Too Cold For Snow

counter-loops.
    Thirty years earlier, Henry’s father, when he heard his son was thinking of taking up figure-skating full time, broke his son’s wrist by crunching it against the brick edge of the back door frame. Henry was gutted. It was three days before his audition for the Mariposa School of Skating in Barrie, Ontario. Ringing them to let them know he wasn’t coming for the audition was one of the lowest points of his life. He drank to forget that precise moment and to drown his anger at his dad. An anger he sometimes failed to control. Once he had smashed his fist into Planer’s face because he dropped him in mid-mazurka. So Henry tried to drown his anger just as much as he tried to forget his father. But skating, well, that was his sublime revenge.
    Planer realised there was something different about this night when Henry swooped past him and executed a leap that he had never ever seen before, a sort of vulture swoop that saw his partner hurl himself forward, almost as if he was going to take a tumble before righting himself. Planer enjoyed this clownish mock-clumsiness. With Swiss precision Planer sent him skywards with a flick of both wrists. Henry seemed to beat gravity as he flew in a forty foot arc, to land as sure-footedly as a chamois goat.
    They gyred towards the middle; now back to a programmed routine: the first complicated move, where Planer threw him in the air and Henry managed to spin both ways in one single flight, truly seemed to defeat the laws of physics. On impact, his skates splintered the ice into a million shards. Planer slowed down momentarily, just enough to be on the very cusp of moving and stopping. He needed to give his friend a hurling lift straight up into the air so that Henry was airborne above Planer’s head and shoulders, having enough height to close his legs and give the impression he was going to cleave his friend’s head in two as the skates came down. And then, with just a nanosecond to spare, he opened them again and did the splits, landing squarely on Planer’s nonplussed bonce. It was William Tell’s arrow, the circus knife-thrower’s cutting edge.
    Planer imagined how the crowds would be wowed by this audacious feat. He then bowed his head so Henry could tumble forward, but that bit didn’t go to plan. Henry was physically sick, projectile vomiting of the first order. He seemed uncertain on his legs at that point and quite unaware that he had made skating history: executing a move that even the mighty Rondel for all his innate muscularity and verve had failed to do, and without killing Planer in the bargain. Planer had to help his friend take off his skates and clean up the mess. He splashed out on a cab to get them home. Henry wore shades and smelled of juniper from the earlier gin. He looked older by a decade.
    The next morning, while Planer and Harry slept off their exertions, Kyle showed the rink manager, Phil Hurt, the footage: two middle-aged men making magic happen. Hurt knew before they even got to the neardecapitation that he was looking at one of the best skaters in the world.
    ‘I’d like to put this stuff online,’ said Kyle, ‘just to see what happens.’
    ‘With my blessing,’ said Hurt, eager to know more about the back story.
    The video on YouTube became the most watched item in the world. And they were sought for, hunted high and low until they gave themselves up to celebrity. They appeared on Jonathan Ross , and a serialised account of their lives was printed in The Daily Mail. They were feted, toasted and lauded. Henry enjoyed the free drinks as he careered from TV studio to photo-shoot to magazine interview in limousines with tinted windows. Pepsi got in touch, so did a gaggle of clothes manufacturers. They could have their own lines; hell, they could have their own shops. For Henry, all the buzz and attention simply worked up a thirst.
    Planer insisted on carrying on in work. He liked the men he worked with. When Planer got to work on the Wednesday a phalanx of photographers snapped away near the security booth. Inside, there was an eerie hush about the place and more eerie still when Trevor Bunley, one of the Bunley Brothers who owned the place, came up to him as he clocked in. The man, whose complexion most resembled one of his own hung-for-21-days hunks of beef, took him by the arm and led him past two lines of his fellow abattoirees into Cutting Room Three, which was the biggest in the place. Planer couldn’t believe his eyes.