The boards round the ice have sensors in the glass, because a pane that is cracked by a hit has to be changed before the next period. Every night at about half past twelve the sensor on one pane at the home end trips. The camera shows the glass flex, the way it flexes when a player is put into it, and the boards ring, and the ice in front of that pane has the scrape marks of a body going down, and there is nobody there.
I am the rink's maintenance fitter and the glass is mine to change, and pane fourteen is the one I check every morning.
The boards.
A wall round the ice with glass above it, and a sensor on every pane that trips if the pane flexes past a limit, because a cracked pane is a player in the crowd. The sensors log every trip. In a game there are a dozen. On a dark night there should be none.
Pane fourteen, home end, right of the goal, trips at about half past twelve every night.
The hit.
It is a hit. I have been in this building for games and I know the sound, and the camera on that end has sound, and at half past twelve the camera records it: the approach, skates on ice, two sets, fast, and the hit, the body into the boards, the boom of it, and the glass going, the rattle, and then one set of skates going away and the other not.
On the picture the glass on fourteen flexes. You can see it. The pane bows out towards the seats and comes back, and the boards move on their anchors, and the ice in front of fourteen, which was clean, has a scrape on it, a long one, the kind a body makes sliding down the boards onto the ice, and then the marks of somebody getting up slowly.
There is nobody on the ice.
What has been checked.
The pane, changed. The new pane trips.
The boards at that end, re-anchored. They move at half past twelve.
The spot, by me, on the ice, at half past twelve, standing against the glass at fourteen, where he goes in. I heard the skates. Two sets. Coming. I did not move because I did not believe it, and then I did believe it and it was too late, and something went into the boards beside me, a foot to my left, with the whole weight of a man at speed, and the glass went and the boards went and I went, onto the ice, from the shock of it, not from being hit, and I lay there and beside me something lay there too, for the time it takes a winded man to decide he can get up, and then it got up, slowly, and I heard the skates go away, and I lay on the ice for a while longer than that.
Who.
The historian with the programmes did not have this one, which surprised me, and then he found it, in a programme from a game thirty years ago, in the small print on the back page where the club thanked people, a line that thanked a player for his years of service and wished him well in his recovery, and the historian remembered, then, that the recovery had not happened, that the player had been put into the boards at the home end, a clean hit, nobody's fault, the kind that happens, and had got up, slowly, and finished the game, and had gone home, and had not woken up properly the next day, and had been a long time dying of it.
He got up. That is what I keep thinking about. He took the hit and he got up and he played on, because that is what you did, and it killed him slowly, and he is still taking it every night and still getting up.
What is done about it.
Pane fourteen's sensor trips nightly and the inspection log has it as checked and sound every morning, by me, and it is, and the glass at that end has been changed more than any glass in the building and it is the best glass we have.
What I do.
I look after the boards.
When a player goes into the boards hard and does not get up quickly, the rule now, which was not the rule then, is that the trainer goes out and nobody moves him and he does not go back on until somebody with a qualification has looked at him. It is a good rule. It came too late for him by about twenty years.
So I am the trainer. At half past twelve I am on the bench at the home end with a bag, the real bag, the one the team uses, and when the hit comes and the glass goes I go out. Onto the ice, to fourteen, to the scrape, and I kneel, and I say what a trainer says, which is, stay down, don't move, I've got you, and I stay there the time a trainer stays, and I say, you're done for tonight, and I help nothing up, with my arm out, the way you help a man up who is bigger than you, and I walk nothing to the gate, slowly, and off.
The marks on the ice have changed. The getting up is gone. There is the hit, and the slide down, and then the marks stop, because I have him, and he does not get up on his own and skate back into it. He goes off with the trainer. And the camera at that end, with its sound, has recorded, since I started, the thing a crowd does when a player who has gone down hard is helped off, which is applaud, and there is no crowd, and it does.