Inside Edge

The phone was the thing that told him. Not the coach, not the scoreboard, not the thirteen thousand voices in the barn. The phone, buzzing against his thigh through the towel while he sat on the bench in full kit with nowhere to go.

Rop Baird knew, the way he'd always known when a hit was coming, that whatever was on the screen was going to hurt more than the hit ever did.

He'd been a healthy scratch before. Twice, early in his career, when the club had a stacked roster and a coach who liked to remind everyone he could sit anybody. That was different. That was politics, and politics you could out-wait. This was the coach coming down the tunnel before warmups with his tablet held out like a summons, and Rop's own face on it, blown up and slowed down, a great grey slab of a man trying to change direction along the boards and doing it the way a wardrobe changes direction: not turning so much as being persuaded, one heavy foot at a time, weight lurching where his edges should have carried him.

And under the clip, the caption that some pundit had said live on air, into a microphone, to a nation. A fridge on stilts.

He'd read it twice before the words rearranged themselves into meaning. By then the coach had already said the rest, low, almost kind, which was worse than shouting. You're out tonight, Rop. Watch it from up top. We'll talk Monday. And then the part that landed under the ribs, quiet as a blade sliding between them: The game's changed, son. I can't dress a man who hits like you and skates like that. Nobody can. Not anymore.

So now he sat in the tunnel mouth in full gear, helmet on his knee, and watched Edinburgh play hockey without him.

The barn roared and he felt it in his teeth. That was the part nobody outside understood — the sound came up through the concrete, through the rubber matting, through the studs of his skate guards and into the bones of his legs, so that even benched, even scratched, his body kept flinching toward a game it wasn't allowed to play. Somebody scored. Not his line. He didn't have a line tonight. He had a seat and a phone and a clip with two hundred thousand views and climbing, the little number ticking up every time he was stupid enough to look, which was often.

Fridge on stilts. His mates would already have it. His mum would see it by morning; somebody at the Co-op would show her, thinking they were being nice. Here, is this not your Ruaridh?

He turned the phone face-down on the bench and stared out at the ice.

It looked so easy when they did it right. That was the thing that had always undone him, quietly, in a place he never let anyone near. The good ones didn't skate the way he skated — didn't wrestle the ice, didn't fight it. They borrowed from it. A defenceman pivoted at the blue line, and there was no lurch, no gathering of weight, just a body turning inside its own edges like the ice had opened a door and let him through. Fluid. That word the pundits used, the word that was never once in his life going to be used about him. Fluid. Rop had spent his whole career being the opposite of fluid on purpose. Fluid didn't win fights in the corners. Fluid didn't make a winger think twice about carrying the puck up his side of the sheet. He'd built a body that stopped things, and now the game had decided it wanted bodies that flowed, and there was no roster spot left in the whole league for a man who could only stop.

He knew what his worth had always been. His hands and his hits. He'd known it at sixteen when a scout looked at him and didn't write down skating on the pad, only size, mean, coachable. Two of those had held up. He'd made a living, an actual living, off the two square feet of ice directly in front of another man's chest. And it had been enough, for years, because the game let it be enough.

It wasn't going to be enough anymore. He'd heard it in the coach's voice, that awful gentleness, the tone you used on a dog you'd decided about.

The game ended. He didn't watch the end so much as endure it. Kestrels lost by two, and he heard the specific quality of the crowd going home unhappy, that low grumbling drain of a full barn emptying without a win to carry out into the cold. He waited in the tunnel until the noise thinned. He waited while the lads came off, and took the shoulder-slaps and the unlucky, big man that meant nothing and cost nothing, and he was decent about it because being decent about it was the last thing that was still his. He waited through the room, through the coach not looking at him, through the shower he didn't take because he hadn't sweated, because he'd played no hockey, because he was a fridge and fridges don't sweat.

He waited, in the end, until the arena was empty. Until the lads had gone to whatever bar and the staff had gone home and the only sound was the big compressors somewhere under the stands, breathing, keeping the ice cold for nobody.

