Read The Donut Diaries Online

Authors: Dermot Milligan

The Donut Diaries

BOOK: The Donut Diaries
10.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Friday 30 March

Saturday 31 March

Saturday 31 March

Sunday 1 April

Monday 2 April

Monday 2 April

Tuesday 3 April

Wednesday 4 April

Thursday 5 April

Friday 6 April

Sunday 8 April

Monday 9 April

Tuesday 10 April

Wednesday 11 April

Thursday 12 April

Friday 13 April

Saturday 14 April

About the Author

Also by Anthony McGowan

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Book

I’m Dermot Milligan, also known to friends and foes alike as Donut.

It’s finally happened. I’m being sent to the most evil place in the world: CAMP FATSO.

And it’s worse than I imagined. I sleep in a hut with five other PRISONERS. We’re fed on a diet of GRUEL and CARROTS. We’re controlled by the terrifying BOSS SKINNER and his guards. And there are no DONUTS anywhere.

But Camp Fatso is hiding a secret – and I’m going to find out what it is. And with the help of my gang, and some old friends, I’m going to ESCAPE . . .

To the illustrative genius of David Tazzyman;

and to Andy Stanton, who raised the bar,

leaped it, and then made rude gestures

from the far side to try to put me off.

Friday 30 March

‘CHEER UP, DONUT,’
said Renfrew, a happy smile on his goofy face.

Normally he looked a lot like a vole, but today, for some reason, I thought he had moved more in the direction of squirrel.

Or possibly gerbil.

‘No,’ I replied.

We were walking towards the school gates on our way home. It was the last day of term, and the two-week-long Easter holiday lay ahead.

THE LAST DAY OF TERM!!!!!

Throughout history, human kids have marked the end of term with grand celebrations. In the Stone Age they would paint themselves blue and dance naked around a roasting mammoth. The Romans used to hold massive end-of-term gladiatorial contests, where the guy with a net and a trident and a really short skirt would fight some other guy with less cool but probably more efficient weapons and a slightly longer skirt, while the kids yelled encouragement and feasted on larks’ tongues and fried bats. In the Middle Ages, nerdy children would clutch ribbons and skip around a giant stick while the cool kids jeered and hurled rocks at them.

Yes, it should have been a great day.

So how come I looked like someone who’d had all the jam sucked out of his last donut, to be
replaced
by some other disgusting slop, such as monkey poo or cat sick?

The answer lay in two words. Two fatal, deadly, foul, evil, putrid, stinking words.

CAMP. FATSO.
1

‘It’s your own fault, really,’ said Spam, my second best friend.

If Renfrew, my first best friend, was a vole (or squirrel or gerbil), then Spam was a stick insect that had been zapped up to giant size in a freak nuclear accident.

It was true.

It
was
my fault.

I hate it when things are my fault. It takes all the fun out of grumbling. But there it was, pointing at me, the Obese Finger of Truth. I couldn’t avoid the fact that I had sort of semi-volunteered to go to Camp Fatso.

This was as a result of a) a really, really complicated story that would take me another whole diary to explain,
2
and b) realizing that I
was
, in fact, a little too plump, on account of my donut addiction, and could actually do with a bit of slimming down.

And so I responded to Spam’s statement in time-honoured fashion: by hitting him with my school bag and calling him a stupid lanky streak of camel pee.

Even without the looming horror of Camp Fatso it had been quite a traumatic last day of term. Nothing bad happened for the first half of it, if you exclude the fact that the last school dinner was some sort of pie that should have been standing trial at the International War Crimes court in The Hague. So obscurely disgusting was this pie that not even the dinner ladies could tell us what sort of pie it was. Spam hazarded a guess at hedgehog.
Personally
, I thought it might have been whale and bacon.

Either way, it was no sort of preparation for the absolute and utter final last lesson of term, which was PE. I suppose I should have had an inkling of what was coming. Mr Fricker, our deeply demented PE teacher, was famous for two things:

1. The variety of screw-on mechanical contraptions which appeared in place of actual human hands;

2. His last-day-of-term football matches, which often had a casualty list exceeded only by a few famous battles, such as the Somme and Stalingrad.

And so, for the last lesson of term, Mr Fricker warmed us up by shouting at us for a while about personal hygiene (one of his obsessions),
going
into embarrassing detail about which parts of our bodies we should wash most thoroughly, and which bits shouldn’t be washed at all, except under qualified medical supervision.

And then it was out onto the field for a classic David vs Goliath contest, with my form, Burton (David), taking on the might of Xavier (Goliath).

Just to explain, our school has four forms: Burton, which has all the duffers, fatties and weirdos; Campion, which is for the brainiacs; Newman, which is for the sporty-but-thick types; and Xavier, which has the kids who are good at everything, except being decent human beings.

