The Donut Diaries (13 page)

I sat outside the office for ten minutes, sandwiched between two goonettes. I tried to make conversation, but the goonettes weren’t the talking kind.

And then Ludmilla and Tamara came out, looking cowed. I managed to mouth, ‘Get help!’ at Tamara. Unfortunately, mouthing reasonably complicated things never works very well. She might easily have thought I said, ‘Sausage, marshmallow, banana, Humpty Dumpty,’ although I admit that would have been a really stupid thing to say right then. Or at any other time.

The office was huge. There was a figure sitting in a swivel chair, facing away from me, its occupant surveying Camp Fitso through the big window. Slowly the chair spun to face me. Bizarrely, the arms of the chair were formed from two stuffed badgers. But that wasn’t what shocked me. What shocked me was the person in the chair. Shocking and horrifying, and yet also inevitable.

‘Dermot, how nice to see you. Do sit down.’

These words emerged from a mouth so like a cat’s bum, one imagines that somewhere there’s a cat with a human mouth for its bottom wandering around, very much regretting having made the swap.

‘Dr Morlock,’ I said, because that’s who it was, and any other name would have been simply and straightforwardly wrong.

Doc Morlock, my nutritionist, had been the bane of my life for almost a year now, forcing me to undergo a rigorous, donut-free diet, and checking my – well, let’s say waste products – to make sure that I wasn’t straying from the straight and narrow broccoli path.

‘What . . .? I mean, how . . .? I mean who . . .?’

The cat’s bum changed shape. Doc Morlock was smiling.

‘You didn’t know that I was the Oberkommandant of Camps Fatso and Fitso?’

‘No . . . I just thought you were . . .’

‘A simple nutritionist? Oh, no, let me tell you that I have greater ambitions than that. I plan to roll out Camp Fatsos all over the country, improving the health and vitality of the nation’s young people.’

‘And making tons of money for yourself,’ I said. Or rather, thought, as I’m basically a coward.

‘However, we’re here to talk about
you
, Dermot. I feel rather let down by you. Trying to escape in that frankly amateurish way. Did you really think you could do it?’

‘I—’

‘But the more important question is what to do with you now? I could, of course, just have
you
thrown in the cooler for a couple of days. That should help you to see reason. Or, if I felt that this sort of insubordination was going to continue, then I could see about extending your stay with us well beyond the end of next week.’

‘But you can’t! My mum—’

‘Would be delighted if I were to keep you on here, in a permanent residential capacity. Especially if I were to offer her a reduced rate. As you’ve seen, we have excellent educational and recreational facilities. And you know that your mother has absolute faith in my judgement.’

That bit was true. They did yoga together, and my mum used to speak in awe of Doc Morlock’s ability to hold in her wind, which is apparently a big thing in yoga circles. I didn’t know if the threat had real teeth, or just a mouthful of gums.
But
I didn’t want to take the chance. I couldn’t stand it much longer in this place.

‘I’ll be good,’ I said. And I think I may have meant it. ‘I beg you, just the cooler—’

‘We’ll see, Dermot, we’ll see. And for your sake, I hope you’re telling the truth. And by the way, we know exactly who helped you to get over the fence. You’ll be pleased, I’m sure, to find out that you’ll all be sharing the same reward for this.’

‘But,’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘what’s to stop me telling everyone about this place when I get back? They’ll close you down. Worse, they’ll—’

‘Love me for it. Imagine the headlines. “Blimp complains of harsh regime in fat camp.” And then they’ll see the before and after photographs. Parents will beg me to take their loathsome couch potatoes. This country
is
suffering from an epidemic of obesity, in case you hadn’t realized. OK, you’ve taken up quite enough of my time.’

And then Doc Morlock rang a little bell on her desk, and two goonettes came in. I was put in the back of a van with
CAMP FITSO: WHERE YOUR DREAMS OF HEALTH COME TRUE!
written on the side in jaunty lettering. After a bumpy five-minute ride around the perimeter, I was released back into the hands of my own friendly goons, Badwig and, of course, Boss Skinner, both looking very annoyed at being woken up in the early hours of the morning.

Skinner came very close to me.

‘I hope you like yourself, son,’ he said, in that terrifyingly quiet way of his, ‘because for the next few days you’re all you’ve got.’

Then they marched me to my old cell and
kicked
me inside. Badwig threw in a thin blanket.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he laughed as I squirmed on the bare floor.

And, just as Doc Morlock had said, my friends were in the other cells. I heard a noise like someone slowly strangling a goose, which could only be Igor blowing away at his mouth organ. And from somewhere, the sound of Flo’s tears.

They left us rotting there for the whole of Saturday and Saturday night, and only dragged us out on Sunday evening, which is when I’m writing this. All that time in the cold and the dark, with nothing but those creepy meat carcasses for company, and the sound of the strangled goose, and Flo weeping.

In case you’re wondering, there was a
bucket
for a toilet. And I’m not even going to talk about how disgusting that was. You’ll have to imagine it. Actually, no, don’t imagine it. Think of something nice. Some flowers or butterflies, that sort of thing.

Twice a day the door opened and a goon brought in a cup of water and a carrot.

I’d have gone mad, I think, if it hadn’t been for one thing. I found it in the pocket of my filthy tracksuit. It had been put there by Tamara as she stumbled into me.

It was a donut.

She had given me the gift of a donut.

Sometimes a donut can be more than just a donut.

It can be a symbol.

And sometimes it’s just a donut.

Was this a symbol donut, or a donut donut?

More confusion.

