The Donut Diaries (10 page)

Dad’s not a bad swimmer either, which you wouldn’t really expect from a guy who spends most of his time in the toilet. Or maybe that’s exactly what you should expect? When he gets in the water he changes from my not-much-use-at-anything dad to a different dad – a dad who’s good at something, i.e. swimming. He can even do the butterfly, which is a swimming stroke invented by the Nazis to torture their prisoners.

Afterwards, I was famished – like you always are after swimming. I gave Dad one of my pleading donut looks, but he said we were going to try something new.

The new thing turned out to be sushi. Yeah, that’s right, raw – and I mean
totally
raw – fish, wrapped up in cold rice. Yum yum. (That’s a sarcastic yum yum, by the way.) What kind of madman invented that? We all complained about it, but Dad insisted we at least try it. It probably helped that they were having a half-price promotion at the sushi bar. My dad finds it hard to buy anything that isn’t on special offer.

So we sat there not hoping for much and a nice Japanese lady came and brought us green tea that tasted of nothing at all (which I’d count as a result, as green tea sounds like it ought to taste of hot snot). And then the sushi came. It looked quite OK, so I tried a bit. Then I tried a bit more. Dad told me to eat it with some of the slivers of ginger
and
a tiny bit of some stuff that looked like green toothpaste but which turned out to be the hottest, spiciest substance ever invented, and is probably radioactive. But when it’s all in your mouth, it tastes amazing.

For pudding we had these weird little Japanese donuts with sesame seeds on top. Not a real donut, but better than no donut at all.

Not a bad day at all, really.

DONUT COUNT:

(if we’re counting the sushi donuts)

Sunday 24 September

ANOTHER NICE DAY
. With one exception. Me and Jim went and chucked stones in the canal. That might not seem very interesting to you, but sitting with your back against the wall lobbing stones into the water and hearing the lovely round ‘plop’ is surprisingly satisfying, especially when it isn’t peeing down with rain.

I told Jim about some of the rubbish things that were happening at St Michael’s, but I said it in a way that turned it into a joke, and that
made
me feel a bit better about it all.

He told me that things weren’t that great at Seabrook High, which also helped to cheer me up, because hearing about other people’s troubles is always nice. Apparently there was some psycho kid called Garry Martin who’d decided he hated Jim and was going to batter him after school one day. But Jim said his big brother, Chaz, was going to give Garry Martin a ‘Chaz Special’. This involved Chaz kneeling on your chest and dribbling drool down onto your face. He thought that would discourage Garry Martin from bothering him, and I tended to agree – it would discourage me from doing pretty well anything, including breathing.

Then Jim asked, ‘What are your new mates like, then?’

‘Oh, they’re OK. Quite cool, really,’ I replied,
throwing
another stone in the canal so I didn’t have to look him in the eye. Everyone knows it’s OK to fib to your mates as long as you don’t look them in the eye when you do it. Otherwise, if they find out, they tell everyone that you lied to them and did it while you stared right into their eyes. Yep, definitely way worse than ordinary lying.

And just then who should I spy coming along the canal towpath but Renfrew. Not looking cool
at all
. He was walking his slightly jerky walk and you could see his lips moving as he talked to himself, which was one of his weird little habits. I didn’t think he’d seen me.

I know what I should have done. I should have waited till he reached me and Jim and introduced them and let Renfrew hang out with us for a while, chucking stones into the canal and talking about our favourite flavours of milkshakes.

But instead I got up and said, ‘Let’s go to the shopping centre,’ and then I just walked away and up the stone stairs that take you from the canal to the road.

I felt really bad about what I’d done, although I wasn’t sure exactly why. It wasn’t like I’d bullied Renfrew or thrown him in the canal or made fun of him, was it?

Hang on.

I suppose that if there’s any point at all to a diary like this it’s to have a poke around in your own head to try to understand what’s going on in there. I did know why I’d avoided Renfrew. It was because I was ashamed of him. There. It’s out. He was about the least cool-looking kid in the universe, and I was worried that Jim would think that I was uncool too.

