The Donut Diaries (4 page)

The hair, of course, belonged to Tamara Bello.

There was a second or two of silence before the uproar, which took the usual form of outraged squeals, appalled and disgusted yells, some fainting, and one sympathetic vomiting incident.

‘GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!’ Tamara screamed, losing her cool for the first time ever since she got smacked on the bum by the midwife on the day she was born.

‘I’m not touching it!’ yelled one of the other girls. ‘I don’t even know what it is.’

‘It looks like a bit of horse’s hoof,’ said another.

‘You’ll be fine now, boy,’ said Mr Fricker, my handless saviour.

‘Thanks,’ I croaked.

‘I always pay my debts,’ said Fricker. ‘But best
get
on home. Whatever it was that was stuck in there may not have killed you, but this lot might.’

I took his advice and scuttled out of Burgerland, not even bothering to get my refund. I managed to slip in the vomit on the polished floor, but luckily didn’t end up on my bum.

On the way home I scraped together enough change for a plain donut.

My plan now is to go to bed, pull the duvet over my head and eat the donut, hoping that its sweet and healing loveliness will obliterate the horrors of what was the worst day of my life.

DONUT COUNT:

Sunday 1 April

AFTER THE HUGE
fiasco that was the whole of yesterday, today was a fairly quiet day, without any major traumas. You know how Sundays are always a bit rubbish, because the end of the weekend is nigh, and school looms up like a massive monstrous looming thing? Actually, that’s usually a bit of an exaggeration, because normally the worst things that will happen to you on Monday are:

Well, tomorrow I have none of those things to look forward to. Tomorrow it’s going to be actual starvation combined with intense physical activity, plus having to sleep in a strange bed in a dormitory full of weird fat kids.

So today I hung out with my friend Jim, who doesn’t go to our school. We played our spit-dribbling game, which involves dribbling spit (as you’d probably guessed) from the iron bridge over the canal. The point is to try to get a continuous strand of saliva to go all the way from your mouth to the water without breaking, and it’s basically impossible if you
haven’t
got a cold.

Unfortunately a duck chose that moment to swim under the bridge, and got some spit on its back. We aren’t the kind of kids who like spitting on ducks, so we decided to stop the game.

Then I told Jim about my food fiasco of the day before, which made him laugh so hard I thought he was going to fall in the canal.

I thought about being annoyed, but then I realized that it was actually quite funny, and I suddenly felt a bit better, laughter being the great healer and all that.

And then Jim slightly ruined things by saying, ‘You do, don’t you?’

And I, like an idiot, said, ‘I do what, don’t I?’

‘Fancy her!’

I didn’t even dignify the question with an answer, but stomped off home.

There was supposed to be a nice last meal with my family before I left for Camp Fatso, not that the word ‘nice’ is normally associated with the Milligans.

It didn’t happen, of course.

Before it even got going, my mum and dad had a big row about the whole sending-me-away
thing
. My dad said he didn’t approve of ‘fascist health prison camps’, and my mum said that it was his fault that I was overweight, although it really isn’t. It’s my fault. And the fault of donuts for being so delicious.

Because they were arguing, the low-fat vegetable lasagne got so burned it looked like a blackened cowpat, and we had to have cottage cheese on crackers instead.

I kind of expected Ruby and Ella to be nasty to me in their own different ways, with Ruby talking to me in her evil baby voice, going, ‘Ooooh, the poor fat Dodo has to go to a nasty prison for fatties, and he won’t get any of his naughty donuts, will he, poor ickle-wickle baby,’ etc., etc., and Ella giving me one of her scary silent stares, while sticking needles into a fat voodoo doll under the table and maybe
draining
my blood to be used in some ceremony involving toads.

In fact, they were OK. I don’t mean they were actually pleasant or anything, but they didn’t attack me physically or verbally. Perhaps they are human after all, and not just androids sent back through time to destroy my life.

Actually, Ruby and Ella acting all decent made me even more depressed than a full-frontal assault would have done. It somehow hammered home the grimness of what I faced.

Luckily, before I went upstairs, Ruby said, ‘Listen, Dermot, if you take any of my stuff to fat camp, I’m going to scrape the skin off my verruca into your bed so when you get home you get covered in verrucas all over your body.’

