The Donut Diaries (7 page)

I look quizzically at J-Man.

‘Yeah, he starts off well, but that’s it: you now heard the sum total of his conversation.’

‘Hello, old chap, delighted to make your acquaintance,’ Dong said again, as if to confirm this.

The dough-faced boy came forward. ‘This is Florian Frost,’ J-Man said. ‘We all call him Flo.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Flo very quickly, in a high-pitched squeaky voice. He was looking at the floor again. ‘I like bugs, but not to eat. I sometimes lick them, just to taste, but I wouldn’t hurt one. Bugs like to be licked. Did you know that we’ve discovered four hundred thousand species of beetle, but there could be as many as twelve million, yes, I said twelve million, and at the current rate of discovery we won’t have named them all until the sun expands and
obliterates
us, which makes me sad, very sad, yes, it does, thinking of all those beetles without names.’

The kid was clearly distressed by this, and J-Man comforted him.

‘It’s OK, Flo, it’s OK,’ he said, putting his arm around Flo’s shoulders. ‘You’ll name them beetles, I know you will. Let’s get your softy.’

J-Man took Flo over to his bunk and gave him his softy, which turned out to be a cuddly toy beetle, the size of a teddy bear.

‘Flo’s a genius-level brainiac,’ said J-Man when he came back. ‘But he’s not too good with people.’

Then the huge ogre shambled over.

‘This is Igor,’ said J-Man. ‘His real name’s Quentin, but he just doesn’t suit that. But don’t let appearances deceive you. He’s a sweet kid. Just don’t get between him and his gruel or he’ll put his hand down your throat all the way to
your
knees and turn you inside out. And believe me, nobody wants to see your guts on the outside of you.’

Igor and I exchanged nods. I quickly made up a little poem to help me remember Igor and his foibles:

Only a fool

Would mess with Igor’s gruel;

So don’t, or you’ll

Be in for a shock

When he turns you inside out like a sock.

Not my greatest ever poem, I admit, but I made it up on the spot in my head, so you have to make allowances.

Last, I met the spotty kid, who was called Ernesto Gogol. Ernesto creeped me out a bit: his front teeth seemed to have been filed to points. Either that or they were just naturally
pointy
, but as far as I’m aware, pointed front teeth just aren’t part of the human genome, belonging more properly to the world of bats, cats and rats.

Suddenly a siren whined, wailed and screamed. It sounded like a vat of bats, cats and rats being baked alive.

‘What the heck’s that?’ I said. ‘An air raid?’

But I got no reply from J-Man, for the droning of that siren had a bizarre and deeply unsettling effect on the inmates of Hut Four. J-Man stopped literally halfway through a word. His eyes glazed over, and I thought I saw the glistening of a little line of drool at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t quite put his hands straight out and start groaning, zombie style, but it wasn’t a million miles away from that. He was not alone. The
others
all looked the same.
²

J-Man turned away from me and, along with the others, headed out the door. Outside, I saw lines of fat zombies streaming from all the other huts in the compound. The lines converged, and together they trudged towards the mess hall. It was like one of those massive migrations you see on nature programmes, you know – wildebeest on the Serengeti.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed along. I found myself behind the giant, Igor. I tapped him on the shoulder, meaning to ask him what was going on, but he just shrugged me off, making one of his grunts.

From the outside, the mess hut simply looked like a bigger version of the dormitory huts. However, its smell was even worse. There’s some kind of cosmic law that says that wherever kids are compelled to eat, there must be the accompanying smell of cabbage. I reckon that even in school dining halls for Eskimos in Greenland, where there isn’t an actual cabbage for, like, ten thousand miles, and all they eat are dolphins and snow, there’s still a good old cabbagey smell, like a donkey farted into a bag of brussels sprouts.

I followed Igor in, and found a typical canteen, with a counter at one end and tables crowded together, in no recognizable order. Except there
was
a sort of order – each table had a little red flag with a number on it. One for each hut, I guessed.

I say it was a typical canteen, but there was
a
major difference: I’d never seen so many humungously fat kids gathered together. For the first time in my life I was, well, ordinary.

In some ways it was kind of liberating, not to stand out. Usually I wasn’t Dermot Milligan, human being, but Donut, fat kid. People looked at me and saw, not someone with a brain and ideas and feelings and all the usual things that kids have, but a big wobbly gut on legs.

But on another level I sort of missed it. Now I was just part of this huge herd of fatties. At least out there, in the real world, I stood out.

I joined the queue at the food counter. Close up, the smell was even worse. I could feel it seeping into my clothes and hair. It was going to take a long time to wash the cabbagey stench off. In fact, I might never wash it off. I imagined being at university and still smelling of cabbage.
Getting
married. Working in an office. A whole life of people edging away from me because they thought I’d let fly with a silent guff. Or worse, because they thought I just smelled like that naturally. It would only be in old age that I’d find peace and acceptance, because all old people smell of cabbage, so I’d fit right in.

As we all shuffled forward, a sudden wave of excitement went through the line. I heard a sound. It gradually formed itself into a recognizable word.

‘Meat.’

That was a nice surprise. In the DVD about the place they’d only ever mentioned the fresh fruit and vegetables . . .

Anyway, I finally reached the front of the queue. By this stage I was starving, as I’d had nothing to eat since breakfast, and it was
dinner
time now.

The dinner ladies were reassuringly normal. For dinner ladies, I mean. Compared to most normal humans they were pretty gross. There were three of them. One ladled gruel into bowls, another dolloped a slice of some kind of dark meat on top of the gruel and a third supervised in case the ladling and dolloping was being performed in some irregular manner.

I received my gruel. It was grey and thin, like the last bit of puke that comes out when you’ve got nothing left to heave up. And, like all true vomit the world over, it had little bits of carrot in it.

