Into My Arms Read Online Free Page B

engaged her audience. Nothing had ever elated her more than when she was competing and the crowd had spontaneously begun clapping along with the music to her floor routine. She’d been surprised and pleased to find that, on the good days, teaching could be just the same; that there were moments when your students went with you and didn’t look away.
    ‘OK, then, so has anyone here made a mosaic before? Or seen one?’ she asked.
    A few hands went up. ‘Last year in art we made letters—our initials—out of torn-up bits of coloured paper glued onto cardboard,’ a boy in the second row answered.
    ‘That’s a good start,’ said Skye. ‘Ours is going to be much bigger though, and made of glass and tiles. Plus it will last for years and years. Do you still have your initials?’
    The boy shook his head. ‘No way. Mum threw it out pretty much as soon as I brought it home.’
    ‘There you go,’ said Skye. ‘But no one’s going to throw this one out. You’ll be able to bring your own kids to see it.’ She was rewarded with a smile, and selected another hand.
    ‘There’s a mosaic-covered statue down by the Yarra,’ said a girl with thick black hair. ‘It’s a great big thing, like an animal. There’s lots of different colours.’
    ‘Oh, that’s a good one, Natasha,’ exclaimed Skye. ‘It is Natasha, isn’t it?’ She was still learning. The girl nodded. ‘That sculpture’s called Angel , and I think it’s made up of about four thousand tiles. It stood in the moat at the National Gallery for years.’ No flicker of recognition on any of their faces. They were too young to remember that. Skye looked around again. A thin brown arm on the periphery of the classroom tentatively edged forward. ‘Yes?’ Skye said, encouragingly.
    ‘Excuse me, miss, but at home my parents have a picture of a mosque with mo-say-ic.’ The boy spoke haltingly and with an accent, stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables.
    ‘A mosque—that’s like a church or a temple, only for Muslims,’ Skye explained for the benefit of the class. She turned back to the boy, who blinked at her nervously. ‘Where is it, do you know? And can you tell us about the mosaics?’
    He swallowed, his face serious. ‘It is in Iran, where my family is from. The colours are very bright—blue, red and yellow. They are triangles.’ He paused for a second, as though carefully considering his words. ‘They make the ceiling dance.’
    ‘That’s a wonderful expression,’ Skye said. ‘Sometimes tiles do that, if they’re placed at a certain angle—they can cause a flat surface to appear three-dimensional, as if it has curves or crests. There’s some beautiful mosaic work in the Middle East. They use it on the outsides of their mosques, as well as internally. Is this one in Tehran?’
    ‘No,’ the boy said. ‘Shiraz.’
    ‘Perhaps you could bring the picture in next week, ah . . .’
    ‘Zia,’ he supplied. ‘It is pinned to the wall, but I will ask my father.’
    ‘Thank you, Zia,’ said Skye, and instructed the class to open their sketchbooks.
    Later, she asked the students to divide into groups of four or five to work together on specific sections of the mosaic. As the other children quickly coalesced into factions or shrieked to their friends across the room, Zia simply sat at his desk and waited, hands folded neatly in his lap. Once it was clear that no one was going to claim him, Skye picked up her stool and went and sat beside him herself.
    ‘Zia,’ she said quietly, after asking the groups to start pooling their ideas, ‘remember the designs we did last week? Can I see some of yours?’
    The boy gave the slightest shrug of his shoulders and nudged his book towards her. On the first page he’d sketched a frog leaping out of the water towards a lily pad, on the second a bird in flight. The name of the school was crudely lettered underneath, and, Skye noticed, misspelled.
    ‘Fitzroy,’ she corrected him. ‘You’ve left out the