Extract four: About a Boy
12-year-old Marcus’s mother and father separated four years ago. Marcus has recently
moved from Cambridge to London with his mother. It is his second day at his new school
and he has arrived early and gone to the form room to try and avoid some students that
have been giving him a hard time.
There were a couple of girls in the room, but they ignored him, unless the snort of laughter he
heard while he was getting his reading book out had anything to do with him.
What was there to laugh at? Not much, really, unless you were the kind of person who was on
permanent lookout for something to laugh at. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of person
most kids were, in his experience. They patrolled up and down school corridors like sharks,
except that what they were on the lookout for wasn’t flesh but the wrong trousers, or the wrong
haircut, or the wrong shoes, any or all of which sent them wild with excitement. As he was
usually wearing the wrong shoes or the wrong trousers, and his haircut was wrong all the time,
every day of the week, he didn’t have to do very much to send them all demented.
Marcus knew he was weird, and he knew that part of the reason he was weird was because his
mum was weird(observer and clever). She just didn’t get this, any of it. She was always telling
him that only shallow
people made judgements on the basis of clothes or hair; she didn’t want him to watch rubbish
television, or listen to rubbish music, or play rubbish computer games(goat, selfish, biased and )
(she thought they were all
rubbish), which meant that if he wanted to do anything that any of the other kids spent their time
doing he had to argue with her for hours. He usually lost, and she was so good at arguing that
he felt good about losing. She could explain why listening to Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley (who
happened to be her two favorite singers) was much better for him than listening to Snoop Doggy
Dogg, and why it was more important to read books than to play on the Gameboy his dad had
given him. But he couldn’t pass any of this on to the kids at school. If he tried to tell Lee Hartley
- the biggest and loudest and nastiest of the kids he’d met yesterday - that he didn’t approve of
Snoop Doggy Dogg because Snoop Doggy Dogg had a bad attitude to women, Lee Hartley
would thump him, or call him something that he didn’t want to be called. It wasn’t so bad in
Cambridge, because there were loads of kids who weren’t right for school, and loads of mums
who had made them that way, but in London it was different.
Option 1: How does the writer use language to present
the bullies?
Option 2: How does the writer use language to present
the relationship between the son and mother?
The author presents the idea of dysfunctional relationships of Marcus and his mother by
using repetition and tricolon. In the first glimpse of the mother on the reader the author
uses repetition by “she didn’t want him to watch rubbish television, or listen to rubbish
music, or play rubbish computer games" suggesting the immensity of the mother’s bias
against certain common hobbies or actions, whereas due to her authority inside home
the reader feels empathy for Marcus because of the heavy burden he has been bearing
for years. Indeed this empathy underlined with the observation of Marcus “Marcus knew
he was weird, and he knew that the part of the reason why he was weird was because
his mum was weird” demonstrating how strich his mother is about her rules which
conveys the reader to his mum trying to raise an exact copy of herself, causing us to feel
intimidated from her. Overall, it can be seen that the conflicting relationship of Marcus
and his mum where the mother asserting dominance over him inside home, outside
home, even about the characteristics and hobbies of Marcus making the reader
sorrowful about what Marcus trapped into.