Writing that made me feel a bit sick. Truly, the
human
soul can be a dark and dismal place.

Sunday lunch was OK – salmon baked in tinfoil parcels, with potato wedges and broccoli. I found that if you just eat the fluffy bit at the end of each sprig it doesn’t really taste too much of actual broccoli, although you still get that faint feeling you’ve walked into a room five minutes after someone has farted.

I had a sneaky couple of donuts up in my room. I thought they might make me feel better about running away from Renfrew. But it worked the other way round – thinking about Renfrew ruined the donuts. It felt like trying to swallow lumps of cement.

DONUT COUNT:

Monday 25 September

AS I’VE GOT
to think of something I can put in my donut diary that I could actually let Doc Morlock see, I thought I’d try to describe some of the teachers. I haven’t really mentioned them much, except for Psycho Fricker, Woodpecker Brotherton, Hairy Braintree and nice Mr Wells.

For maths we have Mr Kennilworth, who looks like a poodle surprised in the act of licking its own bottom. He’s OK. He knows
a
lot about maths, but doesn’t know anything about how to control the class, so people just talk all the way through his lessons.

Mr Khan teaches chemistry. He’s pretty funny and tries to tell at least one joke per lesson. When I say ‘pretty funny’ I mean by teacher standards. By normal human standards, he isn’t that funny.

Here’s a typical Khan joke:

‘Why do all the other subatomic particles hate the electrons?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because they are so negative!
’
¹

Yeah, well, I warned you.

Mr Beal teaches RE. His main job seems to be to show you how unhappy believing in God can make you.

The Head of the Year is called Mr Whale – he was the short bald man with the megaphone on the first day. You get sent to him if you do something really bad. He then breathes his eggy breath all over your face as a punishment. Or so I’ve been told – I haven’t been sent to him yet.

The headteacher is called Mr Steele. He only ever appears for Friday assembly. He mumbles a few words, then shuffles back to his office. He wears carpet slippers and has fantastically hairy ears, which tells you all you really need to know about him.

Dinner at home was spinach risotto. No comfort there. Dad ate his in the loo. I think he may well have cut out the middleman and flushed it straight down the pan.

Today was one of those rare days when one donut seemed like enough. Not quite sure why. There is something incomprehensible deep down in the soul of every person, I suppose.

DONUT COUNT:

1
Just in case you don’t know, electrons have a negative electric charge, whilst protons have a positive charge and neutrons a neutral charge. Blimey, I can be boring, sometimes.

Tuesday 26 September

RAINED LIKE A
dog today, so we had to stay in our form rooms at break.

I did some more work on the made-up Donut Diary to show to Doc Morlock. Renfrew and Spam helped me out.

I put in the bit about there being something incomprehensible in the soul of every human being, which I thought made me sound pretty deep. The best bit was this, though:

‘I gazed out of my window and saw a tiny
little
bird pecking at the hard ground. It looked like it was probably starving. In fact it was definitely soon going to be lying on its back with its legs in the air, totally dead. I was going to eat a small donut, but the little bird looked at me with such sad eyes that I crumbled it up and threw it out of the window. The bird gobbled up the donut crumbs and then flew away without even whistling a quick thank you, which I thought was pretty rude. But I didn’t mind because I knew I’d done the Right Thing and saved its life by sacrificing my donut. But then, that’s the kind of person I am.’

It was Renfrew’s idea to put ‘gazed’ instead of plain old ‘looked’, as it’s more poetic and thoughtful.

While we were working on the diary,
Corky
showed off his epic farting ability. He doesn’t have to wait for one to come along, but just does them when he wants to. So, if you say, ‘Corky, give us a fart,’ he just does. Amazing, really.

It didn’t amuse Tamara Bello much, though. She’d been reading her book of Chekhov short stories, but when the smell reached her she used the book to waft the smell back, then threw it at me, as if I’d been the one who was farting. Turns out Chekhov packs quite a punch when it gets you in the middle of the forehead.

I kept meaning to talk to Renfrew about
my
disappearing act on the canal but the chance never came up. He probably didn’t notice it …

DONUT COUNT: