if you’d been using the aloe plant I gave you for those bruises. Your face still looks like a dropped pie.’
‘Charming,’ said Luke.
The sides of the sack were dusty with flour and thicker than a phonebook and Luke and Zac had to stop to reposition.
‘Here, pass me your Stainers,’ said Zac when they paused.
Luke pulled the handful of mushrooms from his pocket and quickly passed them over to Zac, who shoved them down the front of his sweatshirt.
Luke would bet his life they were harmless.
Hefting the heavy bag again, he said, ‘Anyway, supposing it works, I know who I want to use them on.’
‘Toad?’ said Zac.
Luke smiled.
‘Well, when we get there with this bag, you turn the oven on low. Real low. The lowest you can get it, okay? We don’t want roast mushrooms.’
‘And what’ll you be doing?’ said Luke.
‘When we get back with the second bag, I’ll slip them in. They’ll take a few hours to dry, though. We’ll have to find a way to get back in here this arvo.’
‘Oh, I can find us a way,’ said Luke.
By the time they’d joined the others with the second bag of flour, it looked like Kitkat and Barry had already sifted their flour into the mixer. Jonas was scooping up the pre-mix bread ingredients from a big bucket next to one of the mixers, while Hong Lo filled a two-litre jug of water.
Great, thought Luke. Looks like I’m on the losing team again.
Whoever got the job done first got to sample a slice of the finished product. In here, fresh, hot bread with real butter was as good as McDonald’s, especially when cold cereal was something worth fantasising over in this place. Luke didn’t make an effort in most competitions, but his stomach was flip-flopping now.
Chef Nick watched the show, every now and then raising a water bottle to his lips. The joke was that the bottle held straight vodka, but Luke knew it was no joke. He’d never seen anyone drain a bottle containing water as thoroughly as Nick. The only time he’d seen someone shaking out every last droplet from an upended bottle, there’d been a little something more in there than mere water.
Luke dug shovelfuls of flour into the mixer while Clarkson sifted in the bread mix. Hooley slopped warm water in on top, occasionally stopping to impatiently punch the pulse button to churn the huge mixing blades.
Impatiently, Luke pushed the safety guards of the mixer to the side; they got in the way of his shower of flour. If Hooley or Clarkson were stupid enough to reach in, he figured their forearm deserved to be blended into the dough.
He looked around for Zac – they needed someone to scrape the sides of the mixer bowl. When he didn’t spot Nguyen with a quick glance, he turned back to the task, shovelling madly. Chef Nick better not catch Zac stuffing around with his ovens.
Suddenly Zac was at his side. How do you do that? Luke thought.
‘You’re a sneaky little bugger,’ he said, handing Zac a long spatula.
‘So you’ve told me,’ said Zac.
‘Start scraping. Get in there.’
The dry ingredients were now a sticky mess in the bowl. Luke leaned on the pulse button, willing the gloop to form into a dough. The mixer groaned its way through the sludge. He heard the other team’s machine stop and he glanced to his left. Kitkat lifted the heavy arm of their mixer and popped out the mixing blades. Barry held the dough hooks, ready to slot them in for the next stage of the kneading. Luke let go of the button on their machine.
‘What are you doing, Black?’ said Hooley. ‘It’s not ready.’
‘Just give me the dough hooks,’ he said. ‘It’ll be right.’
‘No, you’ll stuff it up,’ said Clarkson.
Luke ignored him and ejected the mixing blades from the mixer arm, smacking them on the side of the bowl. Unmixed flour and ribbons of sticky dough spattered from the beaters.
‘Watch it, Black,’ said Hooley, wiping a white splodge from his face.
‘Would you shut it, you girl,’ said Luke. ‘You want Chef Nick over here?’
He shoved the two long dough hooks into the slots where the blades had been, and pushed the arm back into place.
Kitkat glared at him from across the bench; their lead had suddenly evaporated.
‘Don’t look now, Chef Nick’s on the way over,’ said Zac at the same time that Luke stabbed his thumb down on the pulse button.
Luke thought it was probably the sound that shocked him the most. A deafening, screeching scream of metal on metal as one of the dough hooks freed itself from the mixer arm. The other hook smashed against it relentlessly, trying to turn it into dough. Everything else in the mixer jetted itself into the air as though shot from a high-pressure water cannon.
Luke let go of the pulse button, dripping.
For maybe two seconds, the kitchen was very still.
And then the shouting began.
Chef Nick was the loudest. His outstretched arm, fingers still gripping a cigarette, was cloaked in a battered glove. Even knowing how much hell he was going to cop didn’t stop Luke taking a moment to admire the number of swear words Nick managed to get out without taking a breath. The language of the rest of Section Six was pretty imaginative too. Everyone dripped batter and flour. Hong Lo’s glasses had been completely whited out and he stumbled about, shouting words in Chinese. The floor, the walls, everything surrounding the giant mixer oozed and seeped.
‘Told you I’d get us another kitchen shift, didn’t I?’ said Luke, two hours later, elbow-deep in suds at the kitchen sink.
‘You suck, Black,’ said Zac, on his knees on the tiles, scrubbing.
‘Oh, you don’t even know about hating me yet, Zac. Just wait until you’ve peeled a few hundred carrots with me. Actually, maybe you should make up your mind how much you hate me after the onions.’ Luke pulled the last batter-spattered pot from the sink and rinsed it. ‘We’re really going to know our vegetables after today, aren’t we, Nguyen? What with your roasted mushrooms and all?’
Zac looked up, red in the face. ‘Why don’t you go and roast your -’
Luke laughed. ‘Hold that thought, bullet boy. I’m off to fetch us a sack of carrots.’
He dried his hands on a tea towel and made his way towards the supersized walk-in fridge at the opposite end of the room. He figured that Chef Nick wouldn’t be back any time soon. Luke had never had more than five minutes alone in the fridges, but he knew today would be different. When Chef had lost his cool and given him a backhander across the mouth, in front of everyone, he’d figured that old Nick would’ve needed at least a couple of his special water bottles to stop his hands shaking. After he’d barked out orders to Luke and Zac and left the room, Luke was pretty sure that they wouldn’t see him again before dinner.
The coolroom. Luke’s favourite place.
He yanked on the solid door handle of the massive refrigerator and rocked backwards on his heels to pull it open. The triple-insulated stainless steel door was as big as a single-garage door, and when it yawned wide the cavernous cold waited; a frigid mist whorling out indolently, beckoning him inwards.
Luke smiled. He’d been in the coolroom five times, and each time he’d felt more at peace, more safe, more himself than anywhere, anytime else. He stepped inside.
The cold was first. Un-ignorable. Everywhere. And the dimness, the almost-dark dankness. And then the stillness registered.
He breathed in.
The sounds next. Quiet, but not silent. Always a hum, a presence, a ticking, something waiting. Ready. He’d felt the same way since birth, or at least since he’d been aware he’d been born. The cold. The quiet, the ticking, the hum.
