Free The Donut Diaries by Dermot Milligan

never arrived.
    On my right side, J-Man started to move, but he was too slow. There was a blur, and a flurry, and suddenly the tattooed oaf was face-down on the floor. It was Dong, who had appeared on my left, his face as passive and inscrutable as ever. I tried to replay what had happened in slow motion in my head. I think Dong had caught the other kid’s wrist and then performed some sort of ninja move, but it really was too quick for the human eye to take in.
    And then I was aware that it wasn’t just me and Dong and J-Man together, but the whole of Hut Four, who were now confronting an angry mob of Lardies.
    Another Lardy stepped forward. There was something weirdly pie-like about his head, although maybe that was just a hallucination brought on by the carrots I’d been eating. This time it was the huge Igor who went to meet him. Igor gave him a standard school-yard shove in the chest – the kind of thing you see a hundred times every day – but this was delivered with such power that now a second Lardy was on the floor.
    Two–nil to Hut Four!
    And then it looked like it was going to turn really ugly, like a massive sumo brawl. I thought about those nature documentaries where elephant seals fight, whacking each other with their monstrous necks and trying to get in a good old bite or three, and at the end the beach is littered with squashed pups.
    But before mayhem ensued, one of the Lardies eased forward, a pleasant smile on his face. He had the beginnings of a fuzzy moustache on his top lip, and there was a general air of neatness and delicacy about him, despite his bulk. His tracksuit wasn’t like ours: it seemed to be made of crushed velvet.

    He addressed himself to our leader, J-Man, adopting a somewhat theatrical stance, with one leg slightly forward.
    ‘My dear Jermaine,’ he said in a voice like honey drizzled over cream. ‘Let us not permit this to escalate further. Neither of us desires trouble from the,
ahem
, authorities.’ He made a gesture towards a couple of the goons, who were starting to take an interest in our corner of the field.
    ‘I always thought you and the goons got on just fine, Hercule,’ said J-Man.
    Hercule shook his head slowly. ‘You had such promise, once,’ he said in that honeyed, poisonous voice of his. And then he turned to me. ‘You’re the new boy, aren’t you? There’s always room in my organization for boys of, ah, character. And there are perks, you know. Good food. More appropriate clothing.’ He stroked the thick velvet of his lapel. ‘An easier life.’
    ‘I’m happy where I am,’ I said, struggling to overcome the sickening, hypnotic power of his voice.
    ‘You keep your paws off my boys,’ said J-Man.
    ‘Do you think to threaten me, Jermaine? I’ve gone easy on you, on account of our old comradeship. But that leniency is now at an end. Consider that from now on your actions will have consequences.’
    ‘You can stick your consequences where the sun don’t shine,’ said J-Man.
    Hercule made as if to reply, then smiled sweetly, turned, and walked away with the other Lardies.
    ‘You used to be one of those guys?’ I asked.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Why did you leave?’
    ‘Because a kid’s got to sleep at night. And there’s things I won’t do for an extra helping of gruel. C’mon, let’s get changed, it’s time for PE. And I gotta tell you, PE here ain’t fun, no sir.’
    So back we went to good old Hut Four, and got changed into the Camp Fatso sports kit. This should actually have been called the Camp Fatso torture kit. It consisted of an absurdly tight orange (of course) top and a pair of ludicrous micro shorts, designed
solely
to humiliate us. OK, not solely; they had an important secondary function of cutting off the blood supply to the extremities, thereby causing a long, agonizing death by gangrene.
    Dough-faced Flo had tried to manufacture a bigger pair of shorts by stitching together two smaller pairs, but the outcome was like the ghastly