Сборник рассказов на Английском языке

4. Best Friends and the Missing Sandwich

Friendship / Humour

The Great Sandwich Incident, as it came to be known for the rest of the school year, began with a single missing egg-and-cress sandwich and ended with the near-total collapse of a twelve-year friendship, a school-wide investigation involving three separate suspects, and a confession delivered, somewhat theatrically, from the top of the gymnasium climbing frame.

Nadia and Grace had been inseparable since primary school, the sort of friendship built on shared jokes so old that neither could quite remember their origins any more. Every day at lunch, without fail, Nadia brought exactly one egg-and-cress sandwich, cut into precise triangles by her father, and every day she left it, unattended and supposedly safe, on the third shelf of the shared classroom fridge while she went to choir practice. On the Thursday in question, it was gone.

What made the theft so wounding was not the sandwich itself — Nadia could, after all, have bought crisps from the tuck shop — but the timing. It disappeared on the exact day Nadia had planned to tell Grace some genuinely important news: that her parents were separating, and she and her mother would be moving across town at the end of term. She had been building up the courage all week, and had planned, in the small, illogical way that grief organises itself around trivial rituals, to tell Grace over that particular sandwich, at their particular bench, as they had eaten lunch together nearly every day since they were seven.

When the sandwich vanished, so did Nadia's courage, and in its place arrived a fury entirely out of proportion to a piece of missing bread. She accused, in quick succession, a boy named Fergus who had a well-documented weakness for cress, the school's evidently opportunistic resident squirrel, and finally, unforgivably, Grace herself, on the flimsy grounds that Grace had once, months earlier, admitted to liking egg sandwiches "in theory."

Fergus, cornered by an unusually intense Nadia at the lockers, protested his innocence with such wounded indignation that a small crowd gathered, several of whom began, entirely unhelpfully, taking sides in a dispute they understood nothing about. Someone suggested reviewing the corridor's solitary, notoriously unreliable security camera, which turned out to show nothing more incriminating than the fridge door swinging shut on its own, a detail that satisfied no one and merely deepened the mystery to legendary proportions by the end of registration.

Grace, wounded and bewildered by an accusation she couldn't begin to understand, might reasonably have ended the friendship there. Instead, with the patience of someone who has known another person long enough to recognise when their anger is actually about something else entirely, she sat down next to Nadia at the bottom of the empty climbing frame — Nadia had retreated to the top in a fit of dramatic solitude — and simply waited. Several younger pupils gathered at a safe distance, clearly hoping for a spectacle, until a passing teacher shooed them off with the weary efficiency of someone who had broken up a hundred such gatherings before.

It took forty minutes and, eventually, Nadia climbed down, and told her everything: the separation, the move, the sandwich that had somehow become the one stable thing she could hold onto while the rest of her life rearranged itself without her permission. Grace didn't say very much in response, which Nadia would later say was exactly right; she simply put an arm around her and let the silence do whatever work silence needed to do, and the two of them sat there long after the bell had rung for the next lesson, neither particularly caring about the lateness mark that would inevitably follow.

The actual culprit, it emerged the following week, was a supply teacher who had assumed the unlabelled sandwich was communal staffroom food, and who apologised with real mortification once the matter came to light, offering to replace it three times over as if quantity might somehow compensate for the emotional chaos the disappearance had unleashed. Fergus, magnanimous in vindication, accepted a replacement sandwich on Nadia's behalf and ate it himself, which everyone agreed was a fitting, if slightly petty, conclusion to his ordeal.

The choir teacher, hearing an abridged version of events secondhand, quietly rearranged the rehearsal schedule so Nadia could skip the sessions closest to moving day without any awkward explanations required, a small kindness Nadia only found out about months later and which she said, when she finally did, explained rather a lot about why choir had always felt like a safe place to disappear into for half an hour.

The move itself, when it finally came, was smaller and less dramatic than either girl had feared. Grace arrived early on the Saturday with a flask of tea and absolutely no useful packing skills whatsoever, and spent most of the morning being handed boxes she then put down in entirely the wrong rooms, a running joke that kept both of them laughing through what might otherwise have been a thoroughly miserable day. By the time the removal van pulled away, they had already agreed on a bus route between their two halves of town that took exactly thirty-four minutes, a fact Nadia recited to her mother that evening as though it were the most reassuring statistic in the world.

Nadia's father, hearing the full story rather later than he probably should have, took to slipping an extra sandwich into the bag "for Grace, just in case," a habit he continued long after the move, technically unnecessary now that the sandwiches travelled by bus rather than fridge, but which neither girl ever asked him to stop, since it had quietly become, without either of them quite planning it, a small standing reminder that someone in the background was still looking out for both of them.

