Chapter Text
CHAPTER ONE
Poise. Elegance. Sophistication. Flair. A certain additional je-ne-sais-quoi that marries all the other four with a handful of glitter—these are the things that make a man. No, not a man, nor a God… a male figure skater.
For Arnold Rimmer, these are a given. He has been on the ice since he was old enough to stand—technically, earlier, since his father once threw him face first onto the rink in the hopes that it would accelerate his progress. Then again, Mr. Rimmer had always been by turns ferociously ambitious and moderately negligent as a father.
In his own heyday, Pater Rimmer had been disqualified from Olympics figure skating after biting a judge, and so turned instead to coaching with the same level of maniacal obsession that usually marked Bond villains and serial killers, determined that from the ashes of his own failed career should rise the phoenixes—phoenii? Phoenus?—of his three sons. And rise they did.
The fact that Mr. Rimmer had four sons was an unnecessary inconvenience. As far as he was concerned, Arnold was little more than a blip on his radar. In his own words on Arnold’s eleventh birthday, he could’ve ejected a more successful child into a Kleenex than Arnold trying his best—so he focused his attention in the direction of his other, more naturally gifted, less psychotic sons, John, Frank, and Howard, and largely pretended that Arnold was nothing more than an oversized insect taking shelter in his house until the exterminator could gas it out of its hiding place.
But in the meantime, Arnold burned with a desire to be the best. To excel beyond the capabilities of his brothers, beyond even his father, through the ranks until he was the most revered male figure skater in the known universe. He wanted little plastic figurines of himself to be poured out of boxes of Coco Pops; he wanted aspiring young skaters to have bobblehead dolls of Arnold Rimmer mounted on the corner of their desks at school; he wanted to get a bra thrown at him on the rink and then pick it up only to find an embroidered version of his own face gazing seductively back at him.
It’s easy to get carried away in these kind of fantasies, but the point still stands.
One day, he is going to be a star.
One day, sooner than anyone would—
That’s when he is hit by the Zamboni.
As Arnold sprawls across the ice, a voice cuts through his reverie. “Rimmer, will you get out of the fucking way?”
Atop the Zamboni: Arnold’s nemesis. Stubby, grubby, unwashed, undisciplined, disgusting, slobby Lister. He has one leg hitched up, foot propped on the side door, a cigarette in his mouth, and a look on his face like he might be about to try and run Arnold over again.
Arnold scrambles up onto his feet, flushing hot with fury, and shakes an accusatory finger at Lister. “You’re not supposed to be operating the Zamboni!” he shouts at him. “That’s a Second Technician duty only—and while in dereliction of your duty, you attacked and injured a senior member of staff—”
Lister gives him a flat look. “Only ‘cause the senior member of staff is a div and won’t move when he’s asked.”
“Senior members of staff are allowed to stand wherever they damn well please,” Arnold snaps, “and what’s more, they certainly don’t need to justify their decisions—or their—their—their standing positions to anyone of an inferior managerial status just because—”
A third voice cuts through the middle of their civil, professional conversation, echoing over the tannoy overhead. “Rimmer, are you on the rink in trainers again?”
Arnold snaps to attention. “No, sir! Absolutely not, sir.”
Lister blows out a plume of smoke. “Yeah, he is.”
Arnold flares up again. “Shut up, Lister, you worthless, insubordinate glob of tuberculotic sputum—”
The tannoy crackles again. “Rimmer, off the rink!”
Face burning, Arnold skid-shuffle-slips his way towards the rink gate to get off the ice—not helped in the slightest by Lister honking the Zamboni horn to make him jump and nearly land on his face. As Arnold scrambles back onto solid land, he decides the first and most pertinent course of action is to frogmarch directly to Hollister’s office in order to:
1) Grovel for having been on the rink in his trainers, and explain that the only reason for this was because Todhunter refused to let him borrow skates on his lunchbreak after that unfortunate attempted decapitation incident
2) Point out that Lister shouldn’t be on the Zamboni and therefore should be fired without pay immediately
3) Suggest that he be given a two hundred percent pay rise as a result of his diligence to duty.
All in all, a good plan well made.
Arnold knocks briskly on Hollister’s door.
“What is it, Rimmer?” Hollister asks, without looking up. A good sign, Rimmer interprets—clearly he has made such an impact on Hollister’s day-to-day working life that Hollister expects him—and he draws himself up to full height.
“Permission to speak, sir,” Arnold says politely.
Hollister stares at him. “You don’t need to do that, Rimmer. This is an ice rink, not a military operation. You know, you can just start talking.”
Arnold says nothing. He keeps his heels smartly together, his chin lifted, and waits.
“Rimmer, what do you want?”
Arnold’s eyes dart down to Hollister at his desk. “Is that permission granted, sir?” he double checks, as he wouldn’t dare to presume.
With a sigh, Hollister drags a hand down over his face. He presses his fingers into his own eye sockets. “Yes. Permission granted. What the hell is it?”
“I just wanted to apologise from the bottom of my heart for going onto the rink in my trainers—”
“Okay, fine. Just don’t do it again.”
“—and also to inform you that, although it may have slipped your attention—although quite how you could have failed to notice is beyond my comprehension, due to the size of the Zamboni and the fact that it is, by virtue of its function, the largest thing in the building and the only other thing on the ice—”
“Rimmer, get to the point, please.”
Arnold takes a deep breath. “Lister was operating the Zamboni,” he says dramatically.
