The Donut Diaries (4 page)

Of course the class went insane, yelling and screaming and making puke noises. Mr Wells never finished his sentence. What could he say? It’s not like there was a school rule against eating bananas in their skins during break time.

In three savage bites I finished the thing. Then I sat back and burped. A few of the guys cheered.

Tamara Bello gave me a very strange look. At the time I wasn’t sure if it was because she’d seen what was written on the banana or because of the whole grossness of what had followed.

I didn’t even dare look at Ludmilla.

I told my dad the story of the Banana of Doom this evening. I told him it because I was in the downstairs toilet, writhing around in agony, and
he
was outside wanting to know how long I’d be in there. I was writhing around in agony because the banana skin I’d so rashly eaten was launching an escape bid.

When I finished telling him (it took me a while because I was doing quite a lot of groaning and moaning) I heard a strange sort of wheezing sound coming through the door.

It took me a few seconds to work out that he was laughing.

Well, can you blame me? Under the circumstances I thought it was quite restrained.

I KNEW IT
was going to be bad. And it was. Bad, I mean. On the Higgenthorpe Badness Scale, which goes up to 13, it would definitely reach a creditable 11.6 by the end of the day.

It began as I came through the school gates. Banana skins rained down on me, like … well, there’s nothing much you could compare it with, although being hit with a banana skin hurts about as much as being hit in the face with a small fish. It’s more humiliating than painful.

I looked around to see if the Floppy-Haired Kid was behind it, but there was no sign of him. Then a mean prefect called Ivan the Terrible turned up and yelled at me to pick up the mess, which was totally adding insult to injury. Last term I accidentally head-butted Ivan in the nuts, and that had somewhat biased him against me. But even before that he was known as a brutal bully, hence his nickname, Flowery Doris.
¹

But that only raised the Higgenthorpe Badness rating up to 6, which is not far from my usual background levels.

At morning break Tamara Bello came up to me.
She
had a serious expression on her face, as though she was about to announce that I had a terminal disease and had only three weeks to live. I had to remind myself that she was just a twelve-year-old schoolgirl and not a world expert on fatal and probably embarrassing diseases.

‘I appreciate your sentiments,’ she said, still with that terminal-disease face.

‘What?’

‘I mean, I understand what you were trying to say.’

‘Eh?’

‘On your banana.’

‘I wasn’t trying to say anything. It was just—’

‘But I’m afraid you’re not my type.’

‘Oh, I know I’m not your type. You’re not my type
either
. I don’t even
have
a type. I was—’ My voice was getting higher and higher as I
spoke
– it was lucky that Tamara interrupted me before I reached the sort of range only audible to bats.

‘And I understand why you’re now pretending that it was all a big misunderstanding, although I think it’s rather shoddy to declare your feelings like that and then act like you hadn’t. Try again when you’ve grown up a bit.’

Then she wheeled away, leaving me with my mouth hanging open.

Bad, you say, but surely not quite an 11.6 on the Higgenthorpe Badness Scale?

Well, the Badness hadn’t finished with me yet.

Lunch was some kind of pie. There was literally no way of knowing what kind of pie. Some sort of brown stuff. You’d think that must mean it was a meat pie of some kind – maybe one of Ludmilla’s badgers – but
it
actually tasted more like cheese.

Brown cheese? Is there such a thing in the world?

Anyway, afterwards I was sitting on a bench in the yard, trying not to remember the pie, although it was a bit like when someone screams at you out of the blue: ‘Don’t think about an elephant!’

Spam, Renfrew and Corky were with me, and they were all equally traumatized by the brown cheese incident. Then, suddenly, there was a
pfumpf
noise, and a smell of horseflesh. You know how in a war film there’s always a bit where a mortar shell lands in the middle of a group of Nazis, and they go flying off, arms and legs flailing? Well, it was a bit like that now. Renfrew and the other guys exploded out of there. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move
because
Ludmilla was sitting on the bumflap of my blazer. I thought about slipping out of the blazer and just leaving it there, like lizards that can shed their tails, but I was sort of paralysed.

