I followed Igor in, and found a typical canteen, with a counter at one end and tables crowded together, in no recognizable order. Except there was a sort of order – each table had a little red flag with a number on it. One for each hut, I guessed.
I say it was a typical canteen, but there was a major difference: I’d never seen so many humungously fat kids gathered together. For the first time in my life I was, well, ordinary.
In some ways it was kind of liberating, not to stand out. Usually I wasn’t Dermot Milligan, human being, but Donut, fat kid. People looked at me and saw, not someone with a brain and ideas and feelings and all the usual things that kids have, but a big wobbly gut on legs.
But on another level I sort of missed it. Now I was just part of this huge herd of fatties. At least out there, in the real world, I stood out.
I joined the queue at the food counter. Close up, the smell was even worse. I could feel it seeping into my clothes and hair. It was going to take a long time to wash the cabbagey stench off. In fact, I might never wash it off. I imagined being at university and still smelling of cabbage. Getting married. Working in an office. A whole life of people edging away from me because they thought I’d let fly with a silent guff. Or worse, because they thought I just smelled like that naturally. It would only be in old age that I’d find peace and acceptance, because all old people smell of cabbage, so I’d fit right in.
As we all shuffled forward, a sudden wave of excitement went through the line. I heard a sound. It gradually formed itself into a recognizable word.
‘Meat.’
That was a nice surprise. In the DVD about the place they’d only ever mentioned the fresh fruit and vegetables . . .
Anyway, I finally reached the front of the queue. By this stage I was starving, as I’d had nothing to eat since breakfast, and it was dinner time now.
The dinner ladies were reassuringly normal. For dinner ladies, I mean. Compared to most normal humans they were pretty gross. There were three of them. One ladled gruel into bowls, another dolloped a slice of some kind of dark meat on top of the gruel and a third supervised in case the ladling and dolloping was being performed in some irregular manner.
I received my gruel. It was grey and thin, like the last bit of puke that comes out when you’ve got nothing left to heave up. And, like all true vomit the world over, it had little bits of carrot in it.
The second dinner lady was about to chuck the dark meat on my plate.
‘Can I ask what it is?’ I said.
She looked at me through her thick glasses for a while. Her name badge said URSULA, but she didn’t look much like an Ursula. She looked more like a THLUGG. Or possibly a NORA. She finally replied in a monotone, ‘Nutritionally rounded food product.’
I stared more closely at the meat. Like I said, it was mainly a dark brown colour, but now I could see that there was a marbling of grey, and some unsettling pink highlights. It looked like a failed attempt to create life in a horror film.
‘Animal, mineral or vegetable?’ I asked, trying to make a joke with the one called Ursula. There was a long pause, and I sensed the queue of fatties getting agitated behind me. Ursula’s mouth moved but nothing intelligible came out. Finally the supervisor stepped in.
‘It’s absolutely guaranteed fresh,’ she said sharply, as if that answered everything.
My plate loaded up with gruel and nutritionally rounded food product, I went to sit with the others at the Hut Four table. The rest of them were already munching, and as they ate I sensed that they were gradually getting back to normal. The zombie thing must just have been low blood sugar.
‘Do you reckon I could kill this thing with salt, the way you do with slugs?’ I said, pointing at the meat with my fork. I meant it as a joke, but nobody laughed.
‘Don’t you want it?’ asked J-Man. There was a hungry light in his eyes. I looked back at the brown slab. I truly didn’t want it.
‘Nope.’
Moving so quickly the eye could hardly follow it, J-Man speared the meat, cut it up, and distributed it to the rest of the table. They devoured their portions like rabid werewolves.
I ate the gruel.
It tasted cruel.3
I checked out the other tables. To begin with they all appeared more or less the same – filled with identikit plump kids. But now I thought I could see some differences. One table, in particular, stood out. The kids there were enormous, but they weren’t just big: they looked kind of mean. As if to confirm my thought, I saw a leg shoot out from the table to trip up a kid waddling by. He stumbled and his gruel spilled on the floor. I moved to help him. But J-Man put his hand on my arm.
‘Careful, Donut,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘That’s the Lardies. You don’t mess with them, or they will mess you up. And when the Lardies mess you up, you stayed messed.’
‘The Lardies? Who are they? What are they?’
‘The Lardies help run this place the way the goons like it run.’
‘Goons?’
‘Yeah, you know, the guards in the black uniforms. We call them the goons. Anyway, they don’t like to bother with any of the actual brutalization, unless they have to. So they send the Lardies in to sit on any kids who fall out of line.’
‘But what’s in it for them? I mean, why do the Lardies do it?’
‘Back in their huts those boys got all the good things we don’t get no sight of. Candy, potato chips, soda pop, whatever they want. And it’s not just the food,’ continued J-Man. ‘Those guys control everything else in here. The gambling, the bun running—’
‘The what?’
‘Bun running. They smuggle extra food into the camp and sell it to anyone who’s got the money.’
‘But they took our money when we arrived.’
‘Some guys are cleverer than you at hiding it. Others get it passed in through the fence. Some steal it.’
Before J-Man had the chance to tell me anything else about the set-up of the camp, an amplified voice rang out from the other end of the mess hall.
‘Testing, testing, one-two-three.’
It was Badwig, his Cornish-pasty hairdo newly polished, testing the mic.
And there, standing behind Badwig, was Boss Skinner. He moved his head from side to side, eyeballing the crowd, and looking for all the world like a Terminator sent back through time to destroy fat kids. The faithful Gustav was by his side, doing his doggy version of the Skinner stare.
J-Man leaned closer. ‘Just because the guy with the hair does the talkin’, don’t you be thinkin’ he’s got the power. The power is—’
‘Skinner, I know.’
‘There’s bigger bosses than Boss Skinner,’ said J-Man mysteriously.
‘Inmates of Camp Fatso,’ Badwig continued in his whiny voice. ‘It is my pleasure to welcome those who joined us today for the first time. I trust that our longer-term residents will make them suitably welcome.’
This was followed by a sort of growl from the mob, indicating that the sort of welcome they had in mind for us was that given to the Christians by the lions in the Roman arena.
‘There are a couple of announcements I have to make. Tomorrow morning’s run will now begin at six a.m. rather than at six thirty.’ This was met with a groan of dismay.
‘SILENCE!’ hissed Boss Skinner. His whisper penetrated further than the amplified whine of Badwig. Normally groaning isn’t something you can help doing, but nobody groaned after that.
‘And in order to maximize the amount of time you are able to spend in healthy outdoor activities, from now on you will each be given a packed lunch.’
There were some muffled cheers at this. I guessed it was because people thought it would be an improvement on the gruel.
‘Finally, a warning. There was an attempt by one of the new boys to smuggle food into the camp. THIS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. Any further incidents of this kind will be dealt with severely. The solitary meditation chambers await anyone caught infringing our food regulations.’
I l
ooked over at J-Man and shrugged.
‘The cooler,’ he mouthed back.
After dinner we trudged back to Hut Four. It was dark and cold and dismal outside, and dark and cold and dismal inside, as well, especially once the lights went off at 9 p.m. Yep, you read that right. 9 p.m. That’s not been my bed time since Year Three.
After that, the only illumination was an eerie blue glow as Dong and Ernesto took it in turns to light each other’s farts. Which was funny for the first seventeen times . . .
And no one has ever managed to read or write by the light of ignited bum-blasts, but luckily I found the stub of an old candle. There were funny little indentations in it, which puzzled me until I realized that they were tooth marks: yep, some poor kid had tried to eat it, to counteract the terrible hunger pangs we’ve all got.
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.
The Donut Diaries Page 5