Text 1: Marie’s Story: Angry at the world

This is an intermediate-level comprehension exercise.

This is the true story of 18-year-old Marie a young woman living in Johannesburg, South Africa. This is the first episode of Marie’s three-part story.

Marie’s a girl from a good home. She lives with her adopted mother in a big house in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs and on the outside she looks like a normal teenager. But she’s not. Not only is Marie a recovering drug addict, but she’s also been in serious trouble with the police. She’s been a car hijacker, she’s stolen from family and friends, and she probably knows more about addictive drugs than your local GP. You name it, she’s tried it – uppers (stimulants), downers (depressants/sedatives), dagga, crack cocaine, heroin – everything. Oh, yes, and she’s been in rehab (rehabilitation) too. Not once, but three times! I suppose you could say she’s like a cat with nine lives, except that she’s already used up eight of them.

Now she’s trying to get her life back together, but it’s not easy. It’s not easy at all…

“The first time I saw my real (biological) mother she was dead in her coffin,” Marie explained. “I was fourteen years old at the time. She had been killed in a car accident.

“I had been adopted when I was about one year old, so I didn’t remember her. My adopted mom and dad gave me everything, but they didn’t tell me I wasn’t their real daughter. I found that out by accident when I was about 12. It was the maid who first let the cat out of the bag, though the truth is I’d suspected for a lot longer.

“My adopted mom’s sister knew my real mother, which probably has something to do with my mom and dad adopting me, though I’m not sure what. Maybe they adopted me as a kind of favour? I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure and that eats away at me sometimes. And also, why did my mother give me up for adoption? Why not either of her other two children? I know they’re younger than me, my real brother and sister, I mean, but why me? Why not them?

“The whole situation just made me so angry: angry with myself, angry with my real mother, angry with my adopted mom and dad; angry at the world. It was because of anger that I started to go off the rails. And once I’d started, if was just so difficult to get back on again…

SEE NEXT WEEK FOR EPISODE 2 of MARIE’S STORY

Answer the following questions:

1. List the drugs Marie has used.
2. How many times has she been in rehabilitation?
3. Marie was adopted. How old was she when she was adopted? Did she know she was adopted?
4. How did she discover that she was adopted? She says that someone ‘let the cat out of bag’. Who ‘let the cat out of the bag’? What does this expression mean?
5. Marie feels that she may have been adopted ‘as a kind of favour’. What does she mean by this?
6. In the last paragraph she says she ‘went off the rails’. What does she mean? What made her ‘go off the rails’?

Answers

1. Uppers (stimulants), downers (depressants/sedatives), dagga, crack cocaine and heroin.
2. 3 times
3. When she was about one year old.
4. A maid ‘let the cat out of the bag’. The expression means to reveal a secret carelessly or by mistake.
5. To help Marie’s biological mother, who was a distant relative.
6. To lose control and to begin to behave in a negative way that is abnormal and unpredictable.