Free Things I Did for Money by Meg Mundell

face.
    My glass was nearly empty when I caught a gleam amongst the melting ice cubes. I glanced around, but the others were all talking and laughing, seemingly oblivious. When I fished the coin out and held it up to the light, the table fell quiet. Then Will let out a low whistle. ‘Well, well,’ he said theatrically. ‘What have you got there.’
    I looked at Mick, unsure of what to feel. Angry? Patronised? Grateful? ‘What’s this?’ I asked, stalling.
    He shrugged. ‘It’s yours. You found one, so did I.’
    They all stared at me expectantly, like grandparents watching a child unwrap a birthday gift. ‘Finders keepers?’ said Will hopefully, half-raising his glass. Mick grinned at me then, his face creasing up like a cheeky kid, and I smiled back. Held my own glass high.
    â€˜To Saint George and that poor old dragon,’ I said. ‘Gone but not forgotten.’
    Later, watching the video at home, I fast-forwarded the bit where I lay gasping on the deck, skipped over the raw distress that no one should have had to witness. But I watched the last scene several times. I’d shot it from the pier in a blustery wind as the boat pulled out from the marina, heading up the coast to drop the others home. The weather had cooled, so the Spanish guy had put his T-shirt on, much to Lucia’s disappointment. The skipper was out of shot, steering, but the others waved goodbye in unison. All except for Mick. As the boat drew away into the distance, he just stood there with one hand aloft, making the OK signal for the camera.

THE CONE MACHINE
    I’ve made a million ice-cream cones. It starts at eight and ends at six, five days a week, twenty-six cones a minute, for nine years. That’s a lot of cones. If I stacked all the cones I’ve ever made into one huge pile it would stretch halfway to Pluto.
    No one else operates the cone machine. It’s all mine. When I switch it on in the morning it gives me a little beep. All day we stand in the window together, my back to the street. When I open and close the machine it’s like a big flapping mouth — it opens, I pour in the mixture, close the lid, wait nineteen seconds, the machine beeps, I open the lid, take out the flat discs and roll them into cone shapes, stack them up all neat. Then we start over. The cone machine reminds me of a big, helpless baby bird — sees me coming and that big mouth flaps open.
    Anyway, this morning we’re building up a good rhythm when I notice that Frank, one of the ice-cream servers, keeps looking out the window all edgy. I wonder what he’s looking at but I don’t ask — Frank can be kind of uppity. Art student, just a young guy with some fluff on his lip, but ready to take on the world. We’ve had a couple of run-ins over status. He thought rolling some ice-cream into a ball and jamming it in a cone was some kind of performance piece, so I had to set him straight: without your cone, you can forget it, buddy. The cone comes first.
    So Frank’s looking out the window every two minutes, staring right over my shoulder, and it’s getting distracting. I don’t want to break my flow so I wait till I’ve got a batch of batter cooking. Then I click the lid shut, turn, look out into the street.
    And there’s this man. And I know he’s not looking at Frank: he’s looking at me.
    I only have about fifteen seconds, so I play it cool, look right back at the guy like it’s no big deal, so what if he’s staring. Then, real casual, I shift my eyes and start looking at something else, further over to his left. It seems like a long time before the machine finally beeps and I can turn back around again.
    His face is familiar but I just can’t place it.
    Frank is putting on a Broadway show for a pretty girl who wants a vanilla choc-chip, so I have some time to think. There’s dough build-up in the corner of the machine’s mouth, and I