But by then it scarcely mattered who had taken the sandwich at all. Grace had started walking Nadia home twice a week to help her pack, wrapping ornaments in newspaper and arguing cheerfully over which of Nadia's childhood drawings deserved to survive the move, and the two of them had invented a new ritual — a shared sandwich, cut into four triangles instead of three, eaten on the same bench regardless of which side of town either of them now lived on, a small stubborn insistence that some things, at least, did not have to change.

Discussion Questions

1. Why does Nadia direct her anger at the sandwich instead of talking about the real problem?

2. How does Grace's reaction show a mature understanding of friendship?

5. Grandpa's Goat Business

Animals / Humour

When Grandpa Henryk retired from forty years as a postal worker, he announced, over Sunday dinner and with no discernible warning, that he intended to start a business renting out goats for "eco-friendly garden clearance." The family's reaction ranged from polite scepticism to open horror, the latter mostly from Grandpa's daughter, who had grown up watching her father's previous retirement schemes — a short-lived alpaca farm, an even shorter-lived attempt at competitive beekeeping — collapse with varying degrees of chaos.

His granddaughter Effie, sixteen and perpetually short of pocket money, volunteered to help, partly out of genuine curiosity and partly because Grandpa was offering actual wages, a rarity among the adults in her life. The business, which Grandpa insisted on calling "Henryk's Humble Herd" despite Effie's repeated suggestions of something less alliterative, consisted of exactly four goats — Prince, Nutmeg, Delilah, and a bad-tempered animal named simply The General — who were driven, in a trailer Grandpa had bought secondhand and never quite finished repainting, to overgrown gardens across the county to eat everything in sight.

It worked, to everyone's genuine surprise, rather well. Overgrown brambles, it turns out, are exactly the sort of thing goats find irresistible, and word spread quickly among homeowners tired of paying for expensive machinery to clear land that four determined animals could handle for a fraction of the price and considerably more entertainment value. Effie's job, officially, was "herd logistics," which in practice meant chasing The General out of neighbours' vegetable patches at least twice a week and developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of which garden gates the goats could, against all apparent physics, unlatch themselves.

The first few jobs were modest — an overgrown allotment here, a brambled slope behind a retirement home there — and Effie found herself surprised by how much she enjoyed the work, standing in unfamiliar gardens with a clipboard, timing how long it took Prince and Nutmeg to demolish a hedge that would otherwise have taken a professional gardener the better part of a week. Delilah, the gentlest of the four, took to nudging Effie's pockets in search of treats with such persistence that Effie began, without quite admitting it to her grandfather, bringing extra apple slices specifically for her.

The General, meanwhile, developed an early and entirely one-sided rivalry with Effie personally, treating every attempt to guide him back into the trailer as a personal challenge to be resisted on principle. Effie spent one memorable Saturday chasing him around a client's ornamental pond for the better part of an hour, to the vocal amusement of the homeowner, who eventually abandoned any pretence of professional composure and simply filmed the entire pursuit on his phone, later posting it online under the caption "best gardening service in the county, hands down."

The business nearly ended in its third month, when The General escaped during a job at the vicarage and consumed, with methodical and unhurried satisfaction, most of the flowers intended for a wedding taking place that same afternoon. Grandpa, mortified, offered to pay for replacement flowers on the spot, while Effie, equally mortified, spent a frantic twenty minutes attempting to herd The General away from the one remaining rosebush using nothing but a garden broom and a stream of language she was fairly sure her grandfather had never taught her.

The bride, when she eventually saw the damage, laughed so hard she had to be helped to a chair, and later told the local paper that a goat eating her wedding flowers was, without question, the best story she would ever have to tell about her big day. She insisted, over Grandpa's continued apologies, on having a photograph taken with The General before the ceremony, the goat standing beside her in the wedding photographs with the serene, unbothered expression of an animal entirely unaware of the reputation he had just built for himself.

That story, printed with a photograph of The General looking entirely unrepentant, did more for Henryk's Humble Herd than any advertisement could have managed. Bookings tripled within the month. Effie's mother, watching her father's business finally, improbably, succeed after two previous failures, admitted to Effie one evening that she had never actually doubted him — she had simply run out of ways to worry productively about a man who was going to try these things regardless of what anyone said.

Grandpa, characteristically, refused to take much credit for the turnaround, insisting instead that the real hero of the story was the bride herself, for having the good grace to laugh instead of demanding compensation through a solicitor, an outcome he admitted, quietly, he had spent the whole drive home fully expecting. He sent her a jar of honey from Mr. Ferreira down the road as a thank-you gift, along with a hand-written note apologising, with a straight face, "on behalf of The General, who remains entirely unrepentant."

