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Thursday 18 January
    THERE HAS BEEN a second pooping episode. Again, I found myself not very far from the scene of the crime. It was PE with the insane Mr Fricker, who lost both his hands in some kind of military incident before he became a teacher. We spend quite a lot of our time speculating about how this might have occurred. The latest theory is that his hands were chewed off by a starving camel.
    We’re doing rugby this term, which is slightly better than cross-country running, and much, much worse than, say, eating a pizza. Mr Fricker usually joins in, doing really painful, crunching tackles on the kids he doesn’t like, e.g. me. He has some special extra large rugby hands which he uses to catch the ball and shove you out of the way.
    Doing PE is no fun, but there is one thing that’s worse. Forgetting your PE kit is the absolute vilest sin in the Fricker universe. Forget your kit and he’ll invent some terrible task for you to perform while the rest of the class run around on the sports field. Rumour has it that he once made a kid lick the wooden floor of the gym clean. Someone else told me that he drinks out of a cup made from the skull of a boy who forgot his kit two weeks running.
    I was sure I’d packed my PE kit earlier that morning , but when I looked in my bag in the changing rooms: zilch.
    ‘You’re doomed,’ said Spam.
    I went and stood in front of Mr Fricker. He was unscrewing his normal hand and screwing on his rugby hand. What looked like human hair was trapped under the fake nail.
    ‘What is it, Millicent?’
    ‘It’s Milligan, sir.’
    ‘I know who you are. I was being sarcastic. Millicent is a girl’s name. I was suggesting that you are like a girl. A fat girl. Got that?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘So, what do you want?’
    ‘It’s my kit, sir. I’ve—’
    ‘Don’t bother even finishing that sentence, Millicent.’
    ‘Sorry, sir.’
    Fricker screwed in the second giant rugby hand. It made a
skreek-skreek-skreek
noise as he rotated it. I think he did this as what is known as a Displacement Activity. This is when you do one thing even though you’d rather be doing another. The thing he’d rather be doing was unscrewing my head.
    ‘I want you over in that corner, standing on one leg. I’m going to send a boy over every ten minutes. If he reports back that you are not standing on one leg, then I AM GOING TO COME BACK HERE AND TEAR THE LEG OFF AT THE SOCKET AND BEAT YOUR BRAINS OUT WITH IT. Got that?’
    I went and stood on one leg in the corner of the gym, as indicated by the psychopath, and thanked my lucky stars that he was in a good mood.

    The strange thing is that it turns out I’m actually quite good at standing on one leg. It was a double lesson, so that meant an hour and a half. Every ten minutes I changed legs. I did a bit of hopping to keep the circulation going. Only fell over twice. All in all, as an activity, it ranked mid-way between eating a pizza and getting attacked by Mr Fricker on the rugby pitch.
    Anyway, the hour and a half passed. First the girls came in from netball. Ludmilla glanced over at me and raised her hand, as if she was about to give me one of her little waves. But she stopped halfway through, lifted her chin bravely and went on. The tight leotard and short yellow skirt weren’t very flattering, but I still felt a pang of affection for the human girl inside the troll.
    Then the boys came in from rugby. They were drenched by the rain and coated in mud, and had the eyes of people who had seen Terrible, Terrible Things. It was possible that Mr Fricker’s shorty shorts had rucked up his horrific bumcrack again. I said a little prayer to whichever deity it was that had made me forget my PE kit. At the doorway, the battered war veterans turned left and filed into the changing rooms.
    Seconds later, they ran out again. Their faces were all twisted up – some with disgust, some with laughter.
    Mr Fricker appeared, carrying the rugby