J-Man yelled, ‘Noooooooo!’ but it was too late. The siren call of the ice-cream van was too strong. Dong tried to tackle him, but Flo burst through his grasp and was off, pounding through the clearing and towards the trees.
I looked at Boss Skinner. His face was blank. He spat on the ground, and then hissed out of the side of his mouth, ‘Release the hounds.’
The goon who had been holding the slavering sausage dogs let them go. The little devils were already straining, and burst away like guided missiles.
But Flo was moving well for a fat boy, and was already quite close to the trees. If he could reach them he might be in with a chance – the undergrowth was quite deep and tangled in there, and the stumpy-legged little dogs might not be able to keep up with him.
‘Go on, you can make it, Flo,’ J-Man said, and the cry was taken up.
‘Go on!’
‘Run!’
‘Run!’
‘Run!’
He was almost there, but then I heard the ker-chick-ker that could only be the sound of a pump-action paintball shotgun being cocked. I saw Boss Skinner aim and fire, and a deadly red butterfly opened up on Flo’s back. He was down, and the pack reached him, snarling and snapping.
The next thing I knew I was running to help him. J-Man cried out weakly, ‘No, Donut, there’s nothing you can do . . .’ but then, when he saw that I wasn’t stopping, he joined me. We reached Flo together, and tried to pull the hounds off him. Suddenly we were surrounded by a mass of other kids, with the goons pushing and shoving their way towards us.
‘Heel,’ came a quiet but sinister voice.
Instantly the dogs backed off.
‘Now, take these vermin to the cooler.’
The other goons bundled us into the back of the pick-up truck. Flo was whimpering. J-Man looked like he wanted to murder someone.
‘Now see what you’ve done,’ he hissed at me as we bumped over the rough track on the way back to the camp.
‘What’s this cooler like?’
Flo moaned again.
‘You’ll soon find out,’ said J-Man.
And I did.
We had a lesson on ‘Irony’ last term in English. It’s when the actual meaning of a word or phrase is different to the literal meaning. So, for example, if you say something stupid, and I say, ‘Well done, Einstein,’ that’s being ironic. It’s a lot like sarcasm, except . . . er, well, it’s a lot like sarcasm. Anyway, it turned out that the cooler was not an ironic term.
‘It’ was actually several cold storage units under the kitchen block. I was kicked into one by Badwig, who then slammed the door and bolted it shut. J-Man was in another box next to me, and Flo was in one on the other side. There wasn’t enough room to stand up or lie down, so I had to sit hunched against the wall. And did I mention it was cold? Really cold? Well, it was. And worst of all, there was a metal rail running along the roof, and hanging from the rail by vicious-looking hooks were carcasses. I don’t know what they were. Probably piglets, judging by the size. Skinned piglets. Dead, obviously. I guessed that they were the origin of the nasty meat on the plates at dinner time.
Dinner.
I was famished.
I thought about gnawing at the raw, chilled bodies hanging from the roof. But that would have meant that I was a monster. And I wasn’t a monster. Not yet.
After five bleak, shivery minutes, I heard a pounding on the wall.
‘You OK, Donut?’ came the deep voice of J-Man.
‘Nope.’
‘Check on Flo, will you?’
I slapped on the other wall. ‘Hey, Florian, you OK?’
All I heard was a quiet sobbing. At least he was still alive.
They left us in there for three or four hours. I found a mouldy potato on the floor and tried to keep warm by bouncing it off the wall.
Then I ate the potato.
By the time they came to drag me out my legs weren’t working properly. J-Man and Flo were in the same poor shape. The goons frog-marched us back to the hut, dogs yapping again at our ankles.
I was starting to really hate those dogs.
The others gathered round as we lay in a heap on the floor. We’d missed dinner, but they’d saved us a few scraps. Some carrots (of course), a couple of cups of cold gruel, some of the slabs of meat. I took the gruel and a carrot, but turned down the meat. I hadn’t liked the look of the things I’d seen in the cooler.
In front of them all, J-Man said to me, ‘Donut, you did a brave thing, trying to help Flo. You’re one of us now.’
The others murmured their agreement. At lights-out, Flo waddled over and offered to let me sleep with his cuddly beetle, but I declined.
It wasn’t a bad end to a day of horror piled upon horror.
DONUT COUNT:
Hey, you do the math.
1 I know you want to, but don’t say it – the word ‘Uranus’ hasn’t actually been funny for years. Well, OK, it is still quite funny, but sometimes you have to turn your back on obvious jokes about Uranus.
2 Or should that be guard sausage dogs? Or sausage dog guards? Who knows. Who cares.
Wednesday 4 April
SAME ROUTINE THIS morning. A carrot for breakfast, long jog out to the clearing in the forest, dig for worms.
‘Why are we digging for worms?’ I asked J-Man during a carrot break.
He shrugged heavily. ‘Some say it’s to sell to fishermen. Some say they mash them up and turn them into that meat they give us. But I say the goons don’t need no reason to make us work. They just do it because they can.’
‘That’s enough mouth from you, boy,’ yelled one of the goons, a big man with a bull-neck called Spanner.1 He was in Boss Skinner’s role for today, and you could see that he actually wanted one of us to run so that he could put a paintball round into some kid’s face.
After a couple of hours of wearisome worm work, we jogged back to have lunch. Guess what? Gruel. And a carrot. I was starting to hate carrots, the way someone dying of the plague might hate rats. And boils.
