Well, either there weren’t any lasers or we successfully scrunched beneath them, for we came through the tunnel with all our buttocks intact.
‘You OK?’ I asked Renfrew as we brushed the grass and leaves off our clothes.
‘Fine. Rather enjoying all this, actually.’
I could sort of see how this might be fun for Renfrew. His parents thought that playing the violin and doing maths puzzles counted as entertainment, so crawling through the mud on your belly after a day of eating gruel and making Japanese grunting sounds was probably quite enjoyable.
Renfrew checked his map again and pointed. ‘It should be just beyond those trees.’
We followed a little path through the screen of scrubby trees, and there, looming up before us in the moonlight, was Hut Nineteen. And now I didn’t have to concentrate on not being lasered, I noticed something else: the smell. It was deep and rich and truly terrible, like a lasagne made from a tramp’s underpants and dog sick.
I couldn’t see anyone around, although I did hear the distant yapping of a sausage dog.
I hurried to the hut, through the growing stench. Four wooden steps led up to the door. I tugged at the handle.
‘Locked!’
Maybe we should have taken that as our cue to get the heck out of there. But now we had come this far, we had to go on.
‘There’s a window,’ said Renfrew.
It was shut, but the wood was ancient and rotten, and a shove with the palm of my hand forced it open.
‘Up you go,’ I said to Renfrew.
‘Why me?’
‘Because I’m in charge of this mission, plus that window frame looks a bit rotten, and it might break if I step on it.’
I also suspected that even in my new, slightly thinner form, I was still too fat to squeeze through the window. Renfrew, on the other hand, could have been made for squeezing through small spaces. I gave him a boost up.
‘When you’re in you can open the door for me from the inside.’
He stuck his head through the window, then drew it back, like someone snatching their hand from a flame.
‘Reeks,’ he said. ‘And there’s something alive in there. I can hear it . . .’
‘Just get on with it, Renfrew,’ I said rather sternly, and gave him a helpful shove. He half fell through, then scurried round to the door. He opened it, and a wave of stench flowed out, carrying Renfrew with it. His face was tight with terror.
‘I’m not going back in,’ he said, trembling. ‘It’s . . . it’s horrible.’
‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘You wait here then. You can be the lookout.’
I took J-Man’s torch from my pocket, held my breath and walked into Hut Nineteen.
It was like walking into hell itself, such was the stench. It clung to me, thick as Marmite. There was a noise. A restless noise. A shuffling. And perhaps, somewhere, a hiss. Or a sigh. I sensed that the hut was full, but full of what?
I flicked the torch on, and still I could not understand what its beam revealed. Boxes. No, not boxes. Cages. Small cages, stacked from the floor almost to the ceiling, filling every available space.
I moved closer to one of the stacks, trembling. I shone the light through the chicken wire. And there, cowering in the corner of the cage, I saw, not a badge, but . . .
‘A badger?’ J-Man’s eyes were wide with disbelief. ‘You are one crazy dude. Ain’t no badgers in cages. Why’d anyone want to do a damn fool thing like that?’
It was the next morning, i.e. today. We were trudging through the woods on our way to dig worms.
‘Yes – you see, Tamara didn’t say “badges” but “badgers”. I figured it all out. The meat. The stuff they give you with the gruel. It’s badger. Has to be. And those carcasses hanging in the cooler? Badger for sure. And you know what was in their feeding trays? Worms. Yeah, worms. That’s why we spend our days out in these woods, digging. We’re all part of this.’
‘Boy, have you been reading books again, or what? Nobody eat badger. Nobody keep badgers in cages. I say you fell asleep in the john and dreamed it all up.’
‘Both of us?’ said Renfrew.
‘Yeah, well, you’re a new kid, and what new kids say don’t count.’
‘I know what I saw, J-Man. And I know it’s not right. And I want to break them loose.’
