The pavilion had been built for dancing and had spent forty years pretending to be useful. That July it held a temporary ice rink, and the ice was the only cold thing in Marden for eleven miles.
I worked the hire desk: six pounds a session, skates in sizes three to twelve, a cloth for the blades. The compressor sweated, the floor under the mats went slick by four, and I used the mop behind the counter more often than the till. Nine days of it, and half the people who paid did not skate at all. They stood at the barrier with their eyes shut, as though the cold were a place you could visit.
The man in the winter coat came every day at four. He paid in coins, counted into a stack on the counter, and said thank you. Size nine. He laced them on the bench nearest the door, took his glasses off and put them in his pocket, and went out and was terrible.
Not funny-terrible. Careful terrible: knees stiff, arms out, chin down, the way people skate when they have decided that falling happens to other people. He went once round the long side, stopped at the far end, where the ice went grey and soft by evening, and stood there a while before starting again. He never fell. I began to watch for it.
On the Tuesday a girl came in with a plastic brace on her left wrist and paid for four. She held it up for her friends to admire, and I took her money.
The man had a routine: forty minutes, three stops at the far end, one cup of tea from the machine, then the bench by the door and his skates unlaced very slowly, as though his fingers hurt.
By the second week the heat was in the building: the chiller ran all night and the ice still went to slush along the boards by the last session. On the Friday I put a cone out on the bad patch. Mr Ackroyd, who owned the rink, said the cone spoiled the photographs on the website, so I took it away.
In my bag was an envelope from a rink in Leeds, a contract and a line for my signature. Eleven days.
On the Thursday the four o’clock session was empty except for him. The sky over the promenade had gone the colour of wet slate, and I was tired of my own company, so I put my own skates on, which I never did in front of customers, and went out to him.
He was already there, standing still with his hands loose at his sides.
“You’re not learning,” I said.
He did not look surprised. “No.”
“You’ve been coming two weeks. A beginner would have got round by now.” I nodded at the grey patch. “You’re not skating. You’re standing on it.”
The lights dipped and came back. The storm was close enough to hear under the roof, a low sound like a lorry idling outside, and in that half-dark he turned on one foot and went backwards across the corner, three clean strides, and stopped without a wobble.
He came back to me. “I was going to tell you on Monday. I’d have told Mr Ackroyd first.”
“Tell me what?”
“My name is Dennis Rooke. I assess ice for insurers.” He said it plainly, the way he said everything. “A girl fell here last August. Twelve years old, two bones in her wrist. Her family made a claim, the claim needs a report, and your Mr Ackroyd has been telling my office for ten months that the rink is level.”
“You could have asked him for an hour. They sell levels in the hardware shop on the corner.”
“I asked in June. He offered me a free season instead.” Dennis put his hands in his pockets. “I said I’d rather pay. Six pounds a day, forty minutes, and he thinks I’m a lonely man with bad balance, which is a useful thing for him to think.”
The floor at that end dipped by two fingers. I had known that since the spring, the way you know a stair is loose. I had put a cone there, then taken the cone away, and gone on telling children to mind the corner in a bright voice, and gone on taking the money.
“You knew,” he said. Not unkindly. Not kindly either.
“I put a cone out.”
“I saw the cone,” he said. “I came on the Saturday and it was gone.”
The rain hit the roof then, all at once, the way it does at the end of a heatwave. Water came through the gutter and ran down the inside of the glass. We lifted the mats, found the leak over the south side, and put buckets under it. By ten the compressor had given up and the ice was going soft from the edges in.
We mopped. There is no dignified way to move half a rink into a drain: a mop, a dustpan, a plastic bin. After a while we stopped talking and just did it.
“Floor needs re-laying,” he said at last. “I’ll put that in the report. I’ll also put that the building is sound.”
“Would you write that if it were your money?”
“No.” He put his glasses on. “I’d say knock it down and build flats. But it isn’t my money and it isn’t my building, and a report is a report.”
At half past midnight we had most of the water in the drain and the rest in our shoes. He stood in the doorway, where the rain came down in sheets and a gull stood in the middle of the road like it had bought the place.
“Same time tomorrow?” he said.
“The rink’s closed. The ice is a puddle.”
“Then I’ll bring a mop,” he said, and went out into it.
I locked up and sat on the bench with my wet shoes off. The envelope was where it had been for eleven days. I did not sign it there, in the cold, with the roof leaking. At the top of the hill I stopped at the post box, signed it against the wet brick, and posted it, and the ink smudged where my hand was.
The next afternoon at four the door opened and Dennis came in with a mop over his shoulder and his six pounds in coins. I counted them into the till and gave him a size nine.
