The Donut Diaries (8 page)

And so ends the weirdest day of my life, and
undoubtedly
one of the most depressing. And I’ve got a feeling it’s all going to get worse.

DONUT COUNT:

I got a few of the crumbs from the wash-bag donut.

¹
Actually, I don’t suppose eye colour really has anything to do with how cruel you are. There may well be people with pale-blue eyes who are incredibly kind and who constantly rescue cats out of trees and give all their sweets to the poor. And I’m sure there are other people with kindly brown eyes who make a living by torturing monkeys and forcing dogs to smoke cigarettes. But you know what I mean.

²
If, on the zombie scale, one represents Albert Einstein and ten represents a full-blown, brain-eating member of the undead, then J-Man and the rest of Hut Four were suddenly scoring a highly creditable seven.

³
Thought I might try another poem, but I’ve run out of rhymes. That can happen to even the greatest wordsmiths. There’s a famous poem called
Paradise Lost
by John Milton, and it’s about five hundred pages long, and Milton couldn’t even think of a single rhyme in the whole poem – I know, because I had a quick check. And despite that, Milton is totally famous. Weird.

Tuesday 3 April

THERE IS ALWAYS
a certain satisfaction in being right, even if it means that HORROR WILL BE HEAPED ON HORROR IN A NEVERENDING CASCADE OF ROTTENNESS.

The day began (or rather, the night ended) with me in the middle of a dream that was both brilliant and terrible at the same time. I was in a flying donut, equipped for space travel, and I was cruising along somewhere in the region
of
Uranus.
¹
Of course, I had to zap a few bug-eyed aliens, including Admiral Thlugg and the Borgia Empire, which was kind of fun. But then I got peckish and started eating my own spacecraft, which is totally against Star Command regulations, but, you know, I was hungry. So I had this terrible anxiety eating away at me just as I was eating away at my ship. It was a classic rock-and-hard-place scenario: I had the terrible choice of eating my donut ship and dying a horrible space death or NOT EATING A GIANT DONUT!!!!!

I was saved from the horns of this dilemma by the sound of my neutrino engines over-heating (which was the result, I guess, of my over-eating,
ha
ha), and then I woke up to find that the hideous screeching and honking sound was not coming from any engines at all, but from the loudspeakers outside the hut. Yep, it was our friendly wake-up call.

At least it didn’t turn Hut Four into zombies again. They were just normal fat kids groaning and farting and trying to get out of bed by snuggling further under the covers. And then the door flew open and a gale of dead leaves and sleet blew in, along with three of the goons, who ran around screaming, ‘Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schnell!’ At first I thought that Raus and Schnell must be two of the fat kids, but then I figured out that it was just special goon talk for ‘Out’ and ‘Quickly’.

The next thing I knew, a goon had pulled off the flimsy blanket that was the only thing
protecting
me from the horror of the outside world and hurled me onto the floor.

‘OUTSIDE IN TWO MINUTES OR BREAKFAST WILL BE CANCELLED!’ screamed another.

That was enough to make me get dressed double quick. It certainly helped that the orange tracksuits only took a few seconds to put on. What didn’t help was having a goon shouting in my face all the time. There’s nothing better designed to slow you down than having someone yell, ‘Hurry up!’ in your ear.

It was still dark outside, and cold enough to freeze the snot in your nose. We formed a line, and then we had to jog towards the gates of the camp. Halfway there we slowed down and picked up a carrot from a tin bucket.

That was breakfast.

Now, I’ve never really understood carrots. As far as I can tell they don’t taste of anything at all. That is actually not a bad thing, for a vegetable. It would be much worse if a carrot tasted of something like broccoli, cabbage or cauliflower, like broccoli, cabbages and cauliflowers do. But what I don’t get are those people who munch on raw carrots as if they were apples or cakes or something, and claim to actually like them.

But I was starving, so I ate my carrot and, may the God of Donuts forgive me, I finished it right down to the stumpy little bit of green stalk at the end. As we ate, we continued our jog. We were accompanied not just by the goons, but by their little sausage guard dogs:
²
not Gustav himself,
who
was too grand for mere guard duty, but his equally nasty comrades. Like I said, they were as evil as orcs, and kept on snarling and nipping at our ankles, which made me quite pleased about their stumpy legs. If anyone had managed to create a race of long-legged sausage dogs, then they’d no doubt have tucked into our ample backsides, the ruthless monsters.

