The Donut Diaries (8 page)

You think this all sounds bad? Believe me, it was about to get much, much worse. Remember what I said about my trousers being too tight, and so sometimes I’d leave the top button undone?
You
probably guessed back then what was going to happen, didn’t you?

Well, it happened now.

Yep, my blinking pants fell down.

Down. Fell. Pants
.

Down all the way to the ground, like something you’d see in a stupid old film from the days of black and white and no sound. I started to pull them up, but realized that meant pointing my backside at the crowd, and that felt wrong. So I pulled them up as I spun round for the last time.

They were all now laughing so much that they didn’t bother to hide what they were doing. I saw what the kid who’d been lurking at the back was carrying. Actually, he wasn’t carrying it, he was
wearing
it. It was this massive brass instrument, coiled around him like a fat golden python. I don’t even know what they call it – a tuba maybe, or a euphonium.

… Well, I’ve just gone and looked it up on the internet. It was one of these:

A sousaphone, it’s called. Named after a bloke called … Oh, I can’t be bothered.
¹

They must have got it from the music room –
they
had all kinds of stuff up there.

Anyway, this kid was blowing away on it tunelessly, except he now couldn’t blow because he was laughing so much. Suddenly the whole gang of them lost control, and they laughed like it was some kind of laughing competition with a million pounds going to the winner.

And the thing is that I sort of got the joke. Fat kid walking, tuba,
honk honk honk
, trousers fall down, yeah, funny. It was so funny I was about to cry.

As well as the FHK, I saw Tamara Bello standing with a group of girls. She wasn’t part of the gang that was following me, and she wasn’t laughing. In fact, her face was just as blank as the FHK’s had been. But somehow it was a different sort of blankness and I just
didn’t
know what it meant.

That moment there, facing the pack, was the loneliest of my life. And then suddenly I felt that there was someone at my shoulder.

‘Come on, Donut,’ said Renfrew, making his usual
ungth
noise, as if he was swallowing each word.

Spam loomed up on the other side. ‘Jerks,’ he said in his Treebeard voice.

‘B-b-b-b-b-b-b-h-h-h-h-h-h,’ said Corky.

Together we turned our backs on the crowd and walked to registration.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, though I don’t think anything else really bad happened.

When I got back that afternoon I went straight up to my bedroom. My dad knocked on the door and came in and looked at me for
a
while and then went out again. Half an hour later he came back with a bacon sandwich and a donut.

He’s OK, my dad, sometimes.

DONUT COUNT:

1
Sousa. Or Phone. Or Sousaphone. Probably not Sousaphone, because then the instrument would be a Sousaphonaphone.

Tuesday 19 September

I GAVE IT
the works this morning. I began with gruesome gut-rot (food poisoning), moved on to shivers and aches (malaria), foaming at the mouth (rabies), before finally throwing myself on the floor and lying completely still without breathing (death).

Nothing doing.

‘Forget it,’ said Mum. ‘You’re going to school.’

It turned out not to be that bad. I was pretty nervous when I came in through the gates, and
people
did stare and nudge each other, but as for being followed around by a gang of brass-instrument wielding bullies, zilch.

After registration which, to be honest, I don’t remember much about, Tamara Bello came up to me. She stood there with that haughty look on her face and said something. I was expecting it to be nasty and clever at the same time – the sort of insult that only sinks in after a few minutes.

‘I thought it stank,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Stinky and stupid. And not even funny.’

I still didn’t know quite what she was on about.

My pants falling down?

Stinky?

‘Eh?’

‘That stuff with the tuba yesterday.’

‘Sousaphone,’ I said, and wished immediately that I hadn’t.

‘What?’

‘It was a sousaphone, not a tuba. A tuba is … a … different … shape …’ I trailed off. Tamara had already turned away before I’d finished speaking. Fair enough, really.

Dinner tonight was a joy. My mum went out with her work friends. She left strict instructions about what we were supposed to eat. I give no more detail than that it involved rocket and walnuts. Whoever gave the exciting name ‘rocket’ to what is basically lettuce should be put in jail, or possibly just plain executed
and
offered – as their last meal – a plateful of the vile green stuff. The thing about rocket is that it gets rid of the one acceptable feature of lettuce, i.e. it tastes of nothing, and replaces it with a definitely bad thing, i.e. it tastes of the last bit of running sick you chuck up after all the chunks have already made their appearance.

But no rocket was to be eaten tonight. Not by me, at least. Dad ordered pizza.

I had a double-meat feast. It included bits of almost every animal ever domesticated by man, including llama and water buffalo (and possibly, though I don’t want to dwell on it, dog).

Afterwards, I lay back and burped my first contented, satisfied burp in days. Underneath the usual fungusy burp smell, there was a definite hint of roast llama. Ruby ran out of the kitchen waving her hand in front of her face, and Ella did some dry retching, but that just meant that I got to eat the rest of their pizzas too, which I did even though they were both having plain old margaritas. People who like margarita pizza are like people who like ready-salted crisps – they just don’t know how to enjoy life.

Dad cunningly put the pizza boxes in next door’s recycling bin so Mum wouldn’t find out about what he’d done.

All finished off with a couple of donuts. Suddenly life is OK again.

DONUT COUNT:

Wednesday 20 September

EVERYTHING IN LIFE
has to be paid for, and today I paid for the fact that yesterday didn’t stink. By which I mean that today stank worse than my now famous llama-flavoured burp of last night.

Anyway, nothing terrible happened until the fourth period, which was English. The English teacher is called Miss Brotherton. She’s all elbows and knees and has a long bony nose and generally looks a lot like a woodpecker.

After we’d sat down, she said that we had
to
name our favourite book. Tamara Bello said hers was the
Collected Short Stories
of Anton Chekhov, who she said was some Russian writer who was better known for his plays. I didn’t believe that for a second. I don’t mean about him being better known for his plays, I mean that his rubbish-sounding stories was Tamara’s favourite book. It’s probably the
Hello! Magazine Christmas Annual
.

When it was his turn, Renfrew said that his favourite book was
The Lord of the Rings
. My gob just fell open. He gave me a sort of ‘Hey, I’m sorry, but what could I do?’ look.

Miss Brotherton was really impressed. ‘An excellent choice, William,’ she said.

Of course, it was exactly the book I was going to choose, but now I couldn’t say it without looking like a complete suck-up/loser.
It
threw me into a mad panic, and I couldn’t think of a
single
other book I’ve
ever
read, even though I’ve read, like,
millions
.

Miss Brotherton was staring down her enormously long nose at me and the sweat was bursting out all over my face. And then Tamara Bello gave me another one of her looks-without-a-name, but this one got across pretty well the idea that I was a dimwit who had never read a book in his life. I half remembered some titles. Half remembered the names of some of the authors. I opened my mouth, thinking if I did that the name would pop out.

Well, something did pop out.

‘THE BIBLE.’

That got an even bigger laugh than ‘My name’s Donut’, although not quite as big as the sousaphone fiasco.

‘Well,’ said Tamara, in her slowest, most chocolatey voice, ‘that at least explains the shoes.’