The Donut Diaries (11 page)

And that’s when the plan started to form in my head. And it was only in my head for a second before it came right out of my lips.

‘I reckon I could dig under the wall, and get into the girls’ camp. Then I could walk right out of there.’

J-Man nodded.

‘You ain’t the first to have that idea. They dig that wall down deep. And even if you get under it, if someone spots you in the girls’ camp, they send some goons over there. And if you make it out of the camp, then one of the patrols pick you up for sure. And then they lock you in the cooler and throw away the key, yes sir.’

‘But if I could get out, then I could tell the world about what’s going on here.’

‘The world won’t believe you, boy. Now let’s dig some more of these worms before Boss Skinner fires off that pop gun of his.’

Even though I’d only been in Camp Fatso for a few days it already seemed like I was in the routine. But then, in the afternoon, something happened that turned my new world upside down. Turned it upside down, kicked it in the pants, slapped its face and poked it in the eye.

So, the siren went for afternoon PE. It was generally assumed that one of the goons would take charge, probably just continuing the great tradition of human pyramid building established by Mr Phlapp. And that seemed to be working out: two low-ranking goons got us to line up for the afternoon roll-call.

I was in the second row, and was in the
middle
of a donut daydream. Most of my waking moments (as well as pretty much all of my old-fashioned night-time dreaming) were now taken up with donut fantasies. This one involved a giant bouncy donut castle, and every time I landed I took a bite out of it. But as with nearly all my fantasies, it started to go wrong. I suppose it should have been obvious, but the biting business had the predictable effect of deflating the bouncy donut castle, so it was shrinking underneath me, adding a frantic, eat-it-while-it-lasts vibe to the fantasy.

Then I realized that someone had started talking to us. Well, not so much talking as yelling. There’d been plenty of yelling at Camp Fatso, but this was a yell that was both familiar and terrible.

I peered around the fat head in front of me
and
there was the baleful form of . . .

MR FRICKER!!!!!

He had on his Terminator hands – bare metal with rivets and bolts, like pieces of some infernal engine.

‘. . . I understand that things have been pretty sloppy around here,’ he was saying, I mean shouting. ‘But things will change. You can say goodbye to the human pyramid. I’ve scoured the world looking for healthful activities, stimulating to the body and mind. Exercises which—’

And then Fricker stopped. He stopped because he’d seen me. A shadow passed over his face – a shadow shaped something like an eagle, something like the shape that the feeling hate would make if it were made out of shadow. A little motor whirred in his mechanical right hand, and the fingers closed tightly in a sort
of
hamster-strangling way. Had he forgotten that we’d bonded (sort of ) over the choking disaster? That I’d saved him from the mother of all wedgies? Had his primitive mind bundled up the idea of me and his painful humiliation? Sometimes, with grown-ups, you just don’t know.

‘You!’ he said, after a few awkward seconds. He tried to point, but his hand was stuck in
hamster-strangling
mode. He had to use the other hand to straighten out one finger, and aimed it at my eyeball. ‘Yes, you, Millicent, out here.’
¹

Gulping, I pushed my way forward.

‘You can help me demonstrate today’s World Sport. Peruvian shoe-throwing. Comes from the highlands of Peru. Played by the ancient Aztecs—’

‘Incas, surely, sir,’ I said, forgetting, in the heat of the moment, to keep my STUPID MOUTH SHUT.

‘Run!’ commanded Fricker, ignoring my interruption.

‘What?’

‘Run!’

‘Where?’

‘Away, boy, away!’

So I started to run, heading roughly in the direction of the perimeter fence. I glanced back over my shoulder, in time to see Mr Fricker
stoop
, pull off his trainer, take aim, and hurl it at me with the skill and power of an international-grade Peruvian (Inca or Aztec) shoe-thrower. The shoe hit me square between the shoulder blades.

‘Right,’ yelled Fricker. ‘That’s it. You’ve got the rules. And anyone who misses, or shows a lack of appropriate Aztec vigour, becomes the Peruvian.’

So for the next half-hour I was chased around the field while fat kids threw their shoes at me. At the end we played a subtle variation, whereby the Peruvian is thrown at the shoes.

Now, the thing about being hit with shoes is that it’s quite painful, but doesn’t do too much actual bodily harm. Otherwise I suppose it would have been developed further as a weapon of war, and you’d have had knights fighting jousts with fearsome shoe-maces, and battleships firing
broadsides
of kitten-heels, and perhaps armour-piercing sandals for anti-tank use. It also helped that the guys of Hut Four were on my side. They had to throw their shoes as well, but they did it in the gentlest possible fashion, and they also formed a sort of protective wall around me, and also discouraged the others from hurling their shoes with too much force. Nevertheless it was one of the most gruesome thirty minutes of my life, and as each trainer thudded into the back of my head, or my legs, or bounced off my belly, I silently cursed the evil Fricker.

‘Why’s that guy hate you so much, Donut?’ J-Man asked when it was all over. ‘You run into him before?’

‘Could say. He’s the PE teacher at my school.’

