Читать книгу A Threefold Cord - Howard Goldenberg - Страница 9

Chapter Four

Jennifer looked up from her computer at her friends. She had been reading Wikipedia. She said: “Hey, look at this! It says here onions are a deadly poison for cats. We shouldn’t feel so bad that we left the cat at the animal shelter. If Tiger (his name was on his collar) had stayed and joined the Club, we’d have fed him the Onion of Weeping; he’d have cried like we do and then he would have died.”

Nystagmus said: “Well, that’s true. If anyone joins, they must eat the Onion of Weeping. We would have killed poor Tiger.”

The three friends all remembered the Old Lady. How Jennifer was running late for school one morning and had taken a shortcut through the garden of the Old People’s Village. She had heard sounds that made her stop and listen. The sounds came through an open window in one of the tiny little flats. She looked in and she saw an old, old lady, eating an onion and crying. The old lady seemed weak. She was very thin.

The old lady stood and walked shakily to her fridge. When she opened it, Jennifer saw it was almost empty; it held only a bottle of water.

That was the start of it all, an old lady, thin and weak. By the look of her clothes, which were faded and torn, the lady must have been poor. Perhaps she was so poor she had only an onion and some water for her day’s food. When Jennifer saw the lady, she looked in her lunchbox. Mum had packed a tub of yoghurt again. Jennifer didn’t hesitate: she took the yoghurt, dropped to her knees and crawled to the window. She reached up and placed the little tub of food on the window sill. Then she crawled away. She didn’t want the poor lady to see her and feel ashamed.

At lunchtime her friend Nystagmus wanted to swap his fetta sandwich for Jennifer’s yoghurt. “I haven’t got yogurt today,” she said.

She told Nystagmus about the poor hungry lady in the old people’s cottages. Snoth listened quietly to Jennifer’s story. Quietly he popped his banana inside Jennifer’s lunchbox so she wouldn’t be hungry. At the same time, Nystagmus slid his fetta sandwich into Jennifer’s lunchbox.

When Jennifer finished her story she looked down and saw what her friends had done. She felt as if she would cry. She realised how good her friends were. Jennifer said, “You are very kind to give away your own food so I wouldn’t be hungry.”

Both the boys said: We only did what you did!

The three all learned that day how lucky they were to be in this friendship. They thought about the old lady and wondered whether she had any friends. They decided they would try to make sure the old lady never had to go hungry. Every school day Jennifer would deliver a tub of yogurt and all three would share their school lunches.

And on weekends, Nystagmus would drop off fish and chips from his grandparents’ shop.

One Sunday morning Snoth tried eating a raw onion. He cried as he peeled it and he cried more when he started to eat. He had an idea. He ran to tell Nystagmus – he was a good runner, he ran everywhere – but Nystagmus was not at home. Snoth ran to the shop and found Nystagmus talking with someone in the house at the back. He knocked and found the person with Nystagmus was Jennifer. Snoth told them about the onion and about his idea.

And that was the day they started the Threefold Cord.

(We’ll have to wait a while to find out whether Snoth escaped from the cruel boy and the terrifying adult.)