We had a stroll around the perimeter fence after lunch. Dong, the Chinese kid, was there with us, plus Igor, who loomed over us all in his friendly ogre-ish way. Every few metres there was a sign attached to the wire saying:
We came to a large section where the wire was replaced by a tall wall of corrugated iron, hiding what lay beyond it.
‘What’s through there?’ I asked.
J-Man shrugged.
‘What we can’t get, so best not to know.’
I looked into his face, but he wasn’t giving away anything else, so I changed the subject.
‘How do people stand it here?’
‘How do we stand it? You make it sound like we got a choice.’
‘But why don’t the kids get in touch with their parents, tell them what it’s like?’
‘How? You know they got no phones, no internet, no way of getting a message out, unless Igor knocks one of them pigeons out of the air with a butt-blast, and fastens a note to its leg. And anyways, the parents don’t care. They dump us all here just to get rid of us. My dad’s a lawyer. My mom’s a lawyer. You think they want my fat ass hanging round the apartment all day during school vacation? I don’t match the curtains.’
‘But this place . . . it’s barbaric.’
‘Sure is. But it works. We all go back thinner, don’t we?’
‘They don’t look like they’re losing much weight,’ I said, pointing my chin in the direction of a group of the fattest kids. I recognized them as the ones J-Man had called the Lardies.
‘Yeah, the Lardies. Like I said, there ain’t no famine where there ain’t someone getting fat, no sir.’
One of the Lardies saw me looking over and caught my eye. I felt a stab of apprehension, as though someone had punched me in the guts. I usually feel this just before someone punches me in the guts. Actually, my school is the sort of school where the bullying takes the form of teasing, mickey-taking, humiliation on an epic scale, etc., etc., rather than actu
al punching and kicking. Most of the punches and kicks I’ve had, in the guts and elsewhere, have been delivered by my sisters, the dreaded Ruby and Ella.
But this was different. This was a big, tough-looking kid, who was giving me the stare – the stare that says, You, yep, you, I’m thinking seriously about punching you in the face, so you may as well start crying now.
And he was coming towards me, his hands already formed into fists. For an overweight kid I’m quite fast, and I did think about running away. But my new friends were here and it wouldn’t look great. Especially if I also started crying. That kind of thing can really destroy your reputation in an institution like Camp Fatso. So I stood my ground and tried hard not to wet my pants.
‘What you looking at?’ said the kid. He had a buzz cut, and now he was close enough, I could see that he had homemade tattoos on his knuckles: LOVE on one hand and HAET on the other. OK, so I was dealing with a dyslexic psychopath.
‘Me? Nothing.’
‘You saying I’m nothing?’
It was the most obvious trap in the world. Obvious and unavoidable. I sensed some more of the Lardies looming up behind me. I opened my mouth, hoping something might come out that would save me from a beating – but it was a bit like when you search in your pockets for change so you can buy a donut, even though you absolutely know there’s nothing in there except for a snotty hankie, some old sweet papers, and a fluff-covered something, the origins of which you are too afraid to speculate about.
‘Get lost, Gilbert,’ said J-Man, rescuing me.
Gilbert.
Not Spike, or Killer, or Razor, but Gilbert.
What else could I do but snigger?
Bad move.
One of Gilbert’s fists – the one with HAET on the knuckles – opened. I thought for a second that it meant he wasn’t going to hit me after all. Maybe he was going to shake hands. Then he brought the hand up and sent it open-palmed towards my face. It turned out that I wasn’t even worth a punch. I was going to get a slap.
The slap never arrived.
On my right side, J-Man started to move, but he was too slow. There was a blur, and a flurry, and suddenly the tattooed oaf was face-down on the floor. It was Dong, who had appeared on my left, his face as passive and inscrutable as ever. I tried to replay what had happened in slow motion in my head. I think Dong had caught the other kid’s wrist and then performed some sort of ninja move, but it really was too quick for the human eye to take in.
And then I was aware that it wasn’t just me and Dong and J-Man together, but the whole of Hut Four, who were now confronting an angry mob of Lardies.
Another Lardy stepped forward. There was something weirdly pie-like about his head, although maybe that was just a hallucination brought on by the carrots I’d been eating. This time it was the huge Igor who went to meet him. Igor gave him a standard school-yard shove in the chest – the kind of thing you see a hundred times every day – but this was delivered with such power that now a second Lardy was on the floor.
Two–nil to Hut Four!
And then it looked like it was going to turn really ugly, like a massive sumo brawl. I thought about those nature documentaries where elephant seals fight, whacking each other with their monstrous necks and trying to get in a good old bite or three, and at the end the beach is littered with squashed pups.
But before mayhem ensued, one of the Lardies eased forward, a pleasant smile on his face. He had the beginnings of a fuzzy moustache on his top lip, and there was a general air of neatness and delicacy about him, despite his bulk. His tracksuit wasn’t like ours: it seemed to be made of crushed velvet.
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’.
1. I was a rank beginner at the art of the human pyramid.
2. I was afraid of heights.
3. I was a bit of a klutz. Not as bad as some of my nerdy friends back at school, such as Renfrew and Spam, who basically couldn’t be trusted to tie their own shoelaces without stabbing themselves in the eye, but you wouldn’t want to let me hold your priceless Ming vase.
4. I didn’t want to.
5. It was now really, really rainy and windy.
6. It (i.e. the formation of the human pyramid) was a truly stupid activity at the best of times.
7. I mean, a human pyramid? Why . . .?
8. OK, I’m struggling. Maybe there were just seven reasons.
9. Did I mention that I really didn’t want to do it?
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.
The Donut Diaries Page 6
