The little demon seemed almost to burst into flames. He hissed like a cat, and I noticed for the first time that his nails were also long and pointed, and black.
‘So, Gogol food not good enough for the Donut, is it?’ he sizzled. ‘Frightened of a little bit of Gogol spit, is he? Well, one day Donut will be frightened. Very frightened. And all will bow down before Gogol, and Gogol will not forget who was kind and who was unkind. That day Gogol will—’
‘Shut up, Ernesto,’ said J-Man, and he did, thank heavens.
Traditionally, of course, there’s always a traitor in every group, a secret baddy, a sneak, a Gollum, and if Hut Four was going to have an evil traitor it would definitely be him.
So that’s the hut.
And I hope that tonight is the last time I shall see any of them again.
You see, I finally persuaded J-Man to help me go over the wall into the girls’ camp, using the human pyramid we were practising before Fricker arrived. We’re going to try it tonight, after lights-out.
Naturally I didn’t include Ernesto Gogol in the plan, what with him almost certainly being a freakish, pointy-toothed traitor and all.
DONUT COUNT:
Well, zero, of course. But for once I don’t care, because I’m getting out of this hellhole.
Sunday 8 April
IF IT HADN’T been a totally rubbish thing to say for at least a hundred, and possibly a thousand, years, what I’d be saying right now is, ‘Woe is me. Woe is me, I say again.’
As you can see, two days have gone by since my last entry on the toilet roll. And am I now at home, belly full, body warm, mind at ease?
Nope.
This is what happened.
The camp was in darkness by 10 p.m on Friday. The hut guys all knew what was happening, except for Gogol. I waited until his tell-tale snoring began – a pigletty sound of exactly the kind you’d expect to come out of a traitor, sneak, etc., etc. Or a piglet.
Quiet as giant mice, we crept from our beds and out of the hut. I’d been monitoring the movements of the guards for the past couple of nights. Goons with dogs did a patrol of the grounds on the hour, and at thirty minutes past. That would have given us half an hour to get over the wall, which should have been a piece of cake. Oh, cake, cakey, dear old cakey . . . caaaaaaaaake . . .
Where was I? Oh yes, but it wasn’t that easy. At quarter past and quarter to, the goons in the watchtowers would turn their searchlights on and sweep the compound.
This meant that we had fifteen minutes max. But even that couldn’t be relied on. Sometimes the goons in the towers would do an extra sweep, out of boredom, I guess. And if we were caught in the searchlight, then it wouldn’t just mean the cooler: those automatic paintball cannons they had up there would rain red destruction on our heads.
Dong had some black boot polish, and we all smeared our faces with the foul stuff, which added very much to the excitement of the whole thing. Except for J-Man, that is, who had a natural advantage for night-time adventures of this sort.
Even though it was my plan, it was J-Man who took the lead, of course. But I was incredibly proud of all the guys. True, I was taking the biggest risk, and would definitely be the hero if this was ever made into a multimillion-pound movie, although it would be quite hard to find an actor who had sufficient charisma to play me, and who was also quite fat.
Anyway, off we slipped, moving between the pools of deepest darkness formed by the shadows of the huts. It was about five hundred metres, and we had to be careful, so it took a good ten minutes for us to reach the imposing, ominous majesty of the wall.
There were only five of us, so we were going to have to improvise a hitherto never attempted and highly unstable two-one-one-one pyramid. In fact it was really more of a human Leaning Tower of Pisa, if we’re being accurate. The only way to pull it off was for the whole human edifice to lean against the wall for stability.
This is how we were arranged:
ME
J-MAN
D O N G
FLO - IGOR
I had to ascend last. It was both easier and harder than my previous efforts. Harder, in that it was pitch black, so I couldn’t see where I was putting my hands and feet. Easier, in that the human pyramid was reclining against the wall, so I wasn’t climbing straight up.
And somehow, despite the strain and effort, each of my comrades managed to say an encouraging word as I climbed over them.
‘A pawn can take a queen, Donut: be that pawn.’
‘If you find any interesting beetles, keep them for me.’
‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance.’
And then I was scrambling up J-Man. He said not a word. We’d grown pretty close and I guess he was all gummed up with emotion.
So, with a lot of huffing and puffing, I managed to get up onto J-Man’s shoulders. The top of the wall was just out of reach. I was going to have to jump for it.
Let me tell you, jumping when you’re on top of a swaying pyramid of straining fat kids is not easy. But just as my feet were on the shoulders of the residents of Hut Four, I knew that their hopes were on mine, and I put everything into one last effort.
I leaped.