I thought about saying that there was nothing that she owned that I wouldn’t happily have
burned
in a giant bonfire, even if the resulting pink cloud would block out the sun and bring on a new ice age causing the destruction of civilization as we know it. But I didn’t have the fight in me.

‘Sure,’ I said, and shrugged.

DONUT COUNT:

Last day, so had to fortify myself for what was to come.

Monday 2 April

1 p.m.

IT WAS SUPPOSED
to be a two-hour drive to Camp Fatso. The plan was to set off at 7 a.m. to get there for the 9 a.m. start. My mum was taking me because my dad’s lost his licence. I don’t mean that the police took it away from him or anything, just that he put it down somewhere and now can’t find it.

Things went wrong from the beginning. First
my
alarm clock didn’t quack (it’s shaped like a duck and I’ve been meaning to destroy it for years now) and then the car wouldn’t start, so we had to call the AA man, who turned out to be the AA lady, and it took her half an hour to sort out the problem. And then we got really badly lost because I was in charge of directions and I got confused about the difference between Sussex and Suffolk when I put the address into the sat-nav.

It all meant that we were hours and hours late.

When our sat-nav told us that we were about five miles from Camp Fatso, we drove through a small village with nothing much in it except a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb and a closed-down petrol station and a shop that sold doormats.

After the village, the road twisted and turned
like
a snake having a fight with another snake, and it took a further fifteen minutes to get to Camp Fatso. The countryside gradually changed from fields with cows in (one of which was having a giant green wee) to woodland. It should have been pretty in a countrysidey sort of way. But the trees were too close together for my liking, so it all seemed sort of gloomy and depressing and a little bit threatening.

‘This is lovely,’ said Mum. ‘It’s a bit like a fairy-tale forest.’

Did I really need to explain to her what happens in fairy tales? That kids get abandoned by their evil parents? That they get eaten by wolves? Imprisoned and tortured by witches? Forced to do silly dances while wearing those shoes with curly-wurly toes?

I didn’t ever want to have to wear those shoes.

But I knew that she was only saying it because she needed to believe that she was taking me somewhere nice.
¹

My first sighting of Camp Fatso was a tall wooden tower that loomed over the trees. A flag was flying from the top of the tower. The flag had a picture of a rosy-cheeked kid, grinning like an idiot who’d finally got a joke two days after he’d heard it. Then there was a sign at the side of the road saying
CAMP FATSO
, and we turned off. We bumped along a track for a few more minutes until we came to a wooden gateway. Above the gateway there was a banner that read:

CAMP FATSO: GET FIT HAVING FUN!

There was a man at the gate wearing a black tracksuit and carrying a clipboard. There was something weird on his head, like a sort of Cornish pasty made of hair. I’d say it was a wig,
except
that no one, surely, would knowingly wear a wig that looked so much like a wig? It might as well have had a giant arrow above it, inscribed with the words
THIS IS A WIG
.

He looked at his watch and said, ‘Just arrived?’

I wanted very much to say, ‘Duh!’ but I didn’t. We’ve all decided at school that saying, ‘Duh!’ when someone says something stupid is itself stupid, and the kind of thing you would say, ‘Duh!’ about, if saying, ‘Duh!’ hadn’t just been banned.

‘Sorry, traffic,’ said my mum.

‘Name, please.’

‘Dermot Milligan,’ she said. She obviously thought I’d get it wrong if I answered myself, and I’d say Dilbert Minigun or Dr Sebastian Banana or whatever.

The black-tracksuited, bad-wigged man
looked
at his clipboard.

‘Ah, yes. Excellent. Out you get, young man.’

‘Can’t I drive him in?’ asked my mum, looking a bit worried.

‘Sorry, ’fraid not. No cars. And you’ll have to say your goodbyes here. We’ve found it just makes things more difficult for the young people if their parents or carers hang around. I’ll take Dermot up to reception.’

I grabbed my bag from the boot and tried to escape before my mum could give me a hug, but she was too clever for me.

‘You’ll need some money,’ she said, holding out a twenty-pound note. I had to climb back into the car to get it, and that meant a hug, two kisses and a splashing of tears.