One morning a week the rink is curling, and the stones live in a rack by the boards between times, forty kilos each. Every night after close the camera records eight stones going down the sheet. Not sliding on their own. Thrown, from the hack, with the turn a curler puts on, and the sound of brushes sweeping ahead of them, and the stones stop in the house, and in the morning they are in the rack, and the ice has been pebbled by somebody who knew how.
I am the ice technician at a rink that does curling on Tuesday mornings, and the stones are the heaviest thing I am responsible for.
The stones.
Sixteen, in a rack by the boards. Forty kilos each. The curlers come on a Tuesday, the sheet is pebbled, which is water sprayed in droplets that freeze and let the stones run, and they play, and the stones go back in the rack, and that is curling at our rink.
Every night after close, eight stones are thrown.
The end.
The camera on the far end sees the sheet. At about midnight a stone leaves the rack. It goes to the hack, which is the foothold at the end, and it is thrown. From the hack, with the slide, with the turn put on it at release, and it goes down the sheet with the sound a stone makes, the rumble, and ahead of it there is the sound of two brushes sweeping, fast, the way sweepers go when the stone is light and they are trying to carry it, and the stone curls, and it stops in the house, on the button or near it.
Eight. Four each way, the way two players throw in an end. The sweeping, the calls, which are there, on the camera's sound, a voice calling hard, hard, and then whoa, and the stone stops. Eight stones in the house at the end of it, in a pattern that a curler would say was a good end.
And then the stones go back to the rack, one at a time, carried, and the ice is pebbled, by a hand, with the can, which is hanging on its hook.
What has been checked.
The camera, replaced. The end is played.
The stones, weighed. Forty kilos. I cannot throw one properly and I have tried.
The sheet, at midnight, by me, at the side, on the rubber. The stone came out of the rack past me. I heard the hack take a weight, the slide, the release, and the stone went past me down the sheet, turning, and ahead of it, a yard ahead, two brushes went over the ice I could see, and the ice under them changed the way ice does under a brush, the frost going, and there was nobody holding them, and a voice beside me said, hard, and it was a man's, and then, whoa, and the stone stopped.
I stood there for all eight. At the end of the end the voice said, good end, lads, and I said, it was, because it was.
Who.
The curling club keeps its own records, and a woman who has run it for forty years looked at the camera with me and named them. Four men, a team, who had curled here on Tuesday mornings for decades and then, she said, the last of them had died, and the team had gone, and the club had not had a men's four since.
The end on the camera is their end, she said. The way the skip calls it. The way the lead throws. She watched it twice and went quiet, and then she said that the last of them, the skip, had asked her, in the hospital, whether the ice would still be there, and she had said yes, and he had said, good, we'll get a game in.
They are getting a game in.
What is done about it.
The pebble on the ice in the morning is a problem for the public session, because pebbled ice is not skating ice, and I scrape it off at seven, and the manager has asked who is pebbling the ice at night, and I have told him, and he has said, can we not have them on a Tuesday like everybody else.
What I do.
I look after the ice.
I pebble it for them. At close, before they come, I take the can and I pebble the sheet properly, the way the club's woman showed me, because the pebble they were doing themselves at midnight was a good pebble but it was a dead man's pebble on a can that is hanging on a hook and I thought the least I could do was give them a sheet.
The end is played. Eight stones. And since the ice has been ready for them, there is a ninth sound on the camera, before the first stone, which the club's woman recognised before I did, and which is the sound of four men tapping their brooms on the ice at the hack, once, which is what curlers do to the ice technician when the sheet is good, and which nobody has done to me on a Tuesday in all the years I have done this, and which I now get every night at midnight from a team that has not got a single living member, and I will take it.