Too Cold For Snow

full of gin. On the bar stool he was exposed, open to view and judgmental scrutiny.
    ‘That’ll have to be the last one,’ said the barman, ‘or I won’t have enough gin to sell to my sober customers.’
    ‘Indubitably,’ said Henry.
    Henry was fighting two phobias: phengophobia, a fear of daylight and soberphobia, a fear of seeing the world without the blur of alcohol. Booze. It was a hazy, necessary cordon sanitaire separating him from the monsters and howling voices. A night-owl by necessity, he used to work in the casino and slept in the staff room, an indulgence granted him by the Chinese managers because he’d always volunteer to do the extra hours, even when tacked on the end of a killer shift.
    Planer put a bag of meat on the counter in front of him: his friend was about to embark on a high protein diet.
    ‘I hear you’ve taken a job in the killing fields,’ said Henry, with a pantomime slur.
    ‘It was the only career path left – other than a lavatory cleaner.’
    ‘I’m not allowed any more hooch here I’m afraid,’ said Henry, waving a limp wrist in the direction of the barman, who gave them both a genuinely benign smile.
    ‘So let’s go do what we do best.’
    Planer and Henry had been given a spare key to the ice rink and even when Henry was seven sheets to the wind he could still dance better than anyone: he levitated in air, took space as a challenge and could skate out of his body. He was a genius on skates and had trained in Helsinki and Leningrad. His element was frozen water.
    They let themselves in through the back door, went straight up into the arena and turned on the rink lights using a dimmer. Henry fell over twice before they got to the guard rail but then lifted himself up again, expressing a Falstaffian fart.
    Planer loved the incongruity of it all – how this barely articulate dipsomane could rouse himself from near torpor to delicious flight. The man wobbled when he walked, for Christ’s sake!
    They had stashed their skates behind a fire hose in a cupboard. Henry had a spangly pair with blades he had made himself using an industrial grinder. Planer had chunky, utilitarian ones, which made him feel safe when he had to catch Henry.
    Henry and Planer went up to the control booth and slipped in a CD of music that Henry had made. It had the dark majesty of Gorecki’s ‘Three Pieces in Olden Style’ along with some pulsating dance anthems from Faithless. Henry took the music mixes seriously as he required the shock of the new to lift his skating game. And he loved Faithless: he always included something by them. It kept him young. Bugger being forty-eight.
    It took Henry a few clumsy minutes to lace his skates as the music on the CD started to spread a grey cloak of mordant music across the glister. The Gorecki: no laughs, but lots of lingering beauty. He took a few faltering steps before his innate grace kicked in and he started to do some warm-up loops, seeming to lose weight as he did so. Planer went counter-clockwise to him, the strangeness of the music vexing him as his mind tried to pick out a rhythm or create an image he could fix on. He saw clouds of dark steam coming off the stacks of a steelworks and ragged lines of refugees coming out of the forest. Planer had seen things that had burned into his memory in Burundi, El Salvador and Guatemala. The music triggered flashbacks to a childhood in the shadow of the coking ovens and his peregrinating work as a photographer.
    Henry, meanwhile, was vividly alive in the moment, working up the synchronised rhythm of breathing and movement, looking for cues in the music to which he could respond. He had dismissed the slowdown effects of the alcohol and had found fluid elegance in his motion.
    In the shadow of a pillar, in the topmost tier of the seating area, a young film student called Kyle trained his PD 150 camera on the two men. He’d heard rumours about them sufficient for him to get permission from the rink owner to keep watch. The owner himself was intrigued: two old guys who broke in to figure-skate. A cleaner had seen them once, he’d said they danced pretty well.
    As the beats started pounding out from the speakers Planer reckoned the music was too loud and feared they were going to get caught, but Henry said he needed to feel the bass notes in his diaphragm.
    He started with easy jumps, working incrementally through the doubles, the triples and the quads as Planer started to work up speed in his