The Donut Diaries (7 page)

Sunday 17 September

JIM AND ME
were lounging around in my room, surrounded by loads of junk. My mum had told me that unless I tidied up a bit she was going to come in with five bin bags and throw everything out. But tidying your room is famously the hardest job in the world, except maybe being the Queen’s Official Bum Wiper (my dad told me she has a special person to do it for her, and she’s really fussy about it being done properly, and he says if you don’t do it well enough that counts as
treason
, which still has the death penalty.)
¹

‘So are things OK at Seabrook then?’ I said to Jim.

He put his finger in his ear and had a good old root around. ‘It’s all right.’

‘Pete and Ben and The Other Jim are there too, aren’t they?’

I should say here that there was another Jim at my junior school. He was quite boring, so everyone called him The Other Jim. I reckon even his mum called him The Other Jim.

‘Yeah,’ said Jim – not The Other Jim, but my Jim, the real Jim. ‘But it’s different now. They’ve got new friends and …’

He just trailed off. I didn’t know what to say.
Then
Jim cheered up by himself. He looked around.

‘Your mum’s right. There’s a lot of junk in here, isn’t there?’ he said.

‘Not really. It’s just my stuff.’

‘Nah, most of this is embarrassing. It’s gonna have to go.’

Now
I
looked around, and began to see things for the first time. Yep, he was right. There were things here that could destroy me. Plus, frankly, there was hardly any room to sit. So we divided everything into three piles:

KEEP

CHUCK

DUNNO

The KEEP pile was heavily electronics-based, and basically represented the past two birthdays and Christmases, plus some money
my
granny gave me before she went ga-ga (I wasn’t allowed to keep the money she gave me
after
she went ga-ga). It had all my PS3 games, my DSi (not pink, but a nice, decent white), my iPod, that sort of thing. They weren’t going anywhere, although I did have a sneaking suspicion that the DSi didn’t really cut it any more.

The CHUCK pile was on the small side, because I kept taking things out of it that Jim put in. The biggest item was some kind of toy animal. Couldn’t tell you exactly what kind. Maybe an aardvark. Possibly a sloth.
²

Anyway, this
thing
, the toy
whatever
, was pretty beat up. It had been part of the family for a long time, and it showed. Ruby and Ella had really put it through the wringer. Ruby had cuddled it to within an inch of its life and then finished it off with a yellow ribbon noose around its neck. Then she’d daubed pink nail varnish on the corpse. Ella had shaved off its fur and put staples all over its poor floppy ears and gouged out its eyes, probably to use in some kind of voodoo ritual.

The girls had called it various names (Sweet Pinky Boo Boo, Kushaaar Vulture Lord of Thraaall, etc. etc.), but I didn’t bother with the whole naming business, because I couldn’t bear to get too emotionally attached to what was clearly a profoundly damaged individual.

As well as the animal, there were a couple of Lego bricks so tightly jammed together you’d need dynamite to blow them apart, so they weren’t much use for anything other than throwing at Ruby and Ella, and I had better tools for
that
job.

The DUNNO pile was a lot bigger. It had things in it that I knew I wouldn’t ever use again, such as swords, bows, shields, toy cars, Junior Scrabble, Junior Monopoly … all that kind of stuff. But the thing is that even though I knew I wouldn’t be using them again, they all had
good
memories. It also had all my
Star Wars
Lego, loads of Warhammer, some rare action figures – the evil black Spiderman, for e.g., plus the whole set of
The Lord of the Rings
figures, including the very rare and hard-to-come-by Witch King.

‘Remember,’ I said to Jim, ‘when we swapped round Ruby’s Barbies and Ella’s demon puppets, and they united their forces and came for us and we had to fight them off, and I was wearing my Roman Centurion outfit—’

‘And I had this crossbow.’ Jim pulled the trigger on the crossbow, despite the fact that the arrows had been lost at least three years earlier, and even the string was nothing but a memory.

Jim looked at the Lego and other stuff in the DUNNO pile. ‘
Star Wars
is a bit lame …’
he
said. ‘Remember that Jedi lunch box I had last term?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I deliberately lost it so my mum had to buy me a different one.’

‘What did you get?’

‘Just plain. Totally er,
unthemed
. No icon, no logo, no nothing. It’s the only way to go. Anything else and you know you’re going to regret it in three months’ time.’

I nodded.

I was impressed with Jim. His thinking had progressed lately, and he was obviously now at a higher stage of development than me.

‘It’s sometimes useful,’ he said, ‘to have a big brother to kneel on your chest and slap your face and tell you exactly what it is that’s lame about you.’

‘I’ve got sisters to do that.’

