The Donut Diaries

by Dermot Milligan

  Monday 9 April

  THIS MORNING, BEFORE breakfast, we had a secret Hut Four talk. The subject, of course, was betrayal. As Doc Morlock had told me, someone had snitched our plan.

  ‘It had to be Gogol,’ said Igor.

  I agreed.

  ‘Are we sure it was anyone?’ said J-Man. ‘Couldn’t it just have been that the goons eyeballed you? Or maybe those two chicks got seen, and we all got caught as collateral damage?’

  ‘Just a quick tip, J-Man,’ I said. ‘In case you ever meet them, don’t call Tamara or Ludmilla a “chick” to their faces or you’ll be like the guy who asked for crushed nuts with his ice cream and ended up in hospital. But the truth is, if someone looks like a traitor, acts like a traitor and happens to be the only one of us who didn’t get thrown in the cooler, then logic says that he must be the traitor. The only question is what we do about it.’

  ‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ said Dong.

  ‘I hear you, China D,’ said J-Man, shaking his head sadly, ‘but that’s a tough thing to do, even to a snitch.’

  ‘What?’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘The Oriental Deester was saying that we should use the traditional snitch’s punishment on Gogol. Ain’t that right, Dong?’

  The Chinese kid smiled politely. ‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance.’

  J-Man nodded, as if resigned to the inevitable.

  ‘What is the traditional punishment?’ I asked.

  He told me.

  ‘Let’s take a vote,’ he said, looking deadly serious, as well he might.

  He went round the room, asking each of us in turn.

  ‘Donut?’

  ‘I say yes.’

  ‘Dong?’

  ‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘OK, that’s another yes.’

  ‘Igor?’

  Igor silently shook his head.

  ‘Fair enough, big guy. You got a kind heart.’

  ‘Flo?’

  Florian had his hands cupped around a ladybird he had found.

  ‘Didn’t like it in the nasty cooler, did we, Lady? Ernesto should be sorry for what he did, but he hasn’t said sorry, has he? And if you don’t say sorry then you’ve got to be punished.’

  In the afternoon Mr Fricker looked strangely pleased to see me.

  ‘Good to have you back with us,’ he said, although he couldn’t stop his hands from making the by now traditional strangling motions.

  Luckily we’d moved on from Peruvian shoe-throwing.

  ‘Today’s World Sport,’ Fricker announced, ‘is Eskimo seal-wrestling. Right, I need a volunteer to be the seal . . .You, Dermot? Good man.’

  I don’t really want to say much about what followed, except that I was stripped down to my boxer shorts, covered in grease and . . .Well, you can fill in the rest for yourselves.

  In the evening I ate my gruel and even considered eating the piece of meat. But the image of the things hanging in the cooler haunted me, and I just couldn’t make myself do it, even though my poor body was crying out for sustenance. There was another reason I couldn’t eat much: I knew what was coming. And that was enough to kill even a raging appetite.

  At midnight the hut began to stir. J-Man shook me awake – I’d fallen asleep and was in the middle of a dream about – well, you can guess.

  We gathered around Gogol’s bunk. J-Man shone the beam of his torch in the creepy kid’s face. He woke with a startled cry.

  ‘Hey! What’s—’

  But he never had the chance to say anything more. Igor put his hand over his mouth.

  ‘You have been found guilty of the offence of being a snitch,’ J-Man intoned in his deep voice. ‘And the penalty for snitching is—’

  Gogol seemed to know what was coming and he began to fight. But Igor and Dong easily subdued him. Flo attached a device to his feet – a chain made from tin cans strung together with shoelaces.

  ‘Get him to the door,’ said J-Man.

  Gogol was now begging. ‘You can’t do this. I’m innocent. I didn’t snitch on nobody.’ His eyes were wide, and his zits were popping.

  ‘Do we really have to do this?’ I said to J-Man.

  ‘Too late to go back now, boy,’ he said. ‘In any case, we gotta send out a message. You mess with the boys of Hut Four, you get messed up right back.’

