Photo by kaleb tapp on Unsplash
If you’ve ever spent much time at an ice rink, you’ll know they are lawless places. That’s why they need so many rules. No skating without a wristband. No camel spins. No skating against the flow of traffic. This list of dos and don’ts, poorly enforced by teenagers in high-vis jackets, is the only thing protecting everyone involved from all out carnage. For this reason, you’ll never find me chewing gum, wearing headphones or going against the tide while everyone else skates counterclockwise.
It’s a muggy Sunday afternoon outside, so I’m wearing an unorthodox sundress. I don’t wear gloves either but I skate so fast that the cold can’t catch me. I arrive before the chaos of birthday parties and Scout groups, coming from my housemate’s barbecue, with my skates slung dangerously over my shoulder. If it was up to me, I’d have the ice to myself.
In here, the air is fresher than street level, like opening the front door of my house the night after snowfall. The ice is newly zambonied. It looks like the rink has been wrapped in cellophane.
My footing is uncertain as I step onto the rink. It’s been three years since I’ve skated. I am the third person on, beating the casuals still queuing to collect skates. I recognise a female skater, already on the ice, from my figure skating days. Today she is practicing her turns in the customary black leggings and neat bun. Her name is Christine. I pretend not to see her, and she gives me the same treatment. I’m sure she would say I no longer have the figure for figure skating. Or ignore me completely.
To her right, behind a plastic pane, is the ice rink DJ. Complete with shaggy hair and tank top, he is bopping along to Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off. With all this space I carve a couple of lemons in a push-pull motion, but my rinklegs feel wobbly. I begin to slalom down towards the end zone and my toe pick catches on the ice. I trip, but catch myself. My heart has flown up into my throat. All I can think about is the fear of falling.
I didn’t stay for long at the barbecue. My housemate had her PR friends round, gloating about her promotion to associate. By my second mojito and my third: ‘So what do you do, Cleo?’ I’d had enough. I had my response crafted, ready to recite: “I’m currently a temp but in the future I hope to become a more permanent person.”
I return to skating forward. No lemons, no slalom, a couple of easy forward crossovers. My sundress parachutes slightly. I pick up speed, and as I do the great mass of skaters spill out onto the ice.
There are weekend dads, preteens in out-of-season Christmas jumpers, ice hockey players in tracksuits. Most don the clunky blue skates with blunt blades. I dodge flailing arms and legs. I swerve around toddlers clinging to penguin bollards. I pause by the side. There’s a man that I know all too well from my figure skating days, sat in the stands on his own. The way he’s watching the rink, he could easily be one of those solitary men you hear about, spending their weekends at swimming pools, playgrounds, the beach, and now ice rinks. There is, of course, another rule at the rink: All children must be accompanied by an adult. All adult spectators must be accompanied by children. But that rule doesn’t apply to the coaches.
I start to go really fast, emboldened by the side-clingers, digging in my skates to speed up and then letting myself glide. I’m not sure if I’ve gone deep down into my body, or somewhere high up in the air, but my movements become fluid. I’ve missed this. The ice is an atlas onto which I draw cobbled streets, lagoons, dark alleyways, rolling hills and long empty motorways. I’ve forgotten my job, the street I live on, the barbecue. Right now, if someone asks me what I do, I will tell them I skate.
A girl has fallen. Her friend is looking around for help. I’m fully first aid trained. The girl is clutching her arm, she is bleeding through her pink hoodie. I know how to stop a catastrophic bleed. I could help. I skate past. She is escorted off the ice by marshals who prop her up. I hope they have a blanket for her. I hope it’s just a small cut. I hope they have a warm first aid room and that her mum is waiting on the side to give her a hug.
She leaves behind red spots on the ice, seeping into blade-carved cracks. The rink closed when I was a child after someone got shot. We weren’t allowed to come for years after that. There was a big refurb, and eventually enough time had passed that it was pronounced safe. Fifteen-year-old me decided to become a figure skater, but I was too late. I had the wrong clothes, in the full throes of puberty, with children half my age. As a twenty-year-old I can’t say I’m any better prepared.
I come off the ice, pausing at the drinking fountain. I hoped I wouldn’t see him today, and yet there he is, my old coach Jonathan. He’s looking in my direction. I turn away, and see the girl in the pink jumper in the first aid room, surrounded by skate marshals. She is hunched over, her mum dabbing her face with a tissue.
Three years ago I had my own accident on the ice. I’d spent months rehearsing for a half-time figure skating performance at a Red Hawks game. I was wearing my sequins with such pride, as though I was the star of the 1984 winter Olympics, to be featured on squat tellies across the nation. We picked out our outfits online, and I turned up in this mermaid-inspired turquoise number, nude tights, the tiniest tutu, hair pressed into ringlets.
