The Donut Diaries (7 page)

I’ve decided to draw a line under the earlier mishap and start again.

1
In case you don’t know, a ‘Scotch egg’ is not the way in which the Scottish race reproduces itself (they give birth to live young, like the rest of us), but a savoury delicacy made from a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat and finally coated in breadcrumbs. They’re actually quite nice, although they lie heavy as cannonballs in your stomach, and take about a month to digest.

THERE HAS BEEN
a second pooping episode. Again, I found myself not very far from the scene of the crime. It was PE with the insane Mr Fricker, who lost both his hands in some kind of military incident before he became a teacher. We spend quite a lot of our time speculating about how this might have occurred. The latest theory is that his hands were chewed off by a starving camel.

We’re doing rugby this term, which is slightly
better
than cross-country running, and much, much worse than, say, eating a pizza. Mr Fricker usually joins in, doing really painful, crunching tackles on the kids he doesn’t like, e.g. me. He has some special extra large rugby hands which he uses to catch the ball and shove you out of the way.

Doing PE is no fun, but there is one thing that’s worse. Forgetting your PE kit is the absolute vilest sin in the Fricker universe. Forget your kit and he’ll invent some terrible task for you to perform while the rest of the class run around on the sports field. Rumour has it that he once made a kid lick the wooden floor of the gym clean. Someone else told me that he drinks out of a cup made from the skull of a boy who forgot his kit two weeks running.

I was sure I’d packed my PE kit earlier that
morning
, but when I looked in my bag in the changing rooms: zilch.

‘You’re doomed,’ said Spam.

I went and stood in front of Mr Fricker. He was unscrewing his normal hand and screwing on his rugby hand. What looked like human hair was trapped under the fake nail.

‘What is it, Millicent?’

‘It’s Milligan, sir.’

‘I know who you are. I was being sarcastic. Millicent is a girl’s name. I was suggesting that you are like a girl. A fat girl. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So, what do you want?’

‘It’s my kit, sir. I’ve—’

‘Don’t bother even finishing that sentence, Millicent.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

Fricker screwed in the second giant rugby hand. It made a
skreek-skreek-skreek
noise as he rotated it. I think he did this as what is known as a Displacement Activity. This is when you do one thing even though you’d rather be doing another. The thing he’d rather be doing was unscrewing my head.

‘I want you over in that corner, standing on one leg. I’m going to send a boy over every ten minutes. If he reports back that you are not standing on one leg, then I AM GOING TO COME BACK HERE AND TEAR THE LEG OFF AT THE SOCKET AND BEAT YOUR BRAINS OUT WITH IT. Got that?’

I went and stood on one leg in the corner of the gym, as indicated by the psychopath, and thanked my lucky stars that he was in a good mood.

The strange thing is that it turns out I’m actually quite good at standing on one leg. It was a double lesson, so that meant an hour and a half. Every ten minutes I changed legs. I did a bit of hopping to keep the circulation going. Only fell over twice. All in all, as an activity, it ranked mid-way between eating a pizza and getting attacked by Mr Fricker on the rugby pitch.

Anyway, the hour and a half passed. First the girls came in from netball. Ludmilla glanced over at me and raised her hand, as if she was about to give me one of her little waves. But she stopped halfway through, lifted her chin bravely and went on. The tight leotard and short yellow skirt weren’t very flattering, but I still felt a pang of affection for the human girl inside the troll.

Then the boys came in from rugby. They were drenched by the rain and coated in mud,
and
had the eyes of people who had seen Terrible, Terrible Things. It was possible that Mr Fricker’s shorty shorts had rucked up his horrific bumcrack again. I said a little prayer to whichever deity it was that had made me forget my PE kit. At the doorway, the battered war veterans turned left and filed into the changing rooms.

Seconds later, they ran out again. Their faces were all twisted up – some with disgust, some with laughter.

Mr Fricker appeared, carrying the rugby ball and adjusting his shorts. The boys swarmed around him. He looked puzzled, then furious, then blank. His blank look was his most scary. It meant he had gone beyond rage and into hatred.

I stayed in the corner on one leg.

Mr Fricker stomped off to his private office,
which
was just a bit of the gym with a curtain round it. It was where he kept the special attachments for his arms – the ping-pong bat, the hockey stick, the car vacuum cleaner, the cake slice, the frying pan. When he sprang out a minute later, a large pair of metal tongs protruded from his left wrist socket. From his right was a good old-fashioned pirate’s hook, on which hung a clear plastic bag. He stalked over to the changing rooms.

