Free The Donut Diaries by Dermot Milligan Page B

another.
    But it was going OK. I was up to the penultimate tier – the one with two fat kids. I was quite pleased to see that it was the Tweedle twins, who you’d have thought would be used to working as a team.
    And then I made the fatal mistake of looking down. I hadn’t quite grasped how high up it was going to be. It felt like I was on top of the Eiffel Tower. An Eiffel Tower made out of fat people.
    Phlapp was looking up as I looked down.
    ‘Keep at it, lad, you’re doing fine.’
    I don’t know why, but I always find encouragement discouraging. It means the person doing the encouraging thinks I’m about to fail – otherwise why bother encouraging me?
    But I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to complete the pyramid, to form a perfect geometrical shape here amid the horrors of Camp Fatso. It would be a blow struck on behalf of, er, human pyramids everywhere!
    So I gritted my teeth and climbed on. Right foot on Tweedledum’s left thigh, left foot on Tweedledee’s right. Now the shoulder. I was still holding onto Dee and Dum’s hair with my hands . . . I just had to let go and stand fully erect.
    I stood.
    I’d done it.
    Phlapp beamed proudly. Kids around the field began to clap.
    And I could see for miles. See over the fence. See the woods beyond and, further out, fields and roads and freedom. And in the other direction I could see over the blank wall of corrugated iron. What I saw there astonished me.
    It was another camp.
    And it was full of girls.
    Girls playing rounders and netball. Girls skipping and laughing. And even though the rain was lashing into our faces on this side of the wall, over there the sun was shining.
    So that’s what J-Man had meant.
    Then I felt a wobble. I glanced down again. Phlapp was somehow unsatisfied with the positioning of one of the boys on the bottom tier. There was a kink where there should have been a straight line. He was fiddling, prodding, pulling, trying to get back to that state of geometric perfection he craved. But I knew that it was insanity. Even after my short acquaintance with the human pyramid, I knew that it is folly to mess with the structure once it is up.
    And yes, the inevitable was happening. The line kinked more, then buckled. One of the bottom-tier kids went down on one knee and the whole edifice began to crumble. Tier by tier, the pyramid collapsed. Poor Phlapp tried vainly to shore it up, but it was futile.
    And fatal.
    At the last moment he seemed to realize the peril he was in, and he turned and began to run. But it was too late. I was already falling. I’m not sure who screamed louder, me or him.
    And then I landed right on top of him with a sickening crunch, with a certain amount of added splat, crushing him into the mud, like an elephant sitting on a quail’s egg.

    It hurt, but not that much, as the soft mud provided a certain amount of cushioning. As did my in-built air-bags.
    I picked myself up. The crowd around us was silent for a second or two. And then someone – Flo, I think – said, ‘Jeepers, you’ve killed him . . .’
    And suddenly the other goons were there, and people were shouting in my face, including Boss Skinner and Badwig. I heard the words ‘deliberate attack’ and ‘assassination attempt’ and I tried weakly to protest. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ I said, which made me sound like the most pathetic murderer in history.
    And then, to my relief, I heard a groan, and Phlapp pushed himself up onto his elbows. ‘Accident . . .’ he said, his voice as frail and feeble as a dying daddy-longlegs.
    Boss Skinner’s black eyes bored into me. ‘Your lucky day, boy,’ he whispered, as if he’d been hoping that Phlapp really had died, just so he could inflict suitable retribution on me.
    Half an hour later the ambulance arrived to take Phlapp away.
    Nothing very interesting happened during the rest of the day.
    Dinner was gruel.
    In the evening we lay on our bunks whilst Igor played his harmonica. I say ‘played’