The Donut Diaries (2 page)

So as I ran with the ball up towards the other end of the pitch, with the girls laughing at my chubby white legs and my own team more interested in the mud fight, I sensed the oncoming approach of the insane PE teacher. His fist-shaped football hands were pumping up and down like the pistons of a nightmare express train powered by rocket fuel and high-octane fart gas.

He could probably have just tackled me, but he wanted more than that. He wanted to get across the message that nobody scores against the Fricker. In fact, nobody should even try.

So he launched himself into one of his infamous sliding tackles, otherwise known as ‘the Scythe’, the purpose of which is to crunch through your legs like a hatchet through dry sticks. I prepared for the agony, expecting to spend some time flying through the air before landing on my head. There was a small chance that Fricker’s tackle would actually kill me, and I imagined all the nice things people would say about me at my funeral service, although it was sort of ruined by the presence of Ruby and Ella, my horrible sisters, who didn’t take it seriously at all and laughed and chewed gum through the whole thing and turned it into a Fiasco.

But death for Dermot did not result, on this occasion. Mr Fricker began the sliding part of the tackle. He was about ten metres away when he initiated the Scythe. To begin with it all went
well
. Fricker was horizontal, and heading straight for my legs, cutting through the mud and surface water like a powerboat. I saw the metal of his football studs gleaming – the rumour was that he sharpened them to improve their grip and cutting edge. They were like the slashing claws on the back legs of a velociraptor.

I seriously considered screaming, but decided against it because of Tamara Bello. The same went for wetting my pants. I didn’t know much about girls, but I did know that screaming and pant-wetting are quite far down the list of ways to impress them, coming just above bad breath and just below following through after a wet fart.

And then I noticed the look on Fricker’s face. At the beginning of his slide it had been his standard, steely, children-slaughtering look. And then it changed, first to a look of mild surprise, then horror, and finally agony. He was still sliding, but his speed was slowing. I realized that he wasn’t actually going to reach me. The whole thing had been initiated too early, so desperate was Fricker to chop my legs off before I had the chance to score. But I still couldn’t quite work out why his face was purple and his eyes were crossed.

Finally he came to a complete stop. There was the PE teacher, lying on his back in the mud, staring up at the sky and emitting the sort of sound you’d expect from a wounded bat.

‘You OK, sir?’ I said, walking towards him tentatively. Approaching injured PE teachers is one of those things, like going back to a lit firework you think has gone out, or plucking a bum hair from a sleeping buffalo, that is definitely not recommended.

A few other kids had come up by now.

‘His shorts,’ said someone. ‘Look at his shorts.’

Generally, most of us tried to avoid looking at Mr Fricker’s shorts, but once my gaze was directed there I understood immediately what had happened. Mr Fricker’s long slide had resulted in his shorts getting rammed right up his . . . I mean into his . . .Well, let’s just say that he’d given himself the mother of all wedgies. And now he was clawing at the shorts with his artificial hands. But the trouble was that, as I’ve said, he had his punching hands on, which were clearly totally useless at pulling shorts out of bum cracks. It was kind of tragic. Someone behind me said something in a low voice, and someone else spluttered. I looked around. I saw the smirking face of the FHK. He was enjoying the spectacle. Up until then, something inside me, something horrible and mean-spirited, had been enjoying it
too
. But I realized that anything that amused the FHK couldn’t really be funny.

‘We can’t leave him like this,’ said Renfrew, who was now at my side, as he usually was at times of crisis.

‘What can we do?’ I said.

‘You’re going to have to go in,’ said Spam, looming up on my other flank, as he also usually did when I needed him, or when we were just hanging out, getting chips, sitting on walls, etc., etc.

‘Why me?’ I asked, but only in the way every hero at some point or other in the story tries to Escape His Destiny. I already knew the answer. It was because I was standing a bit closer to Fricker than everyone else, and so it was, by the iron laws of schoolboy logic, up to me.

I nodded.

‘OK, Renfrew, give me your sock.’

‘My sock?’

‘Just get on with it, man, there’s no time to lose.’

‘B-but—’

‘NOW!’

Fricker had now gone from purple to white. Blood circulation had clearly been impeded, if not cut off altogether.

I held out my hand, and Renfrew laid a muddy sock in it. I kneeled beside the PE teacher.

‘Can you hear me, sir?’ I said.

Fricker blinked a couple of times. I think his sight may have gone. A dry tongue flicked at his lips.

‘I’m going to try to yank them out, sir. The shorts, I mean. It’s going to hurt. You should bite on this.’

I put Renfrew’s sock between the parched
lips
, and Fricker clamped down on it. And then, amid the horrified groans of the crowd, which now included the girls and their netball teacher, Miss Gunasekara, I heaved at the small amount of short fabric that was still visible. Mr Fricker became utterly rigid, as if he’d been given an electric shock. To begin with there was no movement from the shorts: they were so embedded I thought only dynamite would extract them. Then I felt a tiny tremor. They were shifting! But it was all proving too much for me. I was already worn out from the football. Sweat poured into my eyes. My muscles shook and I could feel the cold talons of cramp begin to pierce my biceps.

