The Donut Diaries

by Dermot Milligan

  DONUT COUNT:

  Sunday 1 April

  AFTER THE HUGE fiasco that was the whole of yesterday, today was a fairly quiet day, without any major traumas. You know how Sundays are always a bit rubbish, because the end of the weekend is nigh, and school looms up like a massive monstrous looming thing? Actually, that’s usually a bit of an exaggeration, because normally the worst things that will happen to you on Monday are:

  1. Several hours of intense boredom at the hands of geography, maths and French teachers;

  2. Getting a break-time dead leg from a prefect;

  3. Being forced to eat some kind of pinky-green meat paste stuff with a side order of vegetables that look like they’ve already been eaten and regurgitated at least once before, all served to you by a dinner lady with hatred in her eyes and some sort of brown matter under her fingernails that you hope against hope might just be congealed gravy, but which some deep part of your soul knows is the result of a fingers-bursting-through-the-toilet-paper situation;

  4. Having to put up with a snide remark from your enemy, the Floppy-Haired Kid, and possibly also a punch in the kidney from him when you’re not looking.

  Well, tomorrow I have none of those things to look forward to. Tomorrow it’s going to be actual starvation combined with intense physical activity, plus having to sleep in a strange bed in a dormitory full of weird fat kids.

  So today I hung out with my friend Jim, who doesn’t go to our school. We played our spit-dribbling game, which involves dribbling spit (as you’d probably guessed) from the iron bridge over the canal. The point is to try to get a continuous strand of saliva to go all the way from your mouth to the water without breaking, and it’s basically impossible if you haven’t got a cold.

  Unfortunately a duck chose that moment to swim under the bridge, and got some spit on its back. We aren’t the kind of kids who like spitting on ducks, so we decided to stop the game.

  Then I told Jim about my food fiasco of the day before, which made him laugh so hard I thought he was going to fall in the canal.

  I thought about being annoyed, but then I realized that it was actually quite funny, and I suddenly felt a bit better, laughter being the great healer and all that.

  And then Jim slightly ruined things by saying, ‘You do, don’t you?’

  And I, like an idiot, said, ‘I do what, don’t I?’

  ‘Fancy her!’

  I didn’t even dignify the question with an answer, but stomped off home.

  There was supposed to be a nice last meal with my family before I left for Camp Fatso, not that the word ‘nice’ is normally associated with the Milligans.

  It didn’t happen, of course.

  Before it even got going, my mum and dad had a big row about the whole sending-me-away thing. My dad said he didn’t approve of ‘fascist health prison camps’, and my mum said that it was his fault that I was overweight, although it really isn’t. It’s my fault. And the fault of donuts for being so delicious.

  Because they were arguing, the low-fat vegetable lasagne got so burned it looked like a blackened cowpat, and we had to have cottage cheese on crackers instead.

  I kind of expected Ruby and Ella to be nasty to me in their own different ways, with Ruby talking to me in her evil baby voice, going, ‘Ooooh, the poor fat Dodo has to go to a nasty prison for fatties, and he won’t get any of his naughty donuts, will he, poor ickle-wickle baby,’ etc., etc., and Ella giving me one of her scary silent stares, while sticking needles into a fat voodoo doll under the table and maybe draining my blood to be used in some ceremony involving toads.

  In fact, they were OK. I don’t mean they were actually pleasant or anything, but they didn’t attack me physically or verbally. Perhaps they are human after all, and not just androids sent back through time to destroy my life.

  Actually, Ruby and Ella acting all decent made me even more depressed than a full-frontal assault would have done. It somehow hammered home the grimness of what I faced.

  Luckily, before I went upstairs, Ruby said, ‘Listen, Dermot, if you take any of my stuff to fat camp, I’m going to scrape the skin off my verruca into your bed so when you get home you get covered in verrucas all over your body.’

  I thought about saying that there was nothing that she owned that I wouldn’t happily have burned in a giant bonfire, even if the resulting pink cloud would block out the sun and bring on a new ice age causing the destruction of civilization as we know it. But I didn’t have the fight in me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, and shrugged.