“Okay.”
Arnold looks at him. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Hollister repeats. “Okay, fine, alright, great. What about it?”
“He’s not allowed to operate the Zamboni,” Rimmer points out. “It’s strictly a duty for Second Technicians and higher—he hasn’t had the prerequisite training on how to operate it safely—”
“What can I say, he picked it up,” Hollister says. “It’s not that hard, Rimmer. It’s pretty straightforward, and as long as he’s doing it responsibly and someone senior has eyes-on, it’s not a problem.”
“It is a problem!” Arnold says, and he can hear that his voice is pitching up higher. “It completely undermines the chain of command! It makes a mockery of the entire ice skating establishment, of the illustrious sport that we represent, the art-form whose legacy you are responsible for upholding, and right now, with the greatest respect, you’re not upholding any legacy at all—you’re barely upholding your own fat arse and—”
Anyway, the long and short of it is that Arnold is asked to leave the building.
He is told to take five outside, while Hollister mulls over exactly what is going to become of the situation. On the way out, there was something said about three weeks on lavatory duties and a ban on Zamboni duty, but to be entirely truthful, it was all said so loudly and so suddenly that it was scarcely intelligible—and for some reason, when Arnold tried to point out how difficult it was to understand Hollister’s decrees when he was foaming at the mouth like a rabid animal, somehow that only made the situation worse, so who knows?
Perhaps, Arnold thinks as he leans on the fence outside the ice skating centre, Hollister has some kind of severe medical condition which affects his capacity for logical reasoning and his speech, and that’s why he’s being a little bit touchy. That makes much more sense.
“That seemed like it went well,” Lister says, from behind him, and Arnold flinches.
“What are you doing out here?”
Lister flicks the blue flame of his lighter to his cigarette. He sucks until it lights, takes a long drag, and then, inspecting the cigarette, says, “Revolutionising German poetry.”
“Alright, you’re on a smoke break,” Arnold says. “But why are you here?”
“Thought I’d wind you up.”
“Yes, thank you, and you’re doing the job beautifully, so you might as well piss off back inside now.” Arnold makes a shooing motion with both hands. “Go on, then. Toodle-oo.”
The problem with Lister is—actually, how long have you got?
The first offense: Lister got the job here without a CV. He just walked in and asked if they had a position going—for literally anything. I’ll scrub lavs, I’ll hand out shoes, I’ll dress up as a mascot and give out flyers, I’m not fussed—which first of all, shows an incredible lack of purpose or ambition, because who on earth is satisfied with just any old job? Obviously he has no real interest in skating or anything to do with it, and probably just needs the money to funnel into—God knows. He certainly isn’t spending it on clothes or his personal hygiene.
The second offense, to lead on from the first: Lister is categorically, undeniably the most repulsive person Arnold has ever met.
Now, Arnold likes to think of himself as a fairly tolerant person. For example, he’s never been deliberately cruel or hurtful towards a homeless person, but rather prefers to turn his nose up at them with a haughty look so that they can infer exactly what he thinks of them, and then he walks on by as though they don’t exist. Honestly, he’s just about overflowing with compassion and humanity, but good lord, Lister puts him through his paces.
It’s not just the thick, rank odour of vindaloo on his breath, although that is a significant factor. It’s everything—he has body odour you could cut with a bread knife, and he eats off the floor, and he farts remorselessly, and once Arnold saw him pick his nose and then discreetly wipe his findings on his own shirt!
Offense the third, comma, most grievous: Lister takes a special, perverse pleasure in irritating the daylights out of Arnold. He’s too old for school, and he’s not at university as far as Arnold can tell, not least because Lister completely lacks motivational drive and doesn’t even care to apply himself to his job, let alone learning anything, although if he was taking a degree in Undermining Arnold Rimmer At Every Turn then he’d surely get a first without having to try. Apparently because God and Hollister both hate him, they share nearly every shift, are almost always assigned to the same room or the same duty, and Arnold has technically been designated Lister’s supervisor, which is a fate not quite as bad as being hung, drawn and quartered, although not by much.
Lister has a smart-aleck answer for everything, delights in doing things wrong on purpose, deliberately pushes all Arnold’s buttons because he seems to enjoy making him angry—and worst of all, worst of all—is that sometimes, just sometimes, for no explicable reason, Lister actually succeeds in making him laugh.
In this instance, however, Lister seems quite content to remain the most infuriating human being on the planet, and as such, he only shrugs before point blank refusing to do what Arnold has so pleasantly requested—namely, fucking right off.
“Not on your life, man,” Lister says. “I’ve got twelve minutes of me break left and I intend to use every last one.”
“Take your break somewhere else,” Arnold tells him. “Nowhere is it written into our contract that thou shalt pass all thy breaks outside the front steps.”
“Oh, yeah? What about that one that gives me free license to call you a twonk if you start talking Shakespeare?”
“There’s no such thing as talking Shakespeare,” Rimmer says acidly. “It’s just English—good old fashioned, plain and simple medieval English—which, of course, you would know and, moreover, would understand, if you had in fact ever been to school and tried to learn anything.”
“I did go to school,” Lister protests. “I went to art college and everything.”
Arnold eyes him sceptically. “You went to art college?”
“Yeah. Made a portfolio of all the cock-and-balls I’d scribbled on the back of me science books and turned that in.” Lister pulls on his cigarette again, exhales smoke. “They said I was clearly an anti-establishment maverick with a taste for Dadaism and gave me a scholarship.”
