Away Rules

Eleven minutes into sudden death, Lachie Gilmour's left shoulder was sitting half an inch lower than his right, and Eilidh Rintoul was the only person in the building who knew it.

She stood at the back of the away bench with her heels against the boards behind her and her arms folded over the zip of her training top, and she watched it the way she watched everything on a game night: without seeming to. The Clan's rink was smaller than the barn and louder for it, the roof low enough that the noise came straight back down on top of you. Four thousand Highlanders on their feet, a drum somewhere up in the north stand, the boards shuddering every time a body went into them. The air down at ice level was cold enough to sting the inside of her nose and smelled of rubber matting, wet wool and the burnt-sugar edge of whatever they were selling on the concourse.

Lachie came off at the far gate on a change, and she tracked him all the way down the bench. Six foot three of him, heavy through the chest and the thighs, the black-and-silver Kestrels sweater dark with sweat between the shoulder blades. He sat at the end of the bench nearest her and dropped his head and breathed.

Left arm resting a fraction further forward on his thigh than the right. Not favouring it. Accommodating it. The scar over that shoulder was five years old and she had never once seen it complain in a game this tight, which meant the joint was tired, which meant the man was tired, which meant nothing at all, because every man on the bench was tired. It was the sixth game in nine days and the season was on its last legs.

She took the water bottle from the rack and leaned over his shoulder to hand it to him. He took it without looking round.

"Shoulder," she said, low, under the noise.

"It's fine."

"I didn't ask how it was."

He sprayed water over his face and handed the bottle back, and for a second, as he did, his eyes came up and found hers. Blue, and rimmed red with the cold and the effort. Then they went back to the ice and the second was gone, and she put the bottle back in the rack and folded her arms again and was staff.

That was the job. That had always been the job.

Up in the gantry, she knew without hearing it, the Clan's commentator would be saying what every commentator had said about Lachie this season. She'd heard it first in October, on a podcast one of the young lads played in the dressing room for a laugh: the Kestrels are still rolling out the fridge on stilts, God love them, while the rest of the league has moved on. The room had gone very quiet and Deek had turned it off. Since then it had been in the papers twice and on a banner in Kirkcaldy, of all places, his own town. Lachie had read the banner, nodded at it as if it had made a fair point, and gone out and taken their best forward into the glass on the first shift.

She did not think he was a fridge on stilts. She had his hamstrings under her hands twice a week. She knew precisely what that body could still do and what it was paying to do it, and the ledger was closer to even than anybody in the gantry imagined. That was a professional opinion. She had several others about him that were not, and she had kept those where they belonged for three seasons, which was in a locked drawer at the back of her head.

Nairn's rule. Away from home, staff and players did not fraternise. Not a drink, not a lift, not a knock on a hotel door after curfew, and if it happened anyway, the gaffer did not trouble himself working out whose idea it had been. The player was an asset under contract. The staff member was an expense. He had said it to her on her first road trip, standing in a service-station car park outside Dumfries with a coffee in one hand and a menthol rub smell coming off him like weather: It's not personal, hen. I've seen it go wrong three times and it was never the lad that got the bus home.

She had said she understood, and she had. She'd thought it was a sensible rule. She still thought so. She had simply not known, at the time, that it would have a face.

On the ice the Kestrels' third line were hemmed in. The Clan had been the better side since the third period and everyone on the bench knew it; the overtime had been a long slow drowning, the Kestrels getting the puck out and the Clan carrying it straight back in. Boaby was having the night of his life in goal. Twice in the last minute he had gone down and come up with the puck under his glove while the crowd howled, and from the bench you could see his chest going like a bellows inside the pads.

"Change, change," Nairn said, and the bench rose.

Lachie went over the boards with Cammy and Struan. Cammy was twenty and skated as if somebody had told him the ice might be taken away, all legs and appetite, and Struan went out alongside him with that narrow, watchful look of his, the look of a man counting the room. Lachie went to the left point. Big, slow-looking until he wasn't. She watched his first three strides out of habit, checking the push-off on each side, and the left was fine. The left was fine.

