The Donut Diaries

by Dermot Milligan

  But I didn’t mind. I knew I’d done the right thing.

  And now the day was done, and we were going home.

  I looked at Renfrew and Spam.

  ‘Donuts on me, gentlemen,’ I said.

  After what I’d just seen and done, I certainly needed a few.

  DONUT COUNT:

  Well, I needed something to erase the image of Mr Fricker’s auto-wedgie from my mind.

  1 Camp Fatso is basically a place where fat and/or generally unhealthy kids are sent to be made thinner and/or healthier, by means of cross-country runs and gruel.

  2 OK, OK, let’s just say that it involved some chimpanzee poo, a plot to frame me, an elaborate counter-plot and, well, lots more poo. Pretty disgusting, really. You can read all about it in the second volume of my memoirs, The Donut Diaries: Revenge Is Sweet.

  3 The Floppy-Haired Kid, or FHK for short, or Really Nasty Sly Spiteful Rotten Sneak for long, was the one who tried to frame me with the poo, as mentioned above. He failed because of my genius for counter-plotting.

  4 I should say that I’ve no idea if he really was abandoned as a child, but nor do I know for certain that he wasn’t, so it’s definitely within the realm of possibility, and would explain a lot.

  5 In fact, Ludmilla is probably one of the top ten most fearsome creatures in any year of any school, if you exclude the Beelzebub School for Demons, Devils and Monsters, in Hades itself. She was also wrapped up in the events of last term. She’s basically a kindly ogress who keeps her chips in her armpit. She had a gigantic crush on the FHK, and part of my brilliant counter-plot involved me getting them together for snogging purposes, hehehe!

  Saturday 31 March

  10 a.m.

  RIGHT, MY SCHEME for today is to hit town for a last taste of freedom before my stomach is imprisoned in the Inhuman Conditions of Camp Fatso on Monday, for two terrible weeks.

  I’d watched the Camp Fatso promotional DVD with my parents, and it was scary stuff. Healthy food, cross-country runs, no mobiles or computers. In other words, every adult’s idea of what kids should be doing, and every kid’s idea of hell.

  My plan for today – and I believe that it is a classic – is to sample every single forbidden food, all the evil, fat-drenched, sugar-coated, high-calorie, nutrient-low nasties that Camp Fatso was designed to exclude.

  There’s nothing fancy-nancy about my targets. This isn’t the time for exquisitely arranged plates adorned by tiny sculptures made from whittled radishes.

  I am going for the Magnificent Seven:

  1. Cheeseburger

  2. Kentucky Fried Chicken

  3. Meat-feast pizza (with quite literally ALL THE MEATS, from aardvark to zebra, by way of spider monkey, camel and tapir)

  4. Kebab (from the awesome King Kong Kebab Shop next to the bus station)

  5. Ice-cream sundae (at least as big as my head)

  And finally, the crowning glory – my new favourite donut:

  6. The Butterscotch Explosion: a donut injected with a filling of soft caramel, with broken crystallized sugar sprinkled on the top, and melted toffee drizzled over the sugar.

  Ah, only six, you say. But I plan to buy two donuts!

  And I know you’re thinking that it’s nuts to passively accept my Camp Fatso sentence in the hopes of actually shedding a few belly-scoops of flab, and then go on such a monstrous eating binge. Doesn’t that undermine exactly what I am trying to achieve? Aren’t I biting off my nose to spite my face – biting it off, that is, sprinkling it with bacon bits and icing sugar, frying it in lard and then covering it in melted chocolate and eating it?

  No.

  Not in the least. That’s where we come to part two of my plan, which is to take exactly one bite (or slurp, or lick, as appropriate) from each of these foody delights. No more, no less. Altogether this will add up to one reasonably large, but not insanely HUGE, meal.

  And I’m using quite a lot of psychology here. I’ve found that a big part of the enjoyment of eating is in the anticipation – you see that lovely mound of food in front of you, and you eat it in your mind before you put it in your mouth. And isn’t that first bite always the best? And doesn’t it always go a bit downhill after that?1

  Your next question is probably going to be, given that I only have twelve pounds saved up, how am I going to pay for all that food, most of which will be wasted?