We jogged through the gates and J-Man moved up to my side.

‘Don’t drop behind,’ he said. ‘If you do, the dogs will fall on you like wolves.’

I sped up a little.

Soon we were in among the trees. All around me, fat kids were sucking asthmatically for breath, dogs were yapping, goons were shouting. My body couldn’t decide if it was too hot or too cold. I was sweating and shivering.

‘H-h-how long do we have to run for?’ I gasped in the general direction of J-Man.

‘TILL YOU DROP!’ screamed a goon, who’d overheard me.

Finally, just as I thought I could jog no more, the head goon yelled out, ‘Stop!’ We were in a clearing. I promptly fell to my knees and, I’m sorry to say, puked. You know how normally there are a few bits of carrot in your sick, and you always point to them and say in a supposedly humorous way, ‘I don’t know how carrots get in sick. I don’t even eat carrots,’ etc., etc.? Well, this time what came out of me was 99.9 per cent carrot, with a tiny little bit of normal sick in it.

I’d have pointed this out to one of my companions, but they were all leaving their own chunky orange puddles, so there didn’t seem to be much point. I suppose it’s the beauty of keeping a diary – you can write stuff like that in it, otherwise it would all just go to waste.

When I’d stopped being sick I looked around. There were about thirty kids here – the occupants of my hut, plus half a dozen others. There was also a pick-up truck that had arrived before us. And standing next to it, wearing a cowboy hat and a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses, was the deeply unpleasant sight of Boss Skinner.

Once we’d all stopped vomiting, the other goons shepherded us over to the truck. Then Boss Skinner made a speech in his whispering mode so we had to strain to hear his words.

‘For the benefit of those of you who haven’t done this before, I want teams of two. One pick, one shovel. The pick guy picks, the shovel guy shovels. You find worms. The worms go in the bucket. You fill up the bucket, then we go back to camp. You don’t fill up the bucket, you sleep here tonight. Anyone runs, we set the dogs on you. Anyone talks, we set the dogs on you. Anyone digs too slow, we set the dogs on you. Got any questions? If you do, we set the dogs on you.’

We divided into pairs, and got out tools from the back of the truck. I ended up with Ernesto Gogol, the spotty, weaselly kid with the sharp teeth. I had the impression that nobody else wanted to pair up with him.

Or with me, for that matter.

I guessed that having a partner new to the pick-and-shovel routine was bad news. Anyway, Gogol got the glamour job – the picking – while I did the grunt work – the shovelling.

So he hacked away with the pick, then I shovelled with the shovel, putting the loose soil to one side. Then we both went through the soil looking for worms. Luckily it was quite a good place for worms. Long, thin, slimy ones; short, fat, juicy ones. Think I’m gonna . . .

No, I wasn’t that hungry. Yet.

After an hour we had half filled our bucket, and the worms were getting scarcer. I was dog-tired and we were all pretty grubby by then from all the scrabbling about in the mud. It was also freezing. And my back ached, along with all the other bits of me, except, possibly, my earlobes. And although it was tough enough to make everything hurt, the work wasn’t quite hard enough to keep us warm, and the sweat from the run had seeped out to meet the drenching rain working its way in.

Just then I heard a sort of magical music. A tinkling, dream-like sound. In my befuddled state, I thought for a moment that I’d died and gone to heaven, and the music was the strumming of the angels’ harps as the pearly gates opened up for me, and a saintly baker was offering me a plate of golden donuts – but, you know, the sort of gold you can eat.

And then I realized what it was. Somewhere, away through the woods, there was a road, and on that road an ice-cream van had parked and was playing its tune, calling out to the starving and the wretched, offering salvation in a cone or on a stick.

Instantly, all the heads that had been bowed towards the earth and the worms therein shot up.

‘Nobody moves,’ came the deathly quiet voice of Boss Skinner. ‘Or I set . . .’

But it was too much for one fat kid. It was Flo, the dough-faced boy. Anyway, we all heard a strangled cry and sensed the earth shudder, and the blimp got to his feet.

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!’