The Donut Diaries (10 page)

He addressed himself to our leader, J-Man, adopting a somewhat theatrical stance, with one leg slightly forward.

‘My dear Jermaine,’ he said in a voice like honey drizzled over cream. ‘Let us not permit this to escalate further. Neither of us desires trouble from the,
ahem
, authorities.’ He made a gesture towards a couple of the goons, who were starting to take an interest in our corner of the field.

‘I always thought you and the goons got on just fine, Hercule,’ said J-Man.

Hercule shook his head slowly. ‘You had such promise, once,’ he said in that honeyed, poisonous voice of his. And then he turned to me. ‘You’re the new boy, aren’t you? There’s always room in my organization for boys of, ah, character. And there are perks, you know. Good food. More appropriate clothing.’ He stroked the thick velvet of his lapel. ‘An easier life.’

‘I’m happy where I am,’ I said, struggling to overcome the sickening, hypnotic power of his voice.

‘You keep your paws off my boys,’ said J-Man.

‘Do you think to threaten me, Jermaine? I’ve gone easy on you, on account of our old comradeship. But that leniency is now at an end. Consider that from now on your actions will have consequences.’

‘You can stick your consequences where the sun don’t shine,’ said J-Man.

Hercule made as if to reply, then smiled sweetly, turned, and walked away with the other Lardies.

‘You used to be one of those guys?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Because a kid’s got to sleep at night. And there’s things I won’t do for an extra helping of gruel. C’mon, let’s get changed, it’s time for PE. And I gotta tell you, PE here ain’t fun, no sir.’

So back we went to good old Hut Four, and got changed into the Camp Fatso sports kit. This should actually have been called the Camp Fatso torture kit. It consisted of an absurdly tight orange (of course) top and a pair of ludicrous
micro
shorts, designed
solely
to humiliate us. OK, not solely; they had an important secondary function of cutting off the blood supply to the extremities, thereby causing a long, agonizing death by gangrene.

Dough-faced Flo had tried to manufacture a bigger pair of shorts by stitching together two smaller pairs, but the outcome was like the ghastly product of some scientific experiment to create a new life form that had gone horribly wrong, and spawned a monster.

J-Man chivvied us along.

‘Let’s move it, guys! You know we lose dinner if we get out there late.’

So we trundled out onto the sports field, along with about fifty other Camp Fatso kids. Waiting there for us was a small, bald goon whose name, as I soon found out, was Mr Phlapp.

‘Settle down now,’ said Mr Phlapp, in a perfectly normal voice. It turned out that Phlapp was about the least insane adult I’d met at Camp Fatso. True, there were a couple of things that limited his skills as a PE instructor. The first was that he didn’t seem to like sport very much. The second was that, instead of sport, he had a strange obsession with human pyramids. This is when you get kids to stand on each other’s shoulders, each layer being smaller than the one below it, the whole forming a rough pyramid shape. It was an unpleasant and hazardous operation, especially considering the size of those taking part.

‘Right, let’s begin with a basic three-two-one,’ said Phlapp, and soon the field was scattered with little pyramids: three kids on
the
bottom row, then two, then one. I was put in a group with J-Man, Dong, Flo and two fat twins from another hut, whom everyone called the Tweedles. I began on the bottom row, which was both the easiest and the hardest job. Easiest, because it required zero skill – you just had to stand there without falling over. Hardest, because you had what felt like several tons worth of fatty standing on your shoulders.

‘Good work, nice shape, very pyramidical,’ said Phlapp in an encouraging way. ‘Now let’s have a good clean dismount.’

There was quite a lot of falling, landing face-down in the mud, etc., etc., but no serious injuries.

‘Excellent, time to move up to the classic four-three-two-one.’

This time round I found myself on the
second
tier. I had to climb up the legs, back and shoulders of the guy beneath me – who, luckily, was the titanic Igor. To him I was as insignificant as a fly on an ox.

I didn’t mind the second tier. It wasn’t high enough for my fear of heights to kick in, and the strain wasn’t as bad as being at the bottom. But it still isn’t exactly how I’d choose to spend my leisure hours. Especially not as the wind and rain had begun to pick up.

‘OK, one more and we’ll call it a day,’ said Phlapp. ‘And let’s make it the majestic five-four-three-two-one. You, young man, the new boy, what’s your name?’

‘Me, sir? Dermot.’

‘Why don’t you have a go at the top?’

‘Er . . .’

Obviously, there were at least nine reasons why I shouldn’t ‘have a go at the top’.

But they were all there waiting for me. They were the cake, and I was the cherry, so I began to clamber up the enormous, but still uncapped, human pyramid that had miraculously formed before my very eyes.

Yes, it was the Great Pyramid of Fat Geezers!

It wasn’t just my crew any more, but other kids I didn’t know, so I had to keep saying, ‘Excuse me,’ and, ‘Sorry about that,’ and, ‘Ooops!’ whenever I put my foot or hand in the wrong place – and it turns out that almost everywhere is the wrong place when one
human
being is climbing over another.

But it was going OK. I was up to the penultimate tier – the one with two fat kids. I was quite pleased to see that it was the Tweedle twins, who you’d have thought would be used to working as a team.