  This is where part three of my plan comes into operation.

  It brilliantly utilizes my dad’s manky toenail.

  I’ve got this theory that nearly all dads have a manky toenail. It just goes with being a dad, along with forgetting where you’ve put your keys and not listening when ladies tell you about what sort of day they’ve had. You should probably check your own dad’s feet, just to see.

  Anyway, my dad got his manky toenail from playing five-a-side football, which he does every Wednesday night. Playing five-a-side football is basically the only way to get him out of the toilet, where he mostly lives. He used to be good at football when he was at school, and I think he’s probably still not bad, although it helps that he plays with a load of old codgers just as wrecked as himself.

  The manky toenail arrived on the scene a couple of months ago. Dad came home after a game limping like he’d been shot in the leg with a bazooka. Well, OK, probably not a bazooka, as that would have completely blown his leg off, and one of the rules about having your leg blown off is that you get around by hopping rather than limping. Unless you’ve had an artificial leg fitted, but there wasn’t time for that. So in he came, moaning and generally making a fuss, with his face all drained of colour like there’d been a terrible tragedy – which, in a way, if you were one of his toes, would be true.

  It was one of the few evenings when we were all at home together – that’s me, my mediumly-scary-but-also-quite-nice mum, my goth sister, Ella, and my pink sister, Ruby. In the evenings, Ella is generally to be found hanging around the graveyard with the other members of the Undead Community, and Ruby’s usually doing pink things with her pink friends in her pink bedroom.

  Anyway, like I said, we were all there for a change, and we were staring at my dad’s feet, as there was nothing on the telly.

  We’d all gathered round while he took his trainers off, and then shrank back in horror when we saw the blood soaking through the toe-end of his sock. My mum peeled the sock off while my dad pretended to be brave. What was underneath was really quite disgusting. The big toenail on his right foot was hanging by a thread. Well, not really a thread, more a strand of nail. It had broken right at the base, and there was toe-blood (definitely one of the worst kinds of blood) everywhere.

  My mum’s not usually very sympathetic about my dad’s various ailments and complaints, such as his hay fever, his backache, the mysterious ringing in his ears and his periodically itchy bottom, but even she was shocked into sympathy. She gave him a wooden hairbrush to bite down on while she used the kitchen tongs to pull off the destroyed nail.

  My dad made a noise like a dying buffalo. Ella did a sort of fainting thing that I’m pretty sure used to be called a ‘swoon’ in the olden days, and Ruby threw up into the fruit bowl.

  Her sick was pink, which in itself raised all kinds of questions, but we can’t go into that now.

  The point of all this is that my dad’s severed big toenail has lived on our kitchen windowsill ever since that evening. Over the months the blood turned a deep purply-black, and the nail itself buckled and thickened till it looked like a fossilized claw. If you were ever going to have nightmares about a toenail, then this is the nail you’d be dreaming of.

  I don’t really know why it stayed on our kitchen windowsill for so long. It could just be that nobody wanted to touch it, or maybe it had become invisible, the way some old ornaments that have been in the same place for ever become invisible.

  But I’ve now found the perfect use for it. This is the most brilliant part of my plan. You see, what I intend to do is this: at each café, restaurant, etc., etc. I will or
der my food, ravish the plate with my eyes, take a good big bite, savour the flavour, roll it around in my mouth, and swallow. I will then plant the manky toenail on the plate, and make a serious but dignified complaint. Everyone will be totally disgusted and freaked out by the toenail, and I’ll be able to leave without paying, carefully taking the toenail with me, so that I can repeat the trick at the next eatery.

  One of the many beauties of this scheme is that no one will think it’s a scam, because I’ll only have had one bite. And who would leave a meal after one bite, unless they really did find a blackened toenail in their cheeseburger?

  Genius, see.

  And now it’s time to go and put it into operation. I shall report back in due course.

  1 Let’s say the first mouthful scores a maximum ten, the next will be a nine, then an eight, and so on. Not that it ever reaches a zero, not unless you’re talking vegetables. But then vegetables begin at zero, so it’s not saying much.