I should probably have stayed where I was, but I just couldn’t stop myself from following. Nor could most of the other boys. Or the girls, including Miss Gunasekara – Mr Fricker’s second in command – who was as nice as he was horrid.

And so we saw Mr Fricker approach the large greeny-brown poo, right in the middle of the changing-room floor. Saw him kneel down
before
it like a Masai warrior tracking a lion. Saw him grasp it firmly in the tongs and transfer it to the plastic bag.

Behind us, there was a groan followed by a thud. Someone had fainted.
¹

Fricker turned and glared at us. He held up the bag with its gruesome contents showing through the clear plastic. ‘Evidence!’ he said.

His eye seemed to seek me out in the crowd.

Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Told Mum and Dad about the two poo incidents at dinner. Dad seemed quite interested, but Mum said it wasn’t a fit subject for the dining table.
Ruby
said that boys were disgusting, so I pointed out that for all we knew it could be a girl. She was too stupid to reply that the evidence actually suggested quite strongly that it was a boy, as the poos were in the boys’ toilet and the boys’ changing room. It’s a sad state of affairs when you have to point out the flaws in your own logic.

As soon as the subject came up, Ella put her fingers in her ears and made cat noises.

No sign of Crow. Reckon he’s been staked.

1
This turned out to be Ludmilla, who had an unexpectedly delicate constitution. She had to spend the rest of the day in the sick bay. The sick bay is a grim and terrible room where you get sent if you are sick. All it contains is a sort of bed to lie down on and a bucket of sand to soak up the vomit if you puke. As the room smells of vomit most of the time, there’s always a very good chance you will puke, as nothing makes you puke like the smell of puke. I think this is officially called a vicious circle. Of puke.

NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED
at school today, which was a relief after recent events. About the most interesting thing was when Spam said, more or less out of the blue:

‘I heard that every time you do a fake burp you lose an hour of your life.’

It took a while for that to sink in. I mean, the stupidity of it.

‘What the heck do you mean by a fake burp?’ I said. ‘Do you mean when you deliberately
swallow
air to make yourself burp, or do you mean when you haven’t really burped at all, but just made a burp-like sound to try to impress people?’

‘Well, I—’

‘And how come it’s exactly an hour? How would your body know? Is it, like, keeping count?’

‘It’s—’

‘And how does anyone know that this is true? Have scientists captured some kids and strapped them to a burp-monitoring apparatus and kept them imprisoned in a lab all their lives until they die? ’Cos, basically, how else would you measure it?’

‘I’m just—’

‘And even if they did that, how would they know when you were supposed to die – you
know
, if you hadn’t done any fake burps?’

‘Easy, tiger,’ said Renfrew, putting a restraining hand on my shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ I said. I’d been too hard on Spam, who was a gentle soul.

I blame the poo. It had put me on edge.

Mum took the girls out to see a movie tonight – the sort of appalling load of old rubbish where ladies go on about their shoes, hair, feelings, etc. etc. etc., and then have to decide whether to go out with the nice geeky bloke or the cool handsome one, and they choose the cool one – only to find out that he’s nasty, and he snogs their best friend, and then they end up with the geeky one, who turns out to be quite cool and really good-looking when he takes his glasses off.

Obviously, I’d rather scoop out my eyeballs with a stale donut than go and see one of those films. So me and Dad spent the night watching
The Great Escape
for the eighteenth time and eating pizza. This was allowed because the pizza was a vegetarian one, but for once the vegetableness of it didn’t ruin the pizzariness of it.

Despite the pizza and the movie, my dad still seemed a bit down in the dumps. I felt I should try to talk to him about …
things
. The trouble is, I don’t really have the vocabulary for it. Maybe if I’d gone to the rubbish girlie movie with Mum and Ruby and Ella I could have picked up some tips.

So I had to take a plunge into the Unknown.

‘You all right, Dad?’

‘What? Oh, yeah.’

There was a pause for about ten minutes. We were at the part where Steve McQueen is bouncing the ball against the wall of the cooler.
¹

‘Do you want the rest of your pizza, Dad?’

‘Help yourself.’

Some more time went by. Steve McQueen tried to jump his motorbike over the fence and into Switzerland.

‘Are you sure you’re OK, Dad? It’s just you seem a bit, er, not OK.’

My dad took a sip of his beer and I took a sip of my diet cola.