Summary
THE SPLIT
Sephy and Minerva visit their mom in the hospital, and Jasmine asks that they bring her makeup and alcohol. Kamal hasn’t been by to see her, and she says her perfect daughters are the only ones who love her. Callum’s house is also tense: His father and brother are going to an L.M. meeting, and Meggie won’t speak to Ryan as long as he's in the L.M., so Callum feels alone and angry with Lynette.
Around six months pass; Callum turns 16 with almost no celebration; Sephy sees her mother slip further into alcohol dependency. Callum and Sephy talk on the phone—Sephy has to go shopping with her mother at the Dundale Shopping Center today, which she dreads. When Callum tells his family he’s going to the shopping center, Jude and Ryan panic and tell him not to go. He realizes the L.M. has something planned for the shopping center. Callum runs and pulls Sephy from the shopping center just before a bomb goes off, killing seven people and injuring many more.
The news reports that the L.M. gave only a five-minute warning for the bomb, but Jude says that’s a lie—when the cell was ordered to plant the bomb, they were told there would be an hour warning, with plenty of time to evacuate everyone. It’s implied that Ryan knew a warning wouldn’t actually be given. Meggie is furious with them, but especially Ryan, for involving the family with the L.M. During their argument, she slaps him and injures her hand. She asks Jude to take her to the hospital. Callum, feeling forgotten, goes with them. In her confusion after the bombing, Sephy isn’t able to sleep, so she tries some of her mom’s chardonnay.
Mercy Hospital is a depressing, busy, underfunded mess, and it takes a long time for Meggie to be seen. She and Jude have a private conversation, making Callum feel even more left out. The nurses require ID for noughts now, but Meggie doesn’t have hers, so Nurse Carter takes Callum and Jude’s, promising to delete their info if Meggie comes in the next morning with hers. Sephy, meanwhile, begins to drink every night—to smooth out the rough edges, as her mother says. Meggie kicks Ryan out of the house so he can’t corrupt her sons, but Jude says he’ll just go with his father—he’s not giving up the L.M. Callum leaves and no one notices, since they’re all too busy yelling and hating one another.
He finds Sephy on their private beach, drunk, and berates her. They argue—Callum calls out how luxurious and easy Sephy’s life is, and Sephy says that she’s just tired of everything and doesn’t know what else to do. Callum asks her to promise to stop drinking, and Sephy promises she’ll try. She kisses Callum, but he says she reeks of alcohol; she tells him that he can be just as cruel as her father is to her mother. She accuses him of being in the L.M. and says she wishes he’d just let her get blown up. He kisses her, and things go further than kissing—Sephy finds that it makes things better but still isn’t enough. Callum is conflicted. He can’t stop thinking about her, but he knows they’re both too young, and he wishes Sephy could live even half of his life to see how easy she has it. He prays to God: if He’s up there, please let him and Sephy be together when they’re older. That night, with no warning, the McGregor house is tear-gassed, and they are all arrested with no explanation.
Sephy, also conflicted, decides to sort herself out before thinking about a future with Callum. She asks her mom if she can go away to boarding school, but her mom says no. She realizes Callum is the only thing holding her back. She tries repeatedly to get a hold of Callum to tell him she wants to go away to school, but he doesn’t pick up.
Callum is interrogated by the police about his family’s involvement in the L.M. Hours later, he learns from his mom that the police don’t have Jude, but they say his fingerprints were found on an empty can near the bomb site—which they checked against his ID taken at the hospital. Meggie and Callum are free to go, but they learn that Ryan is being formally charged with political terrorism and seven counts of murder.
Meggie and Callum visit multiple solicitors and are turned away. The fifth one, a nought named Adam Stanhope, agrees to talk to Ryan. Mr. Stanhope gets Meggie and Callum a meeting with Ryan, who only confessed because the police told him they 1) had Jude in custody, and 2) had enough evidence to hang him. Sephy watches the news with Jasmine and Minerva. Sephy doesn’t believe Ryan is guilty, but her family certainly does, and they worry about how their connection to the McGregors will affect their reputations—especially Kamal’s. Sephy is determined to prove Ryan’s innocence.
Callum and Meggie learn from Mr. Stanhope that a Cross lawyer, Kelani Adams QC, has agreed to take Ryan’s case, and that an anonymous benefactor has covered all of the legal fees. Callum knows it was Sephy, and he swears to himself that he’ll pay her back no matter what it takes.
Kamal Hadley returns home, and Sephy is overjoyed until she realizes he’s only back because of Ryan's trial. Callum is called to the headmaster’s office at Heathcroft, where Mr. Costa tells him that he shouldn’t attend classes until his father’s matter is “satisfactorily resolved.” Callum argues, but he realizes that he, like all other noughts accepted to Cross schools, is being excluded/removed for things Crosses would just be told off for. Callum slams Mr. Costa’s door and leaves Heathcroft, knowing he’ll never come back.
Analysis
Sephy develops a drinking habit, which she'll find particularly hard to break over the upcoming time skip. This behavior is learned directly from her parents, as she finds it "smooths out the rough edges," a phrase she learned from Jasmine. Though Sephy hopes not to become a clone of her mother, she mimics Jasmine's coping mechanisms and finds them effective, showing she has more in common with her mother than she might think. Callum also learns from his parents, and especially how they treat him. After Lynette's death, he is left behind by his parents and brother. He doesn't have a place in the main event, instead trailing behind; he's left on the outside by his parents, so he feels left on the outside by everything.
Callum often displaces this anger. For example, on page 182, Callum observes that his family drifting apart is "something else to hate my sister for." When he directs his hatred toward Lynette, the reader can see that this is him lashing out in (at least mostly) the wrong direction. Callum and Sephy both displace their hatred onto specific people, and often onto each other, then end up retracting or apologizing for that rage. These frequent projections continue to encourage the reader to dig underneath what a character is saying for what they actually mean and feel.
One device Blackman uses to encourage readers to dig deeper is rhetorical questions. Especially when confronted with systemic societal forces they don't understand, both Sephy and Callum will ask a question that goes unanswered in the moment. On page 234, while Ryan is being held by the police, Callum thinks, "They didn't have a case, so what was taking so long?" By phrasing his thought process as a question, Blackman encourages the reader to answer. What could the police be holding Ryan for? Rhetorical questions force imaginative engagement and active participation in the story.
