The Donut Diaries (10 page)

The hall was packed, and there were loads of other teachers standing at the sides.

‘These events will not be tolerated,’ I heard Mr Whale saying. Then he dropped a piece of paper, and bent down to pick it up. I took my chance – there were a couple of seats in the back row, and if I could just slip in and nab one I’d be safe.

I squeezed into the gap. My head was through. My chest was through. But that was it. My belly, swollen with my slightly-bigger-than-average breakfast, just wouldn’t fit. And, worse – I couldn’t get back out. I was stuck like a cork in a bottle.

And – could it have been my imagination? – the gap between the doors seemed to be getting smaller. I was being CRUSHED TO DEATH. Few things make a boy panic more than being CRUSHED TO DEATH. My struggles began to attract attention. A couple of kids turned round. And some of the teachers. The more people who saw, the more noise there was. First grins. Then some laughter.

Mr Whale was standing again, after finding his notes. And now I’d caught his attention. That wasn’t good. Plus there was the whole being CRUSHED TO DEATH thing that I had going on.

Then, relief.

Someone had slid the doors wide enough for me to fall through. And fall I did, right into the arms of my rescuer, who turned out to be none other than the Floppy-Haired Kid.

Miss Brotherton was the first teacher to reach me.

‘Sit down and be quiet,’ she hissed, not really distinguishing between me and the FHK.

‘Thanks,’ I said, when we were safely in the back row. In reply he gave me a little smile.

Mr Whale finished saying what he had to say. I still hadn’t quite worked out what it was all about. I looked quizzically at the FHK.

‘The Phantom,’ he mouthed back silently.

‘And now,’ added Mr Whale, ‘I’m going to pass you over to the headmaster, who will add some further words of his own.’

This statement produced a gasp from the assembled school kids. The Head, Mr Steele, is famously frail and feeble-minded. He only ever appears in public to announce the school sports results during the normal Friday assembly. He has literally never been seen at any other time or in any other place.

And now he was shuffling towards the microphone. Being forced to change the routine he’d kept to for the past twenty years had clearly further confused his mental state. Even from the back I could see that he didn’t have any shoes on, and that one horny toenail had sliced its way through a dirty grey sock. He was dressed in what had probably once been a perfectly OK suit, woven from a mixture of asbestos, horsehair and belly-button fluff, but now it was in a pretty terrible state, with curious yellow and brown stains, as if the old headteacher had dribbled an egg-and-gravy sandwich down his front.

He reached the mic.

He stared with milky eyes around the hall.

He strolled away again, obviously convinced that he’d done whatever it was that he was supposed to do. Mr Whale firmly guided him
back
to the mic, and whispered urgently in his ear. Then he passed him the piece of paper he’d picked up off the floor. It was obviously a speech he’d written out for the Head.

Mr Steele began. The first few words were confident. For a moment, he seemed like a young man in his fifties and not the nonagenarian that he usually appeared.

‘As you will no doubt have …’

But he could not sustain it. His eyes wandered from the notes prepared for him. He tried to find something else in the wide space of the hall to spur himself into action. And then, suddenly, he had left us for another time, another place, another universe.

‘The Upper Sixth ice-hockey team has …’

Again Mr Whale approached and whispered. This time he looked a little angrier.

Mr Steele was dumbfounded. ‘What, no ice hockey?’ he said, his feeble voice caught and amplified by the mic. ‘There is no ice? Or hockey? Oh. I see. I see.’

He focused on the paper again. ‘Ah yes. The, ah, the dirty. The human dirt. This will not do. Really. Do, it will not.’

He looked over at Mr Whale, who nodded encouragement.

‘And nor, if I may say so, will not this do. I repeat again, IT. NOT. DO. WILL.’

This brought a small cheer from the audience. The cheer perhaps over-stimulated Mr Steele.

‘Well, thank you very much, and my congratulations to the girls’ second eleven dwarf-throwers, who came a creditable nineteenth in the … in the … ah. Well, good luck and good
night
. The lights are going out all over Europe. Ask not what your country can do for you, but for whom the bell tolls. You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be led.’

Then Miss Choat came over on her backwards-bending ostrich legs, took his arm and guided him off the stage.

This meant that the stage belonged again to Mr Whale.

‘Thank you, Headmaster,’ he began, glancing at Mr Steele’s receding figure. Then he turned the Evil Eye on us. ‘Do not doubt that we will catch the person who is doing this. And when we’ve caught him – or her, if a her it be – then the full might of the law will be brought to bear.’ He smashed his fist into his palm to add emphasis. ‘And until we find the culprit, all morning breaks will be spent in your form rooms.’

