The rink plays music from a drive through speakers over the ice, and the DJ's console logs every track. After close, with the console off, a track plays. It is a slow one, from the eighties, and it is not on the drive and never has been. The lights over the ice dim to the level we use for the couples' skate, on their own, and for four minutes the empty pad is lit for two people, and the ice, when I go out after, has two tracks on it, side by side.
I am the DJ at an ice rink, which is a job that exists, and the console is mine, and the song that plays after close is not.
The system.
A drive of tracks, a console at the end of the rink, speakers over the ice. I run the sessions, I pick the music, the console logs every track with the time. The last song of a public session is a slow one, and the lights come down to the couples' setting, and it is the bit of the job that people remember.
After close, with the console off at the wall and the lights up for cleaning, one track plays.
The track.
A slow song from the eighties. A ballad, a big one, the kind that was played at every rink in the country in that decade for exactly this. It is not on the drive. The log shows it, by name, as a track played from a source the console calls line in, and nothing is plugged into line in.
The lights over the ice come down while it plays. Not the house lights. The ice lights, to the couples' level, and the spot that goes round, the old one that we never use because it is a fire risk, comes on and goes round, slowly, the way it did when I was a boy skating here.
Four minutes. Then the lights come up and the spot goes off and the log has the track as finished.
The tracks.
On the ice, afterwards, before the resurfacer, are two sets of blade marks, side by side, a foot apart, going round the pad the way a couple goes round, slow, in time, with the small crossings where one of them has gone round the other. One set is bigger than the other. They go round four times, which is four minutes of slow skating, and they go to the gate, together, and stop.
What has been checked.
The console, replaced. The track plays.
The speakers, isolated. The track plays from them.
The rink, at close, by me, at the console, which was off. The track started. I know every song that has ever been played in a rink and I knew it by the first bar. The lights went down. The spot came on. And I looked at the ice and it was empty and the marks came, two sets, side by side, round, slow, in the spot as it went round, and I could hear the blades under the music, and I could hear, once, when they passed the console, somebody laugh, a woman, the small laugh you laugh when your partner has nearly had you both over and saved it.
Who.
I did not have to ask. My mother told me, when I told her about it, that everybody who skated here in the eighties knew the couple. A boy and a girl who came every Friday and skated the last slow song, every week, for years, and who had been going to be married, and who had been in a car, one Friday, on the way here, and had not arrived, and the DJ of the time had played the last slow song to an empty ice that night because he did not know what else to do, and had done it every Friday after, until he left.
The console logs the track as played every night now, not Fridays. I think they have been coming every night since the console stopped being a person.
What is done about it.
The music licence we pay covers tracks played and the licensing body's report shows a track we do not own played every night, and the manager has asked me to take it off the drive, and I have said it is not on the drive, and he has said then where is it coming from, and I have said, line in.
What I do.
I run the music.
I went to the shop in town that still sells such things and I bought the track. On a record, because it was the only form they had it in. And I have put it on the drive, ripped, so the log has a source for it, so the licence is right, so it is ours.
The track still plays after close. From line in, not from the drive. I do not think they want mine.
But I do the lights now. At close, when the track starts, I bring the ice lights down myself, from the console, to the couples' level, and I put the spot on, and I say what the DJ says at the last song, which I say every session and which I had never said after close, into a live microphone over an empty rink, which is, last song, couples only, take your partner, and the marks come, side by side, and go round four times, and at the end I say, thank you, see you next Friday, and the lights come up, and one of these nights I am going to be brave enough to look at the gate when they get to it, and I am not yet.