C-A-T

As she climbs upstairs the next morning, Lampie does not feel quite as certain as she did last night. When she gets to the room, she puts down the tray of food on the floor in front of the bed.

“Breakfast,” she says. She sits in the chair to wait until he is ready.

Behind her, on the shelves, are the books with their brown spines. She can hear them quietly shuffling around. They are clearly nudging one another and whispering about her.

Her? That child with the mop? She’s going to learn how to read? They rustle their pages, chuckling at her. Whatever is she thinking? She’ll never be able to learn. As if! Can you imagine?

Lampie sighs and looks at the floor. Maybe they’re right, she thinks. She will just have to wait and see.

 

I’ll just have to wait and see, thinks Edward as he crawls out from under the bed, if I’ll ever be able to teach her something, that stupid child. He has laid out some things on his desk: paper, ink and a book with strips of paper marking the easy sections. But then he sees her sitting there, dangling her legs, in Joseph’s chair.

“Not in that chair!” he shouts. “Get up! This instant!” She must not sit there, absolutely not.

Shocked, Lampie jumps up and sits on the floor. With her legs crossed, and her arms too. Then she puts one finger up to her lips.

“What are you doing?”

“That’s what you have to do at school, isn’t it?” she says. “That’s how you’re always supposed to sit.”

“Oh.” He has no idea. “Right, then. We’ll start with… Um, you were at school for two weeks. So what do you already know?”

She puts her hand in the air and points a finger at the ceiling.

He looks up.

“What? What’s up there?”

“If you want to say something, you have to raise your hand.”

“There’s no need to do that. You can just speak to me.”

“E.”

“E?”

“Yes,” says Lampie. “The letter E.”

“You went to school for two weeks and you can read the letter E. What else?”

She shrugs. “That’s it.”

“Fine, the letter E.” He writes an elegant flowing letter on a sheet of paper and holds it up. “The letter E is the fifth letter of the alphabet. Our alphabet, the Latin alphabet, is based on the ancient Phoenician script, which in turn developed from…”

She puts her hand up.

“What?”

“That isn’t the letter E.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Isn’t. The E is made out of lines.” She draws in the air with her finger.

“Ah,” says Edward, nodding. “You’re talking about the capital letter, the upper-case E.”

“The what?”

“This is the small letter, the lower-case version. But it is most definitely an E.”

“Oh,” Lampie says. “But…”

“It’s very simple,” Edward explains. “Every letter of the alphabet can be written in two ways, depending on its function in the sentence. If it’s at the beginning, then…” He is starting to enjoy himself a little now.

She whispers something.

“What did you say?”

“Never mind,” says Lampie. “Doesn’t matter.”

 

The books on the shelves are helpless with laughter. It’s difficult, isn’t it, little girl? they giggle. Oh yes, reading’s not for everyone, you know. It takes years and years of study. Look at her, that little mop girl who thought she could learn how to read and write in no time. Whatever was she thinking? Don’t get ideas above your station…

She stands up.

“Where are you going?” shouts Edward. “We’re not finished yet!”

“Downstairs. To help Martha in the kitchen or something. To mop the floor.”

“But I was going to teach you to read.”

“Forget about it. There’s no need.” She is already at the door. “I’m too stupid anyway.”

Edward throws his pen down. “Good grief!” he says. “You coward. You… defeatist! No wonder they threw you out of school.”

“They didn’t throw me out.”

“No? So why did you leave?”

Lampie stops, but she does not turn around. “Because… because I had to look after my mother.”

“Oh,” says Edward. “What about after that?”

“She died.”

“Well, then you could have gone—”

“And then I had to help my father. And then… then something happened and I came to live here. And now I have to take care of you.”

Edward sits up straight. “You don’t have to take care of me. No one has—”

“Oh really?” Now Lampie turns around. “No one has to take care of you? So are you going to do everything for yourself from now on? Fetch your food, your water, get yourself into the bath, out of the bath, count to one hundred and whatever—”

“One hundred and thirty-five.”

“Yes, I’ve actually got the hang of that now! Do you think I enjoy doing it? Getting bitten and shouted at by a… by a… nasty reptile!” She knows she should not be saying it, but right now she does not care.

