The first to come in was a black kid, who looked pretty tough. Or at least as tough as you can look when you’re wearing dirty orange pyjamas.
Next came a conventional fatty, like me, but drawn by a cartoonist so that everything was even rounder. His face was lost in flab, so it looked like someone had thrown a lump of dough at his head, where it had stuck. He glanced nervously at me, and then down at the ground, mumbling something to himself, as the others stomped in behind him.
The next was a giant kid – not so much fat as generally huge. His head clanged on the iron lightshade dangling from the ceiling. He had hands like the bucket scoop on a digger. Irregular clumps of hair were arranged randomly over his scalp, separated by areas of scabby, stubbly skin. It was not a good advert for cutting your own hair with a set of blunt gardening shears. All in all, he looked very much like an ogre, which made me think again of what my mum had said about the place being like something from a fairy tale.
Next came a weedy, grey-faced specimen, with constellations of boils and spots sprayed over his face. Yep, I could make out the Great Bear, Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper, all done in zit-form. He wasn’t fat at all, just vaguely unhealthy-looking, as if he’d spent his entire life locked in the school toilet. He had the sort of furtive, slightly ratty look to him that’s gone completely out of fashion. Except among rats.
After him, a big fat Chinese kid waddled in, looking like a juvenile sumo wrestler. I wondered if he was a black belt in some kind of ninja stuff, like throwing those little death-star thingies or whacking people with two sticks joined by a chain. Then I realized that it was probably racist to assume that anyone of Chinese or Japanese descent is good at throwing ninja death stars, so I decided to stop thinking like that, and just assume that he was a simple fatty, like the rest of us.
‘Hi,’ I said, as they all gathered around me. I thought they were being friendly until I noticed their faces. They each stared blankly at me, as if I’d already managed to do something to make them hate me.
‘So who crapped in your lunch boxes?’ I said, trying to win them over with a bit of feisty humour.
I may as well have been trying to win over a man-eating tiger by offering it a banana.
‘Newbie,’ said the tough-looking black kid in an American accent.
The ogre made a sort of rumbling noise. It sounded like he was saying, ‘Doom.’
‘And what do we do to newbies?’ continued the black kid.
The others all yelled in unison, ‘PILE ON!’
And that’s what they did.
It was like being jumped on by a family of mammoths.
Now, you’ve probably had a pile on at school, when you all basically pile on top of everyone else (hence the name). It’s quite a good laugh, and the kid at the bottom hardly ever has to go to hospital or suffers long-term brain damage.
But this was different. This was an Olympic-level pile on. I had the weight of four titanic fatties and one spotty kid pressing down on me. My calculations show that this is equivalent, in terms of pressure per square inch, to the conditions on the surface of Venus and at the bottom of the ocean, i.e. totally blinking FATAL.
I tried to scream for help but there was zero air in my lungs. I thought I was going to die. Squashed flat by kids even fatter than me. What a way to go. And I hadn’t even had lunch.
And that’s when I remembered it. The wash bag. It was on the floor, just a few centimetres away, a picture of Homer Simpson smiling on the front of it.
Luckily, although I was pinned under the living mound of flesh, I could move my right arm just enough to reach the wash bag. I managed to slip my fingers into it, and found what I was looking for.
The wash-bag donut! I thought that it would save me from hunger, but now it was going to save me from death.
I knew that any kids who’d been here for a while would be craving sweet things the way a vampire craves the slender neck of a young girl. With a flick of my wrist I sent the donut (chocolate icing, hundreds and thousands, a bit squashed) skittering across the wooden floor of the hut.
I don’t know who saw (or smelled) it first, but I heard the cry of ‘Donut!’ go up, and suddenly I was free. I looked over to see a writhing mass of fat humanity fighting over the sugary treat. They were like sharks on a feeding frenzy; like vultures tucking into an opened-up wildebeest belly; like grannies at a jumble sale.
Only the black American kid wasn’t partaking in the scramble. He stood off to one side, shaking his head slowly, as if disappointed by the performance.