Arnold would quite like to strangle him.
“By the way,” Lister says, flicking his cigarette butt to the asphalt and grinding it underneath his boot, “I’m pretty sure Shakespeare was the Renaissance, but. Suit yourself.”
With that, he heads back inside.
Arnold squeezes the metal barrier in both hands so hard that he thinks he might break some of his own fingers, and he focuses on breathing. In… and out. In… and out.
He’s going to murder Lister and make it look like an accident.
When he is calm enough—and Hollister is calm enough—to resume their discussion, it becomes more like five weeks of lavatory duties, and apparently that starts more or less immediately. He is directed towards a pair of fusty marigolds and a sponge, by Todhunter’s sneer—just to add insult to injury.
Then, adding outrage to offense to insult to injury, Arnold stalks into the men’s bathroom to get to work and finds no other than Lister, knelt on the tiles, already at work there.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Arnold says loudly, stopping dead in the doorway.
Without looking up, Lister says, “Nice to see you too, Rimmer”, and scoops a glob of something disgusting out of one of the sinks with his bare fingers. He isn’t even wearing gloves, and when he uses the back of a hand to push one of his dreadlocks back over his shoulder, there is a thin, viscid trail of something scummy caught in the end of his hair. Arnold thinks he might be sick.
God. This sort of thing is beneath Arnold. Cleaning urinals, emptying sanitary waste bins, restocking the Lillete’s dispenser—those are tasks for the nobodies of the world, the directionless losers, the sperm that would’ve been better off swallowed. People like, for instance, Lister.
“Will you stop that?” Arnold snaps, finally losing his temper, after stewing some ten minutes in gradually mounting irritation as Lister works through what feels like every tool in his arsenal for slowly driving Arnold up the wall.
Lister lifts his head. “Stop what?”
Of course, by this point, Lister has stopped—stopped mumbling the same tuneless two bars of Humpin’ Around, stopped idly beatboxing, stopped intermittently chuckling to himself and then glancing hopefully over at Arnold as though considering whether to let him in on the joke. Regardless, Arnold is not about to let Lister win by politely refusing to acknowledge his grievous defiance of social niceties. “Stop all your idiotic blathering.”
“What idiotic blathering?”
“That! All of that—everything about it.”
“I’m not saying nothing!” Lister protests, throwing his hands in the air so that a glob of dirty soap flies from his sponge and lands with a thick splatter on Arnold’s bare forearm.
“And—do you mind?!” Arnold squawks. “Will you get your grotty sponge out of my face?”
“It’s not in your face, it’s in my hand.”
“It’s in your hand and in my face, and it’s revolting. Do you have any idea the kind of putrid bacteria that breeds in public urinals? That could easily end up in my mouth or in my eye or—or—or in my lungs! Then the next thing you know, I’ve got some big, ugly flesh-eating tapeworm trying to crawl into my guts—”
“Well, steady on, Rimmer, usually you buy them dinner first,” Lister says. “Or d’you not want a girlfriend anymore?”
Arnold’s jaw tightens. “Shut up.”
“I’m only trying to help, man, and I know you’ve not got masses of experience with—”
“I have plenty of experience, thank you,” he grits out.
“Ringing up sex hotlines pretending to be Patrick Swayze does not count as experience, Rimmer.”
“No, proper experience, I’ll have you know.” Arnold’s voice rises in volume and his own sponge falls, forgotten, into their shared bucket. “Real, proper experience with girls who actually really fancied me.”
“Name one girl who fancied you.”
Arnold’s mouth opens and closes uselessly. “Well—no! I’m not—I don’t owe you anything, and what’s more, I’m a gentleman, so I’m not going to—”
“When your list of sexual exploits sounds like a senior politician trying to talk his way out of a scandal, you know it’s bad.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Hey, it’s alright, I heard they’ve brought out a sort of Barbie’s First Relationship Kit—so for just thirty quid, you can practice being an emotionally constipated disappointment ahead of time, and you can even decide which red flags you’re gonna start waving first, so that—”
“Shut up, Lister,” Arnold snaps again, louder now. “Just shut up, I mean it.”
Lister holds his hands up in mock surrender. “Oh, shit, well, if you mean it, this time,” he mutters with an eye roll, and he turns back to his urinal, sponge in hand.
For a moment, they work in angry silence, and Arnold steadfastly refuses to engage Lister in conversation—even when the ends of Lister’s dreadlocks trail through the soap; even when Arnold looks over to see that Lister has just spent the last five minutes squeezing droplets of water from his sponge to idly chase a stray pube down off the ceramic—until they go to dunk their sponges at the same time. Their knuckles knock in the warm, sudsy water.
“Oh, Rimmer,” Lister says, his voice low and smooth, and he ducks his head with a smirk. “I had no idea you felt that way.”
Arnold snatches his hand out of the water and he can feel himself flushing with blotchy, furious heat. “Don’t touch me,” he bites out, and then Lister reaches across with one sopping wet, soapy hand, and flicks Arnold in the centre of his forehead.
Naturally, Arnold explodes.
Some twenty minutes later, when Arnold has calmed down enough to explain to Hollister the exact nature of Lister’s various offences—including but not limited to: insubordination, defiance, inappropriate workplace conduct, questioning Arnold’s masculinity, undermining his authority, and unsafe chemical practice—Arnold is sent outside to wait on a nearby bench while Lister is called in for his own version of the story. No doubt an absolutely preposterous distortion of reality, but unfortunately, Hollister’s style of management still adheres to the presumption of innocence.
