The Donut Diaries (2 page)

Everyone knows that diaries are mainly for girls. My sister Ruby had one once. I found it hidden under her mattress, where I was looking for her secret sweet stash. It was full of stuff about her dolls falling in love, and other puke about pop stars she wanted to snog. Or maybe the dolls wanted to snog them, can’t remember. It was
one
of the sickest documents ever produced by the Human Mind. I thought about throwing it in the bin or taking it to school to show my friends, or encasing it in lead and dropping it in a deep ocean to protect mankind, but in the end I decided just to stick a couple of the pages together with a bogey. I remember it was one of those ones that are in the shape of Japan, and are quite crusty at one end but still moist and juicy at the other, and they are always the best ones for sticking stuff together. She never noticed – or at least she never blamed me for it. She probably just thought it was one of her own that had fallen out.
¹

Actually, although diaries are mainly for girls, I quite like writing stories. It’s the thing I’m famous for at school. When Miss Bean said, ‘I’d like you to write a story about …’ most of the kids would groan and complain, but I used to love it.
²

So I suppose I could just look on this as a chance to write stories, except true and not completely made up, like the one I did about getting abducted by aliens who took me to their planet and made me their king and worshipped me as a god, until they realized that I didn’t have any special powers and then they tried to kill me, but I defeated them all because human farts were deadly poisonous to them.

Anyway, I spent today hanging out with Jim, my best friend. I’ve known him since we were
at
nursery together. He’s about as normal as a kid could be, except he likes to eat ear wax.

We were sitting on the platform at the top of the climbing frame in the park. We’d kicked a couple of eight-year-olds off, and we had about half an hour before the teenagers came along and kicked us off. That probably carries on until at the end of the day you have a bunch of tough pensioners sitting up there, smoking and drinking alco-pops and jabbering at people passing by.

I’d picked up three donuts from the bakery, one for Jim and two for me, but Jim wasn’t hungry so I ate his for him, otherwise it would have been wasted. Everyone knows that you shouldn’t waste food because of global warming and the starving children in Africa and all that.

‘Sorry you’re not coming to Seabrook with us,’ said Jim.

‘Me too,’ I said, although it sounded more like ‘mufftuff’ because my mouth was full of donut.

Jim was going to Seabrook High, along with nearly everyone else from my junior school. I was going to St Michael’s. St Michael’s is quite posh, and you’re supposed to be brainy to get in. If I’d known I was going to pass the exam then I’d have tried to fail it. It was only because I thought I didn’t have a hope in hell that I tried to pass, if you get what I mean.

Mum really wanted me to go there because she’s quite snooty, and also she thought there was less chance of me being bullied because of my weight. She didn’t understand that the way you avoid being bullied is by being surrounded by your mates, who have all got used to you being a porker.

I think Jim knew that I was a bit worried about the whole thing.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. But he wasn’t looking me in the eye. Instead he was looking across the park at the houses, even though there was nothing interesting there, apart from a dog having a very long wee. ‘But, er, maybe you could think about possibly, sort of, I don’t know, getting a bit, you know, thinner.’

Jim had never said anything like that to me before. And suddenly I found that I was telling him about Doc Morlock. I hadn’t meant to, because of the massive embarrassment factor, but it just came out.

I thought Jim would join me in making fun of the nasty old cat-bum-mouth, and he did, a bit. But then he said, ‘Yeah, but maybe she’s right. Maybe you should, you know, eat less donuts.’

I did know, sorta. But I was still a bit annoyed at Jim for saying it. So I said, ‘Fewer.’ Then he said, ‘What?’

‘It’s
fewer
. If you’ve got loads of something, you don’t say “less”, you say “fewer”. You’d only say “less” if there was, like, a massive donut, say as big as a tractor tyre. Then you could eat less of it.’

Even as I was saying it I realized that I was being a jerk, and I wished it right back in my mouth. Jim isn’t as good at school stuff as me, but he’s not an idiot or anything. Because I felt bad I said, ‘OK, maybe you’ve got a point.’

And to show that I meant it, instead of licking all the donut crumbs off from around my mouth and eating them, I wiped them off with my jumper sleeve and then shook them over the
edge
of the climbing frame, so I wouldn’t be tempted to try to suck them up from my jumper later. Anyway, it made Jim laugh, and we were friends again.

DONUT COUNT:

1
I should probably add that now I’m twelve I don’t stick stuff together with bogeys any more. Usually. I suppose it’s one of those signs of growing up, like suddenly being embarrassed about the jumpers with pictures on them that your parents buy you for Christmas.

2
Well, actually I’d complain and moan too, but just for show.

Thursday 7 September

SO, YEAH, I
suppose I’ve been thinking about my weight. It’s not like I’m one of those giant obese kids you get in America, who eat six Big Macs for breakfast and have to be pushed around school in a wheelbarrow. I’m just a normal overweight kid. Every class in every school has a fatty like me. But … well, if I could press a button and
not
be fat, then I’d press it. The trouble is that there isn’t a button. Being less fat means not eating as many donuts, and
that’s
as hard for me as it would be if you went up to someone else and said, ‘Actually, you’ve been taking too many breaths lately, so from three to four p.m. I’d like you to stop breathing.’

