Hire skates are scanned out against a wristband and scanned back in, because a pair that walks is forty pounds. After close the system logs one pair out. The size is a child's, a half size we do not carry. They are scanned back in at about four. In the morning they are on the rack, in the slot for that size, which does not exist, and the blades are wet, and the laces are tied in a double knot the way a parent ties them.
I run skate hire at an ice rink, and the rack is mine, every pair on it, and one pair that is not.
The system.
Hundreds of pairs on racks by size. A customer gives their shoes and their wristband, the wristband is scanned against the pair, and the pair is scanned back when they return them. A pair that is out is on the screen as out until it is back.
After close, one pair goes out.
The pair.
Size one and a half. A child's. We do not carry half sizes in the small ones, because children do not know the difference and it would double the rack. There is no slot for one and a half. The screen shows a pair of one and a half out, to a wristband number the system has not issued, at about half past eleven, and back in at about four.
In the morning there is a pair on the rack. Small. White, the old kind, leather, not the plastic ones we have now. In the gap between the ones and the twos where there is no slot, put there carefully, the way a pair is put back by somebody who knows where it goes. The blades are wet. The laces are tied.
I put them in the office. In the morning they are on the rack.
What has been checked.
The system, by the supplier, who has confirmed that a size one and a half does not exist in the stock list and has been scanned out and in every night for a year.
The rack, at half past eleven, by me, behind the counter. The pair was not on the rack. The screen said out. I heard, from the ice, through the doors, a child skating. Not well. The scrape and stop of a beginner, and a fall, the small sound a small person makes hitting the ice, and a laugh, and the scrape again.
At four the screen said in. The pair was on the rack. The blades were wet, and the laces were tied in a double knot, tight, as a parent ties a child's skates so they will not come undone, which is a thing you do for somebody, not a thing a child does for themselves.
Somebody is tying them.
The skater.
I asked the rink's oldest staff. They did not know a child. They knew a mother.
A woman who had worked skate hire, years ago, before the scanning, when it was a book, and who had brought her daughter to the rink after close, most nights, because she could not afford the sessions, and put her in a pair of the old white hire skates, one and a half, because the girl's feet were small for her age, and laced them for her, and let her skate the empty ice for an hour while she cashed up, and the girl had not been very good and had loved it.
They did not know what had happened to the girl. They knew the mother had stopped coming to work one winter and had not come back and that the manager of the time had gone to the house and come back and not said anything, and that the old white one and a halfs had been in the lost property for years and had gone in a clearance.
The girl is skating. The mother is lacing her up.
What is done about it.
The pair is on the screen as out every night and in every morning and the stock count is one pair over, in a size we do not have, and the auditor has written, one pair, size one and a half, unlisted, present, and initialled it, and has not asked.
What I do.
I run the hire.
There is a slot now. I made one. A gap in the rack between the ones and the twos, with a label, in the rink's labelling, that says one and a half, and the pair lives in it, and it is the only pair on the rack with its laces tied.
I have started doing the lacing. Not hers. Her mother does hers. But at close I take every small pair off the rack in the ones and twos, and I check the laces, and I lace them properly, as I would for a child who was going to skate in them, because the racks at half past eleven are empty of everyone but one little girl in a pair of old white skates that her mother tied, and the racks, I have decided, should look as though every child who ever skated here had somebody to do that for them.
The wristband that was never issued is in the system as a child ticket. I have put a name on it. Not hers, I do not have it. It says, evening skater, and the system lets it through every night, and when the pair is scanned back in at four the screen says, thank you, see you next time, which it says to everybody, and which I have come to think of as the one thing this rink has said to her in thirty years that it meant.