The Donut Diaries (6 page)

Or rather, the words had been scratched into the banana skin with some sharp implement and the scars dyed with red ink.

I looked over at Ludmilla.

She smiled back at me and gave a little wave, wiggling her fingers. I noticed that one of the fingers had a plaster on it.

And I realized what she’d done.

She’d written the message in blood.

I thought I was going to puke up my Weetabix.

Then, at break, something happened that took me back to the bad old days of last term. Well, sort of …

I was hanging out with the guys as usual. Spam had just come up with one of his Amazing Facts.

‘Over the past four hundred years,’ he’d said, ‘over a million people have been killed by tigers.’

That took some absorbing. If it was invented, then it was a nice piece of work. If it was true, then it played uneasily with my deep-rooted fear of being eaten. I’d always reckoned that a bear would get me, but if the figure of a million tiger victims was true, it made it more than likely that the big stripy cat would be the one to Feast On My Flesh.

I was thinking about this when I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye. A gang, made up mainly of the cool kids from Xavier House plus a few of the swots from Campion, was approaching us in a very peculiar manner. It took me a few seconds to work out what was going on. At first I thought they were supposed to be some kind of giant beetle. Then
it
struck me: they were pretending to row a boat. They must have practised because it was pretty realistic. You could tell that the sea was quite rough, and the boat was being tossed about. One kid was standing at the prow, and he was pretending to hold something – something long and spear-like. This kid, whose name was Nick Fedallah, then pointed towards our bench.

‘Thar she blows!’ he yelled, and the ‘boat’ changed course towards me.

Then I got it. It was a whaling expedition, and I was the whale. Sort of quite funny, really.

If you weren’t me.

When they got closer, Fedallah hurled his harpoon.

‘Strike!’ he yelled. ‘I got me a big one! Let’s reel him in, boys, reel him in.’

Then they all hauled on the imaginary rope.

Of course, by now the whole schoolyard was enjoying the spectacle. It’s not often, after all, that you get to watch an authentic whale-slaying at break time. Mrs Smote, the simple-minded playground monitor, who wore wellington boots and a coat made out of cat pelts (you could still see their little ears and the blank, leathery eye-sockets), laughed and clapped like she was at the circus.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Should I just ignore the whole thing? Should I join in and let them haul me on board and slice off my blubber? Should I go on the rampage like Moby Dick and smash their boat to pieces? Or maybe just swim away with the rest of my pod?

The whaling boat was about ten metres away, and they were all straining at the imaginary oars while Fedallah got ready to hurl another harpoon at me, when my dilemma was solved by, of all
people
, Tamara Bello. She strolled up, looking like a species that had evolved far beyond the jabbering apes around her, took out a rather large imaginary pair of scissors, and cut the invisible rope attached to the harpoon.

I suppose the boat crew should have fallen backwards once the rope had been cut, but they weren’t
that
good. Instead, they all just tutted and moaned and went off to do other stuff, not even bothering to step over the wooden walls of their boat or swim to shore, which you’d have thought was the least they could do. But then again, you’d need a will of iron to stand up to Tamara Bello …

And now she turned to me, hands on hips.

‘You should learn to stick up for yourself,’ she said, and then walked slowly away across the waves.

‘I think she likes you,’ said Renfrew, who then dodged away before I had the chance to kick him in the nuts.

More food-related misery tonight. My dad does his best to keep up with Mum’s healthier eating
programme
, but it doesn’t really work as his heart isn’t in it. It’s a bit like one of those really boring teachers who wears a novelty tie with Snoopy or Donald Duck or a pirate skull-and-crossbones on it to try and prove how ‘crazy’ he is. So, for tea tonight we had vegetarian sausages and sweet potato chips. The vegetarian sausages were the kind that have actual vegetables in them so you occasionally come across a complete pea or a hunk of carrot, which is the last thing you want to find in a sausage (imagine eating a pea and finding a whole little sausage in the middle of it – you’d be a bit concerned, wouldn’t you?). And I can’t even imagine what the sausagey stuff in between the vegetables is. Some mixture of soil and dog hair? Asbestos? We’ll never know.

But it was the chips that I really objected to. ‘Sweet’ potato is one of the biggest lies in the
history
of the world. Some genius advertising guy must have thought that one up. I bet they were originally called ‘not-very-nice-orange-potatoes’. Not even being turned into a chip – normally the greatest thing that can happen to a member of the potato family – can save the not-very-nice-orange-potato. For a start, they’re orange. Who wants an orange chip? I’ll answer that – NOBODY wants an orange chip. And one of the main jobs of a chip is to be crunchy on the outside. These not-very-nice-orange-chips were not in the least crunchy on the outside. They were as crunchy on the outside as a baby’s bum cheek. The other major job of the chip is to be fluffy on the inside. These not-very-nice-orange-chips were all hard and crunchy on the inside. This meant that the eternal beauty of the chip – all that is great and noble about it – had
been
turned completely inside out. Sacrilege!