“And do you think, do you think?…” the boy begins. He is stumbling over his words, almost spitting because he is so angry. “Do you think I like to have you doing all those things? A brainless bumpkin like you? Who doesn’t know anything, who can’t even read?”

“Well, teach me then!” yells Lampie.

“That’s what I’m trying to do!”

“But I’m too stupid, eh?”

“Maybe,” says Edward. He looks at her with his pitch-black eyes. “But maybe not.”

 

He stares at her as she stands there in the doorway. At her ragged dress and that wispy hair, at the bruise on her cheek, which has almost faded away, the bandage on her wrist. Then he turns to look at the chair, the desk stacked with books. That chair is where Joseph sat. That book, The Three Musketeers, is one that Joseph often read aloud to him – Edward knew it almost by heart, but that was what made it so good. That atlas, too, had given them hours of pleasure – leafing through it, tracing maps and tracking his father’s travels, with neat dotted lines and crosses to mark the harbours. There is the book about birds and the one about flowers, full of dried petals and leaves that the old man brought for him. Exactly the right flower on exactly the right page. It is nowhere near full. It probably never will be complete now.

He takes a sheet of paper from the desk and draws two lines on it. A horizontal one and a vertical one.

“Let’s just start again. I’ll make it easier.” He points. “Look, child. This is a T.”

“My name is Emilia,” says Lampie. “And you’re a child yourself.”

“Emilia, then.”

“But you can call me Lampie too. That’s what they—”

“Look at the letter!”

Lampie looks. “Er. Eh?” she says.

“No, T,” says Edward. “This is an A.” He takes another sheet of paper and draws a shape on it. He makes the sound of the letter. “A. That is the letter A.”

“Mm,” says Lampie thoughtfully.

“Excellent. We can do that one too!” He takes a third sheet of paper.

Four lines with two points at the top. “Mm. That’s the sound of the letter M. Look. Let’s start with those letters, shall we?”

He places the three sheets of paper on the desk, on top of Alexandre Dumas. They will not be getting around to that book for a while.

 

“So we have a T, an A and an M.”

Lampie shrugs. If he says so. She still has not stepped back into the room.

“So what does this say?” asks Edward.

“I don’t know,” says Lampie. “They’re just letters.”

“M-A-T,” says Edward slowly. “What does that spell?”

“No idea.”

“Just look at the letters.”

“But I’m too stupid.”

“No, you’re not. Read it. M-A-T. What does that say?”

“How should I know?”

“Go on. What does it say?”

“I DON’T KNOW!” yells Lampie. “Mat or something!”

“Exactly,” he says. “Mat.”

“Really?” She comes closer to the desk and takes another look. M-A-T. She feels quite lightheaded. She understands. She can read a word!

Lampie is speechless. Mat. She thinks of all the mats she has ever walked on or swept or beaten… There are so many mats in the world, and now she can read all of them. M-A-T. This is easy!

“And now let’s continue,” says Edward in a very important voice. “We’ll take another letter. This is the letter C. You see? It’s a C. And I’ll take away the M and put down the C instead. Now what does it say?”

Lampie frowns. Her mat is gone, her lovely mat, which she understood. That mean boy has turned it into something else, something she is too stupid to read. With a letter C or something. C as in, “You see?” Yes, she sees that she can’t read C.

“C? Like the sea, with the waves and?…”

“No, no. I see where you’re going wrong. That’s the name of the letter, but that’s not what it sounds like in this word.” Then Edward pronounces the sound for her, very clearly. Lampie stares at him, feeling more stupid than ever.

But then suddenly she gets it. The light goes on. She sees the C!

“Cat,” she says. “C-A-T.”

“Cat,” replies Edward. He looks almost as happy as she does.

 

And now the world is made up of letters, of letters that she can read. Everywhere she looks, she sees the letters C and A and T and M.

On the spines of books, inside the books, on Lenny’s scraps of newspaper. In the kitchen, the C is on the coffee tin, and the T is on the packet of tea.

Lampie skips along the corridors all afternoon. She wipes a clean T in the dirt on the windows. She mops the slowest M ever in the longest corridor of all.

Tomorrow she is going to learn how to write her name.

Then she will finally belong in this world.