A* Narrative for IGCSE First Language English: The Portrait by Philip Liang
Sarah O'Rourke - Jan 05, 2026
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A* Narrative for IGCSE First Language English: The Portrait by Philip Liang
It was a bright cold evening of summer and Anna shuddered into her coat in an effort to escape the biting wind.
As she slipped into her new flat with the last of the boxes, she dropped her keys into the bowl in the hallway and paused to kick off her boots.
The apartment was a small battered space that had not seen much renovation since the late seventies, according to the last owner. The heater whined like a dying horse and the pale blue wallpaper peeled at the corners like old scabs. Still, it was hers.
Anna moved towards the small stack of boxes between the tube telly and rudimentary kitchen that was most definitely stuffed with several biohazardous organisms, and gently placed the last box on top of the others. They were the last remnants of her old life: clothes, hygiene stuff, some crumpled drawings, a shoe box filled with CDs, a handful of game cartridges, the old yellow console, and an annual from the end of senior school.
Now all of that was done. She just had to sort through the mess and figure out where everything would go. Thankfully, she did not have a lot of things to unpack. Unfortunately, however, she was the only one left to do it.
Anna’s parents weren’t dead, but they might as well have been. The new recession of the early 90s had hit them hard, and suddenly the scaffolding of family life cracked completely. Her father buried himself in contract work abroad, gem shipping to the continent, and her mother vanished into one managerial role after another.
Now she had completely accepted that they were simply trying to survive and give her a stable future, but as a child she could only see that they had chosen work over her. Latchkeys, the anthropologists called kids like her—those who came home to an empty house, left to fend for themselves while their parents put in long hours at jobs to pay the bills.
She pulled the boxes into smaller piles, one for those she would need to use on a daily basis and one that might just gather dust in the cupboard forever.
Peeling the drafting tape off the first box in the forgotten pile, Anna found herself staring at a tangle of wire and plastic. The old yellow Co90. Black, bulky and scratched, its trademark yellow Y logo still clung stubbornly to the corner. The cartridges wedged between the console and the box wall slipped free as she lifted it out. It was lighter than she remembered.
Her throat tightened. Beneath the games lay something flatter, wrapped in a crinkled grocery bag from a now defunct store. She slipped it out carefully and her breath caught. It was a framed portrait.
Anna did not remember it being tucked into this box, and for a moment, she simply stared at it, frozen. It was of her and her old friend Lyric. They must have been twelve at the time the photo was taken. They were sitting on the steps of his home at Frostholm, grinning widely.
There had been no falling out, no dramatic goodbyes, but somewhere between the start of college and adulthood they had drifted apart. The last she’d heard of him, he had moved to study on the continent. Her fingers ran along the frame. The image of the two of them, young and carefree, stirred up something deep in her chest.
The weekends spent playing video games in his living room. The endless chatter about Chrono Peace, Wingman, and what other games they could afford. It all felt so far away now.
She turned the photograph over and was startled to see a note written in jagged handwriting: You thought there would be something here. Anna smiled and shook her head. Those exact words had been an inside joke from Wingman.
How long had it been since she’d last spoken to him? Almost a decade. She had no idea where he was now, what he was doing, or if he even remembered her.
As she studied the portrait again, Anna considered placing it back in the box, to bury it in the past where it belonged. But the temptation to reach out again was overpowering. She could not bear for something to end without resolution.
Her hand drifted to her cell phone in her pocket, but hesitation washed over her instantly. What would she even say? Hey, remember me? The kid who spent hours at your place playing video games? No, that wouldn’t work. She dropped her hand from her pocket.
Lyric had likely grown up, maybe moved on completely. What was the point of dragging up the past? But the longer she held the photograph in her hand, the more her mind wandered back. They had been so happy. Simple, no complications. They’d argue about high scores, laugh at ridiculous plotlines.
She sighed. The more she stood there, the colder the apartment seemed to get. But it was not the cold that bothered her. It was the emptiness, the absence of familiarity.
Anna hesitated a moment longer, then pulled her cell phone from her pocket. Her thumb hovered over the keypad as she entered the contact list. She couldn’t. What if he had changed? What if he had forgotten everything? She bit her lip, but she couldn’t let go.
With a deep breath, Anna scrolled to the L section of her contacts, where its only name stood unchanged since the day she first saved it: Lyric D. Anna’s thumb hovered over the call button.
Lyric, she thought again. She hadn’t heard his voice in so long. She wondered how he would sound now. Her thumb hovered one last time before she pressed the button.
The call began to dial.