Finally, the spotty kid used his superior speed and got hold of the donut. He was about to chomp on it when, from either side, the ogre and the dough-faced boy dived in, their mouths open, like blue whales eating krill. Their huge jaws bit off the two ‘wings’ of the donut, leaving just the middle section. The spotty kid tried desperately to lift it up to his mouth, but it never got there. The Chinese boy now grabbed the spotty kid’s hand. They wrestled for a few seconds, and then the Chinese boy opened his huge mouth and engulfed the hand that still clung to the remains of the donut. I thought he was going to chew that hand right off, but it seemed he just sucked the donut pulp out of it, for when the spotty kid finally pulled his hand back out, it was as clean as a whistle, but also slightly puckered and wrinkled, like when you’ve been in the bath too long.
All the way through, the black kid stood aloof in one corner, his eyes half closed.
‘Got any more?’ asked the pimply kid.
I shrugged. ‘Maybe. For my friends.’
They looked at each other. Then the black kid stepped towards me.
‘We can be friends. In fact, your hut buddies are the only friends you’ll ever have in this joint.’
‘Yeah,’ said the spotty one, ‘we stick by each other. Without us, you is nothing.’
‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it,’ I said, dusting myself down.
‘You’re the new kid. What did you expect?’ said Spotty.
I shrugged. ‘Not getting squashed to death, maybe . . .?’
‘You’re breathing, ain’t you?’ said the black kid. ‘So where are the cakes, huh?’
‘They’re in a secret compartment in—’
‘In your bag,’ he said, finishing my sentence. The other kids all joined in with a collective groan. ‘Well, you can say goodbye to those suckers. You figure you’re the only kid who ever tried sneaking food in here like that? You’ll never see those donuts again.’
‘But they can’t—’
‘They can do anything they want to.’
At that moment, the door was thrown open and two of the black-clad guards came in. One was my old friend Badwig, which didn’t exactly fill my soul with joy, but the other looked much scarier. He was as lean as a whippet, and had slate-grey hair and slate-grey features, and a jaw so square it made other squares look like badly drawn circles. I thought I was seeing things for a second – there seemed to be a machine gun on a strap across his shoulders. They weren’t allowed to carry arms, were they? Then I realized that it was a paintball gun – Jim had had a paintballing birthday party last year. It would have been fun if it wasn’t for the fact that I attracted most of the enemy fire, being the biggest target. And let me tell you, those paintballs really, really hurt when they hit you.
A snarl from ground level alerted me to the third member of the party: Gustav, the evil sausage dog.
‘Fall in line!’ yelled Badwig.
Instantly the other inmates of Hut Four did just that, forming a neat, if rather fat, line, like currant buns in a packet. I joined them.
Badwig stood to one side while the scary guard walked silently along the line, staring each of the kids in the eye. Gustav followed him, growling and snapping at shins and ankles.
Then, just before he got to me, the lean, mean, grey guard glanced down at his feet. His face changed. He looked puzzled for a moment. Then he lifted up his foot and examined the sole. He put his finger to it and then raised the finger to his mouth.
A thin, lizard-like tongue shot out.
I realized what it was he’d seen: donut crumbs!
The scary guard spoke in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
‘What is the meaning of this?’
It wasn’t clear who he was speaking to, so no one answered.
The silence in the hut weighed about a million tons.
‘I will count to three. If I do not have an answer by then, this hut will be subjected to collective punishment.’
He didn’t specify what the collective punishment was, but I guessed it was unlikely to be losing the chance of a second scoop of ice cream at dinner time.
Then I had a little brainwave. Or a mild attack of insanity.
‘It was me,’ I said. Then I added a ‘sir’. Not sure why, it just seemed wise.
You’re probably wondering why I did this. The owning-up bit, I mean.
