Text A: The Last Week (a story written for this practice paper)
[1] The shutters of Haroon Tailoring had come down at seven o'clock every evening for forty-one years, and on the first morning of the last week Nadia watched her grandfather lift them as though nothing were different. He rattled the padlock, leaned his shoulder into the corrugated metal and shoved it upwards with a groan that belonged partly to the shutter and partly to him. Above the doorway, a notice from the municipal office had been pasted at an angle: the old arcade would be demolished at the end of the month to make way for a car park.
[2] "Don't stand there like a customer," he said. "Customers stand. Family works."
[3] Inside, the shop smelled of chalk, machine oil and the starch that clung to everything. Bolts of cloth leaned against the walls like tired soldiers: navy wool, cream cotton, a silk the colour of ripe apricots that nobody had ever bought. The great black sewing machine squatted by the window, its gold lettering worn away in two places where her grandfather's thumbs had rested for decades. Paper patterns hung from a wire across the ceiling, swaying slightly whenever the door opened, so that the whole room seemed to breathe.
[4] Nadia had been sent to help because she was fifteen and had nothing better to do in the school holidays, or so her mother claimed. In truth, Nadia suspected she had been sent because nobody else could bear to come. Her uncles had offered money, a van and a cousin with a strong back; none of them had offered to sit in the shop.
[5] Her grandfather gave her a ledger and a pencil. "Everything in here," he said, sweeping his arm around the room, "goes in there. What it is, how many, and who should have it."
[6] "Who should have it?"
[7] "Things have owners," he said, "even when they don't know it yet."
[8] For the first two days she wrote dutifully: twelve reels of black thread, four pairs of shears, one tape measure with the first ten centimetres missing. Her grandfather spent most of the time talking to people who drifted in from the bazaar. The man who sold mangoes from a handcart came to complain about the car park. A schoolteacher came to collect a jacket she had left for alteration in March and then forgotten. An elderly woman Nadia had never seen before came simply to sit on the customers' bench, saying nothing, while her grandfather pressed a shirt that did not seem to belong to anyone.
[9] "Who was that?" Nadia asked when the woman had gone.
[10] "Mrs Qureshi. I made her wedding coat." He folded the shirt with great care. "Her husband's too. He died last winter."
[11] On the third day, Nadia found the tin. It was wedged behind the cutting table, a biscuit tin with a picture of a castle on the lid, so rusted at the hinges that she had to lever it open with a pair of shears. Inside were hundreds of strips of paper, each one pinned to a small square of fabric. On every strip, in her grandfather's careful, slanting hand, was a name, a date and a list of numbers: chest, waist, sleeve, length.
[12] She read them sitting cross-legged on the floor. Some of the names she knew from family stories. Some she recognised from the bazaar. One, dated fourteen years earlier, said simply: "Nadia. First Eid. Length 52." The square of fabric pinned to it was apricot silk.
[13] She looked up at the bolt leaning in the corner, the one nobody had ever bought.
[14] "You've found my library," her grandfather said from the doorway. He did not sound annoyed. He sat down heavily on the bench and held out his hand for the tin, and for a long moment he turned the strips over without reading them, as if he could tell who each one was by touch alone.
[15] "Why did you keep them?" she asked.
[16] "A tailor who forgets a measurement has to ask again," he said. "And people change. A man comes in at twenty with a waist like a young tree, and at fifty he is a different shape altogether, and he is embarrassed, so he says the old coat must have shrunk." He smiled faintly. "If I have the old numbers, I can let the coat out and say nothing. That is half of the job. The other half is knowing when to say nothing."
[17] Nadia thought about this. "And the car park? Will you say nothing about that?"
[18] Her grandfather put the lid back on the tin, pressing it down until it clicked. Outside, a motorbike coughed and the mango seller shouted a price. "A car park is also useful," he said at last. "People will come to the bazaar more easily. Perhaps they will buy more mangoes." But his hands stayed on the lid, and she noticed that they were not quite steady.
[19] On the last afternoon, the ledger was full and the shelves were empty. The patterns had come down from their wire and lay in folded stacks, flat and silent. Her uncles' van stood outside with its back doors open like a mouth. Nadia carried out the shears, the thread and the tape measure with its missing centimetres. Her grandfather carried the sewing machine himself, refusing all help, his face set and red with effort.
[20] When everything else was gone, he handed her the bolt of apricot silk.
[21] "It was always going to be yours," he said. "I was waiting for you to grow into it."
[22] She held it against her chest. It was lighter than she had expected. Behind them, he pulled the shutter down for the last time, and the sound it made, a long, falling rattle, followed them all the way down the street.