The Donut Diaries (14 page)

Not deliberate – I’ve just had so much to think about that I plain forgot to get my hands on a donut. And now I’m regretting it. There’s a donut-shaped hole in my stomach. So that’s a hole with another hole in the middle of it, which is definitely the holiest kind of hole.

IT WAS CORKY’S
idea to follow Ludmilla to the chip shop at morning break. We saw her squeeze through the hole in the fence and stump across the no-man’s-land to reach the streets outside the school. I knew it would take all four of us to tackle the Pfumpster. It was like something my dad
had
told me about the Second World War. The Germans had miles better tanks – e.g. the mighty Tiger and the even more excellent Panther, not to mention the much feared Tiger II. Anyway, you’d need at least three Shermans to even think of taking on a Tiger, and even then you might all get your turrets blown off. But four on one and you had a decent chance, although you had to put a shell in the Tiger’s vulnerable rear.

That was our best hope with Ludmilla.

NOTE TO SELF: AVOID REFERRING TO THE TIGER TANK’S VULNERABLE REAR, IN CASE PEOPLE THINK YOU MEAN LUDMILLA’S BUM. WHICH YOU DON’T. I HOPE.

We cornered her after she came out of the chip shop. She had the bag in one hand and a wooden fork in the other. I wasn’t sure how much damage she could do with that fork. It would probably break if she tried to stab you in the heart with it, although it might work in an eye-gouging capacity.

‘Hello, Ludmilla,’ I said, trying not to think about her jabbing the fork into my eyes.

‘Pfumpf,’ she replied dismissively.

‘I thought we had an understanding, Ludmilla.’

‘Pfumpf.’

‘I thought we were … friends.’

‘Pfumpf, pfumpf.’

‘OK, Ludmilla, you want to play hardball. One of my associates quite clearly saw you send a text when I went to the toilet the other day.

And straight—’

‘Because of your diarrhoea,’ chipped in Renfrew unhelpfully.

‘
I haven’t got blinking diarrhoea!!!
Where was I? Ah yes … and straight away the Brown Phantom appeared to lay his dastardly thingy on the toilet floor. And that’s no more of a coincidence than the cabbage smell that follows one of Corky’s farts.
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So that means that you’re just as guilty as the Phantom and you’ll be in just as much trouble. Unless you confess it all to us now, in which case there’s a chance of a plea bargain.’

‘A what?’ said Spam.

‘Shut up, Spam,’ I hissed back.

Then I saw what was happening to Ludmilla’s
face
. It was crumpling, and then re-forming and crumpling again, as if she was desperately trying to control it – I saw this thing once where someone was trying to make a dish on a potter’s wheel, and it was hilarious because the clay just went all over the place, and the harder they tried to make it go into a dish shape, the more it looked like an explosion in a jelly factory.

‘I’ll never betray him!’ she cried.

‘Eh?’

‘The one you call the Phantom. I … I love him!’

‘No need for that sort of language,’ I said.

I hadn’t expected this reaction. Not from the Pfumpfster. I suppose the reaction I expected was more of a ‘Shut up, you stupid pudding, or I’ll ram these hot chips in your fat face.’ Also, well, I was a bit miffed. I mean, Ludmilla was
supposed
to be in love with me, wasn’t she?

‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Spam. ‘The Phantom is evil. Pure evil. You’ve got to tell us who he is.’

Then Ludmilla uttered a strange, high-pitched cry and launched herself at me. It was like being hit by a charging rhino and I went down with her on top of me. I was pinned there, and she grabbed hold of my ears with her hands and started to pull my face towards hers. It was clear to me in that moment that she planned to bite my nose off.

But I remained reasonably cool under the circumstances. In between a certain amount of begging for mercy, I managed to say to the guys (who were, after the initial shock, trying to wrestle her off me), ‘Get her bag. Her mobile. See who she texted …’

That had an immediate effect. Ludmilla
leaped
off me and snatched the bag back from Corky, delivering a vicious slap while she was at it, which sent Corky reeling, and he is not the sort of kid to reel easily. Then she plunged her hand into her bag and pulled out her mobile. Which she then proceeded to EAT!!!!

Well, not
eat
as in swallow and digest, but eat as in take big bites of it, which she then spat out and ground into the floor with her foot. I suppose she got the idea from my banana stunt, which had put the whole idea of eating things best left uneaten on the agenda, not to mention the menu.

We stood around, faintly amazed at this performance (except Corky, who was still too busy reeling).

‘You shouldn’t really do that,’ said Spam, after a while. ‘Mobiles have poisonous stuff in them. Mercury. Arsenic. Er, plutonium …’

‘And all you really had to eat was the sim card,’ added Renfrew.

It was almost sort of funny. But then I had one of my rare moments of human decency. I saw, like in a kind of vision, how the Temptation of Ludmilla must have happened.

And, like all the best moments of human decency, I knew how to use it to my own selfish advantage.

‘It was like this, wasn’t it … You were heartbroken because of the banana. The Phantom preyed on your weakness. He charmed you. He spoke sweet words, did he not?’

‘Pfumpf,’ she said, but it was more tearful than her usual noise. In fact, it was close to a sob. Making girls sob was well down on my list of priorities in life, coming under harpooning whales, clubbing seal pups, and snipping the ears off baby rabbits with gardening shears.

Except, of course, when it came to making
my
sisters cry, which was quite a different matter.

‘He made promises, didn’t he …’ I added, in a softer tone. ‘Promises about what he’d do if you just let him know where I was? Seemed such a small thing … And I suppose he told you what a rat I was—’

‘He didn’t need to,
pfumpf
.’

‘But it was all lies. I’m not a rat,
he
is. Just tell us who it was …’

‘NEVER!’

And with that, Ludmilla broke through the human cordon and fled on her tree-trunk legs.

‘Shall we go after her?’ said Spam.

‘Nah,’ I replied sadly. ‘I’ve seen enough misery for one day. We’ll have to find some other way of striking back at the Brown Phantom.’

There are times when sadness consumes the human soul … and so the human soul gets its own back by consuming something else.

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The loud ones, that is. The quiet ones are usually eggy.

I HAD TO
buy more time. There was only one way to do that. I had to go right to the top. That meant Mr Steele, the headmaster.

Right at the beginning of the first term, he had told us in assembly that, ‘My door is open, always open, to any boy or girl. Or any other kind of person. Indeed any human being, regardless of colour, sex, species or, ah, shoe size. All you have to do is knock, and that open door shall be, er, shall be, that is to say … opened
even
more. Opened up to the hilt.’

So at morning break I went up to his office. Miss Bush lived in a sort of mini-office that you had to go past to get to the headmaster’s.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked in her piercing voice. She didn’t seem like a very happy person, Miss Bush. I suspect that she was Wronged in Love as a young woman. Maybe it had involved some confusion over a message written on a banana, although I admit that that would be a pretty big coincidence.

‘I need to speak to Mr Steele. It’s urgent.’

‘I’m afraid you can’t see him.’

‘Oh, isn’t he in?’

‘Yes, he’s in, but he refuses to see people when he’s in. He’s very specific about it.’

‘Oh. When
can
I see him?’

‘You can try when he’s out. He left no
instructions
about not seeing him when he isn’t here.’

‘So, when he’s in I can’t see him, but I can when he’s not here?’

‘That’s it, yes.’
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