Well, my thinking was as follows:
1. It was going to make me look good in front of my new hut mates.
2. As we were going to be stuck together for the next two weeks, it was important that we get on.
3. It would make them less likely to squash me to death.
4. I didn’t think the punishment was likely to be that bad.
5. It was, actually, my donut, even if I hadn’t eaten it.
The chiselled jaw swivelled my way, like a machine-gun turret on a German bomber. The owner of the jaw had pale-blue eyes, strongly suggesting the capacity for Infinite Cruelty.1
A hissing sound emerged from the thin-lipped mouth. Suddenly he was right in front of me. There was a faint smell of decay, thinly masked with mouthwash. He was shorter than I’d expected – we were about the same height.
‘Do I look like I’ve been knighted?’ he said, his voice still as quiet as a butterfly landing on a dandelion.
Badwig took a step towards the other guard and said, ‘He’s new, Boss Skinner . . .’
I don’t know if he was actually trying to help me out, or just sucking up to skinny Skinner.
Skinner said not a word back, but merely thrust out his hand. I thought for a second he was going to smack Badwig, but he was just silencing him. The other guard stepped back again, looking like a scolded puppy.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘N-no, sir.’
I don’t know what it was about being called ‘sir’ that upset the little maniac, but now he burned with a cold, silent rage that made him speak, if anything, even more quietly.
‘My name is Boss Skinner. You call me Boss Skinner or plain Boss and nothing else. Understand that?’
‘Er, yes. I mean, yes, Boss Skinner.’
‘Do I need to get my hound here to help you remember?’ He exchanged significant looks with Gustav, who stood alert and ready to strike. He definitely had the look of a sausage dog that wanted to eat some ankles.
‘No, Boss.’
Now the whisper was back, like a breeze through a forest of razor blades.
‘You brought food in here.’
‘I-I-I—’
‘You brought bad food in here. Forbidden food.’
‘Boss Skinner, I didn’t—’
The hand came up again. It was impossible to carry on.
Boss Skinner took off his trainer.
He looked at the sole. He held it up to me. There were mashed donut crumbs squeezed up into the tread. He brushed the crumbs onto the floor. Gustav moved greedily towards them, but froze as his master whispered, ‘No!’
‘You lick it up,’ he said to me.
‘What, Boss Skinner?’
I glanced along the line. Most of the other kids were staring straight ahead. But the Chinese kid was looking at me. His eyes were wide open and he shook his head, as if in warning.
‘I said lick it up. Unless you want to spend a week in the cooler.’
Whatever the cooler was, I didn’t want to go there. And more than that, there was something about Boss Skinner that made it impossible to stand up to him. So I got down on my hands and knees. I was actually about to lick the crumbs off the floor, despite the envious growling of Gustav, when I realized that something was happening. There was movement all around. I looked up. The other kids had all got down on their hands and knees, too. They looked like a herd of cows.
I glanced quickly at Boss Skinner. His face had turned even greyer than before, and his lips had completely disappeared. If you were going to enter a competition to paint the Most Evil Face Imaginable by the Human Brain, and you handed in a picture of Boss Skinner looking like he did right now, you’d definitely win. Or at least come third, assuming the top two spots had gone to Adolf Hitler and Lord Voldemort.
I think at that point one of the kids actually mooed. You know, like a cow. And then someone else did, and soon the whole herd of fatties was mooing. Plus giggling, which slightly spoiled the cow-effect, the bovine race not being known as big gigglers.
Gustav didn’t like the mooing, and he backed off, whining. Maybe he’d had a bad experience with a cow.
Anyway, the upshot was that Boss Skinner’s attempt to destroy me on my first day had turned to farce. He ground his teeth, and then spun round and marched out of there, with Badwig and Gustav on his heels.
I got up, and most of the others got up as well, although the dough-faced boy stayed on to finish up the crumbs.
‘Thanks,’ I said to the black kid. ‘That was decent of you. I mean, doing that cow thing.’
He nodded, his face still impassive. ‘Like I said, hut buddies gotta stick together. ’Specially against Boss Skinner. That man’s a psychopath, even by the standards of this place. Anyway, you owned up for the donut, and that gets you some respect around here. What’s your name, kid?’
I thought for a moment. Dermot or Donut? I was called both at school.