  Saturday 31 March

  8 p.m.

  WHY MUST ALL my dreams of glory end like this, in defeat and disgrace?

  It says in a book somewhere (don’t ask me which one, I’ve read several): ‘Those whom the gods love die young.’

  Well, there should be another saying: ‘Those whom the gods hate they first make a bit fat and then heap humiliation on their heads.’

  Truly the gods must hate me.

  All went quite well, to begin with. I dressed in my baggiest trousers to accommodate any slight expansion in the gut area that might arise from my expedition. I got the bus into town, and it was one of the most delightful bus journeys I’ve ever taken, purely because of what I said earlier about anticipation being the best part of eating.

  The first thing that went wrong occurred as I took a short cut along a narrow alleyway connecting two streets, one of which held the gleaming temple of joy that would provide the Sacred Cheeseburger. There was just enough room for two people to pass each other. It was actually a pretty good place for a mugger to hang out, but I reckoned I was pretty safe at twelve o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Plus, I had the world’s uncoolest mobile. It was an old pink Crapia, discarded by Ruby, that I’d painted battleship grey using my model aircraft paint. I kept this well hidden from prying eyes, i.e. any of my mates or anyone else who might know me. But if there was a mugger, then I’d happily give them a tenner to take it off my hands.

  For some reason I decided to check my money halfway along the alleyway. I’d raided my money box, so I had a ton of change, and I just wanted to make sure there was enough to start the giant food-ball rolling. I scooped a load out of my pocket, but a few coins spilled out onto the grimy floor of the alley. I knelt down to pick it up, and at the same moment heard a giggling, chattering, empty noise that could mean only one thing. A very bad thing. A gang of girls was approaching.

  I suddenly felt really silly, scrabbling around after coppers and five-pence pieces. But I also thought it would look like I was trying to be flash if I just got up and left it all there. You know, Oh, look at me, I’m so posh I can just leave money lying on the ground, lah-di-dah, lah-di-dah, I’m just going to put on a silk dressing gown and do a little bit of ballet.

  It was an actual, authentic dilemma, like in a movie where the hero has to decide, say, whether to save his girlfriend from the jaws of a crocodile or to rescue a small child who’s about to totter over the edge of a volcano into the fiery, bubbling lava below. Obviously, in the movie he’d end up doing both, probably using the stunned crocodile to catch the kid or something, but this wasn’t a movie. This was the thing that scientists have calculated is 87.4 per cent worse than movies: this was Real Life.

  So, not feeling too happy, I glanced up. And I found myself staring right into the dark eyes of Tamara Bello. She gave me this look that said, What the heck are you doing here, scrabbling about on the dirty floor, blocking the way of me and my posse? There was also a supplementary question that asked, Just what sort of a buffoon are you, anyway?

  Then her face changed to something slightly different.

  An expression for which the word ‘revulsion’ may well have been invented.

  All the time I’d been vaguely picking up my coins without paying proper attention to what I was doing. Now I looked down and saw that what I’d thought was a coin was in fact a piece of squashed chewing gum, and my fingers were halfway through the act of prying it off the floor.

  ‘Look at that fat kid scraping gum off the floor!’ screeched one of the girls, who was dressed up as if she was going clubbing, even though it wasn’t anywhere near disco o’clock. She wasn’t from my school. Nor were the others, apart from Tamara, and she obviously wasn’t going to admit that she even knew me.

  ‘Have a fresh one,’ Tamara said, and dropped a piece of gum next to me as she and the others skipped past. One of them stepped on my hand, and another stuck her knee into my side, knocking me over.

  Annoyingly, I couldn’t think of a single decent comeback or cutting remark. In fact, I hadn’t managed to say anything at all, the whole time. I felt like a big fat dummy.

  And that’s exactly when you can fall back on your old friend, food.

  So up I got and off I did trot to the glittering lights of that palace of dreams, Burgerland. As I was queuing up at the counter, I decided to slightly modify my plan by getting a double cheeseburger, fries and a Coke.