‘Seems kinda weird, him turning up here like that.’

‘I realized a long time ago, J-Man, that it’s weird when something weird doesn’t happen.’

‘I hear you, Donut. I hear you.’

After a delicious supper of caviar, roast suckling pig, chips, more chips, chocolate éclairs and donuts (gruel, actually), I was more or less carried to bed by the guys. I was battered and bruised, but not beaten.

‘I need to get over the wall,’ I said to J-Man, as he tucked me in and fluffed my pillow.

‘No, kid,’ he said. ‘You don’t. What you gotta do is tough it out, like the rest of us saps.’

DONUT COUNT:

¹
One of Mr Fricker’s little jokes was to misremember my name in various unpleasantly feminine forms.

Friday 6 April

NOW I’VE GOT
to know them all a bit better, I think I should give a more detailed sketch of the other guys in Hut Four, as it’s not really fair just to think of Flo as the dough-faced beetle geek, and Dong as the silent Ninja, although that actually does kind of sum them up.

J-Man

I don’t need to say much more about J-Man. He’s black, cool as a panther (but fat as a bear,
so
you’ve got two
Jungle Book
characters for the price of one), wise, brave, loyal and strong. In a nutshell (a giant nutshell), my hero.

Florian Frost (Flo)

Flo is a tender-hearted soul. Unlike J-Man, I’m not convinced that he is a genius. He does seem to know a lot about beetles. And his only joke is a beetle joke. He ‘did’ his beetle joke for me on my second day at the camp. He approached me with a matchbox. Inside were two odd-looking, long-nosed beetles.

‘Weevils,’ he said, avoiding eye contact as usual. Well, avoiding eye contact with me, that is. He was perfectly good at keeping eye contact with the weevils. ‘You have to choose one.’

‘What do you mean, choose one? I’m not going to eat it, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No. I wouldn’t let you eat one. Just pick your favourite.’

I looked around at the other Hut Four guys. They were all trying not to laugh.

‘OK, I’ll pick that one,’ I said, pointing at one of them. They looked identical.

‘Ha ha,’ said Flo. ‘Incorrect. You picked the big one.’

‘So? Why is that wrong?’

‘Because you should have picked the lesser of two beetles.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, I got it wrong, I think. I mean, you should always choose the lesser of two weevils. You see, it sounds like “two evils”. People say that. They do. They say you should always choose the lesser of two evils. But I did it with weevils. It’s a joke. About weevils.’

Then he got a bit over-emotional, and J-Man had to comfort him, while he rocked on the floor cuddling his fluffy beetle.

So that’s Flo.

Dong

Don’t know what to say about Dong, because he still doesn’t speak any English, except for the ‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance’ line. It’s quite hard not to see him as a Man of Mystery, but I wonder if I was trapped in the Chinese version of Camp Fatso, which is probably called something much more Chinese, like Camp of the Sleeping Overweight Dragon, then maybe they’d all see me as a Man of Mystery too, like James Bond or Harry Potter, even though I’d still be the same old Donut. Anyway, because of his special ninja powers,
Dong
doesn’t seem to suffer as much as the rest of us. He probably spent years training in a Tibetan monastery, learning how to put up with all kinds of privations. Although I guess that then he wouldn’t be such a fatty.

Igor

Igor is the surprise package of Hut Four. Looking at him, you’d naturally assume that he’s a borderline idiot, i.e. on the borderline between idiot and complete idiot. Not only is he totally huge, which people irrationally associate with being unintelligent, but he also looks a bit thick, in a drooling, blank-eyed way, which people also, and rather less irrationally, associate with being unintelligent. But yet again, it seems that appearances are deceptive.

The other evening I was lying in my bunk
trying
to imagine that I was on a beautiful tropical island, being served chilled drinks in a coconut shell by the fair Umbilica, Queen of the Zabamba people. (I should say that the drink was not coconut flavoured, because I don’t like coconuts. It was some sort of fruit juice known only to the island, tasting of lime and mango. Or maybe pineapple and pomegranate. Something good, anyway.) Like I said before, all my fantasies are haunted by the ghosts of bad things, but in this one I’d carefully put the bad things off into the future so I could enjoy swinging in my hammock and drinking my delicious drink. (The bad thing, by the way, was that I was going to have to marry Queen Umbilica when I grew up, but only for one day, after which I was to be sacrificed to the Zabamba gods by being thrown into a volcano.
But
, like I said, that was miles in the future.)

Anyway, I was rudely ripped from my daydream by the looming figure of Igor.

‘Do you play chess?’ he rumbled.

Normally he was almost as mute as Dong.

‘Yeah. Sort of,’ I replied.

It turned out that Igor had whittled a set of chess pieces from candles (white pieces) and some unspecified brown matter (black pieces). The board was chalked out on the bare wooden planks of the floor.

I have to say that Igor’s whittling skills were, at best, just OK, so when the pieces were lined up it didn’t look so much like a great medieval battle about to take place, with kings and knights and castles and whatnot, as like zombies versus apocalyptic mutants.