Groans and half-choked cries of ‘No!’ rose from the crowd. They were quelled by another glare.

‘Dismissed,’ said Mr Whale, and that was it.

Normally, of course, me getting stuck in the giant hall doors would have created a sensation, but the Special Assembly devoted to the catching and smashing of the Phantom was such a unique and memorable event that my own little mishap seemed to be forgotten. However, I hadn’t forgotten that the FHK had given me a hand when I needed it most. So I went and thanked him at lunch time.

‘Forget it,’ he said in his usual careless way, as if my thanks meant absolutely nothing to him. But it didn’t change the fact that he’d helped me out, and might not be such a swine after all.

Still within the new revised target …

THINGS VERY TENSE
at school today. Everyone on edge. The Phantom could be anyone. Could be anywhere. The atmosphere was as thick as one of Corky’s fruitier farts.

The boredom of morning break spent trapped in the form room was somewhat alleviated by a game called Speedbum, invented by Renfrew. In Speedbum, what you do is distract someone, e.g. by knocking their pen on the floor or by telling them that their shoelaces are undone or
by
looking out of the window and exclaiming loudly that the alien invasion of Earth has begun. You then see how many times you can write the word ‘bum’ on their exercise book. Corky turned out to be the world record holder at Speedbum. He managed fifty-seven bums in the time it took Spam to go to the wastepaper bin and back. His Speedbum expertise has probably got something to do with his Tourette’s syndrome, which makes him want to swear all the time, and a stutter that means he can never get it out. It’s tragic, really. But also very funny. I suppose that’s what they call a paradox.

Tamara Bello watched all this with a Queen Victoria face. So when she was searching for something in her bag, I wrote an absolutely tiny ‘bum’ on her book, so small you’d only be able to see it with a microscope. Still, that showed her.

On my other side, Ludmilla had a different sort of look on her face. It was more a ‘let me join in’ sort of look. But I didn’t want to encourage her into thinking that the banana message was true all along or anything like that. And if I wrote ‘bum’ on her book, she might think I was saying that I thought she had a nice bum. Or a rotten one. It was a lose-lose situation if ever there was one. There’s a time and a place for writing ‘bum’ on someone’s exercise book, and this clearly wasn’t it.

Crow was round at ours again tonight. He actually said a few words in human language, rather than just using his finger. He’s not that bad when you get to know
him
. The funny thing is, he’s got a weekend job selling ice cream. That in itself cheered me up after the recent traumas – just the thought of Crow in a white coat handing out choc-ices and 99s was enough to make me giggle. An ice-cream-selling Goth seemed pretty far-fetched. But then, as I said at the time, life is full of farfetched things, such as Ella finding someone just as weird as her to go out with. Then I ran for it, to avoid getting jabbed in the eye by one of Crow’s giant fingers, or vamped to death by Ella.

YESTERDAY WAS LIKE
one of those days in a war when nothing much happens and you can hang out your washing on the barbed wire and play football in no-man’s-land.

Well, today was different.

I was settling down at my desk for English with Miss Brotherton, contemplating a quick round of Speedbum, when two prefects came in. One was my old enemy, Ivan the Terrible. He was still limping from his mishap with the poo,
but
it looked like it had just been a sprain and not a break.

Pity.

I didn’t know the name of the other prefect, but he always followed Ivan around, the way a smell of egg follows a fart. He had a zit on the side of his nose that was actually bigger than the nose itself, so it looked like the spot had a nose rather than the other way round. Ivan was no genius, but the spotty prefect was the kind of kid who’d stick his finger up his bum and act surprised when it didn’t smell of flowers.

‘We’ve come for Milligan. Mr Whale wants him,’ said Ivan, not showing very much respect for Miss Brotherton. That was quite risky. Miss Brotherton could be pretty fierce, in a big-nosed, woodpeckery kind of way. Which,
I
admit, is not the fiercest kind of fierce, but it’s more fierce than being fierce in a rabbitty way, for example. But today Miss Brotherton wasn’t even woodpecker-fierce. She looked a bit sad. She was going out with Mr Wells, so maybe they’d had an argument, or he’d decided that her nose was just too big and her elbows too sticky-outy, even if she did have quite nice hair.

So she just waved me out of the room, like a bored judge waving a condemned man off to the gallows.

On the way to Whale’s office, the two prefects kept shoving me against the walls and tripping me up and the usual prefect tricks.