The business has since expanded to eight goats and a small waiting list, and Effie, now planning to study veterinary science at university, credits those two chaotic summers with teaching her more about animal behaviour than any textbook has managed since, though she is quick to add that no lecture has yet come close to matching the specific horror and delight of watching The General survey a bride's ceremonial flower arch with the calm, calculating eye of a professional critic about to deliver a very unwelcome verdict.

The vicarage wedding photographs, framed copies of which now hang, with the couple's cheerful permission, on the wall of the Whitmore family's kitchen, remain Grandpa's proudest possession, and he has been known to point them out to any visitor who lingers near the kitchen table for longer than about ninety seconds, whether or not they have expressed the slightest interest in hearing the full story of The General's one and only wedding appearance.

Effie still works weekends for her grandfather, still chasing The General out of places he shouldn't be, and has come to understand something her grandfather apparently knew all along: that the difference between a foolish idea and a good one is sometimes only a matter of which one you're stubborn enough to see through, and that a goat eating the wrong flowers at exactly the wrong moment can, against all reasonable expectation, turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to a struggling little business.

Discussion Questions

1. What does the story suggest about the relationship between failure and eventual success?

2. Why might the author have chosen a goat, specifically, as the animal at the centre of this story?

6. The Hedgehog in the Post Box

Animals / Humour

The Whitmore family post box had, for as long as anyone could remember, been a perfectly ordinary metal container attached to a perfectly ordinary garden gate. This changed one October evening when twelve-year-old Oliver, retrieving a parcel, discovered a hedgehog curled at the bottom of it, apparently having climbed in through the small gap at the base in search of shelter and then found the smooth metal walls entirely impossible to climb back out of.

Oliver named him Postman almost immediately, over his older sister Jess's strenuous objections that naming a wild animal was "exactly the sort of thing that leads to disaster," a prediction that would prove, over the following fortnight, to be almost entirely accurate. Postman, once rescued and examined by a slightly baffled local vet who confirmed he was healthy but clearly not going anywhere in a hurry given the encroaching cold, became something of a fixture in the Whitmore garden, spending his days asleep in a box lined with straw and his nights doing whatever hedgehogs do, which appeared to consist mainly of eating enormous quantities of cat food and occasionally getting stuck under the shed.

Jess, despite her objections, turned out to be the one who researched hedgehog care most thoroughly, printing out feeding schedules and hibernation guidelines with the grim determination of someone who fully expected to be proven right eventually and wanted the evidence ready when she was. She would never admit, then or later, that she had also spent one entire Sunday afternoon sitting quietly by Postman's box, simply watching him sleep, an activity she insisted to Oliver was "purely diagnostic."

The trouble began when Oliver's best friend Kwame, visiting for the weekend, became so enamoured of Postman that he insisted on bringing his entire class in for a nature project the following Monday, an idea that seemed, at the time, entirely reasonable, and turned out, in practice, to involve twenty-eight extremely enthusiastic ten-year-olds, one escaped hedgehog, and a full afternoon spent searching every flowerbed on the street while Oliver's mother stood at the gate apologising to increasingly confused neighbours.

The search itself became something of a spectacle. Mrs. Kowalczyk from number nine contributed a torch and a great deal of unsolicited advice about hedgehog behaviour gleaned entirely from a wildlife documentary she'd watched the previous winter; the postman, arriving mid-search to deliver the day's actual mail, took one look at the scene and, with admirable professionalism, simply joined the search himself rather than ask any questions. Jess, who had sworn she wanted nothing further to do with the animal, was nonetheless the one who eventually spotted him, crouching under the rhododendron with the quiet triumph of someone whose earlier scepticism had, in the end, made her the most observant searcher of the lot.

Postman was eventually located under a rhododendron three doors down, entirely unbothered by the chaos he had caused, and the incident might have ended there had Kwame's teacher, Ms. Farrow, not been so struck by the children's genuine excitement that she asked whether the class could return, properly organised this time, to learn about hedgehog conservation. Oliver and Kwame spent the following week building what they grandly termed "Postman's Official Habitat," a project that involved considerably more cardboard, glue, and disagreement about architectural vision than either had anticipated, Kwame favouring an ambitious multi-storey design that Oliver quietly scaled back once it became clear neither of them could actually build a working staircase for a hedgehog.

By the time the class returned, properly supervised and considerably calmer, Postman had a proper hedgehog house at the bottom of the garden, a laminated information sheet Jess had grudgingly helped design despite her earlier scepticism, and something like local celebrity status. Ms. Farrow's class raised enough money, through a sponsored walk that Kwame organised with alarming efficiency for a ten-year-old, to buy hedgehog houses for three other gardens on the street, each one installed with a small ceremony that the neighbours, somewhat to their own surprise, genuinely seemed to enjoy attending.

