The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

the future
holds. I still don’t know what I’m going to do.
    I can’t stand it.
    I hate it. Even this, this stupid notebook,
this diary, whatever it is. I despise it. I mean, what’s the point of it anyway?
Who am I writing
to
? Who are you? Why am I talking to you? What are you going
to do to help me?
    Nothing.
    Less than nothing.
    If you exist, if you’re reading this,
then I’m probably dead. Because if I ever get out of here the first thing
I’m going to do is burn this notebook. Burn
you
. You won’t exist
any more. But then …
    Just a minute.
    If I get out of here and burn you, if I
delete your existence, does that mean you won’t
ever
have existed?
    Shit, that’s hard thinking.
    Let me think.
    You
have
to exist now. Otherwise
I’m dead.
    But I’m not. And neither of us knows
how this is going to end …
    So that means …
    Shit.
    I can’t be bothered with it.
    I don’t feel well.
    I’m going to sleep.

Sunday, 5 February
    It’s sometime in the afternoon.
I’ve had really bad diarrhoea all day. My mouth is dry and my belly hurts.
    I can’t get out of bed.
    No energy to write.
    Later, evening.
    I’m still in bed. I don’t know
what time it is. I’ve been asleep. I can hear the others talking in the kitchen.
Jenny, Anja, Fred. It’s a comforting sound, but kind of depressing too. I feel
left out. Everyone’s finally talking to each other and I’m too sick to be
there. It’s not fair.
    Fair doesn’t come into it.
    Later still.
    My stomach seems to have settled down.
It’s still hurting a bit, but it’s not too bad. Just a dull ache, deep down
inside me. I haven’t had to go to the bathroom for a while, which is good.
Constant diarrhoea is a really shitty thing to have. No joke. Diarrhoea, bubbling guts,
bad smells … 
very
bad smells. This room absolutely
stinks
.
    Jenny’s been bringing me bowls of soup
all evening. Hot soup, hot milk, cold towels. I keep telling her I don’t want to
eat anything, but she keeps on bringing it anyway. Just in case,she
says. Every time she comes in she tries not to wrinkle her nose at the smell, but she
can’t help it. I don’t blame her. It’s a nose-wrinkling smell.
    I’ve insisted she sleeps somewhere
else tonight.
    ‘But you need looking after,’
she said.
    ‘Whatever I’ve got might be
catching,’ I explained. ‘Who’s going to look after me if you get
ill?’
    ‘Well …’ She wrinkled her
nose again. ‘I suppose I
could
sleep in the room next door.’
    ‘At least you’ll be able to
breathe.’
    She smiled awkwardly.
    ‘Look,’ I said.
‘I’ll leave my door open, OK? If I need you, I’ll knock on the wall.
And if you need me –’
    ‘I’ll whistle. I’m a good
whistler.’
    She whistled, just to show me what she
meant. Then she picked up the tray of cold soup and left.
    Fred popped in a while ago. He says he
still feels like shit, but he thinks he’s over the worst of it now. He
doesn’t look too good. He’s lost a lot of weight. His eyes are kind of
watery and his nose is all runny. He looks like someone who’s just getting over a
really bad dose of flu. He didn’t say much, just asked me how I was doing, hoped I
was getting better, that kind of thing. It felt odd at first, being alone in a tiny
little room with this grizzly-bear-sized man. It made me feel a bit edgy. A bit cramped.
After a while though, after I’d realized he wasn’t going to eat me or
anything, I started to relax a bit. I talked to him. I asked him how he was doing, what
he thought about things – escaping, getting out, that kind of thing. It was kind of OK,
just the two of us, talking about stuff. Strangelyrelaxing. At one
point he even smiled at me. He’s got surprisingly nice teeth. Smaller than I
imagined. Whiter too.
    I don’t know what kind of teeth I
expected him to have. Maybe tattooed ones, or fangs or something.
    Before he left he gave me a friendly pat on
the arm. You know, one of those man-to-man/see-you-later-mate pats. I