  I opened the door. Gogol was still fighting like a demon. He clutched at the door frame, but I prised his grip loose. Igor and J-Man were too strong. Together they hurled him out into the darkness. Gogol landed with a thunk and a clank from the cans. He tried to move, and the cans rattled and clanked louder. Suddenly the night was lit up with the piercing beam of a searchlight. We all ran to the windows. The beam had found Gogol. He tried to run from it, but there was nowhere to hide.

  ‘No!’ he screamed. ‘I’m not escaping – it’s a mistake – it’s—’

  But then his voice was cut off by the deafening rattle from a high-power automatic paintball cannon, unleashing ten 20mm paintballs a second. The red shells crashed into Gogol. He reeled and staggered, like a puppet controlled by a drunken puppeteer. He fell, and still the red horror rained down on him. With one last, supernatural effort he dragged himself up and ran towards another of the huts, but the machine guns cut him down again.

  Sickened, I turned away and so I missed the final act. But I heard the shouts of the goons, heard the yapping of the sausage dogs, heard, above all else, the utter silence from the splattered body of Ernesto Gogol.

  Dong looked at me. ‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ he said, in a way that was sad, guilty and accusatory all at the same time.

  DONUT COUNT:

  Zero, of course. But even if I’d had a brimming box full of the finest donuts ever made by the hand of man, I’d have said no thanks, so disgusted was I with what we had done. Well, I might have eaten one or two, in case it gave offence to whoever had gone to the effort of making them. Perhaps just a chocolate icing, and a butterscotch.

  Tuesday 10 April

  WE NEVER SAW Ernesto Gogol again. Either he was sent to another camp, or perhaps – and I hope this is true – he was released on compassionate grounds. He’d done his dirty work for the goons, and been punished for it. Now I hoped he could find some peace and forgiveness.

  Anyway, on the next day’s worm hunt I mentioned the mysterious Hut Nineteen to J-Man.

  He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘Ain’t no such hut. Ain’t never spoken to no boy from Hut Nineteen. No sir.’

  ‘But what about these badges that Tamara mentioned? Do you know what they could be?’

  ‘Badges? Well, we all got these.’ He pointed at the insignia on the left breast of the tracksuit – three boys, one fat, one just overweight, one skinny. ‘Guess she talkin’ ’bout that.’

  And then a paintball shell thumped into the ground right between us, spraying us in a gory red mist.

  ‘You boys want to find out what it feels like to get one of these babies in the face?’ asked Boss Skinner, his quiet voice somehow carrying the twenty metres from his truck to our worm hole.

  ‘No, Boss,’ I said, and got digging.

  ***

  I arrived back at the hut tired and dirty and depressed, but something, or rather someone, was waiting for me there who put an astounded grin on my face.

  ‘RENFREW! What on earth . . .? Is it just you, or are the other guys here?’ I babbled.

  Renfrew smiled his little rodenty smile. It was the best thing I’d seen since the beginning of my Camp Fatso ordeal.

  ‘It’s just me – Spam and Corky are still away on holiday. I got a text from Tamara Bello. She said she’d had to bribe one of the guards to get her phone back, and that you were in desperate trouble and I had to get in here to help you.’

  Renfrew always made a strange sort of ‘ungth’ sound before he spoke. It could be quite annoying at times, but n
ow it was music to my ears.

  ‘Trouble’s right. Did you tell my mum and dad what was going on?’

  ‘I tried. I said Camp Fatso was rubbish and like a jail, but your mum said that it was just you kicking up a fuss about not having any donuts for a couple of weeks. She said that your nutritionist warned her that you’d be like this, but that in the end you’d be happier and healthier.’

  ‘What did my dad say?’

  ‘I didn’t see him. Er . . . he was in the—’

  ‘Don’t tell me, the toilet.’ Did I mention that my dad hides from life in the toilet all day? Well, he does. ‘But how the heck did you get in here?’

  ‘That part was easy. I told my parents that I actually wanted to go to Camp Fatso, and they jumped at it. My dad’s always been worried that I’m too much of a weakling, and they think I’ll get some muscles and learn to stick up for myself. And it was dead cheap, because the Camp Fatso people said that some kid had just had to leave early . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes, that would be Ernesto. You’re sitting on his bed.’

  At that moment I sensed the others come into the hut and fan out behind me.