As Arnold sits there, hands loose in his lap, a little girl attempts to perch on the other end of the bench to loosen the laces of her boots.
Arnold fixes her with a glare until she wisely reconsiders her choice of seat, and then he drops his head into his hands with a mournful sigh.
Why does Lister happen to good people? Arnold has never done anything to deserve this. He’s a goody, and all he does in this life is sow the seeds of positive karma, and yet there must exist somewhere a cruel, vindictive God hell-bent on—
The little girl returns with her boots in hand. “Excuse me,” she asks meekly. “Sorry—I was just wondering if you could please help me with—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, I am not interested in your problems,” Arnold bursts out, his head snapping up. “Go set up your poxy lemonade stand somewhere else, with someone who cares—I am preoccupied with something slightly more important than how many little dollies you can sell at the county fair!”
At that moment, the door to Hollister’s office opens, and Arnold is spared from caring about this child’s response, because out comes Lister.
“Lister!” Arnold exclaims, and he stands up. “What happened? Were you sacked? Arrested?”
“Not quite,” Lister says, wiping a smear of something crusty onto his shirt and then pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts with a rueful shrug. “I’ve got to do a hundred hours of community service, you know, helping old ladies cross roads and that—but… the worst of it is that I’ve been told I’ve gotta hand me matterlove back in.”
Arnold’s face creases into a bewildered frown. “Your matterlove?” he echoes. “What’s a matterlove?”
Lister’s glum look breaks into a cocky grin, and he slaps Arnold on the shoulder. “I’m alright, duck, what’s a matter with you?”
Baffled, Arnold just blinks. “What?”
Letting out a loud, stupid laugh, Lister walks off, and so Arnold is left behind trying to work out whether or not Lister is actually in trouble for what happened.
***
At nine-thirty PM, Arnold is the last man standing at the Jupiter Corps ice rink. He doesn’t mind being in charge of locking up—he has nowhere better to be, he doesn’t mind being completely alone, and to tell the truth, he often finds he works better when he doesn’t have to deal with anyone else.
There is a certain satisfaction in going through a checklist to ensure that everything has been completed for the evening, every necessary task ticked off and triple-checked. The last things on his list before he lets himself out the back are to lock and deadbolt the main doors, to turn down the lights, to lower the metal shutters and lock the main office.
Everything is silent and still. The lights are down. Arnold is alone.
On his way to the front of the building to enable the security alarm, Arnold gives into temptation, in much the same way as he does most evenings.
He sets down the key ring on the bench and he ducks underneath the divider to get behind the front desk. God, he wishes he could wear his own skates, but he’s not allowed. When he turned sixteen, his father bought them for him—white, gleaming, strong and sturdy and beautiful and sharp enough to hold up a bank robbery—and then told him in no uncertain terms, that they were winner’s skates.
If you wear these and lose, his father had said, his voice as calm and measured as if they had been discussing the weather, then that’s the end for you.
Seven years later, Arnold still doesn’t even really know what that means. Is his father going to take the shoes back? Is he going to destroy them? Is he going to kill him and make it look like an accident? Write a strongly worded letter to the owners of every ice skating establishment in the universe and tell them that Arnold Rimmer is forbidden from ever setting foot on the ice?
He has no idea, but he’s terrified to find out, and so he is reduced to this: borrowing the scummy, sweaty, imprecise skates from behind reception when no-one else is around. It’s become something of a routine now, spending fifteen minutes assiduously cleaning the inside of the shoes with an antibacterial wipe, sharpening the blade in the back, and unlacing the entire boot to relace more precisely before he can even consider putting his foot inside.
Then he skates.
He is always careful to set a mop by the gate as a contingency plan, just in case anyone comes by, but there shouldn’t be any interruptions. He’s already locked up, the metal shutters drawn, so that now it’s just him and the ice.
Slow, steady pushes. Circuits round the edge, building up speed. No music, just his father’s voice in his head: Kick foot through. Left arm higher. No—again. Bend your knees. Be better. Precision, Arnold, for fuck’s sake. Be better. Again. Again. The clean slice of the blades against the ice. Dead stop, testing the toe pick. He bends to touch his toes, rolls his shoulders back until his neck cracks, and sets off again.
He skates until his muscles are warm and loose, then loops the circuit again, faster. Waltz turn, pivot—again. Be better. For fuck’s sake—and spiral, getting that back leg higher until his hamstring is burning—straighten your toes. Chest higher. Head up. No, higher. Do it right or get off the ice—and it’s that simmering resentment in the pit of Arnold’s gut that decides it.
Skating backwards, the air hissing in his ears, arms outstretched. Knees bent, skating leg steady. Fuck, fuck. Do it right or get off the ice. Half turn, inside edge, and he vaults up.
For a moment, it’s giddy, intoxicating—he’s flying—until his focus comes back for him to pull his arms in, bringing that leg up to pull around, and fuck, oh fuck—he lands. With a wobble, admittedly, and an imperfect flail of arms that would’ve got something thrown at him if his father had been here and not just in his head, but he lands all the same. That leg stretches out behind him, a quick half circle backwards as the momentum carries him, and then Lister says, “Holy shit.”
