Chasing Daisy

they’re speaking Spanish. I wonder if they’re sisters. Holly will know. Holly knows everything.
    ‘Hi, Catalina, Frederick said you wanted this?’ I offer it to her.
    ‘What is it?’ Her tone is as horrible as the look she gives me. ‘Oh, popcorn,’ she says, spying the crumpled packaging. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’ she demands to know.
    ‘Um, I couldn’t fit it in my—’
    ‘Have you been eating it?’
    ‘I couldn’t fit it—’
    ‘Put it there,’ she huffily interrupts, pointing to the tabletop in front of her.
    The catering here is excellent, so why she’s demanding popcorn in the first place is beyond me. Actually, I take that back. Nothing beats popcorn. But unlike her, if the rumours are to be believed, I won’t be throwing it up in the toilets later.
    I finally return to the kitchen.
    ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Frederick shouts.
    ‘I had a bit of an accident,’ I explain.
    ‘You smell like you’ve been eating . . .’ He leans towards me and gives a single loud sniff through his extremely large nostrils. ‘Popcorn!’
    He looks like a cartoon gangster, Frederick. Big nose, greasy black hair. And he’s very tall and extremely lanky. I glance back at him to see him eyeing me suspiciously.
    ‘Um, do I?’ I ask innocently. He has an annoyingly good sense of smell. I guess it’s useful if you’re a chef, but in situations like these. . .
    ‘What sort of accident?’ he snaps.
    I anxiously lead him outside to the scooter.
    ‘It could be worse,’ he grumpily concludes after he’s inspected the damage.
    ‘What happened?’ Holly appears around the corner, full of concern when she sees us kneeling on the floor studying the scratches.
    I fill her in, her eyes widening when I tell her who my audience was.
    ‘Right, enough,’ Frederick interrupts. ‘Back to work. There are three bags of potatoes for you to peel, Daisy.’
    I notice that Holly gets to decorate a cake. I always get the shittiest jobs.
    ‘Hey,’ Holly says later, when Frederick pops out of the kitchen. I’ve been watching her distractedly for the last ten minutes as she’s cut a sponge cake into large cubes and plastered them with chocolate icing. ‘A few of the lads have been talking about going out tonight. Fancy it?’
    ‘Sure, where?’
    ‘St Kilda,’ she says, dipping one of the chocolate-covered cubes into desiccated coconut.
    ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Curiosity gets the better of me.
    ‘What?’
    ‘With that cake.’ I nod at the furry-looking cube.
    ‘Lamingtons,’ she explains. ‘They’re Aussie cakes.’
    We always try to cater according to the country we’re in and it sometimes makes for an ‘interesting’ menu.
    ‘Anyway, back to tonight . . .’ She leans against the counter and wipes the coconut off her hands.
    ‘Where’s St Kilda?’ I ask.
    ‘It’s a really cool suburb on the other side of the park.’
    ‘Will we be able to get away in time?’
    ‘Yeah, should be fine. We did the early shift and half the team is going to that sponsorship event anyway so we don’t really need to be around after eight thirty. I’m gagging for a drink.’ She puts her hands up to her head and tightens her high, bleached-blonde ponytail.
    ‘I need a drink, too. Especially after earlier . . .’
    ‘I still need to hear all about that,’ she says. ‘Not now, though,’ she adds, as Frederick walks back in, so we both put our heads down and crack on.
    ‘You called him a dickhead again? In front of Will?’ Holly claps her hand over her mouth in wide-eyed shock, then starts laughing through her fingers.
    The air is hot and humid and we’re seated outside a pub in St Kilda. We walked here straight from the track, along Fitzroy Street’s dozens of cafés, restaurants and bars, all spilling out onto the pavement with rowdy revellers.
    ‘He deserved it,’ I say flippantly.
    ‘Who deserved what?’ Pete, one of the mechanics, plonks himself down on a recently vacated chair next to us. A few of the ‘lads’, as Holly likes to call them, have joined us for a drink. It’s ten o’clock at night and they’ve only just come from the track, although they swear they’re heading back to the hotel by midnight. Last time they said this, we were in Shanghai towards the end of the season, and they were out on the town until three a.m. When Simon got wind of it, he was not happy.
    ‘She crashed one of the team scooters in front of Will and Luis earlier,’ Holly tells