Fricker was staring at me now, although I don’t know what he was actually seeing. Perhaps rather than the overweight kid before him, he
saw
the gates of heaven, or an open football goal, or the mother and father who’d abandoned him as a child.
⁴

Anyway, he was losing his grip on life, as I was losing my grip on his shorts. And then I felt a pair of immensely powerful hands close around mine, and smelled, at the same moment, a strong whiff of horse meat.

It was Ludmilla Pfumpf, the strongest and most fearsome human being in our year.
⁵

Together we made one last, supreme effort, and with a noise like the roar of a military jet passing over our heads, Mr Fricker’s shorts were torn from his bottom.

Immediately, Miss Gunasekara, who’d been paralysed by fear or fascination throughout the whole operation, went into action. She took a netball bib from one of the girls and covered Mr Fricker’s shame, and then yelled at us all to go back to the gym and get changed.

None of the kids thanked me for rescuing Fricker, and in fact most of them, led by the FHK, called me various names, the mildest of which was teacher’s pet. It wasn’t surprising, really. He was a dangerous lunatic, and we’d all have been safer if he’d been permanently disabled by the Epic Wedgie.

But I didn’t mind. I knew I’d done the right thing.

And now the day was done, and we were going home.

I looked at Renfrew and Spam.

‘Donuts on me, gentlemen,’ I said.

After what I’d just seen and done, I certainly needed a few.

DONUT COUNT:

Well, I needed something to erase the image of Mr Fricker’s auto-wedgie from my mind.

¹
Camp Fatso is basically a place where fat and/or generally unhealthy kids are sent to be made thinner and/or healthier, by means of cross-country runs and gruel.

²
OK, OK, let’s just say that it involved some chimpanzee poo, a plot to frame me, an elaborate counter-plot and, well, lots more poo. Pretty disgusting, really. You can read all about it in the second volume of my memoirs,
The Donut Diaries: Revenge Is Sweet
.

³
The Floppy-Haired Kid, or FHK for short, or Really Nasty Sly Spiteful Rotten Sneak for long, was the one who tried to frame me with the poo, as mentioned above. He failed because of my genius for counter-plotting.

⁴
I should say that I’ve no idea if he really
was
abandoned as a child, but nor do I know for certain that he wasn’t, so it’s definitely within the realm of possibility, and would explain a lot.

⁵
In fact, Ludmilla is probably one of the top ten most fearsome creatures in any year of any school, if you exclude the Beelzebub School for Demons, Devils and Monsters, in Hades itself. She was also wrapped up in the events of last term. She’s basically a kindly ogress who keeps her chips in her armpit. She had a gigantic crush on the FHK, and part of my brilliant counter-plot involved me getting them together for snogging purposes, hehehe!

Saturday 31 March

10 a.m.

RIGHT, MY SCHEME
for today is to hit town for a last taste of freedom before my stomach is imprisoned in the Inhuman Conditions of Camp Fatso on Monday, for two terrible weeks.

I’d watched the Camp Fatso promotional DVD with my parents, and it was scary stuff. Healthy food, cross-country runs, no mobiles or computers. In other words, every adult’s idea of
what
kids should be doing, and every kid’s idea of hell.

My plan for today – and I believe that it is a classic – is to sample every single forbidden food, all the evil, fat-drenched, sugar-coated, high-calorie, nutrient-low nasties that Camp Fatso was designed to exclude.

There’s nothing fancy-nancy about my targets. This isn’t the time for exquisitely arranged plates adorned by tiny sculptures made from whittled radishes.

I am going for the Magnificent Seven:

And finally, the crowning glory – my new favourite donut:

Ah, only six, you say. But I plan to buy
two
donuts!

And I know you’re thinking that it’s nuts to passively accept my Camp Fatso sentence in the hopes of actually shedding a few belly-scoops
of
flab, and then go on such a monstrous eating binge. Doesn’t that undermine exactly what I am trying to achieve? Aren’t I biting off my nose to spite my face – biting it off, that is, sprinkling it with bacon bits and icing sugar, frying it in lard and then covering it in melted chocolate and eating it?

No.

Not in the least. That’s where we come to part two of my plan, which is to take exactly one bite (or slurp, or lick, as appropriate) from each of these foody delights. No more, no less. Altogether this will add up to one reasonably large, but not insanely HUGE, meal.

And I’m using quite a lot of psychology here. I’ve found that a big part of the enjoyment of eating is in the anticipation –
you
see that lovely mound of food in front of you, and you eat it in your mind before you put it in your mouth. And isn’t that first bite always the best? And doesn’t it always go a bit downhill after that?
¹

Your next question is probably going to be, given that I only have twelve pounds saved up, how am I going to pay for all that food, most of which will be wasted?

This is where part three of my plan comes into operation.

It brilliantly utilizes my dad’s manky toenail.

I’ve got this theory that nearly all dads have a manky toenail. It just goes with being a dad,
along
with forgetting where you’ve put your keys and not listening when ladies tell you about what sort of day they’ve had. You should probably check your own dad’s feet, just to see.