Well, I’d said about half of this, actually being quite funny about it – or so I thought – when I saw my dad’s face. It had a look of total defeat on it. It reminded me of something. It was the way I felt on the inside last term when things had been at their lowest ebb, and I had no friends and all the world was against me.

So I said, ‘Actually, Dad, this is pretty good.’ And then I ate everything on my plate and asked for seconds.

Well, I had to get the taste of orange chips out of my mouth, didn’t I?

BAD DREAMS IN
the night. I was being chased through a forest of giant donut trees (that wasn’t the bad part – my best dreams usually involve giant donut trees). I couldn’t see what was chasing me, but I heard its thunderous tread and felt its breath hot on my neck. Somehow I managed to climb a tree, out of range of those chomping jaws. But the thing prowled around the tree, waiting for me to fall into its gaping maw.

Actually, the dream slightly improved from
there
on in, as I kept myself alive by eating the donuts on the donut tree. When I woke up I’d eaten half my pillow.

But I couldn’t go on like this.

I was running out of pillows.

So, at break time, I shook hands with my friends, saying what I thought might be my final farewells, and went up to Ludmilla. She was sitting by herself on a concrete bench. She didn’t seem to have many friends. Actually, she didn’t seem to have
any
friends. She was concentrating hard on eating a Scotch egg.
¹
She looked like an
ogre
or troll, crunching on the skulls of innocent humans she’d captured in the forest.

‘Ludmilla,’ I said, and she looked up at me.

I’d been planning to say something like,
You seem to have got the idea that we’re a couple. But we’re not. The message on the banana wasn’t for you, it was to the banana. I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last skull-crunching troll maiden on earth, so please stop persecuting me with bananas and chips
.

But then she looked up at me from her Scotch egg, and in that look there was so much … I don’t know, hope and longing, that I just couldn’t be mean to her. I thought about the terrible time I’d had during the first term, and how lonely it was possible to feel.

So I sat down next to her.

‘Thanks for the banana,’ I said. ‘But I sort
of
wish you hadn’t written on it in your own blood.’

Ludmilla made a puzzled sound, a bit like a reasonably friendly gorilla who’s found something that may or may not be edible on the forest floor.

She reached into her clothing and I thought she was going to pull out another bag of chips. But all that emerged in her big hand was a ballpoint pen. A
red
ballpoint pen.

‘Oh, I see,’ I said, rather embarrassed.

Ludmilla then offered me a bite of her Scotch egg.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m on a diet. You know. Healthy stuff only for me.’

Then I remembered that I did, in fact, have a donut in my pocket. I took it out and broke it in half and gave one of the halves to
Ludmilla
. I didn’t mind sharing the donut as it had raspberry-flavoured icing, which is only my ninth favourite flavour. She bit into it, even though she still had quite a lot of Scotch egg in her mouth. From then on she alternated bites between the donut and the Scotch egg. That seemed a waste of a perfectly good half-donut to me, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that people like different things and there’s no point trying to argue about it, even if they are TOTALLY WRONG.

After a while I said, ‘I don’t really want a girlfriend, Ludmilla.’

Ludmilla stopped chewing for a couple of seconds. I suppose it was her way of showing extreme emotion.

‘Maybe when I’m a bit older …’ I paused. ‘The thing is, I don’t really know what to do with girls or how to talk to them. Except my sisters, and I mainly communicate with them by calling them names and throwing stuff at them.’

‘
Pfumpf
,’ she said, which was fair enough.

‘So I think that we should just be friends. What do you think?’

‘Banana,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘What?’

‘Banana!’

‘Oh, yes.’

I took the banana she’d given me out of my pocket, and handed it back to her.

Strangely, as I walked away, I saw the FHK looking over at Ludmilla. He was smirking a smirk, although it wasn’t quite his usual smirk. It was a bit less smirky than the normal smirk. No doubt he was enjoying my romantic difficulties.

‘How was it?’ asked Renfrew when I returned to the safety of my own lines.

‘Not too bad. She’s all right, actually, Ludmilla.’

‘Are you still married to her?’

‘Nah. But the divorce is, er, amicable. I get custody of the donuts and she gets the Scotch eggs, although I’m allowed to see them at weekends.’