  ‘Is this a new boy I see before me?’ said J-Man.

  ‘You won’t believe this, but he’s a friend of mine,’ I said. ‘From the outside.’

  ‘Hmph,’ said J-Man, unimpressed. ‘That don’t change nothin’. You know what we gotta do to a new boy.’

  He sounded tough, but he gave me a little wink.

  ‘What’s he talking about, Donut?’ Renfrew asked, looking a little worried. In fact, as he saw my massive hut buddies looming around him, he looked very worried.

  ‘Sorry, old friend,’ I replied ruefully. ‘But tradition is important here. PILE ON!!!!!’

  We didn’t give Renfrew the full treatment – it would have squashed him flat. It was just enough to make him feel like one of us.

  Afterwards I did the introductions, and then we told Renfrew what had been going on here. He shook his head in amazement.

  ‘I wouldn’t believe you if it wasn’t for the stuff I dug up on the internet. It’s mostly rumours, but there are some amazing things about the history of the place.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like in the Second World War it was a prison camp for captured Italians.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘It totally was, and there was a bust out in 1944. They dug a tunnel and . . .’

  His tale ran on excitedly and only stopped with the siren announcing PE, at which point it was my turn to astonish Renfrew by telling him the identity of the new Camp Fatso PE instructor.

  ***

  That afternoon’s World Sport was angry Japanese grunting (the angriest grunter is the winner, and you get disqualified if you accidentally miaow or make any other cat noises). As this involved very few opportunities to make my life miserable, Mr Fricker followed it up with a quick round of Smack the Rhino, a game originating in Mozambique.

  And yes, I was, surprise surprise, the rhino.

  Fricker hardly batted an eyelid when he saw Renfrew, which I thought was a bit odd. I suppose Renfrew isn’t quite as noticeable as me, being small and gerbil-like. But still, as I say, it was strange . . .

  At dinner time we had a long, droning talk from Badwig about ingratitude, and how some people were determined to spoil it for all the others, which was why the carrot ration was being further reduced.

  ‘I name no names,’ he said, looking straight at our table, ‘but you can all work out who is responsible for this and take appropriate action.’ Then he pointed at us in case anyone hadn’t got it yet. Using the age-old tactic of divide and rule, it neatly turned the anger away from the goons and onto us. So while trudging back to Hut Four we had to endure punches and kicks and general, all-purpose abuse from the rest of the camp.

  But for once I didn’t really care. I didn’t care, because I had a plan. OK, not really a plan. More just a thing to do. But having a thing to do is the best thing short of an actual plan for slightly cheering you up. Especially when you’ve got an old friend to do it with.

  DONUT COUNT:

  So far, anyway. But I suppose there’s always the faint chance that I might stumble across one on my way to Hut Nineteen.

  Wednesday 11 April

  HORROR!

  Horror!

  Horror!

  And in case I haven’t got my point across adequately,

  HORROR!

  I slipped from my bed at midnight and woke Renfrew. We were quiet, but not quiet enough.

  ‘Where you guys going?’

  It was J-Man, as ever watching over us.

  ‘I’m showing Renfrew the way to the latrine hut.’

  I’d decided to keep my plan secret from the rest of the hut. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them, it was just that I thought the fewer people in the know, the smaller the chance of something leaking out. Plus, if we were caught, the others wouldn’t have to face the cooler again, which was something I really didn’t want to have on my conscience.

  ‘Cain’t he use the bucket like everybody else?’ groaned J-Man.

  ‘Hey, he’s only little – if he falls in he’ll drown.’

  ‘If the goons catch you, you goin’ in the cooler again. Maybe this time you don’t come out.’

  ‘We’ll take our chances. Can I borrow your torch?’

  ‘Take it. But you turn that sucker on and the goons will be all over you like flies on a cow flop.’

  ‘I hear you. It’s for when we’re in the latrine. We’ll be careful.’

  ‘Mind you are. I don’t wanna lose that flashlight.’

  Luckily there was just enough light from the half-moon for us to see without the torch.

  ‘You sure you know where you’re going?’ I hissed to Renfrew.