I turned slowly to look into the huge face of Ludmilla Pfumpf. Her tiny black eyes, set deep between her jutting brows and the massive fleshy expanse of her cheeks, were drilling into me. And her mouth … her
mouth
. It was doing something. It had bent itself into a strange shape, hitherto unseen except in nightmares. Her
teeth
. I could see her teeth. They were small and white, like tic-tacs. Small teeth in large faces have always frightened me.

And now she was reaching into her clothing.

OMG.

What was she doing? She was rummaging, feeling for something. Something nestled into
her
armpit. And now she was drawing it out, that horrific ‘smile’ (if smile it was) still caught on her face, like a dead kangaroo stuck on a barbed-wire fence. The hand gripping whatever it was that she’d concealed under her clothing was free now. She stretched it out towards me. I looked down. And there, clutched in that massive fist, was a bag of chips: greasy, steaming, fetid.

I tried to speak, but nothing would come out. I shook my head.

‘
Hhhhhhggggghhh
,’ said Ludmilla.

It was too much for me. She was just too powerful. I put my trembling fingers into her bag and took out a chip. It was still hot, although whether the heat was left over from the frying or had been imparted by her armpit, I couldn’t say. And then, my hand still trembling, I put the chip to my mouth, and ate. I was dimly aware of
a
sort of groan, which must have come from my companions.

Then Ludmilla nodded, satisfied, and stood up.

‘Bye,’ she said, in a voice that rumbled like an earthquake. I think it was the first actual word I’d ever heard her utter. Then she thumped away on
her
tree-trunk legs.

My friends rematerialized.

‘Thanks for backing me up there, guys,’ I complained.

Spam ignored my sarcasm. ‘Do you realize what you’ve done?’ he said.

‘What? Nothing, I didn’t do anything.’

‘The chip,’ intoned Renfrew. ‘You took a chip from her.’

‘And then you ate it,’ added Spam.

‘So …? That doesn’t mean anything, does it? It was only a chip.’

‘Among her people it does,’ said Spam. ‘It means a lot. It has grave significance.’

‘Her people …?’ He’d made it sound as if she was a member of a lost tribe or alien race.

‘The Pfumpfs. You’re one of
them
now.’

I put my head in my hands and groaned.

I could see the truth of it. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was now a Pfumpf.

No matter how bad things get, I’m determined to make up for yesterday’s lapse. Four days of half-rations and I’ll be back on course.

1
That’s just a joke, by the way. Ivan the Terrible was, of course, the nickname of the prefect whose real name was Ivan Szymanowski. And right there you see another good reason to call him ‘the Terrible’, as nobody on Earth knows how to pronounce Szymanowski.

THAT IMAGE – THE
one of Ludmilla reaching into her armpit and pulling out a bag of chips – haunted me all weekend, ruining everything, the way someone else’s eggy fart can ruin a really good movie.

Actually there were plenty of other things to ruin the weekend, such as Dad having one of his bad days on Saturday. He refused to come out of the toilet at all, and Mum had to feed
him
bits of grilled bacon which she slid under the door. Then, on Saturday evening, Ruby did one of her famous screams that goes on for two hours. I don’t mean, like, five minutes. I mean an actual two hours. All I’d done was borrow her iPod. And very slightly break it. Served her right for having so much rubbish music on it. And anyway, you have to expect things to get slightly broken eventually, don’t you? I mean, nothing lasts for ever, does it? And if things did, then all the people in China who make things would be out of a job and probably starve to death in their gazillions. Was that what Ruby wanted? Dad could probably have fixed it, but he was in the toilet making a sound a bit like the song of the humpback whale, probably in an attempt to drown out Ruby’s screams.

Then, on Saturday night, the weirdest thing of all happened, although I’m not sure if it counts as good or bad. One minute me and Mum and Ruby were watching the telly (Dad was still in the toilet, though all was nice and quiet in there as he’d stopped his whale singing). And then, suddenly, I sensed that there were other entities present in the room. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I had a strong urge to run and hide.

Mum and Ruby felt it too, and together we all turned towards the door. Two thin figures stood there. One was immensely tall. They were both dressed entirely in black, although their faces were deathly pale.

‘This is Crow,’ said the slighter of the two, who I now recognized as my sister Ella. ‘He’s my boyfriend.’