As a little kid, when there was nothing on the telly I used to sit and watch our washing machine. I was kind of fascinated by the way the clothes and suds all churned around. Well, that’s what the inside of my head was like now. Spinning and churning. But not getting the clothes clean, of course.

If it was a symbol donut, I should probably keep it, because those kinds of donuts don’t come along very often. But then I was very hungry. And so, of course, were my friends.

And that’s when I decided to break it up and share it out, tossing the chunks along to the others through the bars. So it did become a symbol donut. A symbol of our friendship and our solidarity against the cruelties of Camp Fatso.

I ate my fragment crumb by crumb, like Charlie eating the Wonka bar he gets for his birthday.

So, at last I have a donut count:

DONUT COUNT:

¹
Actually, ‘monstrous’ is a little unfair. Inside Ludmilla’s massive form were some pretty huge bones. But inside those was a heart that was yearning to love and to be loved, and I was actually quite fond of her.

Monday 9 April

THIS MORNING, BEFORE
breakfast, we had a secret Hut Four talk. The subject, of course, was betrayal. As Doc Morlock had told me, someone had snitched our plan.

‘It had to be Gogol,’ said Igor.

I agreed.

‘Are we sure it was anyone?’ said J-Man. ‘Couldn’t it just have been that the goons eyeballed you? Or maybe those two chicks got seen, and we all got caught as collateral damage?’

‘Just a quick tip, J-Man,’ I said. ‘In case you ever meet them, don’t call Tamara or Ludmilla a “chick” to their faces or you’ll be like the guy who asked for crushed nuts with his ice cream and ended up in hospital. But the truth is, if someone looks like a traitor, acts like a traitor and happens to be the only one of us who didn’t get thrown in the cooler, then logic says that he must be the traitor. The only question is what we do about it.’

‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ said Dong.

‘I hear you, China D,’ said J-Man, shaking his head sadly, ‘but that’s a tough thing to do, even to a snitch.’

‘What?’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The Oriental Deester was saying that we
should
use the traditional snitch’s punishment on Gogol. Ain’t that right, Dong?’

The Chinese kid smiled politely. ‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance.’

J-Man nodded, as if resigned to the inevitable.

‘What is the traditional punishment?’ I asked.

He told me.

‘Let’s take a vote,’ he said, looking deadly serious, as well he might.

He went round the room, asking each of us in turn.

‘Donut?’

‘I say yes.’

‘Dong?’

‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance.’

‘OK, that’s another yes.’

‘Igor?’

Igor silently shook his head.

‘Fair enough, big guy. You got a kind heart.’

‘Flo?’

Florian had his hands cupped around a ladybird he had found.

‘Didn’t like it in the nasty cooler, did we, Lady? Ernesto should be sorry for what he did, but he hasn’t said sorry, has he? And if you don’t say sorry then you’ve got to be punished.’

In the afternoon Mr Fricker looked strangely pleased to see me.

‘Good to have you back with us,’ he said, although he couldn’t stop his hands from making the by now traditional strangling motions.

Luckily we’d moved on from Peruvian shoe-throwing.

‘Today’s World Sport,’ Fricker announced, ‘is
Eskimo
seal-wrestling. Right, I need a volunteer to be the seal . . .You, Dermot? Good man.’

I don’t really want to say much about what followed, except that I was stripped down to my boxer shorts, covered in grease and . . .Well, you can fill in the rest for yourselves.

In the evening I ate my gruel and even considered eating the piece of meat. But the image of the things hanging in the cooler haunted me, and I just couldn’t make myself do it, even though my poor body was crying out for sustenance. There was another reason I couldn’t eat much: I knew what was coming. And that was enough to kill even a raging appetite.

At midnight the hut began to stir. J-Man shook me awake – I’d fallen asleep and was in the middle of a dream about – well, you can guess.

We gathered around Gogol’s bunk. J-Man shone the beam of his torch in the creepy kid’s face. He woke with a startled cry.

‘Hey! What’s—’

But he never had the chance to say anything more. Igor put his hand over his mouth.

‘You have been found guilty of the offence of being a snitch,’ J-Man intoned in his deep voice. ‘And the penalty for snitching is—’

Gogol seemed to know what was coming and he began to fight. But Igor and Dong easily subdued him. Flo attached a device to his feet – a chain made from tin cans strung together with shoelaces.

‘Get him to the door,’ said J-Man.

Gogol was now begging. ‘You can’t do this. I’m innocent. I didn’t snitch on nobody.’ His eyes were wide, and his zits were popping.

‘Do we really have to do this?’ I said to J-Man.

‘Too late to go back now, boy,’ he said. ‘In any case, we gotta send out a message. You mess with the boys of Hut Four, you get messed up right back.’

I opened the door. Gogol was still fighting like a demon. He clutched at the door frame, but I prised his grip loose. Igor and J-Man were too strong. Together they hurled him out into the darkness. Gogol landed with a
thunk
and a
clank
from the cans. He tried to move, and the cans rattled and clanked louder. Suddenly the night was lit up with the piercing beam of a searchlight. We all ran to the windows. The beam had found Gogol. He tried to run from it, but there was nowhere to hide.

‘No!’ he screamed. ‘I’m not escaping – it’s a mistake – it’s—’

But then his voice was cut off by the deafening rattle from a high-power automatic paintball cannon, unleashing ten 20mm paintballs a second. The red shells crashed into Gogol. He reeled and staggered, like a puppet controlled by a drunken puppeteer. He fell, and still the red horror rained down on him. With one last, supernatural effort he dragged himself up and ran towards another of the huts, but the machine guns cut him down again.