‘Call me Donut,’ I said.
He chuckled and put out a chunky hand. ‘I’m Jermaine. They call me J-Man. Meet the gang.’
He gestured to the Chinese kid.
‘This is Dong. His parents sent him over here from Beijing, and he don’t speak a whole lot of English.’
Dong gave a little bow.
‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ he said in perfect English.
I look quizzically at J-Man.
‘Yeah, he starts off well, but that’s it: you now heard the sum total of his conversation.’
‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ Dong said again, as if to confirm this.
The dough-faced boy came forward. ‘This is Florian Frost,’ J-Man said. ‘We all call him Flo.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Flo very quickly, in a high-pitched squeaky voice. He was looking at the floor again. ‘I like bugs, but not to eat. I sometimes lick them, just to taste, but I wouldn’t hurt one. Bugs like to be licked. Did you know that we’ve discovered four hundred thousand species of beetle, but there could be as many as twelve million, yes, I said twelve million, and at the current rate of discovery we won’t have named them all until the sun expands and obliterates us, which makes me sad, very sad, yes, it does, thinking of all those beetles without names.’
The kid was clearly distressed by this, and J-Man comforted him.
‘It’s OK, Flo, it’s OK,’ he said, putting his arm around Flo’s shoulders. ‘You’ll name them beetles, I know you will. Let’s get your softy.’
J-Man took Flo over to his bunk and gave him his softy, which turned out to be a cuddly toy beetle, the size of a teddy bear.
‘Flo’s a genius-level brainiac,’ said J-Man when he came back. ‘But he’s not too good with people.’
Then the huge ogre shambled over.
‘This is Igor,’ said J-Man. ‘His real name’s Quentin, but he just doesn’t suit that. But don’t let appearances deceive you. He’s a sweet kid. Just don’t get between him and his gruel or he’ll put his hand down your throat all the way to your knees and turn you inside out. And believe me, nobody wants to see your guts on the outside of you.�
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Igor and I exchanged nods. I quickly made up a little poem to help me remember Igor and his foibles:
Only a fool
Would mess with Igor’s gruel;
So don’t, or you’ll
Be in for a shock
When he turns you inside out like a sock.
Not my greatest ever poem, I admit, but I made it up on the spot in my head, so you have to make allowances.
Last, I met the spotty kid, who was called Ernesto Gogol. Ernesto creeped me out a bit: his front teeth seemed to have been filed to points. Either that or they were just naturally pointy, but as far as I’m aware, pointed front teeth just aren’t part of the human genome, belonging more properly to the world of bats, cats and rats.
Suddenly a siren whined, wailed and screamed. It sounded like a vat of bats, cats and rats being baked alive.
‘What the heck’s that?’ I said. ‘An air raid?’
But I got no reply from J-Man, for the droning of that siren had a bizarre and deeply unsettling effect on the inmates of Hut Four. J-Man stopped literally halfway through a word. His eyes glazed over, and I thought I saw the glistening of a little line of drool at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t quite put his hands straight out and start groaning, zombie style, but it wasn’t a million miles away from that. He was not alone. The others all looked the same.2
J-Man turned away from me and, along with the others, headed out the door. Outside, I saw lines of fat zombies streaming from all the other huts in the compound. The lines converged, and together they trudged towards the mess hall. It was like one of those massive migrations you see on nature programmes, you know – wildebeest on the Serengeti.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed along. I found myself behind the giant, Igor. I tapped him on the shoulder, meaning to ask him what was going on, but he just shrugged me off, making one of his grunts.
From the outside, the mess hut simply looked like a bigger version of the dormitory huts. However, its smell was even worse. There’s some kind of cosmic law that says that wherever kids are compelled to eat, there must be the accompanying smell of cabbage. I reckon that even in school dining halls for Eskimos in Greenland, where there isn’t an actual cabbage for, like, ten thousand miles, and all they eat are dolphins and snow, there’s still a good old cabbagey smell, like a donkey farted into a bag of brussels sprouts.
The Donut Diaries Page 4