Callum McGregor

Callum McGregor’s story follows a boy shaped by the gap between his life as a Nought and the privilege enjoyed by Crosses, and by his attachment to Persephone Hadley, a Cross. He encounters discrimination in housing, education, public representation, and the justice system; later, he joins the Liberation Militia and participates in Persephone’s kidnapping. His love for her offers a way beyond inherited hostility, but it does not undo the violence he has joined or the state’s power to condemn him. Hanged for kidnapping and political terrorism, Callum leaves behind a child, a bereaved Persephone, and a brother committed to revenge.

Identity and early experience

Callum’s chapters are narrated in the first person, giving the reader direct access to his efforts to manage anger and humiliation. At home, he contrasts an imagined palace with the family’s cramped, rundown house: a “three-up, two-down” with a small vegetable garden. Returning from Persephone’s home sharpens the disparity. Callum tries to turn his attention away from resentment by looking at the trees and sky before entering the house, a small act of self-command rather than any change in the circumstances that provoke him.

His preparations for Heathcroft High carry a related anxiety. He lays out the ruler, pencil case, pens, pencils, exercise book, and calculator required by the school, then polishes the old calculator again, still feeling that he lacks something. The school supplies have been assembled, but they cannot make the gap between his family’s resources and the school’s expectations disappear. His private instructions to himself to be grateful show how early he has learned to manage deprivation as if it were a personal failing.

School and institutional exclusion

The hostility surrounding the admission of Nought students to Heathcroft turns Callum’s unease into a public confrontation. A crowd gathers outside the school, chanting “NO BLANKERS IN OUR SCHOOL.” Callum and three other Nought students are surrounded by police as officers try to move through the crowd; other police form a line to push the Cross demonstrators back. The scene makes clear that formal access to the school has not brought safety or acceptance.

The account of the protest is contested. A television report describes the Nought students as having met “some hostility,” while Callum recalls that police tasked with protecting them allowed the crowd to reach them and that Cross spit covered the back of his jacket. His bitter observation about the reporter’s euphemism points to a further form of exclusion: what happens to Noughts is softened or omitted when the story is presented to the public.

Callum also overhears Mr Costa dismissing the problem at school, suggesting that Nought students who find it difficult should go elsewhere. Mrs Paxton counters that they are being picked on and warns that one of them may retaliate. The exchange reveals the difference between recognizing a danger and addressing its cause. Later, Mrs Paxton’s account of Mr Jason’s background leaves Callum trying to understand why a teacher he had thought might support him seems to hate him. Even when an individual’s position appears uncertain, the school’s larger climate gives Callum little reason to trust that authority will protect him.

Family and the reach of policy

Callum’s family life is affected by rules that reach beyond the classroom. At the hospital, Nurse Carter tells his mother and Jude that medical care cannot be administered until they show their identity cards, under a new government requirement that patient IDs be checked and registered. The nurse presents the measure as a way to prevent benefit fraud; in the McGregor family’s experience, it makes access to care conditional on official identification. The apparently administrative procedure brings state scrutiny into an intimate moment of family need.

The family is also affected by the criminal case against Callum’s father, Ryan McGregor. Persephone’s mother blames Callum and his family for drawing the Hadleys into court and public attention, telling Persephone that she should have stayed away from them. Her reproach makes Callum’s association with Persephone appear not as a relationship between two young people but as a source of reputational danger to her Cross family. Such judgments reinforce the boundary that the two are trying to cross.

From insurgency to kidnapping

As a member of the Liberation Militia, Callum operates under a false identity. The police do not know his real name or appearance; they know his cell by the codename Stiletto. The cell is mainly involved in acquiring money, explosives, and guns, and Callum says he expects to rise within the organization. His description of its cause as just sits uneasily beside the methods and weapons that sustain it, a tension that becomes decisive when the Militia turns to kidnapping.

Callum takes part in abducting Persephone, the daughter of Kamal Hadley, and hiding her in a remote place to force Kamal to meet their demands. Jude celebrates the operation as a success, and Callum’s role makes the political conflict immediate and personal: he has helped seize the woman he loves as leverage against her father. When Jude praises him as a younger brother, Callum responds by grabbing Jude’s jacket and shoving him against a wall. The gesture exposes the fracture beneath the apparent triumph; Callum is not simply at ease with the act or with Jude’s celebration of it.

The captivity brings Callum and Persephone together again. Callum remembers that he arrived at her room consumed by anger and the desire to hurt her, but the scene changes as she falls asleep beside him, holding on to him. He recognizes that he could harm her or protect her, and the contrast between those possibilities concentrates the moral crisis of his position. His feelings for Persephone do not erase his participation in coercion; instead, their intimacy makes the stakes of his choices harder to evade.

Love, death, and aftermath

Callum and Persephone make love in the cabin in the woods on the night Callum goes to collect ransom money. Persephone later tells Jude that Callum said he loved her that night and points to her pregnancy as evidence of their relationship. This revelation establishes that their bond continued during her captivity and that she is carrying Callum’s child. Their child links their private relationship to the public conflict that has already claimed Callum’s life.

At Hewmett Prison, Persephone arrives with her family without initially understanding why they are there. She sees Callum among the Noughts gathered to witness Ryan’s execution, and the public announcement identifies Ryan as having been convicted of seven counts of murder and political terrorism. This encounter reunites Persephone and Callum across the division between seated Crosses and standing Noughts, but only in the setting of a state execution. Callum’s father is condemned and hanged; later, Callum himself is hanged for kidnapping and political terrorism.

Callum’s final words to Persephone are interrupted by the opening of the trapdoor. In the aftermath, she tells Jude that Callum had admitted the Militia’s approach was wrong and that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” She also confesses her own guilt, believing she could have saved Callum but did not, and says that the people around them stood by while he died. Jude, meanwhile, holds Kamal responsible for Ryan’s death and treats Callum’s execution as another reason for revenge. Callum’s death therefore closes neither the political conflict nor its cycle of retaliation.

Narrative and thematic significance

Callum’s narrative repeatedly sets the institutions’ stated purposes against their effects. School admission does not prevent harassment; a news report reduces abuse to “some hostility”; hospital identification rules turn administrative verification into a condition of treatment; and the justice system executes Ryan and later Callum. These episodes accumulate around a central contradiction: Noughts may be formally admitted, processed, or tried, yet Callum’s experience shows how unequal power shapes what those procedures mean in practice.

His relationship with Persephone makes that contradiction intimate without offering an easy escape from it. They love one another across the Nought–Cross divide, but Callum’s membership in an armed movement and his participation in her abduction place his ideals and actions in conflict with that love. His eventual recognition, reported by Persephone, that retaliation cannot create justice arrives too late to save him. His life and death thus connect personal tenderness to political consequence: love can expose the human cost of the hierarchy, but it cannot by itself undo the violence, institutions, and inherited grievances that sustain it.