And then I made the fatal mistake of looking down. I hadn’t quite grasped how high up it was going to be. It felt like I was on top of the Eiffel Tower. An Eiffel Tower made out of fat people.

Phlapp was looking up as I looked down.

‘Keep at it, lad, you’re doing fine.’

I don’t know why, but I always find encouragement discouraging. It means the person doing the encouraging thinks I’m about to fail – otherwise why bother encouraging me?

But I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to complete the pyramid, to form a perfect geometrical shape here amid the horrors of Camp Fatso. It would be a blow struck on behalf of, er, human pyramids everywhere!

So I gritted my teeth and climbed on. Right foot on Tweedledum’s left thigh, left foot on Tweedledee’s right. Now the shoulder. I was still holding onto Dee and Dum’s hair with my hands . . . I just had to let go and stand fully erect.

I stood.

I’d done it.

Phlapp beamed proudly. Kids around the field began to clap.

And I could see for miles. See over the fence. See the woods beyond and, further out, fields and roads and freedom. And in the other
direction
I could see over the blank wall of corrugated iron. What I saw there astonished me.

It was another camp.

And it was full of girls.

Girls playing rounders and netball. Girls skipping and laughing. And even though the rain was lashing into our faces on this side of the wall, over there the sun was shining.

So that’s what J-Man had meant.

Then I felt a wobble. I glanced down again. Phlapp was somehow unsatisfied with the positioning of one of the boys on the bottom tier. There was a kink where there should have been a straight line. He was fiddling, prodding, pulling, trying to get back to that state of geometric perfection he craved. But I knew that it was insanity. Even after my short
acquaintance
with the human pyramid, I knew that it is folly to mess with the structure once it is up.

And yes, the inevitable was happening. The line kinked more, then buckled. One of the bottom-tier kids went down on one knee and the whole edifice began to crumble. Tier by tier, the pyramid collapsed. Poor Phlapp tried vainly to shore it up, but it was futile.

And fatal.

At the last moment he seemed to realize the peril he was in, and he turned and began to run. But it was too late. I was already falling. I’m not sure who screamed louder, me or him.

And then I landed right on top of him with a sickening crunch, with a certain amount of added splat, crushing him into the mud, like an elephant sitting on a quail’s egg.

It hurt, but not that much, as the soft mud provided a certain amount of cushioning. As did my in-built air-bags.

I picked myself up. The crowd around us was silent for a second or two. And then someone – Flo, I think – said, ‘Jeepers, you’ve killed him . . .’

And suddenly the other goons were there, and people were shouting in my face, including Boss Skinner and Badwig. I heard the words ‘deliberate attack’ and ‘assassination attempt’ and I tried weakly to protest. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ I said, which made me sound like the most pathetic murderer in history.

And then, to my relief, I heard a groan, and Phlapp pushed himself up onto his elbows. ‘Accident . . .’ he said, his voice as frail and feeble as a dying daddy-longlegs.

Boss Skinner’s black eyes bored into me. ‘Your lucky day, boy,’ he whispered, as if he’d been hoping that Phlapp really had died, just so he could inflict suitable retribution on me.

Half an hour later the ambulance arrived to take Phlapp away.

Nothing very interesting happened during the rest of the day.

Dinner was gruel.

In the evening we lay on our bunks whilst Igor played his harmonica. I say ‘played’ but I really mean ‘blew’ as you wouldn’t call any of the sounds that came out of it ‘music’.

I was glad when it was lights-out. Sometimes the oblivion of sleep is all you can hope for.

DONUT COUNT:

If we include the ones I dreamed of that night, then 764. If not, then zero.

¹
I don’t mean that his bull-neck was called Spanner. The name belonged to all of him, almost certainly including his neck. I mean, it would be fairly stupid of him to have a separate name for his neck, but then he was fairly stupid, which you could tell from the way he kept accidentally spitting on his own feet.

Thursday 5 April

THIS MORNING THE
camp was all abuzz about the squishing incident. A couple of guys clapped me on the back during the worm dig. No one seemed to believe that it was an accident. I decided to let them think what they wanted to think.

I’d been doing a lot of thinking myself – mainly about what I’d seen from the top of the human pyramid. The girls’ camp looked a lot nicer than ours. The buildings were new,
and
there was what appeared to be a gym and a swimming pool. I talked to J-Man about it during a carrot break.

‘Yeah, the girls’ camp’s what they let the outside world see. Remember the DVDs and all that publicity material? That was all shot in the girls’ camp.’

‘But the girls . . . the ones I saw, they weren’t all, er . . .’

‘Fat? Like us? That’s right, boy. They call that side of the institution Camp Fitso, and they’ve got girls of all shapes and sizes in there.’

‘And I didn’t see any dogs or goons . . .’

‘Why’d they need dogs or goons? That place is paradise, I hear. They get three good meals a day. Sure, it’s healthy stuff, but it’s real, hot food. Risotto and steamed fish and fruit smoothies for dessert, and, well, I don’t know
what
else. Who’d want to escape from that, huh?’