‘And how you gonna do that, even if you is right? You couldn’t even get your own self out of here. You think you can stroll out through them gates with two hundred badgers down your pants? You got a bit more room down there than when you first came here, but not enough for that kind of payload.’
‘There’s a tunnel. Dug by the Italians in the war. Renfrew found old letters from the prisoners in an archive on the internet. Prisoners who escaped.’
‘Really? And where that tunnel be?’
‘Ah, well, I don’t know, exactly.’
‘That ain’t much use, is it?’
‘There must be a way of finding it. Somehow we’ve got to get those badgers out of there. And we have to do it by Friday. There was a schedule pinned to the inside of the door of Hut Nineteen. Feeding times, that sort of thing. And then, for Friday evening, there was a black cross. It means that’s when they’re going to kill them. I know it. And you’ve got to help me.’
J-Man did his now familiar slow head-shake, and then he started breaking up the ground with his pick. After a while he said to me, ‘Lardies might know if there’s a tunnel. If you want I can fix for you to see the boy Hercule Paine. I don’t recommend it, no sir. But if that’s what you want, then be it on your own head.’
‘You can do that?’ I said, my hopes putting in a little spurt. ‘I thought he hated you, and you hated him?’
‘That about the size of it. But I still got some influence. I ain’t happy about it, but I see what I can do. This gonna cost you. This gonna cost me. You make a pact with the devil, the only coin he care about is your soul.’
And then J-Man hit the turf with his pick so hard I thought he was going to open up a crack to the molten core of the earth itself.
The message came back through J-Man, though he couldn’t even bear to look me in the eye as he told me.
‘You get yourself to Hut One after dinner.’
The other guys heard what he said.
‘You shouldn’t go there,’ rumbled Igor. ‘Only trouble will come. You should stay and play chess with me.’
‘Yeah,’ said Flo. ‘You shouldn’t see the bad boys. The bad boys are bad. You should stay with the goodies.’
‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ said Dong, but he got his message across pretty well too.
‘Sorry, guys. I’ve got to do this.’
‘Why?’ said Igor. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you going to see the Lardies? Are you joining them?’
‘Nah, nothing like that. I can’t tell you any more. It might get you into trouble. Let’s just say that it’s something I have to do. You’ve just got to look after Renfrew for me while I’m gone.’
‘Sure thing.’
I didn’t really need to ask. Renfrew had become a sort of pet to the Hut Four guys.
And so it was that I found myself knocking on the door of Hut One after dinner this evening.
The door opened, and there in front of me was the one they called Demetrius the Destroyer. He had a face like a half-eaten pork pie. The word was that he’d once bitten the head off one of the sausage dogs for making the mistake of yapping at him. I didn’t know if that was really true, but I wasn’t going to put it to the test by yapping.
‘Boss, the Donut kid’s here,’ he said out of the side of his mouth, without taking his eyes off me.
‘Spread ’em,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Against the wall. I gotta frisk you.’
So I put my hands against the wall and let the big lummox pat me down. He did it with all the gentleness of someone trying to beat a monkey to death.
From the outside, the hut had been indistingui
shable from all the others. The inside was a different story. In place of the hard wooden floor and hard wooden chairs and hard wooden beds, there were the softest of soft furnishings: a carpet thick enough to swallow a midget, easy chairs draped in rich fabrics, and a four-poster bed, like something Henry VIII would have considered a bit too showy. I didn’t see anywhere for the other Lardies to sleep, and supposed that they must be the residents of Hut Two.
But they were here in strength now. As well as the mountainous Demetrius the Destroyer, I saw Gilbert Pasternak with his LOVE and HAET tattoos, plus a couple of other bruisers, looking like barrage balloons painted with angry faces. And there, on a long couch, propped up by satin cushions like a bloated slug, lay Hercule Paine himself. He was eating grapes.
‘Dear, dear boy,’ he said. ‘Do come in and make yourself at home. I apologize for the security precautions. I trust that Demetrius wasn’t too . . . rough? He has a gentle soul, but on occasion he can be somewhat over-exuberant.’
