The ice sits on a slab with pipes in it and the plant room holds the slab at a temperature, logged every minute by sensors in the concrete. Every night one sensor, in the far corner, reads two degrees colder than the others. The pipes under that corner are the same loop as the rest. In the morning the frost on the boards in that corner has a shape in it, on the inside, at the height of somebody sitting on the ice with their back to the boards.
I am the plant engineer at an ice rink and the slab is mine, which means every sensor in it is a number I read before I have taken my coat off.
The slab.
Concrete with pipes in it, brine in the pipes, the brine chilled in the plant room and pumped round, and the ice on top. Sensors in the slab at twenty points read its temperature every minute, so I know the ice is the same everywhere, because a soft patch is a broken wrist.
The far corner reads two degrees colder than the rest. Every night. From about midnight to about six.
The corner.
The sensor is in the slab under the corner where the boards meet, at the end away from the doors. The brine loop under it is the same loop that runs under the next sensor along, which reads normal. The cold is not from the pipes. It is in the slab, in a patch about the size of a person, and the ice over it, when I have gone out at two with a thermometer, is harder there, and the air over it is colder, the way it is over a freezer with the lid up.
The frost. The boards have frost on the inside at night when the building is cold, a film of it, and in that corner, in the morning, the film has a shape. A clear patch, at the height of a back, the width of shoulders, with the frost gone where a body was against it, and below it, on the ice, two clear patches where legs were, out in front, the way a person sits on ice when they have gone down and are not getting up.
What has been checked.
The sensor, replaced. The new one reads two degrees cold.
The pipes under that corner, dug out, which cost a week of ice, and there was nothing wrong with them, and they were put back and the corner was cold again that night.
The corner, at two, by me, on the ice. I sat where the shape sits. With my back to the boards and my legs out. It was cold, the cold of sitting on ice, and then it was a different cold, a cold that came from beside me, and I was not alone in the corner, and I did not look, and I said, out loud, are you all right, because that is what you say to somebody who is sitting on the ice, and nobody said anything, and I got up, and the sensor, on my phone, went a degree colder when I did, the way a place gets colder when the only warm thing in it leaves.
Who.
The rink had a death on the ice. Not recent. Before the slab was relaid, before the plant room was rebuilt, in the seventies, when the sessions were bigger and the stewards fewer. A man, skating in a public session, had gone down in the far corner and sat up against the boards, and had looked, the people who saw him said, like a man who had fallen and was getting his breath, and he was there for most of a session, and people skated past, and when the session ended and the ice cleared a steward went to move him on and he had been gone for an hour.
Nobody had asked him if he was all right. That was the thing the paper said, afterwards. Several hundred people had skated past a man dying against the boards and every one of them had thought he was catching his breath.
What is done about it.
The corner is two degrees cold and the ice is harder there and the coaches have been told to keep the small ones away from it, and they have, and the corner is the one part of the pad that is never skated on in the day, which means the ice there is always fresh, which means it is always the best ice in the building, and nobody uses it.
What I do.
I run the plant.
I go out at two. I do not sit with him. I tried that and I think it was the wrong thing. I skate past. The way people did. But I stop. I stop in front of the corner, on my blades, and I look at the empty boards where the frost is going to clear, and I say, are you all right, mate, and I wait, the length of time you wait for a man to answer, and then I say, I'll get someone, and I skate to the gate.
The sensor has changed. The corner is still cold at midnight. But at about ten past two, since I started, it comes up. Two degrees, over about a minute, to the same as the rest, and stays there till morning, and the frost on the boards in the morning has no shape in it, and I have come to think that what he needed was not company but somebody going to get someone, and that he has been sitting there fifty years waiting to see one person do it.