It happened in about four seconds.

Cammy picked up a loose puck at the Kestrels' blue line and turned up the boards with his head down, the way every coach in the country had been telling him for two years not to, and a Clan forward came across him at full speed from the blind side. Big lad, number nineteen, a name she'd have to look up later. He didn't play the puck. He didn't pretend to. He went through Cammy with his shoulder and his elbow up and drove him face-first into the boards three feet from the Kestrels' bench, and the glass bowed and the sound went through the floor and up the bones of her legs.

Cammy went down and didn't move.

Eilidh had a hand on the bench gate before she knew she'd moved. You did not go on until the official waved you, and the official had not waved, and she stood there with her palm flat on the cold top of the gate and her heart going like a struck bell while Cammy lay on his side on the ice and the crowd, God help them, cheered.

Then she saw Lachie coming.

He didn't hurry. That was what she would remember after: that he didn't hurry. He came across from the point in four long strides, dropped his stick on the second and his gloves on the fourth, and number nineteen saw him and had time to understand and drop his own. They went together at the hash marks, and the linesmen backed off the way linesmen did, and the whole building got to its feet.

It was not a long fight. Lachie's fights never were. Nineteen got one in early, a right that caught Lachie high on the cheek and snapped his head round, and she felt it in her own teeth. Then Lachie took a fistful of the man's sweater at the shoulder and held him at the end of that long left arm, the tired one, the one sitting half an inch low, and threw with his right. Three times. The second caught the edge of nineteen's helmet as the lad ducked into it, and she saw the strap jump and Lachie's hand come away wrong. The third put nineteen on the ice.

Lachie let go of him. He stood over him for a second, breathing, and then he turned his back and skated to where Cammy was, and crouched, and put his good hand flat on the boy's back.

The official waved her on.

She went out on the ice in her trainers with her bag over her shoulder, short careful steps across the scarred surface, and knelt by Cammy's head. He was conscious. His eyes were open and swimming and his mouth was bleeding from the inside where his lip had met the visor.

"Cammy. Look at me. Don't move your head. What day is it?"

"Saturday." Muffled, furious with himself. "I'm fine. I'm fine, Eilidh, I didn't see him."

"I know you didn't. Follow my finger."

He followed it. Pupils equal and reactive, both of them, neck soft and clean under her fingertips when she ran them down the vertebrae, no tingling in his hands when she asked, grip strong in both. Somewhere above her, Lachie was still crouched with his hand on the boy's back, and she could smell him from here: sweat and the cold-metal smell of the ice and something underneath that was just him, that she had known a long time and had never let herself name.

She did not look at him. She looked at Cammy's eyes.

"Okay," she said. "We're going to sit you up, slowly. Lachie."

"Aye."

They brought Cammy up between them, her hands at his head and shoulders, Lachie's arm under his back. For a moment Lachie's forearm lay along hers, heavy and warm through the sleeve of her training top, and she felt it in every inch of her skin as though she were nothing but skin.

Then an official had his arm and was steering him away, and she heard the announcement come over the speakers in that flat Highland voice: Number twenty-two, Gilmour, five minutes for fighting, and two minutes for instigating. Number nineteen, five minutes for fighting.

Seven and five. A two-minute powerplay to the Clan in sudden-death overtime.

The bench groaned as one animal. Up in the stands they were roaring. Lachie did not argue. He did not so much as look at the referee. He went into the penalty box, sat down on the bench there, took his helmet off and set it between his feet, and tipped his head back against the glass, and she saw the bright mark rising on his cheekbone and the blood on the white tape of his right glove where he'd tugged it back on. Not his blood off the other lad. His own.