The second dinner lady was about to chuck the dark meat on my plate.

‘Can I ask what it is?’ I said.

She looked at me through her thick glasses
for
a while. Her name badge said
URSULA
, but she didn’t look much like an Ursula. She looked more like a
THLUGG
. Or possibly a
NORA
. She finally replied in a monotone, ‘Nutritionally rounded food product.’

I stared more closely at the meat. Like I said, it was mainly a dark brown colour, but now I could see that there was a marbling of grey, and some unsettling pink highlights. It looked like a failed attempt to create life in a horror film.

‘Animal, mineral or vegetable?’ I asked, trying to make a joke with the one called Ursula. There was a long pause, and I sensed the queue of fatties getting agitated behind me. Ursula’s mouth moved but nothing intelligible came out. Finally the supervisor stepped in.

‘It’s absolutely guaranteed fresh,’ she said sharply, as if that answered everything.

My plate loaded up with gruel and nutritionally rounded food product, I went to sit with the others at the Hut Four table. The rest of them were already munching, and as they ate I sensed that they were gradually getting back to normal. The zombie thing must just have been low blood sugar.

‘Do you reckon I could kill this thing with salt, the way you do with slugs?’ I said, pointing at the meat with my fork. I meant it as a joke, but nobody laughed.

‘Don’t you want it?’ asked J-Man. There was a hungry light in his eyes. I looked back at the brown slab. I truly didn’t want it.

‘Nope.’

Moving so quickly the eye could hardly follow it, J-Man speared the meat, cut it up, and distributed it to the rest of the table. They
devoured
their portions like rabid werewolves.

I ate the gruel.

It tasted cruel.
³

I checked out the other tables. To begin with they all appeared more or less the same – filled with identikit plump kids. But now I thought I could see some differences. One table, in particular, stood out. The kids there were enormous, but they weren’t just big: they looked kind of mean. As if to confirm my thought, I saw a leg shoot out from the table to trip up a kid waddling by. He stumbled and his gruel spilled
on
the floor. I moved to help him. But J-Man put his hand on my arm.

‘Careful, Donut,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘That’s the Lardies. You don’t mess with them, or they will mess you up. And when the Lardies mess you up, you stayed messed.’

‘The Lardies? Who are they?
What
are they?’

‘The Lardies help run this place the way the goons like it run.’

‘Goons?’

‘Yeah, you know, the guards in the black uniforms. We call them the goons. Anyway, they don’t like to bother with any of the actual brutalization, unless they have to. So they send the Lardies in to sit on any kids who fall out of line.’

‘But what’s in it for them? I mean, why do the Lardies do it?’

‘Back in their huts those boys got all the good things we don’t get no sight of. Candy, potato chips, soda pop, whatever they want. And it’s not just the food,’ continued J-Man. ‘Those guys control everything else in here. The gambling, the bun running—’

‘The what?’

‘Bun running. They smuggle extra food into the camp and sell it to anyone who’s got the money.’

‘But they took our money when we arrived.’

‘Some guys are cleverer than you at hiding it. Others get it passed in through the fence. Some steal it.’

Before J-Man had the chance to tell me anything else about the set-up of the camp, an amplified voice rang out from the other end of the mess hall.

‘Testing, testing, one-two-three.’

It was Badwig, his Cornish-pasty hairdo newly polished, testing the mic.

And there, standing behind Badwig, was Boss Skinner. He moved his head from side to side, eyeballing the crowd, and looking for all the world like a Terminator sent back through time to destroy fat kids. The faithful Gustav was by his side, doing his doggy version of the Skinner stare.

J-Man leaned closer. ‘Just because the guy with the hair does the talkin’, don’t you be thinkin’ he’s got the power. The power is—’

‘Skinner, I know.’

‘There’s bigger bosses than Boss Skinner,’ said J-Man mysteriously.

‘Inmates of Camp Fatso,’ Badwig continued in his whiny voice. ‘It is my pleasure to welcome those who joined us today for the first time. I
trust
that our longer-term residents will make them suitably welcome.’

This was followed by a sort of growl from the mob, indicating that the sort of welcome they had in mind for us was that given to the Christians by the lions in the Roman arena.

‘There are a couple of announcements I have to make. Tomorrow morning’s run will now begin at six a.m. rather than at six thirty.’ This was met with a groan of dismay.

‘SILENCE!’ hissed Boss Skinner. His whisper penetrated further than the amplified whine of Badwig. Normally groaning isn’t something you can help doing, but nobody groaned after that.

‘And in order to maximize the amount of time you are able to spend in healthy outdoor activities, from now on you will each be given a packed lunch.’

There were some muffled cheers at this. I guessed it was because people thought it would be an improvement on the gruel.

‘Finally, a warning. There was an attempt by one of the new boys to smuggle food into the camp. THIS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. Any further incidents of this kind will be dealt with severely. The solitary meditation chambers await anyone caught infringing our food regulations.’

I looked over at J-Man and shrugged.

‘The cooler,’ he mouthed back.

After dinner we trudged back to Hut Four. It was dark and cold and dismal outside, and dark and cold and dismal inside, as well, especially once the lights went off at 9 p.m. Yep, you read that right. 9 p.m. That’s not been my bed time since Year Three.

After that, the only illumination was an eerie
blue
glow as Dong and Ernesto took it in turns to light each other’s farts. Which was funny for the first seventeen times . . .

And no one has ever managed to read or write by the light of ignited bum-blasts, but luckily I found the stub of an old candle. There were funny little indentations in it, which puzzled me until I realized that they were tooth marks: yep, some poor kid had tried to eat it, to counteract the terrible hunger pangs we’ve all got.