Noughts

Noughts are the subordinated racial group in the novel’s Nought–Cross hierarchy, and their position is shown as a condition imposed and reproduced across public life. School access, policing, medical administration, political speech, and criminal punishment all shape what it means to be Nought; against that machinery, individual Nought characters display different hopes, choices, and responses rather than a single collective outlook.

Identity and social position

The term Nought names a group defined in relation to Cross power. The contrast is visible in the people gathered outside Heathcroft: a crowd chants against admitting Nought pupils while Callum and three other Noughts are surrounded by police trying to force a route through to the school entrance. Officers form another line to push Crosses into two orderly groups. The scene makes exclusion physical: the pupils’ access to school is contested in the street, and the police presence does not prevent the crowd from closing in.

The hostility does not end at the school gate. Looking back on the day, Callum describes the news report as a selective account: it calls the response to the admitted pupils “some hostility” while omitting that the officers assigned to guard them let the crowd reach them to poke, pinch, and punch them. His jacket is covered in Cross spit, yet none of this appears on camera. Nought experience is therefore shaped not only by violence but by the gap between what happens and what the public is shown.

Institutions and everyday exclusion

At Heathcroft, Mr Costa responds to complaints by suggesting that Nought pupils who find school difficult should go elsewhere. Mrs Paxton counters that the Noughts are constantly picked on and warns that one of them may retaliate. Their exchange presents exclusion as an institutional choice: the question is framed not simply as whether Nought pupils belong, but whether the school will address the conditions making them targets.

The same hierarchy enters medical care through a government requirement for patients’ identity cards to be checked and registered before treatment can be administered. When Jude is at the hospital with his mother and Callum, Nurse Carter explains the rule as a measure supposedly intended to prevent benefit fraud. The scene links access to care with official identity verification, showing how administrative procedures can place additional scrutiny between a Nought family and help.

The pressure also reaches private relationships. When Sephy tries to defend herself amid the consequences of her association with Callum and his family, her mother blames her for bringing the family into court and the newspapers, then tells her that lying down with dogs means getting fleas. The rebuke treats closeness across the racial divide as contamination and casts the Nought family as a source of disgrace. The prejudice is carried into domestic speech, not confined to public policy or crowds.

Representation and political power

Political language gives racial hostility a respectable surface. In a broadcast, Sephy’s father describes Nought migrants as a “flood,” links them to rising crime and pressure on communal housing, and presents government action as necessary. The rhetoric turns people into a threatening mass and recruits public anxiety to justify exclusion. Its force lies in how it presents racial division as common sense and collective protection rather than prejudice.

That framing has a personal consequence for Jude, who connects Sephy’s father’s rhetoric with his own hatred of Sephy and with the death of his brother. The passage does not make his hostility interchangeable with the structures that sustain Nought oppression; it shows how political messages enter individual grievance and how the language of group conflict can deepen an already violent cycle.

Punishment and unequal power

The execution of Ryan McGregor makes the unequal stakes of the hierarchy stark. At Hewmett Prison, Noughts stand in silence while some face the scaffold and others weep; Crosses sit in the designated seats. The announcement identifies Ryan as having been convicted of seven murders and political terrorism, with his appeal denied, and declares that he will be hanged. For Sephy, who has not understood why she was brought to the prison until the sentence is announced, the event is also a sudden recognition: Callum is present, and his father is about to die.

The scene places formal judicial procedure beside visible racial division. The prison ceremony names the crime and sentence, while the crowd’s arrangement and expressions show how punishment is experienced within a society already divided between Noughts and Crosses. The execution is not merely a private loss for one family; it makes the authority of the state and the vulnerability of Nought lives occupy the same space.

Varied lives and the limits of the label

The novel also resists treating Nought identity as a complete account of any one person. Four months after Sephy’s kidnapping, she is working as a car mechanic in Sturham, three hundred kilometres from home. Her older coworker Gordy has spent decades in the trade and sees little change between one day and the next; his apparent resignation reminds Sephy of her uncles, Old Man Tony, and her father, and frightens her with the possibility of a future shaped by the same constraints. Another coworker, Rob, is a talker who imagines changing the world by complaining. These sharply different responses give the social condition a lived texture: endurance, fear, and protest coexist.

In a later conversation with Jack, Callum asks what it would be like if power were reversed and white people ruled instead of Crosses. He recalls imagining a world without discrimination or prejudice, with fair policing, equal justice, equal education, and equality of life. The question makes the hierarchy visible by inviting comparison, but his answer is not simply a wish to exchange places: the equality he describes would remove the structures that make Nought status a basis for diminished opportunity and unequal treatment. In that sense, Nought identity is both a mark imposed by the social order and a vantage point from which the order’s claims to fairness can be tested.