Not quite like a panther. More like a frightened pig. But still, it was definitely a leap and not merely a jump. My hands just reached the top of the wall. I sensed that the pyramid had crumbled beneath and behind me, heard the muffled cries as my friends fell. But I was there. I heaved, I scrambled, I made it to the top, and threw one leg over. The wall was made of corrugated iron, and it cut into me like a knife: this was not a place that I wanted to stay for very long.
And then the fatal flaw in my plan revealed itself: there was no matching human pyramid on the girls’ side. But there was no going back now, and no sense in hesitating. I dangled down by my arms, swayed, gulped, and let go.
It was a drop of five metres – enough to do some serious damage if you landed on something hard, like concrete or a really tricky maths puzzle, but I was counting on a soft landing, because of all the rain, sleet and general boggy misery we’d had at Camp Fatso.
And my landing was quite soft, but only because I landed in the huge arms of perhaps the only person at Camp Fitso who could have caught me without being thoroughly squashed.
‘Pfumpf,’ said the monstrous form of . . .
LUDMILLA!!!1
‘Great way to spoil a perfectly good midnight feast.’
But it wasn’t Ludmilla who said that (it couldn’t be, because Ludmilla mainly said, ‘Pfumpf’ – hence her name). And nor was it me, as I was still too utterly flabbergasted at this turn of events to do more than silently open and close my mouth.
No, the speaker was Tamara Bello, last seen by me as I scurried from the burger bar following my toenail catastrophe.
And how did I feel about that? Well, happy, sad, embarrassed, confused. Mainly confused. One of the most surprising things about this situation was seeing Tamara and Ludmilla hanging out together – the coolest and the uncoolest girls in the school. It was like looking down at dinner time and seeing chips and custard on the same plate. It was another confirmation of the fact that in the world of Camp Fatso, the standard laws of the universe no longer held good.
‘Y-y-you,’ I finally managed to say, helped by the jolt as Ludmilla dumped me on the ground. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘As I said, having a perfectly good midnight feast.’
And indeed the ground was strewn with sweet wrappers, empty white boxes bearing the tell-tale marks of chocolate cake, empty cans of Coke, etc., etc.
‘And why is your face all black?’
‘Ah, well . . . it’s complicated . . .’ I dabbed at my face with my hankie. ‘So, you’ve been sent to Camp Fitso . . .?’
‘Duh.’
Now, obviously, as I said before, ‘Duh’ is a pretty stupid thing to say, but I supposed I’d earned this one.
‘But why do you need midnight feasts? Isn’t it a kind of paradise here? A paradise
of food and fun?’
‘Ha! Funny, that’s what we say about your side of the fence. But no, it’s not paradise. It’s OK, I guess, but there’s only so much steamed fish a girl can take. Anyway, what the heck are you doing climbing over the wall?’
‘Because it’s a hellhole over there. They starve us and make us dig up worms and—’
But that was as far as we got in that particular conversation. For at that moment we were blinded by the dazzling beam of a searchlight.
‘STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE,’ came a commanding voice from a megaphone. ‘WE HAVE YOU COVERED. ANY ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE WILL BE MET WITH MAXIMUM FORCE.’
‘Pfumpf,’ said Ludmilla.
Tamara used a very bad word indeed.
And then suddenly her attitude completely changed.
‘Listen very carefully – we don’t have much time. We’ve clearly been betrayed. We’re not really at Camp Fitso to get fit – we’ve been sent by the Badges Protection League.’
‘The what?’
‘I told you to shut up and listen. We were going to go under the wall into Camp Fatso. But now we’ll never get another chance, so it’s up to you. Hut Nineteen. Go there. Rescue the badges. Understand?
‘No . . .’
Suddenly we were surrounded by goons – except that these weren’t really goons, but goonettes, i.e. lady goons. Which doesn’t mean that they were nice and ladylike – in fact they were horrid, shouting and pushing and jabbing at us with paintball guns. In this manner we were led to a building at the heart of Camp Fitso.
As I’d seen from the human pyramid, everything on this side of the wall was much more pleasant than on the boys’ side, and the building we entered was all big windows and shining steel and polished stone floors. The goonettes took us to an office. I was made to sit on a bench outside, while the girls went in. As they passed me, Ludmilla stumbled and barged into Tamara, who in turn crashed into me.
‘Don’t forget, Hut Nineteen,’ she said, and I felt her cram something into the trouser pocket of my orange tracksuit. I didn’t immediately check to see what it was in case it attracted attention.
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 wa
s 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.
The Donut Diaries Page 8