I thought about the sausage dog he was reputed to have bitten in half. Maybe he was just playing with it . . .
I sat down on a chair. It was the softest thing my bum had touched since I’d left home. It was probably the softest thing it had ever touched, except for the time I accidentally sat on my sister Ruby’s birthday cake.
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ I said.
‘Not at all. I like to regard my little organization as supplying the various, ah, welfare needs of the camp.’
One of the bruisers behind me laughed. It sounded like a knife blade being sharpened.
‘So, how can I be of assistance?’
‘I need to get out of here. And I need to take some, er, things with me.’
‘A common desire. But a futile one. And your time at Camp Fatso is almost up. Why not quietly see out your time and go back home a thinner, happier boy?’
Another chuckle from behind me.
I thought about the schedule. About the terrified eyes. About the meat.
‘I need to get out before Friday.’
‘I know I said that I could help – but I cannot work miracles. I—’
‘I know that there’s a tunnel. An escape tunnel. Dug by the Italians.’
‘A tunnel? Italians? What an imagination you have.’
But I knew I was right. A flickering eyelid told me so. As did the sudden silence in the rest of the room.
I stared into his piggy black eyes.
‘Where is it, Hercule?’
I felt a stinging slap on the back of my head.
‘Mr Paine to you.’
‘No, no, Gilbert, there’s no need for violence. Yet. Let us suppose that there was such a tunnel. Why should I tell you about it? What is there in it for me?’
‘Does there have to be something in it for you? Couldn’t you just tell me because it’s the right thing to do?’
Hercule Paine smiled. He had the kind of mouth that becomes slightly smaller when it smiles. It was almost indistinguishable from a look of disgust.
‘The right thing to do. What a quaint notion. Haven’t you realized yet where you are, my dear Donut? Look around you. How much goodness and virtue do you see here?’
‘I—’
‘You see people acting according to the dictates of power. To have power is to have right on your side. Morality is the slave of the boys with the strongest arms. And that’s me, Donut. What you see here is the truth, undisguised, unadorned. It’s why I love it.’
‘You’re a monster, Paine.’ SLAP. It didn’t stop me. ‘But there are boys here who don’t think like you. Kids who still value truth and honour and decency. Kids like—’
‘J-Man?’ Now Paine’s smile grew, becoming a grin, showing his teeth, which seemed unnaturally small and weak, as if his adult teeth had never come through. And as Paine grinned, the others guffawed. ‘Oh, how very, very amusing. You don’t know, do you? I’d assumed that you would have worked it out by now.’
‘What are you talking about?’ But even as I spoke the words, I knew. ‘J-Man—’
‘Is my creature. Of course he is.’
‘And it was him who told the goons about the first escape bid?’
Hercule Paine inclined his head, as if accepting a compliment.
‘And Ernesto . . .?’
‘A necessary sacrifice.’
I felt sick. Sick and angry. J-Man was a Lardy. Or a spy for the Lardies. A fink. A fake. A phoney.
‘But perhaps there is an arrangement we can come to. I have a certain interest in maintaining the status quo around here – it’s why I prefer for there not to be too many escapes or other disruptions. However, I could make an exception.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it so happens that you are correct. There is an old escape tunnel. It begins under one of the huts, and carries on for a couple of hundred metres, out beyond the perimeter fence and into the woods.’
‘Which hut?’
‘Well, it’s here that we engage in a touch of mutual back-scratching. You see, for that information, you must help me with a little problem of my own. Now, do have a grape.’
This was it. As I’d been warned, to get something from the Lardies, you had to give something, and I was about to pay.
DONUT COUNT:
Of course. But even if I’d had one, I doubt I could have eaten it, so sick did I feel about J-Man’s betrayal. Well, OK, I probably could have eaten it. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Oh, who am I kidding? If I’d been offered a donut I would have wolfed it down and begged for more.