When I got to the changing room, the others were in black leggings and thermals. Charlene, who was lacing up her skates, sniggered. I heard one of them say something like, ‘tragic’. I hid in the disabled loo for several minutes, until the coach knocked on the door. I was surprised that he had followed me. I was not used to kindness from him. He convinced me to just rock it. We were given our three-minute warning. I stood at the door to the ice watching the clock count down, waiting for my cue.
Suddenly I feel self-conscious. I fish out my navy hoodie, tie my into a ponytail, and then take up occupation in the centre circle to practice my mohawks. I shift my weight from one foot to another, changing direction as I go. I mark this territory with glares and huffs, only making an exception for a little blonde girl on her own making ice angels, her hair lying limp against the ice. She looks at me with big admiring eyes as I perform a couple of rehearsed moves for her.
Kids are easily impressed. Stadiums of hockey fans not so much. As soon as I stepped onto the ice for our performance I knew something was wrong. Then, as we were warming up to it, just getting going with some flourishes, my legs gave way. It was only a bunnyhop. I fell onto my arm in a strange way. The music came to a halt. I was perfectly still, bar my chest heaving with terror, ice melting underneath my fingertips. The coach dragged me off. He wanted me out of the way as quickly as possible. I remember lying on the bench in the first aid room alone, hearing the soundtrack for our routine thrumming through the thin wall and thinking: they’re skating without me.
After the performance, quitting felt too dramatic. I believed if I kept going to practice, then eventually everything would return to normal. Some of the hockey players would shout ‘Ariel’ at me from the sidelines at they waited for their turn on the ice. One time I swear I found sand in my locker, though it always sounded too implausible to say out loud. I carried on regardless, until that one Tuesday.
The practice itself was normal. In fact, the girls were friendlier than usual. I thought things were changing finally. But then- it was four days before I realised. The hottest day of the year, as it happened. I went to a lido with some friends, had a picnic in the park. By the time I got back home, the heat of the day was mostly over, but the air was still humid. I caught a whiff of something as I went into my bedroom, but it was only as I went to hang up my hoodie in the wardrobe that I realised. Everything stunk of sardines.
Someone had emptied into my skate bag several tins of sardines in tomato sauce. My mermaid dress, hanging above the skate bag, smelt of rotten fish right down to the very seams.
My Mum called up Jonathan that same evening. He asked to be put on the phone with me to ‘get to the bottom of it’.
‘You know, you really let me down the other day. And you’re calling me up about what? Sardines? Honestly I think you’ve got a serious attitude problem. You know what it is? You don’t work like the other girls. You don’t push yourself. You can keep coming to training, but I’m afraid I can’t put you forward for anymore performances. I only want to put people on the ice who want to be there,’ Jonathan said, before calmly asking to be put back on the phone with my mother.
I sense Christine enter my skatial orbit. She’s wearing the troupe’s trademark black leggings and long sleeved top. I suspect as she approaches that she will perform a spin to show me up, but instead she comes to a crisp t-stop in front of me and smiles.
‘Cleo.’ She says. I don’t rush to fill the silence. I’m trying to stop feeling wobbly on the inside. ‘Good to have you back.’
I flash a sarcastic smile and then instantly regret it. Christine was never deliberately cruel.
‘Look, I just wanted to say what happened was super fucked up,’ she says, tightening her ponytail.
‘I’m over it, really,’ I say.
‘And the way the coach handled it, I’m not surprised you didn’t come back after that.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘The coach put them up to it. He thought it was hilarious.’
‘Uh - excuse me.’
I skate away as the fear of falling takes hold again. Any moment, a deep dark crack will worm its way to the surface of the ice, exposing a deep dark chasm. Down I’ll go, along with three hundred screaming children.
I dump my navy hoodie at the side, now furious, and let my hair flow free once more. When I return to the ice, I begin to skate angrily. I dig into the ice with my blades and terrorise small children with my speed.
But something magical happens as I skate. I can’t hold onto the anger, it flies up above me into the space above my head, filling the arena before atomising into the air.
The public skate is over, and marshals are calling everyone off the ice, but I stay on. I start the routine that got cut short, beginning with a bunny hop but this time I land it perfectly. I feel something approaching redemption, and then I stack it. I misjudge the blade edge, and trip. Some of the skaters stop and turn to watch me. But the ice hasn’t cracked. I’m not falling, I’m fine.
I get up, sweaty and breathless, but muster the energy for one last victory lap.
Deborah Torr is a writer from South London. Deborah used to write for the funeral industry but now writes short stories and occasionally posts on Twitter, @deborah_torr. Deborah was one of the London Library’s Emerging Writers 2019 and has words in Reflex Press, Fictive Dream among others.