  DONUT COUNT:

  Last day, so had to fortify myself for what was to come.

  Monday 2 April

  1 p.m.

  IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a two-hour drive to Camp Fatso. The plan was to set off at 7 a.m. to get there for the 9 a.m. start. My mum was taking me because my dad’s lost his licence. I don’t mean that the police took it away from him or anything, just that he put it down somewhere and now can’t find it.

  Things went wrong from the beginning. First my alarm clock didn’t quack (it’s shaped like a duck and I’ve been meaning to destroy it for years now) and then the car wouldn’t start, so we had to call the AA man, who turned out to be the AA lady, and it took her half an hour to sort out the problem. And then we got really badly lost because I was in charge of directions and I got confused about the difference between Sussex and Suffolk when I put the address into the sat-nav.

  It all meant that we were hours and hours late.

  When our sat-nav told us that we were about five miles from Camp Fatso, we drove through a small village with nothing much in it except a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb and a closed-down petrol station and a shop that sold doormats.

  After the village, the road twisted and turned like a snake having a fight with another snake, and it took a further fifteen minutes to get to Camp Fatso. The countryside gradually changed from fields with cows in (one of which was having a giant green wee) to woodland. It should have been pretty in a countrysidey sort of way. But the trees were too close together for my liking, so it all seemed sort of gloomy and depressing and a little bit threatening.

  ‘This is lovely,’ said Mum. ‘It’s a bit like a fairy-tale forest.’

  Did I really need to explain to her what happens in fairy tales? That kids get abandoned by their evil parents? That they get eaten by wolves? Imprisoned and tortured by witches? Forced to do silly dances while wearing those shoes with curly-wurly toes?

  I didn’t ever want to have to wear those shoes.

  But I knew that she was only saying it because she needed to believe that she was taking me somewhere nice.1

  My first sighting of Camp Fatso was a tall wooden tower that loomed over the trees. A flag was flying from the top of the tower. The flag had a picture of a rosy-cheeked kid, grinning like an idiot who’d finally got a joke two days after he’d heard it. Then there was a sign at the side of the road saying CAMP FATSO, and we turned off. We bumped along a track for a few more minutes until we came to a wooden gateway. Above the gateway there was a banner that read:

  CAMP FATSO: GET FIT HAVING FUN!

  There was a man at the gate wearing a black tracksuit and carrying a clipboard. There was something weird on his head, like a sort of Cornish pasty made of hair. I’d say it was a wig, except that no one, surely, would knowingly wear a wig that looked so much like a wig? It might as well have had a giant arrow above it, inscribed with the words THIS IS A WIG.

  He looked at his watch and said, ‘Just arrived?’

  I wanted very much to say, ‘Duh!’ but I didn’t. We’ve all decided at school that saying, ‘Duh!’ when someone says something stupid is itself stupid, and the kind of thing you would say, ‘Duh!’ about, if saying, ‘Duh!’ hadn’t just been banned.

  ‘Sorry, traffic,’ said my mum.

  ‘Name, please.’

  ‘Dermot Milligan,’ she said. She obviously thought I’d get it wrong if I answered myself, and I’d say Dilbert Minigun or Dr Sebastian B
anana or whatever.

  The black-tracksuited, bad-wigged man looked at his clipboard.

  ‘Ah, yes. Excellent. Out you get, young man.’

  ‘Can’t I drive him in?’ asked my mum, looking a bit worried.

  ‘Sorry, ’fraid not. No cars. And you’ll have to say your goodbyes here. We’ve found it just makes things more difficult for the young people if their parents or carers hang around. I’ll take Dermot up to reception.’

  I grabbed my bag from the boot and tried to escape before my mum could give me a hug, but she was too clever for me.

  ‘You’ll need some money,’ she said, holding out a twenty-pound note. I had to climb back into the car to get it, and that meant a hug, two kisses and a splashing of tears.