Then he laced back up and went out onto it alone.

The house lights were down to the working set, that dim sodium half-dark they left on overnight, and the sheet stretched out grey and enormous and perfect, freshly cut by the last flood, not a mark on it. His skates bit at the gate and the cold came up to meet him, that specific arena cold that smelled of nothing — of refrigerant and rubber and the ghost of ten thousand games — and for one moment, gliding out on a straight clean push, he felt the thing he'd always felt. That the ice was the one honest place. That out here nobody lied to you. You were exactly as good as your edges said you were, and no more, and no less.

Which was the whole problem.

He set up at the top of the circle and tried to do the thing the clip had made a nation laugh at. A simple carve. A clean inside edge, one blade, leaning his weight into the arc and letting the steel hold him through the turn the way it was supposed to hold a man. Just one. Just a single clean edge, the first thing they taught eight-year-olds in the learn-to-skate on a Saturday morning.

He couldn't do it.

He felt exactly where it went wrong, that was the maddening part — he wasn't stupid, he wasn't numb, he could feel his weight sitting too far back over his heel, feel the edge start to bite and then wash out from under him as his body flinched away from committing to it, some deep animal refusal to trust a single thin line of steel to carry seventeen stone through empty air. His whole body was built on planting both feet and being immovable. Everything in him had spent twenty years learning not to fall. And a clean edge was, when you got down to it, a controlled, trusting, deliberate fall — a lean into nothing, a bet that the ice would catch you — and he had never once in his life made that bet and he did not know how.

He tried again. Washed out. Tried it slower. Worse. His feet skidded flat and he caught himself with an ugly stagger, arms out, and the sound of his own blades chattering across the ice was loud as swearing in the empty barn.

He stopped. He stood in the middle of the sheet with his chest heaving from nothing, from a single failed turn, and he put his hands on his knees, and for a bad long moment he thought he might actually break something — a stick, a pane of the glass, his own hand against the boards — the way he never let himself in front of anyone.

Instead he just breathed, and looked down the ice, and let the barn be quiet around him.

And it was the quiet that did it. The specific hush of an empty rink at midnight, that he hadn't stood inside in years, not really, not alone. Because he had stood in it before. Long before he was anybody. He'd been a rink rat here when this place was newer and he was fifteen and nothing, nobody's prospect yet, a big soft kid who came for the public skate and stayed in the cheap seats afterward because his house was loud and the rink was not.

And there had been a girl.

Not a girl he'd known. A girl on this ice, this exact ice, a decade ago and more — figure skater, one of the ones who trained in the dead hours the way he was standing in the dead hours now — and he'd watched her from the dark of the empty stands with a bag of chips going cold in his lap, watched her skate a program he'd had no idea how to name, and he had never in his life seen a human body do what hers did on a blade. She borrowed from the ice. She leaned into nothing and the nothing held her. She carved edges so clean and so deep they left long curved scars in the sheet that he used to go and look at afterward, tracing them with the toe of his trainer, trying to understand how a person made the ice do that.

He hadn't thought about her in years. He'd have sworn he'd forgotten. But standing here now, failing at the one thing she'd made look like breathing, it came back whole and sudden and precise: the sound of her blades, the flat clinical focus on her face, the way she'd fallen once, hard, and got straight back up and done it again, angrier and cleaner. Edges he had never forgotten. He could see them still, curved and certain in the ice, the exact shape of the thing he couldn't do.

He even remembered her name. It had been on a laminated card taped to the boards, a training schedule, and he'd read it a hundred times from the cheap seats without ever once speaking to her.

Mirren Kelso.

Rop straightened up in the dark, alone on the honest ice, and heard himself say it out loud to the empty barn, just to see how it felt in his mouth.

"Mirren Kelso."

It felt like the first idea he'd had in a week that wasn't despair.

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

Get the e-book