  ‘Of course. I printed the plan out from the internet.’ He pointed to a piece of crumpled paper – I really didn’t want to know where he’d hidden it when he sneaked it into the camp. ‘See, this line is the fence, and we just follow it round to here, where there’s an opening indicated. That leads to Hut Nineteen.’

  I thought again about what Renfrew had told me.

  ‘It was all there on the internet,’ he said. ‘Most of it was in Italian, but I just ran it through an online translation engine. What we call Hut Nineteen, they called Capanna Diciannove.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Hut Nineteen, doofus, but in Italian.’

  ‘Oh, OK. But how do you know that their Hut Nineteen is the same as our Hut Nineteen? I mean, surely Camp Fatso isn’t just using the same huts today as back in the war?’

  Renfrew nodded. ‘After the war the camp became a British Army training camp. Then the army sold it and the huts were used for battery chickens. Then the Camp Fatso people bought it. I’ve checked the plans for the old camp against the satellite images of the present camp, and it’s a perfect match. These are exactly the same huts, on the same foundations.’

  The searchlight swept over the field at 12.15 a.m., but I’d anticipated it and dragged Renfrew down onto the ground. The dogs would be harder to avoid, but I planned to cross that sausage dog when I came to it.

  In a few minutes we came to the gap in the fence marked on Renfrew’s map. There was a sign:

  What did that mean? Minefield? No, that would be against the Geneva Convention, surely? It must have just been an empty warning.

  The gap in the fence was actually more of a corridor, or a tunnel, as the wire continued on each side. I was about to lead the way through when Renfrew put his hand on my arm. He pointed to a leaf floating down from one of the trees just outside the fence. For a second it was caught in a red beam.

  ‘Motion sensor lasers,’ said Renfrew, ‘set into the fence post.’

  For a second I imagined a laser cutting me completely in half, and my poor chubby legs running around for a while before they realized what had happened, and fell over.

  ‘I thought this was all a bit too easy,’ I said.


  I also wondered what could be so important about Hut Nineteen that it needed this sort of security. My half-starved brain thought for a second or two that perhaps this was where they kept the donuts, and I felt my mouth fill with drool. But no, whatever lay at the heart of this mystery, it was unlikely to be a ring of deep-fried dough, dusted with icing sugar, still warm . . .

  Focus. I had to focus.

  I had no idea how many lasers there were, cutting across the corridor. There was a faint chance that there might just be this first one, but the evidence of almost every computer game I’d ever played suggested that there would be loads of them, zigzagging across the path like a cat’s cradle. The first beam – the only one I had seen – was perhaps half a metre up from the ground. Too high for most fat kids to jump, and too low for them to crawl under, without a fat butt-cheek cutting the beam and either setting off the alarm (most likely) or getting sliced off by the high-powered laser (less likely, as this wasn’t a game, but real life).

  Too low for most fat kids, but . . . I still hadn’t eaten any of the weird meat they’d been serving up, so I’d been ‘living’ on a diet of gruel and carrots for over a week now. I felt at the waistband of my tracksuit. It was loose. I’d lost an awful lot of puppy fat since I’d been here. Could I, perhaps, fit under the beam?

  ‘OK, Renfrew,’ I said. ‘Let’s do this.’

  I threw myself down, and began to crawl and squirm on my belly. Crawling on your belly is one of those things that looks fairly easy, and is in fact fairly easy for the first couple of metres. It then goes from being uncomfortable, to very, very uncomfortable, to utterly, agonizingly hard. Plus, there was that whole getting-my-bum-lasered-off thing, which I knew probably wouldn’t happen. But then eleven days ago I’d have said that everything that’s happened to me over the past ten days could never happen, so you never know. And if there really were laser beams, could I rule out landmines? Maybe left over from the war when Camp Fatso was a prison camp? I wondered, as I crawled, if it would be better to be blown sky-high by a landmine or have one of my buttocks sliced off by the laser. True, with the landmine, I’d be pretty much 100 per cent dead, which was a very poor outcome by anyone’s reckoning. But having a buttock sliced off would be pretty embarrassing too. How would I ride a bike? You need the full set of buttocks for that, or you’d just slide off, to general ridicule.