Page 135 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

Reluctantly, Jassal starts to smile. I can tell she’s trying to fight it, not wanting to let go of her hurt.

I just smile and wave her over. She thinks about it for another second, then with a heavy sigh, she picks up her slate and the spare for her brother and brings them over to me.

I pick Ahnjas up and set him on one knee, then gesture to Jassal to sit on the other.

They are both big for their age, but not so big that they don’t fit in my lap.

I hold the slate in front of us, the chalk in my other hand.

“Let’s teach Ahnjas a word,” I say, and start to draw.

I draw a basic smily face. Jassal frowns in confusion.

“That’s not letters.”

“I don’t know any letters,” I lie, “but this is a word. What word is it?”

“Happy?”

“I thought you were too stupid to read?” I say, teasing.

Jassal smiles, but it’s a little weak. “That’s just looking at a picture. It’s not reading.”

“It is. You look at the picture, and you know what word it is. That’s reading. You draw a picture for me to read.”

She draws a basic tree. Ahnjas grabs at her chalk, making it a bit wobbly, but not so much as to be unrecognisable. I pass him the piece of chalk in my hand and he starts drawing lines, burbling with delight.

“That’s a tree,” I say to Jassal. “Now I’m reading, too. Shall we teach Ahnjas the words?”

Intrigued despite herself, Jassal nods.

I grab his slobbery little hand and guide it to draw a smily face.

“Happy,” I say to him.

And because of Ahnjas’ habit of repeating one syllable, he answers with a bellowing cry of ‘peepee’ which makes Jassal nearly fall off my lap laughing.

I draw a sunshine and a hut and we practice naming the pictures and drawing them. Ahnjas mostly draws lines, but then he draws a wobbling circle. Jassal finishes it with two eyes and a smile.

“Peepee,” she whispers to him, and they both fall about laughing again.

I set Ahnjas on the floor with his chalk and slate. “I think he has enough to practise now. Let’s look at yours, shall we?”

I shift her so she’s nestled between both my arms, and take the slate in my hands.

Sally has printed out a basic sentence: The girl and boy live in the hut.

If Jassal were an ordinary human child, she would be far beyond this, but patchy tutoring, and maybe her raskarran blood, has left her far behind.

It’s no wonder Molly is catching up and surpassing her so quickly.

“Right then,” I say. “Read this to me.”

“I can’t,” Jassal says, a wobble in her voice.

“You read my words. This isn’t so different, is it?”

“Those were just pictures.”

“Okay. What does a ‘juh’ look like? ‘Juh’ for Jassal.”

She draws a slightly aggravated J.

“So that’s a picture of a ‘juh’ sound,” I say.

“It’s a letter, not a picture.”

“Sounds like it’s the same thing to me.” I take the chalk and draw another J next to hers.

“Juh. Sounds don’t have a shape, do they?

We can draw a bird, but we can’t draw its song.

Seems to me that letters are just a way of drawing a sound.

A picture of something we can’t see. And now I can read this letter picture, too.

” I pretend to scan the sentence. “I can’t see any juhs in this. What sound is this a picture of?”

I point to the first T.

“Tuh, huh, eh,” Jassal says, pointing to each letter in turn.

“Tuhuheh. I don’t think I know that word.”

Jassal giggles. “When a tuh and a huh are together, they make a ‘thhh’ sound.”

“Oh!” I feign surprise. “That’s tricky. So thhh eh. Thhheh. The?”

Jassal beams at me. “Yes!”

“Wow, you’re a very good teacher. Will you teach me some more?”

We go through each of the words in turn. When I get to a sound in my name, I write the letter at the top of the slate.

“Okay,” I say, when we reach the end of the sentence. “Let me see if I understand. This is my test. You’ve got to see if I got it right. I’ve tried to draw a picture of a word with the letters. Will you read it to me?”

I point to my name. Jassal looks at me nervously, but then places her finger beneath the first letter and sounds it out.

“Luh-oh-rrr-nuh-ah,” she says. “Luhohrrrnuhah. Lorna! It’s your name!”

“Is it? Did I do it right?”

“Yes!” She grins at me.

“Alright, high five.” I hold up my hand. “Did your mama teach you this one? High five? You do it when you’re celebrating something.” I take her hand and clap it against mine. “It’s a way of saying ‘well done, that’s great!’”

“That’s silly,” Jassal says, giggling.

“It is, isn’t it? But it’s good to celebrate. I’ve learned to write my name thanks to my very clever teacher. That deserves a celebration. Do you think your mama would write us another sentence? So you can teach me some more?”

Jassal grins and grabs the slate, running back to Sally. I look down at Ahnjas’s slate, which is now just a mess of white chalk. I wipe it clean with my sleeve and he immediately starts drawing a circle, then tries to draw eyes inside it.

“Good job,” I tell him, ruffling his hair.

“Let’s try this one, Lorna,” Jassal says, launching herself into my lap, a fresh sentence on her slate.

“Go on then. Read it to me.”

Jassal stumbles over the first couple of words, and I can sense her confidence wavering.

“Just one word at a time,” I say, placing my hands on either side of the top line of text so it’s the only thing she can see. “Don’t worry about all the rest of it.”

Jassal takes a deep breath, then tries again. I move my hands down the slate as she reaches the end of the line, revealing the next few words to her. The more words she gets, the quicker she goes, until she’s reading almost fluently. As we get to the end of the sentence, I smile.

“Was that right, Sally?” I say, smiling because I know it was.

When I look up, Sally is staring at me, a stunned expression on her face.

“Was it right, Mama?” Jassal says.

“Yes, my sweet. It was perfect.”

“High five?” Jassal says to me.

“Oh, definitely.” I clap my hand to hers. “Now tell me about some of these letters, because I think I heard some tricky ones in there.”

As Jassal talks animatedly about each of the letters, and the double ones that make a different sound, and the magic e, I glance up at Sally again.

Thank you , she mouths at me, wiping away tears with her sleeve.

No problem, I mouth back.

A spark of happiness tries to fight back against the heartbreak inside me. I listen to Jassal talking, try to feed it.

This could be enough, I try to convince myself.

Let it be enough.