The Donut Diaries by Dermot Milligan

much time. We’ve clearly been betrayed. We’re not really at Camp Fitso to get fit – we’ve been sent by the Badges Protection League.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘I told you to shut up and listen. We were going to go under the wall into Camp Fatso. But now we’ll never get another chance, so it’s up to you. Hut Nineteen. Go there. Rescue the badges. Understand?
    ‘No . . .’
    Suddenly we were surrounded by goons – except that these weren’t really goons, but goonettes, i.e. lady goons. Which doesn’t mean that they were nice and ladylike – in fact they were horrid, shouting and pushing and jabbing at us with paintball guns. In this manner we were led to a building at the heart of Camp Fitso.
    As I’d seen from the human pyramid, everything on this side of the wall was much more pleasant than on the boys’ side, and the building we entered was all big windows and shining steel and polished stone floors. The goonettes took us to an office. I was made to sit on a bench outside, while the girls went in. As they passed me, Ludmilla stumbled and barged into Tamara, who in turn crashed into me.
    ‘Don’t forget, Hut Nineteen,’ she said, and I felt her cram something into the trouser pocket of my orange tracksuit. I didn’t immediately check to see what it was in case it attracted attention.
    I sat outside the office for ten minutes, sandwiched between two goonettes. I tried to make conversation, but the goonettes weren’t the talking kind.
    And then Ludmilla and Tamara came out, looking cowed. I managed to mouth, ‘Get help!’ at Tamara. Unfortunately, mouthing reasonably complicated things never works very well. She might easily have thought I said, ‘Sausage, marshmallow, banana, Humpty Dumpty,’ although I admit that would have been a really stupid thing to say right then. Or at any other time.
    The office was huge. There was a figure sitting in a swivel chair, facing away from me, its occupant surveying Camp Fitso through the big window. Slowly the chair spun to face me. Bizarrely, the arms of the chair were formed from two stuffed badgers. But that wasn’t what shocked me. What shocked me was the person in the chair. Shocking and horrifying, and yet also inevitable.

    ‘Dermot, how nice to see you. Do sit down.’
    These words emerged from a mouth so like a cat’s bum, one imagines that somewhere there’s a cat with a human mouth for its bottom wandering around, very much regretting having made the swap.
    ‘Dr Morlock,’ I said, because that’s who it was, and any other name would have been simply and straightforwardly wrong.
    Doc Morlock, my nutritionist, had been the bane of my life for almost a year now, forcing me to undergo a rigorous, donut-free diet, and checking my – well, let’s say waste products – to make sure that I wasn’t straying from the straight and narrow broccoli path.
    ‘What . . .? I mean, how . . .? I mean who . . .?’
    The cat’s bum changed shape. Doc Morlock was smiling.
    ‘You didn’t know that I was the Oberkommandant of Camps Fatso and Fitso?’
    ‘No . . . I just thought you were . . .’
    ‘A simple nutritionist? Oh, no, let me tell you that I have greater ambitions than that. I plan to roll out Camp Fatsos all over the country, improving the health and vitality of the nation’s young people.’
    ‘And making tons of money for yourself,’ I said. Or rather, thought, as I’m basically a coward.
    ‘However, we’re here to talk about
you
, Dermot. I feel rather let down by you. Trying to escape in that frankly amateurish way. Did you really think you could do it?’
    ‘I—’
    ‘But the more important question is what to do with you now? I could, of course, just have you thrown in the cooler for a couple of days. That should help you to see reason. Or, if I felt that this sort of insubordination was going to continue, then I could see about extending your stay with us well beyond the end of next week.’
    ‘But you can’t! My