Page 29 of A Loser by Christmas
“In the summer? What about in winter? That’s when you skated?”
“On an outdoor rink?” He shakes his head. “It hardly ever gets cold enough for ice in Cornwall. Can count on one hand how often I saw snow there. There weren’t any outdoor rinks. No indoor ones either.”
“None?”
“Back then? Not a single one in the whole county. These days, I think there is an outdoor rink at the Eden Project. Just for Christmas though.”
“So where and when did you learn?”
Penny doesn’t truly need to relight the candle my huff blew out. Enough wintry light shines through the window to show Calum and I sitting so closely our feet slot together. She does it all the same, and the candle flame flickers the same way as Calum’s expression. “I learned to skate right here in London. At the Christmas rink at Somerset House. Bit of an annual family tradition, along with getting Mum a tree ornament from Hamleys every year.”
“You only skated once a year? Then how?—”
“Did I end up good enough to turn pro?” He taps his temple. “Savant, remember?” He snorts as if he’s kidding. “To be honest, I didn’t learn to skate for real until the summer I scored a place at an ice academy.”
“Here?”
He nods. “Already loved the city. Hard not to after visiting each December. You know, the whole fam being happy together in the same place. Sharing all those sights for a first time together? Those memories hooked right here.” He taps the centre of his chest. “You know what I mean?”
I don’t. Didn’t, I mean, until Calum reminded me of Christmas Eve feasts shared between three people, and of me hiding the final piece of each new jigsaw so Dad’s visits would last a little longer.
Calum continues, which is handy—my throat has tightened out of nowhere. “I got to spend a whole summer here learning to skate. And learning to love the best game?—”
“In the world?”
“Yeah.” This time, his snort is softer. “But to be honest, if I do something once with my body, it pretty much locks in.” He looks away, a flush replacing any greyness, and I wonder if he’s rewinding and replaying something he did with his body that I’d repeat in a heartbeat if he could carve out time for it in his packed schedule. He looks back and shrugs again, a move I’ve witnessed a lot this week. He does it each time I tell him to live up to his reputation, to give me something loser-like to work with.
“It was Dad,” he confesses later at another rink. It’s smaller than the one my own dad and I watched fall silent on YouTube. Calum’s voice is small too. “Dad is why I ended up in the US.”
“Because he pushed you?”
“No. Because he always said yes to me, then found a way to keep his promise.”
I can’t help picturing Dad making a promise, then telling me I’d missed my sales deadline. “Ah. I understand. He said yes just because he wanted you to make a shit ton of money for him?”
“No. He said it so I could keep following my own interests. He said yes to taking me to rugby practice, at first. Then to county tryouts. I made the first squads for rugby and swimming long before I ever tried out for field hockey. Looking back, his own business had some struggles, but he never said no to a single sport, even if that meant begging favours from friends in our village who had kids older than me so I’d have kit after each growth spurt. Secondhand rugby boots, hockey sticks, and swimming goggles. He said yes to everything I needed, but more than that, he told me to have fun, which is what we do here.”
He means in this final rink of the week where kids zoom across ice to hug their hero, and where Calum proves that all his grey-making PT sessions must be working: He takes a knee with no sign of lower-body issues to reunite with children he must have met during other visits. My camera has caught him remembering names at each rink we’ve visited so far. He does the same here, asking girls and boys about their progress in a skating programme which has taken me days to realise he’s interested in for more than promo reasons.
“Wait. You fund these hockey camps?Allof them? And you buy all the gear for the kids?” I’ve blurred out so many little faces in my footage. Hundreds of them.
“People helped me out when I was their age.”
His involvement adds another layer of contradiction. So does the audio I’ve captured of the same kind of coaching that I’ve replayed all alone aboard my boat each evening, if an egg doesn’t count as company. That hasn’t stopped me from bitching to a potential duckling that everything Calum does is too wholesome.
Almost a week after setting out to ruin him, I still have no idea how to do it.
I want to, though. I really do, even if I already know that viral-video lightning striking twice is unlikely. What matters is that Calum tried to help me. And he’s still trying to help by giving me this free rein with his content. Even if I only get a few hours with him daily, this additional footage still might score my freedom for me.
It’s increasingly hard to see how it could score his.
There’s fuck all about how he gets kids to work together, to play hard and enjoy it like he tells them was all he ever wanted, to make his club ditch him. It’s still all he wants. I hear it loud and clear during this final visit.
“Hold on to the fun of playing even if your team loses.”
None of this is useful. Not a single one of the pep talks I’ve recorded. He’s a one-man hype squad, and I have to admit it’s better than seeing him do a Sleeping Beauty impression while gloves rained down around him. The one reminder of that white-faced, unconscious moment is the no-contact jersey he puts on at the start of each hockey camp coaching session. It’s bright, and so are city lights when we finally make our way through central London once this visit is over.
Traffic slows our progress back to the river in the black cab we share. I use this holdup to tell him that he isn’t making my life easy. “Could you try being a bit more brutal tomorrow?”