She got Cammy off the ice and down the tunnel and into the medical room with Dr Lyall, who looked at the boy over his half-moon glasses and said, "Well, now," in his unhurried Borders way, and began exactly the same checks she'd just done, which was correct, which was how it should be. She stood in the doorway for the first thirty seconds and gave him her findings, and then he said, "Thank you, Eilidh, I have him," and she went back up the tunnel to the bench at a pace that was very nearly a run.

She came out of the tunnel mouth in time to see it.

The Clan had set up in the Kestrels' zone. Struan was blocking a shooting lane on one knee. Deek was hacking at sticks in front of Boaby's crease like a man trying to beat out a fire. The puck went round the boards to the point and back to the half-wall and across, and every pass was a heartbeat, and in the box Lachie was on his feet with both hands flat against the glass.

A minute and forty-one on the penalty clock. A minute and forty.

The shot came from the top of the circle and it wasn't even a good one. It hit a skate in the slot and changed direction and went in off the inside of the post behind Boaby's left pad, low, just over the line, and there was a half-second when nobody in the building was sure, and then the red light came on above the glass and the noise hit her like a wall coming down.

Four thousand people. The drum. The Clan players piling over their boards and down the ice into one shouting heap in the corner. Somebody threw a scarf. A plastic pint cup came spinning over the glass and bounced at her feet.

Their season was over.

On the bench nobody moved for a moment. Then Rop stood, because he was captain and that was what captains did, and went over the boards to Boaby, who was still on his knees in his crease with his mask pushed up and his face blank as a sheet. One by one the others followed him out for the handshakes. Nairn stood at the end of the bench with his hands in the pockets of his long coat and his face showing nothing at all. He did not look at the penalty box. Eilidh noticed that, the way she noticed a limp.

The penalty box door opened. Lachie came out with his helmet in his left hand and skated, alone, to the end of the handshake line. He took his place in it. He shook hands with every Clan player as they came along, including the big lad, number nineteen, who had a dressing on his eyebrow already and who said something to him that she couldn't hear. Lachie nodded, as if it had been a fair point.

She packed the bench. It was something to do with her hands. Water bottles into the crate, the spare tape, the sticks the lads would forget, the towels. She could feel the crowd emptying above her, the wash of it going up the stairs, the happy chant fading into the concourse, and the cold coming back down into the space it left.

The Kestrels came off the ice in a silent file. Skates on rubber matting, the hollow knock of stick blades against the concrete wall. Nobody spoke. Somebody at the front swore once, very quietly, and stopped.

She stood just inside the tunnel mouth with the crate at her feet, where the strip lights met the rink lights and threw everything into hard, tired shadow, and they went past her one at a time. Struan, with his eyes on the floor for once. Deek, who slapped the wall as he passed and didn't break stride. Boaby, carrying his mask by the strap, his face still empty. Rop, who touched her shoulder as he went by and said, "Cheers, Eilidh," as if she had done something.

Lachie was last.

He came down the tunnel slowly, sweater dark with sweat and stuck to the long muscle of his back, his hair plastered to his forehead and the mark on his cheekbone already swelling purple. Up close he was very big. She had known that from the other side of a treatment bench, where his size was a question of how much pressure she could put through her forearm and where the knots sat along his trapezius. In the tunnel it was something else. He filled the narrow space between the walls, and the light went round him.

His right glove was off, held in his left hand with the helmet. The hand itself hung at his side, and she read it in one look the way she'd been trained to: the knuckles split across the second and third, the skin laid open in a clean ragged line where it had met the edge of a helmet. Bleeding steadily, not heavily. Swelling already over the metacarpal heads. The white tape around his wrist was soaked red at the top edge. Probably nothing broken. Probably. She would need to feel it to know.

He stopped. Just for a moment, level with her, close enough that she could feel the heat still coming off him in the cold of the tunnel, and smell the sweat and the blood.

She had a hand half-raised. She didn't know when she'd raised it. It was at the height of his wrist, palm up, the exact gesture she'd made a thousand times: give it here, let me see. Professional. Completely ordinary. Nobody passing would have looked twice.

He looked at the hand. Then he looked at her.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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