Thursday 12 April
J-MAN KNEW THAT something was up.
I’d avoided him all morning.
‘They tell you what you need to know?’ he asked, wielding his pick.
‘Yep.’
The pick cut into the ground.
‘There’s a kind of truth that sits cheek by jowl with a lie, Donut,’ he said.
‘And there’s a kind of liar who sits cheek by jowl with the Lardies,’ I spat back.
The pick slammed into the earth a couple of centimetres from my fingers.
And then something happened to me that had never happened before. I totally lost it. I’d managed to get through twelve years without having a fight (apart from with my sisters, which always ended in tears – my tears, usually), and I didn’t really know how to do it. But I threw myself at J-Man, and the surprise was enough to unbalance him. I landed on top of him and managed to stay there, shoving my knees into his chest.
I heard Renfrew shout out, ‘No, Dermot, he’s not worth it,’ but just ignored him.
‘You betrayed me. You betrayed us all,’ I yelled, and tried to land a punch in his face. He got a hand up and parried it. Then he caught my wrist.
By this time the whole work party had downed tools and gathered round. I knew the goons would be right behind them, but I didn’t care.
‘Donut, you don’t understand. They . . . they made me do it. They got a . . . a hold on me.’
‘I don’t care. What you did to Gogol – making him take the rap. That was unforgivable.’
The kids around us were cheering us on, the way you do when there’s a fight – particularly if the alternative form of entertainment is digging for worms.
I heard a grown-up voice say, ‘We stop them, Boss Skinner?’ And then the answering whisper, ‘No, let the girls fight it out.’
‘I feel bad,’ said J-Man as we struggled together. ‘But I couldn’t . . . I . . .’
Then he let go of my wrists and said meekly, ‘Do what you gotta do,’ and closed his eyes.
I drew back my fist, ready to drive it into his face.
I didn’t.
I don’t think I would have, even if I hadn’t been shot by Boss Skinner in the back. It was the most painful thing I’d ever felt, and the force knocked me off J-Man.
‘Girls done finished playing,’ said Boss Skinner.
But J-Man hadn’t finished. He sprang up with amazing speed for such a big kid and charged at t
he head goon. The boys who’d been watching dived out of the way. Of course, J-Man never reached Skinner – he was cut down by a wall of fire from the paintball guns. Four hit him in the chest, and he staggered back, but then came forward again. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Still he came on. And then Boss Skinner himself enacted the coup de grâce and sent a paintball pellet right into J-Man’s forehead.
‘Take these two ladies to the cooler,’ he said, a smile on his thin lips.
‘Can you hear me, Donut?’
It was an hour later. I was alone in the dark of the cell. J-Man was two doors away. He’d been calling to me ever since he came round.
‘Shut up, J-Man.’
‘You gotta listen, Donut. It was my kid sister. They got her next door in Camp Fitso. Life good for her in there. But they told me that unless I co-operate then that all gonna change. That girl only nine years old. I had to look out for her.’
That made me think. What would I do to protect Ruby and Ella, my two nightmare sisters? OK, maybe not a good example.
‘There’s no excuse for what you did.’
‘I know that. I see it now. I just want . . . atonement.’
‘OK, you can start by telling me about Hut Nineteen.’
There was a pause. Then a heavy sigh.
‘Yeah, Hut Nineteen. That where they keep the critters.’
‘The badgers. I know. Why?’
‘It’s what makes the camp pay. They use the hair to make fancy shaving brushes for rich folk. They undercut the Chinese, and still make a big profit on account of the slave labour they got here. And they get to use up the meat. But I guess you know that.’
‘And you’ve eaten it.’
‘Once you get the taste . . . it’s addictive. Especially when you ain’t got nothing else but gruel. But you know what I’m saying. Is there anything you wouldn’t do for a donut, Donut?’
The Donut Diaries Page 10