The harness is a rope from a track in the roof to a belt, and the coach on the other end takes a skater's weight in the air while they learn a jump, and the winch logs the load. It is stowed at close. Every night at half past eleven it logs a skater. The belt drops from the roof on its own, the weight comes on at the take off, the harness holds through three turns, and at the landing the load goes to zero all at once, which is a rope being let go, and the ice has the mark of a fall.
I am the head coach at a rink with a jump harness and I am the one on the rope, in the day, and at night the rope is nobody's.
The harness.
A track along the roof over the ice, a trolley on it, a rope down to a belt round the skater's waist. The coach holds the other end and runs along the boards as the skater goes into the jump, and takes the weight in the air, and lets them down. The winch on the trolley logs the load, because a coach who drops a skater is a coach who is finished.
It is stowed at close. The belt is wound up to the roof and the trolley is parked at the end.
At half past eleven it comes down.
The jump.
The trolley runs along the track to the far end, where the jumps are set up, and the belt drops to skating height. Then the load comes on. Fifty kilos, a small woman, the log says, moving along the track at the speed of a skater going into a jump, and then the weight leaves the ice, which the harness reads as the rope going tight, and holds, and on the trace you can count the turns, because the rope twists, three, and then the load goes to zero.
Not down. To zero. All at once. That is not a landing. That is the rope being let go, at the top, by whoever has it, and on the ice under the harness, in the morning, is the mark of a fall from height. Not a skater's fall. A drop.
She goes up, and she turns, and she is let go.
What has been checked.
The winch and the trolley, replaced. The jump is logged.
The rope, by me, at half past eleven, holding it. I stood at the boards where the coach stands and I took the rope as it came down and I felt her come on. Fifty kilos, moving, and I ran with it, the way you do, and she went up and I took her weight, which is the whole of the job, and I held it, and she turned, one, two, three, and then the rope was pulled out of my hands.
Not slipped. Pulled. By something on my side of it, behind me, that wanted the rope let go, and it went, and the load went to zero, and the mark was on the ice, and I stood at the boards with rope burns and I said, out loud, no, that is not what happened, I had her.
Who.
Coaches know. I did not need a historian. It was in the profession, the story, when I was young: a girl at a rink, a triple in a harness, a coach on the rope who was not a coach, who was a father, who had been let take the rope because the rink was short and he had done it before, and he had let go. At the top. Nobody has ever said why. It went round the profession as the reason you do not let a parent on the rope, and it was this rink, and it was that track.
She fell from the top of a triple. She did not skate again. I do not know if she is alive. I think what is on the ice every night is not her but the fall, the thing itself, doing itself again, and the letting go is his.
What is done about it.
The harness log has a fall every night and the rink's insurer has asked about it and been told it is a test, and it is, in a way, and nobody has passed it.
What I do.
I coach.
I have taken him off the rope. That is the only way I can put it. At half past eleven I am at the boards with the rope in my hands, and when she comes on and goes up and the pull comes from behind me, the thing that wants the rope, I do not let go. I have burns on both hands. I have had the rope round my forearm, which you are not supposed to do, and been dragged along the boards, and I have not let go, and I have brought her down.
Three turns and a landing. The load goes down the way a landing goes, sixty, forty, twenty, the skater taking her own weight back, zero. On the ice in the morning, since I started, there is the mark of a landing. A good one. The single line of a blade taking a skater's weight out of the air and holding it.
The pull from behind me is weaker each night. I think it is running out. I think whatever he did, whyever he did it, the rope has been let go for the last time in this building, because the rule is that the coach does not let go, and the coach has not, and I am not going to.