Arnold jerks—his foot rolls—and he goes down.
He hits the ice arse-first at about twelve kilometres an hour, which hurts, and then he skids, which also hurts, and then he comes to a halt when he smacks into the wall of the rink, which damages his pride more than anything else.
“Okay, that was less impressive,” Lister admits. On the far side of the rink, he stands with his forearms propped on the barrier, leaning halfway across.
“What are you doing here?” Arnold demands, or tries to. Not just his pride that hurts, then. His lungs feel like when you blow up a paper bag and then burst it with one hard slap to the bubble end, so his voice comes out as a kind of uneven wheeze.
“Left me bag in the changing room.” Lister tilts his head over towards the back rooms and preempts the next question. “Let myself in through the side door. Could ask you the same question, though.”
“I’m—I was just—” Arnold splutters. “I was—mopping.”
Lister cocks his eyebrows, looking far too bloody smug for somebody who hasn’t had a wash since 1982. “I can see that,” he says, with a pointed look at the mop—the dry mop—leaning against the rink gate, approximately twenty metres away from where Arnold is sprawled on the ice. “So how long’ve you been keeping that quiet?”
“What’re you talking about?” Arnold asks, as though maybe if he can just be belligerent enough, then he can somehow barrage Lister’s brain into forgetting everything he just saw.
“I just mean how you can more or less pull off a double Salchow when no-one’s looking, and yet the other day on clean up duty I saw you trip over trying to skate round a cone.”
Heat surges up Arnold’s throat. “I—I—that’s not—actually, I don’t see how—” He has no idea what he’s trying to say, only that he wants more than anything for Lister to just shut up and go away. “That’s not—none of your business, actually.” A further thought occurs to him, as he hauls himself up onto his feet, wincing, and steadies himself with a hand on the barrier; he narrows his eyes at Lister. “Hang on. How do you even know what that is?”
“I mean, I do work in an ice skating rink.”
Arnold sniffs. “Barely.” He dusts himself off and draws himself up tall, although he still doesn’t quite dare to move—what if he falls again? Christ, he’ll look a total tit, and he can tolerate a lot of things but to draw scorn from Lister of all people is more than he can bear. He begins ticking off his fingers. “Just yesterday I heard you bragging that you’ve managed to get away with not doing bin-emptying duties for the last three months. Last time I saw you on the front desk, you were asleep propped up against the wall. You haven’t attended a single health and safety briefing since you joined—I don’t think you’ve paid attention to anything that’s been said to you in a year.”
“Bit rich coming from you, don’t you think?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just think it’s rich of you to slag me off for not paying attention to anything when you wouldn’t notice an alien invasion come through the roof, not even if it slapped your arse and bought you dinner.”
“I do pay attention!” Arnold retorts, offended.
“Get real, man. You’re so self-centred, you make the sun look like a satellite. You’re like an ouroboros of self-absorption.”
“That is not true!”
Lister props his elbow on the barrier, resting his chin on his fist. “What’s me first name, Rimmer?” he says conversationally.
Arnold blinks. “What?”
“My name,” Lister repeats, slow and emphatic. “You know, like how everyone calls you Rimmer, but your name—your actual proper name—is Arnold, or to your mates, the people who really like you, sometimes Arseface. So—what’s my name?”
For a moment, Arnold’s mouth flaps helplessly, speechless. Then, bristling, he says, “I don’t see how that has any relevance in this current situation. Just because I can’t think of your God-given name at this particular moment in time is by no mentions a reflection of my abilities as a technician, or I might add, as a manager of—”
With a sigh, Lister pushes his weight off the barrier. He turns, grabs his bag, and slings it over his shoulder. “Case closed,” he says, and he starts heading towards the back doors. He pauses a moment by the receptionist’s deck, drums a hand on the counter, and half turns back. “It’s Dave, by the way. And for future reference—you tried to take off too early. Threw you off-balance.” He knocks his knuckles against the wood. “See you tomorrow, Rimmer.”
Arnold stares after him in silence until he hears the definitive click of the back door closing. He resents being made to feel ridiculous for not knowing every tiny, miniscule, trivial detail of Lister’s life. Why should it matter to him what Lister’s name is? Yes, technically, it’s on the clock-in sheet that Arnold has to sign every morning, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that Arnold has much more important things that preoccupy his mind—and anyway, it’s not as though Lister knows every sordid detail of everyone else’s life!
Shit, that’s what he should have said. Too late now. Perhaps he can mention it tomorrow, just to really drive the point home. Yes, that’ll work—and how foolish Lister will feel then!
Arnold pushes himself off the wall, propelling himself across the ice at a slow, meandering glide.
Now that he knows for certain that he’s alone, he can focus on his skating—but now there is an additional voice echoing in his head. You tried to take off too early. Threw you off-balance. Not a negative voice, not a voice tearing him down, just… a suggestion.
Frowning, Arnold pushes himself faster, then faster still. He turns on his heel, quick adjustment of balance, pivoting briskly. He moves faster still. Knees—arms out—three-turn to snap round and build momentum, and then he swings around and launches into the air.
Not quite. He manages two rotations, just like last time, but this time he doesn’t land right, stumbles, goes over onto his arse again.
Bollocks. Well, that just shows what that uneducated, boorish ingrate Lister knows. He wouldn’t know a Lutz from an Axel if it introduced itself with a name badge. Either way—it’s clearly impossible, and if there is anything that Arnold does excel at, it’s giving up.