‘Sisters just aren’t the same. They can tell you you’re a rubbish dancer, and let you know that you’ve got uncool hair, but the important stuff, you know, which toilet cubicle to hide in when there’s a maths test, how to spit on the back of a dorky kid’s head in the dinner queue without them realizing it, how to give a decent dead leg … for all that, you need a guy’s touch.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

The fact that girls couldn’t give a decent dead leg was one of those basic truths about the universe that only a lunatic would deny.

‘Look,’ said Jim. ‘Deep down you know what we have to do …’

I nodded.

Five minutes later we were standing around the
big
pile of leaves in our back garden that Dad had been heaping up ready for burning for as long as anyone could remember.

We looked at each other. Jim said, ‘It’s for your own good.’

‘I know.’

And then on went the Lego, the Warhammer, the weird mutant cuddly animal – in fact everything from the CHUCK and DUNNO piles. I’d got the special giant matches from the kitchen (the ones I wasn’t supposed to touch) and used one to light the pile.

I was burning my childhood. It was an authentic Rite of Passage, like when Maori boys get their first tattoo, or Eskimos snog their first walrus.

I felt my eyes begin to water. At first I thought it was because of all the emotion.
It’s
not every day you say goodbye to your childhood.

Then I realized it was because of all the black oily smoke coming off the burning plastic.

We moved back. It was quite impressive. There weren’t any decent flames, but there was a red glow from underneath the tangled pile of old toys, and so much smoke you’d have thought a battleship had been torpedoed and dive-bombed to destruction.

It was about then that I heard the first faint siren. And by siren, I don’t mean a beautiful sea maiden trying to lure me onto the rocks - I mean the electronic wail of a police car.

Or, as it turned out, fire engine.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

That was my dad, leaning out of the upstairs toilet window.

‘We’re just—’

But I never got any further, because then a bunch of fire-fighters wearing breathing apparatus and carrying axes crashed through the fence from next door. Behind them I caught sight of Mrs Baxter, our nosy neighbour, who must have
called
the fire guys, which was a pretty sneaky trick.

And then my mum came out, her face as hard as the stuff they put on the nose-cone of the space shuttle to stop it burning up on re-entry, and my sisters were right behind her, followed by my dad, fastening his trousers.

I got banned from
everything
for a week.

DONUT COUNT:

1
I don’t actually believe in the Queen’s Official Bum Wiper any more, by the way, although I did when Dad first told me about the job.

2
Don’t get me wrong – I’m good on animals. In the wild, I’d be able to tell a sloth from an aardvark. Sloth: upside-down in a tree. Aardvark: er, well, actually I don’t know much about aardvarks.

Monday 18 September

MAYBE I SHOULD
have guessed what was coming. Looking back now, I reckon that maybe there was a funny feeling in the air. But, well, I’ve had a lot on my plate (most of it inedible), so I maybe wasn’t at my sharpest.

Anyway, I strolled through the school gates this morning, not realizing that I was about to have the worst three minutes of my life.

I saw Spam, Renfrew and Corky standing over on the far side of the schoolyard and
I
began to walk towards them.

After a few steps I heard a hideous sort of … I don’t know,
honk
.

I turned round and saw that loads of kids had formed a line a few metres behind me. Probably just twenty or so of them, but it seemed like more somehow. All boys. Some of the kids were grinning, but most of them were trying to look normal. Except that no one normal ever looks the way people look when they’re trying to look normal, if you get what I mean – you know, whistling and looking up into the air as if something really interesting is happening up there, a skydiver or mid-air explosion.

I felt that wave of panic you feel when you’re on your own up against something really bad. Panic mixed up with embarrassment.
And
futile rage. My only thought was to get to the safety of my friends. I turned back round and walked on a bit more quickly.

The honking came again. Each pace brought another huge, rumbling honk, exactly in time to my steps.

Honk

Honk

Honk

I spun round. There was a flurry of action, but I couldn’t make out what was going on. The kids were all from my year. A couple from my class, but mainly kids from Campion and Xavier. I recognized some from the FHK’s gang, including the pale kid with no eyebrows.

I walked on again.

Honk

Honk

Honk

Honk

Again I turned to face them. This time I managed to catch sight of someone disappearing behind the others. He’d obviously come to the front and then been shunted back again into hiding as I turned.

And I saw something else – a gleam of golden metal.

I started to blush. And sweat. I noticed that my shirt had come out at the front and I wanted to tuck it in, because it looked so stupid, but I didn’t want to stop. They were all grinning now, but still trying to hide it.

One person caught my eye. Slightly apart from the others: the FHK.
He
wasn’t grinning or trying not to laugh. He was just staring at me, his face as blank as a painted wall.

I walked away more quickly, just short of a run.

Honk

Honk

Honk

Honk

Honk

I started to run.

Honkhonkhonkhonkhonkhonk

Now it really did seem as if the whole school was laughing at me, not just the kids in my year. Even the prefects, who should have been helping me, were laughing. An older kid tried to trip me up, for no reason at all – just, I suppose, to join in with the others.