But I’m trying, evil Doc Morlock, I’m trying.

For e.g. I went into the baker’s this morning.

‘How many today, Dermot?’ said Mr Alexis, a friendly smile wrinkling up his face. I was his best customer, so I always got that smile.

I looked at the section of the glass case that held the donuts. Both of the great donut families were represented there. There were the ring donuts, either simply dusted in icing sugar or glazed with different flavoured toppings. Then there were the filled donuts, injected with jam and covered in granulated sugar. If all else failed I’d settle for a filled donut, but
my
real love was for the classic ring.
¹

‘Just one,’ I said. ‘Plain, no icing.’

Mr Alexis looked at me like I’d pulled out a gun and demanded all the money in his till.

‘ONE?!’

‘Yep, one.’

I ate it on the way home. Three bites, savouring each one. Experience had taught me that three bites is the optimum. Eat a donut in two bites and there’s a real risk of choking to death. Four or more
bites
and I don’t get that pleasant feeling of having donut matter touching every bit of the inside of my mouth, with not a single taste bud wasted.

And that’s all I’ve had today. A solitary donut. And everyone knows that a solitary donut – a donut cut off from its friends and companions – is the saddest donut in the world.

In the evening I tried on my school uniform for the first time. My dad’s favourite word is ‘fiasco’, and this was definitely a fiasco.

And I know, by the way, that it was dumb trying on my uniform only a few days before school started, but then that’s my family all over.

My mum was too busy to take me shopping with her, so she had got it all off the internet. Nothing was the right size. The shirt I kind of expected. For it to be big enough to fit round
my
neck meant that the arms hung down almost to the floor. I looked like a shaved orang-utan. The trousers were too tight. Not
way
too tight, which would have been better, because then my mum would have sent them back. No, the trousers were just tight enough to make them uncomfortable, to make me think that undoing the button and allowing my belt alone to keep them up might be a good idea. The blazer – yep, it was
that
kind of school – sort of fitted, but the problem there was that it was PURPLE.

You heard me right, PURPLE.

I’ll say it again. PURPLE.

What were they thinking of when they decided to make the blazer purple? I looked like a giant plum.

The new school shoes Mum had got me fitted OK, but they were black and shiny and
looked
like the kind of loser-shoes the absolute lowest low-down guy in a boring office might wear. The guy who makes the tea for the guy who refills the office stapler. I’ve seen newly-laid dog poo with more style than those shoes. I’d have been better off tying two biscuit tins to my feet and going off clanking down the road.

NOTE TO SELF: NEVER AGAIN LET YOUR MUM BUY YOUR SCHOOL SHOES. OR ANYTHING THAT YOU MIGHT HAVE TO WEAR THAT PEOPLE COULD POSSIBLY ONE DAY SEE
.

Anyway, I came downstairs wearing my uniform and looking like something from the circus. Ruby and Ella were there, along with some of Ruby’s pink friends. As soon as I came clumping into the living room in my dog-poo shoes and giant plum blazer, it was as if someone had let off a laughing-gas bomb.
²
Is anything in life as bad as being laughed at by a gang of teenage girls? No.

My mum frowned and told everyone to be quiet, and said that it wasn’t funny and that I looked, er,
lovely
.

Then my dad shouted from the toilet, ‘What’s going on out there?’ which just made the girls
laugh
even more. Ella didn’t say any actual words, but her expression said something like: ‘I’m truly embarrassed, in fact ashamed, to be related to you, and I sincerely hope that you’ve got life insurance, ’cos they’re gonna kill you when you get to school.’

Then she went away to hang upside down somewhere in the dark, and the other girls drifted off too, because there’s only so long you can laugh at a car crash before it gets boring.

Then I noticed that my mum was crying – not making any noise, just that water-quietly-trickling-out-of-your-eyes crying that sometimes happens when you watch a sad film.

‘My little boy’s all grown up,’ she said in a whispery voice.

Then Dad came out of the loo and said, ‘Well, son, you look very smart,’ but the
impression
was ruined a bit by the fact that he was doing up his trousers.

Dinner was something called cannelloni, which turned out to be tubes of pasta nearly as big as toilet rolls stuffed with spinach and covered in a tomatoey sauce. It wasn’t actually that bad, although you certainly wouldn’t go so far as to call it good. If it was a football team it would have been Aston Villa – you know, not going to win the Premiership, but probably won’t get relegated either.

Pudding was a banana.

Hear that sound? The one like a whale singing? That’s my stomach rumbling.

DONUT COUNT:

1
The history of the donut is actually very interesting. Archaeologists think they were invented by Stone Age man, who used to cook mammoth bum holes over charcoal fires. Later, Eskimos made donuts out of walrus eye sockets. The modern donut was invented in the 1780s by a French aristocrat, Eduardo D’Nute, who had purchased a large amount of fresh air from a swindler, but turned his misfortune to his advantage when he surrounded small discs of the air with a ring of dough, and sold them at a healthy profit.