  ‘I’m really proud of you for this,’ she said. ‘It takes guts to do what you’re doing.’

  I had a quick look around. No one was there to see, except Badwig, and I guessed he’d seen it all before.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I said, patting my ample stomach, ‘got plenty of those.’

  Another squeeze, and then I escaped. I trudged through the gates carrying my bag, which was so heavy I wondered for a moment if my mum hadn’t somehow managed to sneak herself into it.

  ‘Right, Milligan,’ said Badwig as soon as my mum was out of sight. ‘You’re in for a wonderful time. But let’s get off on the right foot, shall we? So stand up straight, and quick march.’

  ‘March?’

  ‘That’s right. Swing your arms, one-two, one-two.’

  This was not a good start. I mean – marching . . .?

  And my first sighting of the inside of Camp Fatso wasn’t very promising either.

  I could see a number of long wooden huts and various other buildings. The tower I had seen from the road was one of four, each placed at a corner of a high perimeter fence. I couldn’t see any machine guns up there, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Back on ground level, there was a sports field, marked with various mysterious white lines. Clusters of overweight kids were doing various equally mysterious things around the field, overseen by more adults in black. The kids were wearing bright orange tracksuits.

  Orange is not a good colour for fat people. Take a kid who is more or less round, and dress him (or her, if it’s a female fatty) in orange, and what you have, basically, is an orange. A similar effect can be had by taking tall, slightly curved kids and dressing them in yellow.

  Badwig marched me into one of the buildings. There were a couple of muscle-bound adults in there, lounging around and drinking those protein shakes that bodybuilders slurp all day. They looked me up and down and then one whispered to the other, and they both burst out laughing. In my experience, anything that begins with being laughed at doesn’t usually end very well.

  ‘This is Milligan,’ said Badwig, and the final tiny bit of friendliness had gone out of his voice. Then he added, ominously, ‘The last of them . . .’

  Then he opened up a counter and moved behind it. This involved stepping over something on the floor. For a second I thought it was a large stain; then I saw that it was alive, and I briefly contemplated the possibility that it might be a new species of giant weasel. Then I realized that it wasn’t a large or giant version of a small thing, but a small version of a big thing. A dog. A sausage dog, to be precise.

  I’ve never liked sausage dogs. They look sly and evil to me, but the main thing is that they take themselves sooooo seriously, and don’t realize how fundamentally silly they are. Taking yourself seriously is perfectly OK if you’re the Prime Minister or a professor of philosophy, but there’s absolutely no excuse for it if you’re a dog and you look like a sausage.

  And I know that the real name for a sausage dog is a datchhund, dachunte, doushhound or dachshund, but I can never remember how to spell it, so I prefer to stick with sausage dog.

  Oh yes, and the other thing about sausage dogs is that they really hate me. I can’t say which came first, the me-hating-them or the them-hating-me. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. But all you have to remember is that me and sausage dogs don’t get on.

  But I thought I could at least make an effort, so I tried to stroke the dog. He snapped at me as if he’d been waiting all day for the chance to eat some poor fat kid’s fingers.

  ‘Meet Gustav,’ said Badwig. ‘He’s Boss Skinner’s dog, so you’d best watch him.’

  ‘Boss Skinner . . . who’s he?’

  Badwig and the others laughed.

  ‘Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. Right, put your bag up here.’

  ‘My bag? Er, OK.’

  Not really knowing what to expect, I heaved the bag up onto the counter. Then, to my amazement, Badwig unzipped it, and had a good old root through it, like we were in airport security.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I said. ‘It’s private!’

  I heard more harsh laughter from behind me.

  ‘Got something to hide, have you, Milligan?’ said Badwig.

  ‘No, but I . . .’

  ‘And what have we here?’ he continued.

  I knew what we had here.

  ‘Is it a treat for Gustav? Oh yes, I think it is.’

  He held up a paper bag with four donuts in it.

  ‘Naughty, naughty,’ he said, and I felt myself blushing.

  ‘They were just . . .’ Just what? They were just donuts, and they weren’t allowed.

