legends · 4 min read ·
Night Resurfacer
A night driver of an ice resurfacer finds a figure-skating line drawn fresh on ice that is locked.
I drive the machine that makes the ice. At the Orchard Leisure Centre, after the last public skate and the last hockey practice, after the lights have been cut to a third and the cleaners have gone through with their mops, I climb into the cab of the resurfacer and take it out onto the rink for the night pass. It's a big heavy thing, olive green, with a blade at the back that shaves the ice and a tank that lays down hot water. It takes twenty minutes to do the whole sheet. Thirty to forty circuits, a slow sleeping spiral, and when you come out the surface is glass.
I like it. The rink at night is the quietest place I know. Breath hanging, a hum from the compressors, the low click of the cooling pipes under the floor. I drive in long ovals, and the new ice comes up behind me like skin.
The thing you learn about ice is that it records. Every skate that has crossed it leaves a line, a ghost, a groove. You can read the afternoon in it, the busy bits, the wobbly beginners, the cross-hatching of a speed skater. I read it as I shave it. It's like erasing a very long letter.
In November I began to see a track I didn't recognise.
It was a single line, thin, silver, beginning at the centre of the rink and going out in a long, slow spiral. A careful figure. The sort of curve a figure skater cuts when practising a compulsory. The ice was smooth under the lights and the line lay on it like a hair. I took the machine over it, and the blade shaved it away, and I carried on.
The next night it was there again. And the next. The same spiral, from the centre outward, always the same, always starting at the exact middle where there's a small blue spot on the surface.
The rink is locked at night. There's no one in. No one skates between midnight and six. I've checked the alarms. I stood at the barrier one evening after I'd finished and listened to the building, and there was no sound.
On the fourth night I turned the lights off and sat on the machine in the dark and watched.
For an hour nothing happened. The compressors ticked. A security light glowed green over the exit. And then, towards two in the morning, at the blue spot, I saw a movement, a very faint brightening, like a breath on glass. And a line began to draw itself on the ice, out of nothing, without sound. A slow elegant spiral, pulling outwards with a delicate slicing hiss.
I'm not brave. I held very still. The line widened, round and round. And I saw, at the head of it, not a person, but a kind of depression in the ice, a small moving dent, as though a blade were travelling with no foot above it. It was graceful. It was beautiful. It cut a perfect curve at a speed that no human skater could hold.
I watched until it reached the boards. It stopped. The dent rested there for a moment. And then it turned, with a small sigh of ice, and it began to come back towards me.
I could have started the engine. I did think of it. But I sat in the cab, my hands on my knees, and I watched it come across the frozen floor in a line as straight as a rule, until it stopped a yard from the front wheel. A skate-mark, open at the end like a mouth.
On the ice in front of me, in a thin white scratch, it wrote: *PLEASE*.
I started the engine. I did the night pass. I took the blade across the word and the spiral and the hundred small lines that lay beside them, and I laid down the water, and it froze to glass.
I'm told I should have left it. I'm told that a thing that wants to skate should be let to. But I did my job. The ice was fresh and clean and flat in the morning, and the first public session was full of laughter.
It's been a month. There is no line on the ice any more. I look for it every night. Each night, after the pass, there's a single small thing left at the blue spot at the centre: a thin curl of ice, shaved off by a blade I did not drive, laid down as neatly as a ribbon, as if someone, very gently, had wished to return what I had taken.