pleasure. It was a loaded word; a word that had destroyed his family, and ruined his life. Last night, Paul had cried. He cried thinking of the future, thinking forward to dark September evenings. John and Danny would move on. They’d make new friends and Paul would be alone. Alone. And struggling to fit into a school he neither wanted to be in, nor did he belong.

His sadness is palpable. I want to reach out to him, tell him he wouldn’t be alone. I could be his friend. He could talk to me, cry to me. And I would hold him in my arms, like his father should have.

“Time for a swim”, announces Danny. They quickly disrobe.

I am now fixated by Paul, so much so, I don’t even notice the others enter the water.

They swim in circles, laughing, splashing and sending wave like ripples to the edges of the pond. Paul changes direction and effortlessly crosses to my side, eventually pulling himself out of the water.

He is so close to me now. He might have even seen me, had he been looking. He looks well; a fine specimen of adolescence and so close, I could almost touch him… He re-enters the water in spectacular style, plunging deep below the surface.

Now’s my chance.

You see, even on hot days like this, the water remains cold, and the deeper you go, the colder it gets; sometimes below freezing. It is a lesson Paul would have been taught in Geography in a couple of weeks… but not now… not now that I’ve introduced myself…

A tap on his shoulder; a whisper in his ear, “Time to go”.

***

After ten minutes of hysterical searching for their friend, the twins eventually drag his lifeless carcass to the shore. It lies there, sprawled out on the grass; quite undignified.

I think back to the twin’s grandmother. It was summer when I met her too, but that night was different; all candles and rosary beads, and she was peaceful, almost happy to come with me – poor Paul; cold, wet, frightened.

I glance back over my shoulder at the ensuing pandemonium; a jogger stops to help. Soon the ambulance will arrive, with the paramedics frantically pounding on Paul’s chest, desperately trying to expel water from his lungs… I do hate to see people waste their time.

Besides, someone somewhere is finishing a short story and I must go to relieve them of any future reading pleasures.

The cool, gentle breeze blew against Tiffany’s back as she made her way to the local pier. She had applied many layers of factor 50 sunscreen to her pasty, white body to ensure that the scorching hot sun did not absolutely obliterate her skin, like what had happened when she was in 4th class. She didn’t like to reflect on the memories she had of that school. Oh, how young she was when everything happened, it was all so unfair.

That didn’t matter though. Things were better now; she was ploughing through her Junior Cert and was enjoying the few hot days that Ireland had to offer that year. The past would not affect the Tom Daly-esque skills she was going to perform jumping off that pier.

She pulled on her swimming attire as she stared across the shimmering ocean. It was around 11am so the place was fairly empty, unfortunately soon to be filled up with eager beach-goers. She thought about how her mother always liked to complain about how she had no friends. Sometimes Tiffany wished that she would be a little more subtle about that fact, like practically every other Irish mother to ever exist would. But no, her mother had to frequently remind of her of the sad, sad truth. It wasn’t even that Tiffany wanted friends – she was extremely introverted and much preferred the absence of people around her than the presence of them, she just wanted her mother to find a new topic and shut up about her lack of sociability. It was honestly getting irritating at this point. She caught herself getting mad at this and had to remind herself that this was her day – she was going to enjoy herself. She was going to jump off that pier like there was no tomorrow, acrobat style.

She walked to the edge of the pier and took a test jump to judge how high the pier was. She pencil-dived in and felt a rush of excitement as her body hit the cold, refreshing water. This was the life. However, what wasn’t ‘the life’ was the fact that the pier and beach surrounding it was starting to fill up with people. Mostly families, with young, bratty kids and parents who looked like they couldn’t give a toss about what their kids did or where they went.

She climbed the ladder back up to the pier and tried to ignore the influx of people arriving, along with those already there. It was quite hard to do that when kids were recklessly jumping off a pier in front of her, without a single thought considered about her presence; a bigger, much more capable girl tumbling off the pier. It was almost like they wanted a collision to happen. Tiffany always despised the carelessness of other children, despite being a fourteen-year-old tumbling off a concrete pier. She would communicate this often when she was younger but soon learned to zip it when met with sighs and not – so polite requests for her to shut up. So, on she went, thoughts to herself, jumping off that pier.

Whilst swimming, she noticed a group of girls heading quite far out at sea. “That’s a bit dangerous, how stupid”, she thought to herself, quickly telling herself off after she remembered that she was not supposed to be getting mad at anything today but enjoying herself. This brought ease to her, but as she scanned the faces of the people around her, she identified many of those faces as concerned. “Concerned?”, she thought. “What on earth is there to be concerned about?”

Plenty. There was plenty to be concerned about. She realised this as she turned around and saw those “stupid” girls struggling, badly. She could almost hear one screaming for help but it was quite hard to hear over the cries of the distraught people around her. “Where is the god damn lifeguard?”, a woman exclaimed, noticing that they were missing. Tiffany was training to become a lifeguard and had been top of the class since she joined the year before. Multiple scenarios of her lifeguarding class flashed before her eyes as she froze in shock. She almost could hear the voice in her head of her overenthusiastic teacher shouting, “THREE WHISTLES, LIFEGUARD IN THE WATER!” Any situation as serious of this would have resulted in him barging past anyone in his way and saving the endangered person. Except he wasn’t there. He could not be relied on. There was no whistle either.

She felt an enormous sense of determination blossom inside of her. There was so much rage building up in her chest but she could not move. That was until one of the girls dipped under and never came back up. She had to act fast. She darted over to the lifebuoy, yanked it off the wall and screamed that repetitive, dreaded line, “THREE WHISTLES, LIFEGUARD IN THE WATER!”, despite those three whistles never coming. Off she went with the lifebuoy, speeding through the water.

The once refreshing water now sent chills down her spine as she swam frantically towards the girls. It was life or death now, nothing hypothetical like at lifeguard training. The saltiness of the seawater made her chapped lips sting, but to worry about that now would be selfish, a terrible idea. Every breath she took became more and more desperate, as the lactic acid built up in her muscles and made them ache terribly.

She reached the girls. “Okay, it’s time now”, she muttered to herself inside her head as she was too out of breath to speak. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and dived down to retrieve the girl who was swept under.

The two other girls desperately held on to the lifebuoy, holding their other friend between them. She was quite clearly unconscious and could not make a single move herself, which became evident to Tiffany when she had reached the pier. She hauled her up to safety and instantly felt shivers down her spine as she recognised that the girl in front of her was actually a lifeless corpse. She quickly checked her pulse and was correct – the girl was dead.

Tiffany performed CPR on the girl as another person called 112. She looked into the girl’s eyes as she rhythmically and firmly pushed down and down on her heart, desperately trying to keep her going until the ambulance arrived. However, a sudden realisation caused her determination to save this girl’s life to decline rapidly. Memories started flooding in as she slowly started to recognise who she was staring at. The primary school she constantly pushed aside when it came up in thought could not be ignored any longer. The very cause of her hatred of life at the time was the body right in front of her very eyes. The body whose life she had complete control over. The body who bullied her relentlessly, who made sure that she couldn’t feel safe when coming to, being at or leaving school, who made her doubt her right and ability to speak her opinion and who made her feel nothing but humiliated. And what for?

The crowd stared in horror as Tiffany stopped, rolled the girl over the edge of the pier and watched her fall smack bang into the water. Power was hers again. She smiled at this fact as she got up, strolled to the edge and jumped off her beloved pier.

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