  ‘Well, you won’t be needing those in Camp Fatso,’ said Badwig.

  Then, right before my eyes, he started feeding my donuts to the horrible dog. I honestly wouldn’t have minded sacrificing my donuts to help starving children in Africa, or even to feed quite hungry donkeys abandoned by their owners in, er, wherever donkeys live. But giving them to a SAUSAGE DOG! It was sacrilege.

  ‘And you can’t take these into Camp Fatso either,’ he said, taking my laptop and phone out of my bag.

  I’d anticipated this, and I had an argument ready.

  ‘My nutritionist says I have to keep a daily diary of what I eat, so—’

  ‘Tough. There are no sockets in the dorms or anywhere else to charge electronic devices, so it won’t be of any use to you.’

  That was seriously bad news. The laptop was loaded up with games and movies.

  Badwig put a neatly folded set of orange clothing on the counter.

  ‘Get changed into these,’ he ordered.

  ‘Er, where?’

  ‘Just in the corner over there.’

  Now, I don’t know about you, but one of my pet hates is taking off my clothes in public, so I didn’t exactly leap to it.

  ‘Get on with it,’ said Badwig. ‘Don’t worry, we’re not looking, are we, Gustav?’

  Gustav didn’t reply – he was too busy eating my donuts.

  And so I did. Stupid, I know. I should have told them to get stuffed and called my mum, and got the heck out of there, but somehow I’d been institutionalized already, and found it impossible not to obey orders.

  And of course, halfway through getting changed I found myself under attack by the sausage dog of doom, who’d finished my donuts and decided on a bit of sport to work off the calories. He yapped and nipped at my ankles while I flapped at him with my trousers.

  Finally Badwig came round the counter and picked up Gustav.

  ‘That’s a good boy,’ he said.

  By that stage I’d managed to change into the shiny orange tracksuit. You can imagine how ridiculous I looked. If you can’t imagine, then I’ll tell you: I looked extremely ridiculous.

  ‘Right,’ said Badwig. ‘Now you’re kitted out, you can get along to your hut. It’s number four. Turn left outside. You’ve missed lunch and you’re too late for afternoon PE, so just hang around until the others come in.’

  I went to grab my bag.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Badwig. ‘This goes in the store room with all the others.’

  ‘But my things . . . my toothbrush . . .’

  Badwig pulled out my wash bag. ‘You can take this. Off you go now. The latr
ines and showers are in the blue building on the way.’

  So, giving my bag a last lingering look, I left the office. Gustav had another snap at me, and I hurried down the steps to get out of range, already planning an elaborate revenge.

  The hut was easy to find. I walked slowly along the gravel path, passing Huts One, Two and Three. They were brightly painted in rainbow colours, but that couldn’t hide the fact that they were pretty run-down and shabby.

  I reached Hut Four and walked up the wooden steps. Inside there were six bunk beds, a rough table and an iron stove. It was both cold and stuffy. There was a strong and unpleasant odour of boy: that mix of methane, armpit-juice and foot-cheese. Of course there was no telly, so that’s when I decided to write up the first part of the day.

  But of course I had nothing to write on. By then I needed a wee so I found the latrine hut. It was draughty and cold and miserable, and the toilet paper was that painfully hard and unabsorbent stuff they used to have in World War Two.

  But at least I’d found something to write on. Now I’m wondering if this is the first ever journal written on toilet paper?

  I await the arrival of my hut mates . . .

  1 Throughout history, many of the greatest atrocities have been committed by people who thought they were doing something good, like the Spanish Inquisition and the man who invented cauliflower cheese.

  Monday 2 April

  8 p.m.

  YOU KNOW THOSE books and movies where the hero goes to sleep and wakes up in an alternative reality that turns out to be a demon dimension, or maybe even hell itself? Well, I think I might be in one of those.

  I didn’t have to wait long in the hut before the others began to turn up. I was expecting it to be mainly fatties. However, it really was a parade of all shapes and sizes that came trudging through the door into the hut.