The Donut Diaries (3 page)

Anyway, my dad got his manky toenail from playing five-a-side football, which he does every Wednesday night. Playing five-a-side football is basically the only way to get him out of the toilet, where he mostly lives. He used to be good at football when he was at school, and I think he’s probably still not bad, although it helps that he plays with a load of old codgers just as wrecked as himself.

The manky toenail arrived on the scene a couple of months ago. Dad came home after a game limping like he’d been shot in the leg with a bazooka. Well, OK, probably not a bazooka,
as
that would have completely blown his leg off, and one of the rules about having your leg blown off is that you get around by hopping rather than limping. Unless you’ve had an artificial leg fitted, but there wasn’t time for that. So in he came, moaning and generally making a fuss, with his face all drained of colour like there’d been a terrible tragedy – which, in a way, if you were one of his toes, would be true.

It was one of the few evenings when we were all at home together – that’s me, my mediumly-scary-but-also-quite-nice mum, my goth sister, Ella, and my pink sister, Ruby. In the evenings, Ella is generally to be found hanging around the graveyard with the other members of the Undead Community, and Ruby’s usually doing pink things with her pink friends in her pink bedroom.

Anyway, like I said, we were all there for a change, and we were staring at my dad’s feet, as there was nothing on the telly.

We’d all gathered round while he took his trainers off, and then shrank back in horror when we saw the blood soaking through the toe-end of his sock. My mum peeled the sock off while my dad pretended to be brave. What was underneath was really quite disgusting. The big toenail on his right foot was hanging by a thread. Well, not really a thread, more a strand of nail. It had broken right at the base, and there was toe-blood (definitely one of the worst kinds of blood) everywhere.

My mum’s not usually very sympathetic about my dad’s various ailments and complaints, such as his hay fever, his backache, the mysterious ringing in his ears and his periodically itchy
bottom
, but even she was shocked into sympathy. She gave him a wooden hairbrush to bite down on while she used the kitchen tongs to pull off the destroyed nail.

My dad made a noise like a dying buffalo. Ella did a sort of fainting thing that I’m pretty sure used to be called a ‘swoon’ in the olden days, and Ruby threw up into the fruit bowl.

Her sick was pink, which in itself raised all kinds of questions, but we can’t go into that now.

The point of all this is that my dad’s severed big toenail has lived on our kitchen windowsill ever since that evening. Over the months the
blood
turned a deep purply-black, and the nail itself buckled and thickened till it looked like a fossilized claw. If you were ever going to have nightmares about a toenail, then this is the nail you’d be dreaming of.

I don’t really know why it stayed on our kitchen windowsill for so long. It could just be that nobody wanted to touch it, or maybe it had become invisible, the way some old ornaments that have been in the same place for ever become invisible.

But I’ve now found the perfect use for it. This is the most brilliant part of my plan. You see, what I intend to do is this: at each café, restaurant, etc., etc. I will order my food, ravish the plate with my eyes, take a good big bite, savour the flavour, roll it around in my mouth, and swallow. I will then plant the manky toenail
on
the plate, and make a serious but dignified complaint. Everyone will be totally disgusted and freaked out by the toenail, and I’ll be able to leave without paying, carefully taking the toenail with me, so that I can repeat the trick at the next eatery.

One of the many beauties of this scheme is that no one will think it’s a scam, because I’ll only have had one bite. And who would leave a meal after one bite, unless they really did find a blackened toenail in their cheeseburger?

Genius, see.

And now it’s time to go and put it into operation. I shall report back in due course.

¹
Let’s say the first mouthful scores a maximum ten, the next will be a nine, then an eight, and so on. Not that it ever reaches a zero, not unless you’re talking vegetables. But then vegetables begin at zero, so it’s not saying much.

Saturday 31 March

8 p.m.

WHY MUST ALL
my dreams of glory end like this, in defeat and disgrace?

It says in a book somewhere (don’t ask me which one, I’ve read several): ‘Those whom the gods love die young.’

Well, there should be another saying: ‘Those whom the gods hate they first make a bit fat and then heap humiliation on their heads.’

Truly the gods must hate me.

All went quite well, to begin with. I dressed in my baggiest trousers to accommodate any slight expansion in the gut area that might arise from my expedition. I got the bus into town, and it was one of the most delightful bus journeys I’ve ever taken, purely because of what I said earlier about anticipation being the best part of eating.

The first thing that went wrong occurred as I took a short cut along a narrow alleyway connecting two streets, one of which held the gleaming temple of joy that would provide the Sacred Cheeseburger. There was just enough room for two people to pass each other. It was actually a pretty good place for a mugger to hang out, but I reckoned I was pretty safe at twelve o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Plus, I had the world’s uncoolest mobile. It was an old
pink
Crapia, discarded by Ruby, that I’d painted battleship grey using my model aircraft paint. I kept this well hidden from prying eyes, i.e. any of my mates or anyone else who might know me. But if there was a mugger, then I’d happily give them a tenner to take it off my hands.

For some reason I decided to check my money halfway along the alleyway. I’d raided my money box, so I had a ton of change, and I just wanted to make sure there was enough to start the giant food-ball rolling. I scooped a load out of my pocket, but a few coins spilled out onto the grimy floor of the alley. I knelt down to pick it up, and at the same moment heard a giggling, chattering, empty noise that could mean only one thing. A very bad thing. A gang of girls was approaching.

