How does a pro fare with the Leaving Cert essay?

Look, I was fantastic at English at school. I ‘got’ Othello, Yeats was a kindred spirit, I loved a good session of literary analysis (though to this day every copy of Silas Marner I find I kick into the sea). I was, in short, a pretty good bet to land the elusive Honours A, despite being at least a year too young to sit the Leaving (I was sixteen) and lacking focus to the extent I regularly wandered into traffic. And yet when the results landed that September, I’d been awarded a C. Respectable, of course, but not what I was aiming for, or what my exceptional teacher Mr Conneely was expecting. I’m not saying I’m still sore about it; it’s just that every time Day One of the Leaving Cert comes around I like to sit in a room with the curtains drawn, wailing and eating pastries.

I’m convinced I mucked it up on the composition question, so sitting Section II: Composing again felt like a chance to right (write?) some wrongs. I drafted some rules: No Word, no spellchecker, no Roget’s Thesaurus. I agreed to tweet as I went along, so that others could be wowed by my scholarly ferocity or horrified by my ineptitude, whichever applied. The paper arrived. I rolled my shoulders. This is for you, Mr Conneely!

There are more parameters given in the modern composing question than there were when I did my exam back in 1998. That’s a good thing: being restricted to certain kinds of essays cuts your chances of being dazzled by choice. I picked the first option: “Write a short story in which the main character is transformed when faced with a daunting challenge.”

Conclusions? It was hard. Ridiculously hard, and I was only doing it for the craic, as opposed to sitting an exam that could potentially set the course of the rest of my life. As a novelist, I take time to think, to take risks, to get to know my characters, to bring them places that may never make it to the finished story, just to see what might happen. Not to mention the luxury of honing, pruning and improving in further drafts. Having to come up with a piece, spontaneously, and make it original and interesting while still consciously displaying skills learned over a 13 or 14-year period is quite the challenge. No wonder I made a hames of it first time ‘round. Am I proud of what I produced on my second shot at it? God, no.

And that’s before I go into the damage done to my right wrist. After 70 minutes of furious scribbling I set down my Bic, picked up my keyboard, and held on, crooning, for fifteen minutes.

Lisa McInerney tweets as @swearylady.

See also @examwatch. Lisa McInerney is the author of the novel The Glorious Heresies (John Murray) and a very proud graduate of Mr Conneely’s English Class of 1998.

The Drop

English paper 1 (higher level)

Composing question: Write a short story in which the main character is transformed when faced with a daunting challenge.

The Drop, in which a boy must confront his fears and frailties to retrieve an important pack from a mountain ravine - Leaving Cert essay by Lisa McInerney

Any and every hope they had of making it any further was contained in that satchel. Such a small thing, he thought, to hold so much of such importance. It was made of some animal’s skin and was about the width of his forearm, held shut by straps and braided rope. And such a little way away, too; only maybe fifteen feet, still quite visible even in the murk of the late hour. It’s all relative, he thought. Fifteen feet was only a couple of strides on flat ground, in the daytime. Fifteen feet almost straight down, in the dark, with the wind picking up and his cheeks stinging with the cold, well. That’s a very different fifteen feet, isn’t it?

His companion struggled to the edge of the drop. She looked down. Hands on her thighs, the injured leg very obviously the weaker, trailing its counterpart by some inches and sickeningly twisted at the ankle. She barely grimaced, though. Again he felt a stab of jealousy. Oh, there was admiration too: she was so strong as to be a paragon and in her strength she represented so many possibilities now open to him. And there was no doubt that she had envied him, on occasion: his easy life, even the comfort of his gilded cage. But as the days had gone by and as he had become more aware of his potential, his own resilience, he had looked at her and felt that she already had the innate toughness he felt was his due. He had to work for it yet. That was not his fault; he couldn’t help how he had been reared. It was unreasonable envy, but envy nonetheless. He both cherished and feared the feeling.

‘I can’t get down there,’ she said.

He inhaled and the breath caught in his throat.

‘Yeah you can,’ he said. Desperation made him repeat it. He took her by the elbow and she shrugged him off.

‘How can I?’ she snapped. She threw one hand up in frustration. The other stayed on her thigh. Even in the darkness he could see how tightly she was clutching; there was strain in her knuckles; they were bone white and he felt the blood drain from his face in sympathy.

‘You’ll have to go,’ she said, grimly.

He looked over the edge of the drop. It was hard to make out a way down. The face was largely rock; there were the roots of the tree under which they’d sheltered before the attack, but he didn’t believe he had the strength or ingenuity in him to utilise their footholds, their natural railings. Now, if it was her, she’d be down to the satchel and back before he’d have time to worry or wonder. But he was soft, and fearful, and . . .

‘If you don’t get that bag,’ she cried, jolting him from self-pitying reverie, ‘we have no way of finding the pass. Do you understand? Without the map and without the herbs, we’ll die on this mountain.’

The wind, as if stirred by her anger, whistled around him, whipped his air into his eyes, found a way down his collar and past the tight bindings of his sleeves.

She pushed his shoulder.

‘Go!’

He didn’t respond. She was correct; it was up to him, the weaker of their inconvenient, unintended, mismatched and yet entirely necessary team.

He crouched and shuffled to the edge and let his feet hang down and catch an overhang.

Careful, careful . . .

He remembered her movements from her way-finding or scavenging. He knocked his heels against the earth and made himself secure enough to turn around. He grabbed tufts of hardy mountain grasses and with his feet searched slowly for further indents or jutting roots.

He had been sure she’d offer advice, or, more likely, admonish him for his reluctance, his jerky, fitful movements. But she stayed silent. Maybe she was dealing with the pain of her injured leg. Maybe she knew what a big challenge this was to him, he who had lived all of his seventeen years in the sterile citadel, he who had never known physical labour, he who had never needed bravery, or guile.

He allowed himself no congratulations at the bottom of the drop. He retrieved the satchel and checked the contents. Then he swung the bag over his shoulder and regarded the precipice.

It took more strength to make his way back up and he could feel it in his arms, across his shoulders, in the band across his torso. There was pain, but there was life too. He took a longer stretch than he felt able to at the last part and he felt his muscles sigh and ache and... what was that she’d said so many times? My muscles are singing. She’d said it with gruff complaint and yet now he wondered if the analogy had been intentional. The effort made him feel complete. In pain he felt all that was at stake. He felt alive and everything that went with it: pride, belonging and frailty.

She didn’t smile when he hauled himself back up beside her but it didn’t matter. There was palpable appreciation, and in her brief nod there was concession, acceptance.

She took the satchel from him and set about prepping the herbs to relieve the swelling on her leg.

‘We need to move’, she said, when she was done.

Under the branches of the twisted tree they held the map and orientated themselves. When they moved, he took point. He had yet a lot to learn, but for the first time, he thought himself capable of it.