***
When Arnold gets back to his flat, he finds yet another Post It from his landlord lovingly awaiting him on his doormat. He steps on it, just to prove a point, and then walks right over it as he lets himself in.
The landlord in question, and downstairs neighbour, is a wide-eyed blonde named Holly whose lack of intellect is so staggering that Arnold’s single most lasting impression of her is of her locking herself out and hiring a locksmith to come and let her in, because I’ve left the window open and I’m worried someone will break in. They speak infrequently, usually when she wants to hike rent up. Arnold is by no means a socialist-leaning man, but he resents her power over him, and every time she bangs on the ceiling to complain about Arnold’s late night white noise cassettes, or demands that he push an envelope of crinkled twenties through her letterbox, the closer he feels to a red flag and revolution. Still, the flat is hers, and it’s better than homelessness, so if the price he pays is being accosted in the stairwell to be told about her collection of Pyrenees racing snails, or whatever other insane hobby she’s currently cultivating—then he can grit his teeth and bear it.
To tell the truth, the term flat is perhaps excessively generous—perhaps better would be box, or repurposed zoo exhibition. Although he hasn’t put it to the test, he is fairly certain that he could lie down on the floor with his arms outstretched and reach from one wall to the other. It consists of two rooms: a small, dingy bathroom with a dim overhead bulb that gives every shower the impression of waking disoriented in an alley after a wild evening at the Annual General Meeting of Organ Harvesters; then, in the other room, everything else. Bunk beds, tiny kitchenette, a single wardrobe you’d struggle to fit a family of hamsters into. It certainly knows how to use space efficiently, Arnold will grant it that much, although he thinks it’s certainly stretching the term habitable right to its utmost limits.
Here’s the kicker, though: it costs approximately 120% of Arnold’s salary, and he is now short of a flatmate as a result of Steven Fairchild having told him that he is, to quote, a twat, and if the passive-aggressive Post It notes stuck to his front door with increasing persistence are anything to go by, Holly is a few days shy of coming over with a battering ram and a bucket of diseased rats.
In the face of these terrifying circumstances, there is only one rational thing that Arnold can think of to do, and so he does it, with all the determination and focus of a neurosurgeon trying to conceal his acid habit—he ignores it.
Arnold has to admit, he is ferociously good at ignoring problems until they go away, unless they don’t go away, in which case, he is so good at ignoring them that he rarely notices.
Until the day Holly comes to physically drag him from the premises, Arnold is determined to consign it to a problem for Future Arnold.
Poor old Future Arnold has a lot to contend with, unfortunately. From sloppily reheated dinners (what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—and if it does make me sick, that’s a problem for Future Arnold) to half-arsing any numbers of tasks at work that he’s sure he’ll get round to later, the poor bastard rarely gets a break.
Worse still, it seems unlikely that Present Arnold is ever going to learn, either.
Case in point: last Thursday, Arnold was in charge of tidying away the spare rubber blade guards for boots, a task that encompassed not only putting the guards back in the box, but ensuring that they were matched up with their partner blade guard and put in the correct slot. To tell the truth, after the third time the box tipped over, he couldn’t be fucked anymore. He decided that the easiest option was to shove them all back in the box, whack the box somewhat precariously at the top of the pile—deliberately so—in a way that meant that the next person to open the supply cupboard would knock the box from its pedestal, thus spilling blade guards everywhere, thus: oh, clumsy me, after the person before me must have diligently matched up all these blade guards, now through my own incompetence and no fault of theirs, I’ve cocked it all up.
A foolproof plan, Arnold had thought.
Now, on the far side of the weekend, the rink is taken over by an ice dancing class for under-sevens who work clumsily on Choctaw turns while a woman with a long, wispy plait barks out rather brusque encouragement, and Hollister asks Arnold to restock blade guards from the supply cupboard for them.
“Yes, sir,” Arnold says. “Right away, sir.” He ducks his head in an awkward little half bow, and when Hollister walks away, he holds that position, staring at the floor, and he says, “Fuck.”
With the slow, resigned walk of a man on his way to the gallows, Arnold heads towards the supply cupboard. In order to reach it, he has to pass the reception, where Lister, Kochanski, and McGruder are in the middle of what can only qualify as a very, very loose interpretation of stock check.
Lister is sat on the desk, legs swinging down, and he is the one in charge of the clipboard—although he is severely underqualified for the position, and truthfully, Arnold isn’t even convinced he can read—while Kochanski and McGruder check the boots. The conversation that they’re in the middle of seems so inane as to even bore the tits off a nun, but Arnold doesn’t waste time listening to it.
He passes them by, mop and bucket in hand, and deposits both by the wall out of the way before he goes for the supply cupboard door. He takes a deep breath, steadying himself for the inevitable avalanche.
No point dicking about. Might as well get it over with.
The ensuing crash could’ve killed a lesser man, but Arnold valiantly flinches back just in time to avoid taking a size six to the face, and even manages to grab the box on the way down to key the cascade from getting any worse.
As Arnold fumbles with it, he glances over in case Lister or any of his shit cronies consider laughing at him—but they’re in their own world. The cluster of them are still carrying on their meaningless conversation, and Arnold isn’t eavesdropping, of course; he’s just awkwardly nearby and they’re talking at maximum volume.
“—so what would you be?” Lister is asking, clipboard forgotten, drumming his heels against the wooden side of the desk.