I suddenly felt really silly, scrabbling around
after
coppers and five-pence pieces. But I also thought it would look like I was trying to be flash if I just got up and left it all there. You know,
Oh, look at me, I’m so posh I can just leave money lying on the ground, lah-di-dah, lah-di-dah, I’m just going to put on a silk dressing gown and do a little bit of ballet
.

It was an actual, authentic dilemma, like in a movie where the hero has to decide, say, whether to save his girlfriend from the jaws of a crocodile or to rescue a small child who’s about to totter over the edge of a volcano into the fiery, bubbling lava below. Obviously, in the movie he’d end up doing both, probably using the stunned crocodile to catch the kid or something, but this wasn’t a movie. This was the thing that scientists have calculated is 87.4 per cent worse than movies: this was Real Life.

So, not feeling too happy, I glanced up. And I found myself staring right into the dark eyes of Tamara Bello. She gave me this look that said,
What the heck are you doing here, scrabbling about on the dirty floor, blocking the way of me and my posse?
There was also a supplementary question that asked,
Just what sort of a buffoon are you, anyway?

Then her face changed to something slightly different.

An expression for which the word ‘revulsion’ may well have been invented.

All the time I’d been vaguely picking up my coins without paying proper attention to what I was doing. Now I looked down and saw that what I’d thought was a coin was in fact a piece of squashed chewing gum, and my fingers were halfway through the act of prying it off the floor.

‘Look at that fat kid scraping gum off the
floor!’
screeched one of the girls, who was dressed up as if she was going clubbing, even though it wasn’t anywhere near disco o’clock. She wasn’t from my school. Nor were the others, apart from Tamara, and she obviously wasn’t going to admit that she even knew me.

‘Have a fresh one,’ Tamara said, and dropped a piece of gum next to me as she and the others skipped past. One of them stepped on my hand, and another stuck her knee into my side, knocking me over.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t think of a single decent comeback or cutting remark. In fact, I hadn’t managed to say anything at all, the whole time. I felt like a big fat dummy.

And that’s exactly when you can fall back on your old friend, food.

So up I got and off I did trot to the glittering
lights
of that palace of dreams, Burgerland. As I was queuing up at the counter, I decided to slightly modify my plan by getting a double cheeseburger, fries and a Coke.

It was going to be a mighty big mouthful, but I’d earned it.

I took my tray of goodness and found a table in a sort of booth thing, which was nice and secret, so nobody would see me doing my little trick with Satan’s toenail.

I managed to get one giant mouthful of burger plus maybe seventeen fries in my mouth, as well as a good swill of Coke.

Boy, it was good.

Little did I know that it was to be the high point of the day. I fished the toenail out of my pocket, black and curved and evil, and got ready to put it in with the fries. But then I decided
that
I’d have another bite – not a big whale-bite like the first one, but just a dainty little nibble. OK, it turned into another pretty big one. Let’s say humpback whale rather than blue.

And then I had a thought. What had I done with the nail? I looked down at the tray with its cardboard cartons of food. I couldn’t see it. I looked inside the burger bun, pulling it open to reveal the sticky cheese, gleaming like delicious orange snot.

And then I felt a tickle in my throat, and I knew what had become of the nail, and with that knowledge came the Bucking Steed of Panic. I suddenly started to feel most unwell. Sweat sprang out on my forehead. I didn’t know if I should try to swallow what was in there, or spit it out. I imagined the sharp edge of the talon piercing the soft lining of my throat. But that
was
better than regurgitating my food, here in front of everyone . . .

I decided to try to swallow it down, thinking the mass of food would smooth the passage, and then my guts would do the rest.

Big mistake. Pain, sharp, terrifying. I stood up and bent over the plastic table. I opened my mouth and tried to empty out what was in there, letting a mass of chewed-up food just spill out, the way you’d empty the bin.

I was dimly aware that the door to the place had swung open, and that more people had come in. I vaguely sensed that I had become the centre of attention. But I didn’t care, I truly didn’t care: I could not breathe.

I was choking to death.

And if I didn’t choke, the talon would soon work its way through the inside of my throat and
PIERCE
MY JUGULAR VEIN!!!!!

I coughed, and coughed again, hoping to bring up the toenail. But it was no good. It was definitely stuck in my throat. My eyes were watering and I could hardly see anything, but I knew for sure that there was now a crowd around me.

Great.

I was going to die in Burgerland, in embarrassing agony, in front of loads of people.

Wearing my uncoolest elasticated trousers.

‘Stand back. Let me through.’

The words were commanding and authoritative, and the voice was very familiar. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and saw the bristling form of Mr Fricker approaching. Before I knew what was happening, he had positioned himself behind me, grabbed me under the arms, and proceeded to punch me in the guts with his artificial hands, whilst jiggling me up and down in the time-honoured Heimlich manoeuvre.

Suddenly I felt the little monster in my throat budge. Fricker gave one final thrust, and with a sound like a bear breaking wind, the talon shot out of my mouth, whizzed across the room, pinged against a window, and then, with a kind of ghastly inevitability, got stuck in the hair of one of the girls who had just come in. One of the girls I had just passed in the alleyway.