  It was going to be a mighty big mouthful, but I’d earned it.

  I took my tray of goodness and found a table in a sort of booth thing, which was nice and secret, so nobody would see me doing my little trick with Satan’s toenail.

  I managed to get one giant mouthful of burger plus maybe seventeen fries in my mouth, as well as a good swill of Coke.

  Boy, it was good.

  Little did I know that it was to be the high point of the day. I fished the toenail out of my pocket, black and curved and evil, and got ready to put it in with the fries. But then I decided that I’d have another bite – not a big whale-bite like the first one, but just a dainty little nibble. OK, it turned into another pretty big one. Let’s say humpback whale rather than blue.

  And then I had a thought. What had I done with the nail? I looked down at the tray with its cardboard cartons of food. I couldn’t see it. I looked inside the burger bun, pulling it open to reveal the sticky cheese, gleaming like delicious orange snot.

  And then I felt a tickle in my throat, and I knew what had become of the nail, and with that knowledge came the Bucking Steed of Panic. I suddenly started to feel most unwell. Sweat sprang out on my forehead. I didn’t know if I should try to swallow what was in there, or spit it out. I imagined the sharp edge of the talon piercing the soft lining of my throat. But that was better than regurgitating my food, here in front of everyone . . .

  I decided to try to swallow it down, thinking the mass of food would smooth the passage, and then my guts would do the rest.

  Big mistake. Pain, sharp, terrifying. I stood up and bent over the plastic table. I opened my mouth and tried to empty out what was in there, letting a mass of chewed-up food just spill out, the way you’d empty the bin.

  I was dimly aware that the door to the place had swung open, and that more people had come in. I vaguely sensed that I had become the centre of attention. But I didn’t care, I truly didn’t care: I could not breathe.

  I was choking to death.

  And if I didn’t choke, the talon would soon work its way through the inside of my throat and PIERCE MY JUGULAR VEIN!!!!!

  I coughed, and coughed again, hoping to bring up the toenail. But it was no good. It was definitely stuck in my throat. My eyes were watering and I could hardly see anything, but I knew for sure that there was now a crowd around me.

  Great.

  I was going to die in Burgerland, in embarrassing agony, in front of loads of people.

  Wearing my uncoolest elasticated trousers.

  ‘Stand back. Let me through.’

  The words were commanding and authoritativ
e, and the voice was very familiar. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and saw the bristling form of Mr Fricker approaching. Before I knew what was happening, he had positioned himself behind me, grabbed me under the arms, and proceeded to punch me in the guts with his artificial hands, whilst jiggling me up and down in the time-honoured Heimlich manoeuvre.

  Suddenly I felt the little monster in my throat budge. Fricker gave one final thrust, and with a sound like a bear breaking wind, the talon shot out of my mouth, whizzed across the room, pinged against a window, and then, with a kind of ghastly inevitability, got stuck in the hair of one of the girls who had just come in. One of the girls I had just passed in the alleyway.

  The hair, of course, belonged to Tamara Bello.

  There was a second or two of silence before the uproar, which took the usual form of outraged squeals, appalled and disgusted yells, some fainting, and one sympathetic vomiting incident.

  ‘GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!’ Tamara screamed, losing her cool for the first time ever since she got smacked on the bum by the midwife on the day she was born.

  ‘I’m not touching it!’ yelled one of the other girls. ‘I don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘It looks like a bit of horse’s hoof,’ said another.

  ‘You’ll be fine now, boy,’ said Mr Fricker, my handless saviour.

  ‘Thanks,’ I croaked.

  ‘I always pay my debts,’ said Fricker. ‘But best get on home. Whatever it was that was stuck in there may not have killed you, but this lot might.’

  I took his advice and scuttled out of Burgerland, not even bothering to get my refund. I managed to slip in the vomit on the polished floor, but luckily didn’t end up on my bum.

  On the way home I scraped together enough change for a plain donut.

  My plan now is to go to bed, pull the duvet over my head and eat the donut, hoping that its sweet and healing loveliness will obliterate the horrors of what was the worst day of my life.