“Easy. Long jump,” Kochanski declares, with a cocky grin. “I’m small but I’m fast.”
Lister frowns. “Wait, what’s speed got to do with it?”
Begrudgingly, Arnold starts gathering up skate guards and working at pairing them.
“Everything,” Kochanski replies. “You gotta get yourself up in the air at high speed to get that distance, kid. Short bursts of mega high speed, that’s the name of the game.”
Leaning back against the desk, elbows propped on the counter, McGruder looks over. “Why do I get the impression you were really, really sporty at school?” she says disdainfully.
“Oh, I absolutely was.” Kochanski rubs her hands together with evident glee. “Every waking moment—if I wasn’t running, I wasn’t living.”
McGruder groans. “You make me sick.”
“Oh, yeah?” Kochanski turns to square up to them both. “Go on, what about you, then? If you were gonna win an Olympic sport?”
Lister says easily, “Lager handstand.”
McGruder turns a flat, disbelieving look on Lister. “What the sweet, ever-loving fuck,” she says emphatically, “is a lager handstand?”
“Aw, it’s great, you gotta try it,” Lister explains. “You slam a lager back in one go, then do a handstand and you’ve gotta try and stand up as long as you can without being sick or passing out.”
“Oh, Dave,” Kochanski says fondly, and she reaches out and pinches Lister’s cheek in a way that makes him positively beam. “The more I learn about you, the more things make sense.”
McGruder is much less sympathetic. “I do not know how you’re still alive.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Lister admits. “Usually from doctors, to be fair. I once ended up in A&E and they called me a medical miracle.”
“What were you in A&E for?”
“Shot a staple gun through me foot.”
“How?” McGruder says incredulously.
Lister considers this. “I think I just pulled the trigger,” he says at last, and it’s so completely and utterly stupid, that despite himself, Arnold snorts a half laugh.
From the other side of the lobby, Lister, McGruder, and Kochanski look up, regarding him curiously, and Arnold can feel his ears burning.
Kochanski lifts her chin and raises her volume. “Something funny, Rimmer?” she teases.
Arnold turns to face them. “I have no idea what you mean.”
On top of the counter, Lister leans back to prop himself up on his hands. “What, d’you not have any thoughts on drunken sports?”
“I’m busy, actually,” Arnold says heatedly, “and your witless blathering is only distracting me, so if you don’t mind—”
“Come on, Rimmer, there must be something you’d win a medal for,” Kochanski says.
“Aw, don’t worry, I already know his answer—he’d be the Olympic gold medallist of ironing his knickers,” Lister teases, and laughs along with them. Even McGruder cracks a smirk.
Arnold can feel himself going hot at the back of the neck, and humiliation curls his hands into fists at his sides. “Shut up, Lister,” he snaps. “You’ll regret this.”
“Why, are you gonna ring my mum?” Lister says, and Kochanski breaks out in fresh peals of laughter. “Am I gonna get put in detention?”
“Shut up—”
They are interrupted then by a crackling over the intercom, followed by Todhunter’s voice. “Clean up on the ice, Lister.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lister mutters, rolling his eyes, but he doesn’t immediately make any move.
Arnold brandishes his mop. “Well, come on, then, Lister! Hop to it. You heard the order, let’s go. You’re not being paid to shirk about.”
Under his breath, Lister mutters something which is probably far from complimentary, and he leaps down easily off the counter. He braces a hand against the wall to pop off his skate guards, and then heads for the rink. As he passes, Arnold holds out the mop, but Lister ignores him. Instead, he steps out onto the ice, and skates easily away in the direction of a crying child and a pool of lumpy vomit.
Arnold’s nose wrinkles, but Lister seems fairly unconcerned—then again, he probably feels right at home in a pile of sick, given his predilection for overdrinking and eating curries—and ignores the vomit for a bit, instead kneeling to check on the grey-faced little girl sitting in a heap on the ice. He’s pulling a silly face, making the kid laugh weakly in spite of herself, and it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying from this distance, but his wonky smile is clearly putting her right at ease, and the next thing Arnold knows, Lister has pulled the kid carefully up onto her skates again, and offers her his elbow to skate her back to the gate with all the chivalry of a Regency gentleman. It’s sickening, actually.
“—been dead brave, honestly.” Lister’s voice is low and comforting. “First time I went out on the ice I chucked up as well, so don’t you worry about it.” As they reach the gate, he steadies her with a hand on her shoulder as she stumbles back onto solid ground, and he offers her a smile. “You get some water, yeah? Sit down for a bit. I’ll send someone to check on you in a bit.”
Arms folded, Arnold clears his throat. “Erm, Lister? Just thought I’d remind you that you’re not getting paid to re-enact the Babysitter’s Club, either,” he tells him. “There’s a puddle of sick out there with your name on it, and the longer you neglect it in favour of befriending weak-willed children, the greater the risk of—”
“Drop dead, Rimmer,” Lister says mildly, snatching the mop from Rimmer’s hand, and skates away again.
Arnold huffs.
He carries on stocking blade guards, and then moves onto emptying bins, and the next interruption comes in the form of Lister again, this time skating right up to the barrier of the rink opposite where Arnold is working.
“Hey,” Lister says brusquely, and when Arnold lifts his head, he finds Lister staring at him like a challenge. “I’m just wondering—what’s wrong with you?”
Arnold sits up. “I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, why don’t you just join in people’s conversations, instead of listening to them?” Lister asks.