Ms. Farrow's class, meanwhile, had grown so attached to the project that several parents reported their children requesting hedgehog-related books for their birthdays that year, and one particularly enterprising pair of classmates started a small, entirely unofficial newsletter called The Hedgehog Herald, which ran, in total, for four issues before enthusiasm inevitably shifted to a different animal entirely, though Oliver kept every copy in a folder under his bed regardless.

Kwame, for his part, never quite lost his fascination with the whole episode, and spent much of the following summer cycling over specifically to check on Postman's habitat, occasionally bringing along younger cousins for what he grandly called "educational visits," during which he would recite hedgehog facts with a confidence that rather outpaced his actual expertise, most of it drawn, transparently, from a single library book he had renewed four times without ever quite finishing.

Oliver's mother, who had spent the whole saga alternating between mild exasperation and quiet pride, eventually admitted to Oliver that the post box had never once, in fifteen years at that address, generated so much as a single interesting conversation with the neighbours until a hedgehog moved in uninvited, and that she had, on balance, decided this made the whole chaotic fortnight entirely worth it.

Postman, for his part, remained magnificently indifferent to his own fame, and disappeared, as hedgehogs do, sometime in November to hibernate somewhere Oliver never quite located. Jess maintained, all winter, that she had no particular interest in his whereabouts, a claim rather undermined by how often she found reasons to check the garden. He reappeared the following March, considerably thinner, in exactly the same post box, as if to confirm that whatever adventure he'd caused, he had at least chosen his shelter deliberately, and Jess, for once, said nothing at all about disaster, only smiled.

Discussion Questions

1. How does a small, accidental event lead to a larger positive outcome in this story?

2. What role does Jess's scepticism play in the story, and how does her attitude change?

7. Two Rivals and One Umbrella

Friendship / Humour

For most of the autumn term, Yusuf and Callum had maintained a rivalry so committed, so thoroughly researched, and so entirely lacking in any actual cause, that their form tutor had taken to referring to them, not entirely fondly, as "the ongoing situation." It had begun, as far as anyone could reconstruct, over a debate-club final the previous spring, which Yusuf had won by a margin so narrow that Callum had never quite recovered his dignity, and it had metastasised since into competition over essentially everything: grades, the school's five-a-side football league, and, memorably, an entirely fabricated dispute about whose turn it was to feed the class hamster.

Neither of them could have explained, if pressed, why the rivalry mattered so much, except that it had become a kind of scaffolding around which their identities at school had quietly been built. Yusuf was "the one who beats Callum." Callum was "the one who's going to beat Yusuf eventually." Their classmates, for their part, found the whole thing endlessly entertaining, occasionally egging it on with the mischievous enthusiasm of people who enjoy drama they have no personal stake in, comparing test scores between the two of them out loud and placing entirely unofficial bets on the outcome of the five-a-side league.

Neither role left much room for anything as inconvenient as actually liking each other, which is presumably why it took a sudden, violent downpour on a Tuesday in November, and a single shared umbrella, to finally dismantle the whole arrangement. It happened outside the school gates, where both boys, having missed their buses through entirely unrelated misfortunes, found themselves standing under the same narrow awning as the rain turned from drizzle to genuine assault. Yusuf had an umbrella. Callum did not.

There followed several minutes of extremely stiff silence, each waiting for the other to either ask for shelter or walk off pointedly into the rain rather than accept help from a rival, until the absurdity of the standoff apparently struck them both at once, and Yusuf, without quite looking at Callum, simply held the umbrella slightly further over than strictly necessary. Callum, for his part, made a small, grudging noise that might, in more generous circumstances, have been mistaken for gratitude, and the two of them set off down the road at exactly the same pace, neither willing to be the one who walked either faster or slower.

The walk home took twenty-five minutes, most of a school bus route, during which they discussed, with the strained politeness of diplomats at a difficult summit, the weather, a maths test neither had studied for, and eventually, almost accidentally, the actual debate final from the previous spring. Callum admitted he still thought his closing argument had been stronger. Yusuf admitted, somewhat to his own surprise, that he'd thought so too, and had simply had better luck with the judges' particular interests that day. "You had Mrs. Pallister," Yusuf said. "She always liked a strong opening more than a strong finish." Callum considered this for several seconds, visibly relieved to have, at last, an explanation that didn't require him to accept he'd simply lost.

It was not a dramatic reconciliation. Nobody apologised for anything specific, because there was nothing specific to apologise for, only a year's accumulated momentum that had somehow acquired the weight of an actual grievance. But something had shifted by the time they reached Callum's street, where Callum, rather than simply saying goodbye, found himself inviting Yusuf in out of the rain for ten minutes while it eased off, an invitation that would have been unthinkable a fortnight earlier and that both of them seemed faintly startled to have arrived at.