We have PE lessons with Xavier, about half of whom are in the school football team, including my mortal enemy, the
Floppy-Haired
Kid.
3

No one from Burton is in any of the school teams, not even for games like ping-pong and badminton, designed for people who aren’t very sporty or co-ordinated. Most of us are useless, although my friend Corky is quite dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous as in a dangerous striker who might inflict damage on the opposing defence. I mean dangerous in that he might well crash into you at high speed, and then try to chew your knee-caps off.

Renfrew and Spam, needless to say, were so incompetent that if you watched them in isolation you just couldn’t guess what sport they
were
playing. Instead of football it could easily be golf, or even the ancient Icelandic pastime of Falling Over For No Good Reason At All.

I was actually one of our better players, which tells you all you need to know.

‘And to add a bit of spice to the occasion,’ Mr Fricker decreed in one of his less shouty voices (although by any normal standards he was screaming), ‘the losers will clean the boots of the winners. And,’ he added, ‘I’ll even things up by playing for the Xaviers.’

‘But we’ve already got eleven, sir,’ said Justyn Bragg, who hadn’t quite got it yet.

‘I’m afraid you’re injured,’ said Fricker, his stare suddenly as cold as a nudist on a glacier drinking a glass of liquid nitrogen.

‘But I’m not injured,’ said Justyn, still not getting it.

‘Not injured
yet
,’ said Fricker, screwing in his football hands, which were basically the same as his punching-a-rabbit-to-death hands, at which point Bragg got it, and started limping extravagantly.

Outside, the rain had begun to turn into sleet, as it usually did for outdoor PE. The pitch was made up almost exclusively of mud and puddles. I saw a solitary blade of grass, standing there like the sole survivor of some terrible disaster that had wiped out all other plant life from the earth.

‘This is going to be fun,’ said Renfrew.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Spam, who had a way of missing sarcasm, even when it reached up and slapped him in the face. ‘I think it’s going to be really unpleasant.’

And how right he was.

We Burtons were playing into the wind in the first half, and most of the team huddled together like sheep, while the Xaviers streamed through us like the marauding Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you who played the part of Genghis.

Mr Fricker was all over the pitch, yelling out commands, screaming for the ball, crunching into tackles, chopping down his enemies with his mighty sword. Well, not the sword part. But anyone who got in his way would end up face-down in the mud, with the imprint of Fricker’s football studs on the back of his neck.

By this stage the girls had finished their netball match and had come over to watch us. This added greatly to the embarrassment.
The
basic rule in life is that when you’re being humiliated it’s best not to also have a load of girls laughing at you and yelling out, ‘Hey, fatty, shift yourself, we can’t see what’s happening!’ and, ‘He doesn’t know where he’s going, he needs a fat-nav!’ and that sort of thing.

I particularly didn’t like being watched by the girl known as Tamara Bello (because that was her name), who didn’t bother yelling insults, but just looked vaguely bored by it all, as if she’d rather be reading her book of short stories by Chekhov, a Russian author who died in prison, where he’d been sent for murdering millions of people by boredom.

And then, on the field, farce turned to tragedy, as it so often does. Or maybe this was more tragedy turning to farce. No, actually, this was farce turning into even bigger farce.

We were six–nil down. The Floppy-Haired Kid had scored two goals, and Fricker had smashed in the other four. We were just generally praying for it all to be over so that we could get down to cleaning the boots of the sneering Xaviers, and then going home to lick our wounds, eat our donuts, etc., etc.

Then the FHK got the ball and went for his hat trick. I tried to tackle him, but he dribbled round me, stopped, ran back and dribbled round me again, smirking all the time. I got rather annoyed about that, as it was adding insult to injury, and adding insult to injury is pretty bad, being beaten for unpleasantness only by adding another injury to the first injury.

So I was a bit riled. I chased after the FHK as best I could. I wouldn’t normally have much chance of catching him, but I had a lucky break –
the
ball hit a giant puddle and floated away, out of his control. Suddenly there were a load of us splashing around in there like, oh, I don’t know, otters or seals or something, which was quite good fun.

The FHK was enjoying it rather less than the rest of us because he didn’t like getting dirty or having his hair messed up, so he tried to deliver one of his sly and nasty kicks in the general direction of my rear end, but he only succeeded in slipping and getting a mouthful of muddy water.

The ball broke loose, and I was the one nearest to it. Most of the players were caught up in the massive puddle-splashing fight, and I realized that I had a chance to trundle up the pitch and score a consolation goal.

Mr Fricker, however, had other ideas. Consolation goals were not part of his world view. He believed that you haven’t really beaten your opponent until you’ve ground him into the dirt. ‘The point,’ he said to us once, ‘is not to defeat the opposition, but to DESTROY IT.’

BOOK: The Donut Diaries
10.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Under the Mistletoe by Puckett, Tracie
Ride for Rule Cordell by Cotton Smith
Darnay Road by Diane Munier
Calculating God by Robert J Sawyer
The Next Big Thing by Johanna Edwards
The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth
The Dog in the Freezer by Harry Mazer