Arnold balks. “What—so you can relentlessly mock me to my face? No thanks.”
“But we wouldn’t.” Lister props his elbows on the barrier and leans in closer, confrontational for a man on the other side of a wall and also wearing ice skates. “We only take the piss because you’re always acting like you’re better than us. If you actually made an effort to hang out with people, they’d be laughing with you instead of against you.”
Rimmer considers this, puzzled. “But I am better than you.”
The look that flashes over Lister’s face makes Arnold glad that there is a barrier between them, or he thinks he might have got hit for that. “For fuck’s sake,” Lister mutters, shaking his head. “I give up.”
With that, he pushes off the barrier and takes another lap of the rink, mop in hand, and Arnold doesn’t watch him go. He has bins to empty, and he fully intends to do his job to the very best of his ability, because without his intrinsic contributions to the company, this entire ice rink might very well come falling down around their ears.
As he diligently scrapes chewing gum from the side of the bin where it missed the bag, he rests easy in the knowledge that he is doing something meaningful and worthwhile.
***
Arnold is on the way to clean the window panes in the front door, bucket and sponge in hand, when he hears raised voices emanating from within the equipment shop on the far side of the lobby, and—so sue him—he’s nosey. On his way to investigate, he does consider the possibility that a deranged pickaxe wielding madman has broken into the rink, in which case he is merrily marching towards his own demise. This gives him pause, wondering if it might not be better to go and find Hollister first… but it does seem like an unlikely possibility.
Curiosity draws him in closer until he can hear what is undoubtedly a well-trodden argument—between the guy behind the till, and none other than Lister.
Now, Arnold has no great love of people who work in customer service anyway. They’re usually lazy, disinterested, unmotivated, respond poorly to constructive criticism, and what’s more, he has found that most people in customer facing roles hate him for absolutely no discernible reason. Having said that, there is a special loathing in his heart for the man—if he can be called that—who works in the equipment shop.
There are a great many complaints to be made about this one particular employee. He refuses to wear the rink’s uniform red polo shirt, for one thing, instead showing up to work in increasingly ridiculous outfits like he thinks he’s walking the runway in Paris instead of hooking Spandex suits onto coat hangers; he spends most of his time, as far as Arnold can tell, staunchly avoiding doing any real work; most irritatingly of all, however, is that apparently his name is the Cat.
No-one will tell Arnold why.
At the moment, however, it seems that Lister and the glittery entity known as the Cat are having some kind of domestic tiff.
“—swear to God, man, please,” Lister is saying, but not in the kind of voice likely to invite compassion—more the kind of voice likely to start a fight.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” the Cat replies sympathetically. “You’ve mixed me up with someone who gives a crap.”
“Come on, man,” Lister says. “I’ll pay you in instalments, I’m good for it, just not upfront right now.”
“That’s a sad story. I bet if you put some violins over it, that could be a real tearjerker.”
“Cat!”
“Erm,” Arnold says loudly, hovering in the doorway, and Lister half jumps out of his skin at the sound, before whipping around to glare at him. “What exactly is going on here?”
“Oh, piss off, Rimmer,” Lister says.
“He’s trying to cheat me out of some boots,” the Cat says.
“Lister, Lister, Lister,” Arnold says, shaking his head. “I knew you were a cheap, feckless, lazy speck of mildew, but—”
“Will you mind your fucking business?” Lister snaps.
“I’m trying to!” the Cat retorts. “That’s why I’m saying hell no with a capital hell.”
“What are you trying to buy boots for, anyway?” Arnold asks. “As a heavy, expensive door stop? In lieu of kitchen knives? Are you planning to go on a murderous rampage?”
“Don’t tempt me,” Lister mutters. He shoves a wallet which looks like a scrap of fabric from a museum exhibition on Neolithic weavings into the back pocket of his cargo shorts. “Forget it. Thanks for nothing, Cat.”
“You’re welcome,” the Cat says, beaming. “Nothing is my specialty!”
As Lister walks out, he gives Arnold a flat look as though daring him to say something snidey, and—well. Arnold is more than happy to oblige.
“Oh, Listy,” he says with saccharine sweetness, falling into step on the way out through the lobby. “This is the trouble of getting ideas above your station—like one of those hand-cranked nineteenth century miner’s railway carts trying to use a monorail. You see, figure skating requires a certain dignity, I’m afraid, a sort of nobility of character, an inherent grace to one’s every movement—”
Arnold trips over the doormat.
“Mind the doormat, Twinkle Toes,” Lister tells him.
As Arnold stumbles and rights himself, he realises that Lister is on his way out. “Hey, where are you going?” he protests. “We’ve got to mop the floor in a minute.”
Lister turns and keeps walking steadily backwards. “We?” he repeats. “Rimmer, I’m not even on shift today.”
Arnold stops in his tracks. “You what?”
“I only came in to speak to the Cat.” Lister gives an exaggerated shrug in a pantomime of helpless concern. “You’re on your own with mopping the floor, man.” He pauses by the water dispenser just shy of the door, leans across, and flicks the tap on. Water flows freely over the tray and onto the floor. Lister grins. “Have fun. Let me know how that nobility of character treats you.”
Then he’s gone, away through the sliding doors, where Arnold can’t follow until five P.M, and Arnold is left watching the puddle of water that he will have to mop by himself, as it grows and spreads across the tiles.
***