SkateCal

Let us say you have become someone’s parent, perhaps imagining that it would be cosy to become one of those blissfully meandering couples with a sleeping little creature in a stroller, never suspecting that twelve years later you would be ordered to count points at your daughter’s club figure-skating championship.

It is not the sort of thing they talk about much at the baby clinic, that one Saturday you might be placed in a well-heated conference room outside the ice rink with a trio of other parents in order to compile the judges’ scores in SkateCal for girls of varying ages, from young to older, and thereby be responsible for the ranking, in these forms you have been set to fill in.

You are given a brief introduction to the work, very brisk, because the coach has other things to do, and you are adults with jobs, so you know this sort of thing, but all right: after the programme has been performed, the judges send numbers via WhatsApp to the parent group, who then eagerly fill in the form, add everything up and stack the papers in a pile with the winner on top. It is not really that complicated: each jump requires a code, the competitor may fall, which means deductions, different per class of course, and then there is an overall assessment through which every point towards the end has to be filtered, and do not forget either to enter the correct coefficient.

You do not understand how this is supposed to work, no more than you could have learnt C++ during a coffee break or Claude Code by hearsay. If this were at work, you might call in the union or ask your manager for simpler tasks better suited to your IQ, but here it is a matter of five minutes’ total learning time before the code snippets from the judges arrive on your phones with their S: 4.0, P 4.0, C, 3.75. Interspersed with first 2L7 + 1A + 2T and FSSp3, sometimes marked with << in the corner or sometimes just a three, or a one, and it has to be quick because soon it is Rafaela’s turn, and Ester’s, whose verdict from those who know better reads: Well done. Really lovely arms and expression. Good spins! These phrases are to be entered at the bottom of the paper, but they are only words unless you parents, via the formula on the website, together with algorithm-swift mental arithmetic and patience, succeed in producing the final result, the judgement you are to deliver, even though, as is known, you have only glanced at the relevant statute book for a few minutes.

Fortunately, the others know more than you do. One father has even done this before, the previous evening, so the knowledge is fresh. The stress eases a little, even though everything moves at hyper-speed: Elvira, Majken, Li, Olivia, and do not forget Cornelia, who gets an S of 4.5 and apparently that is excellent, assuming higher numbers are better than low ones, and you do not know that, and are those figures actually supposed to be counted first or last, and does it make any difference? Probably a difference.

This goes on for an hour or so, then another, and you realise that in all your decades of working life you have never encountered a task under such pressure, because you do not work with things like feelings. What do you actually work with, that prevents you from doing things that matter to other people?

You know nothing about figure skating. Nothing at all, you realise.

You try to do what you can do, namely delegate tasks to others, the arithmetical geniuses who quickly grasp the concept and add paper to paper in the pile, which you sort by final score, that much you can manage. Someone has to project-manage, you think, keep everything in order. If no one cares about the whole, everything might collapse, lead to double work, triple work, or someone being forgotten entirely. What would that look like, an awards ceremony where one or two girls do not even get to find out how it went? Weeping and wailing and furious leaders, but at least no deduction from your salary, since this is happening pro bono, because parenthood is compatible only with expenses, but one cannot say that, so you do not say it.

Besides, it is going well like this, you have time to think amid the stream of messages, with you handing out papers with names already filled in and comments that your fellow parents complete with code snippets and notes about deviations, while several others document the whole thing on the whiteboard.

It works, like a miracle, the stacks grow and are organised, there is no time for analysis of why and how it happens, because it is happening.

Until someone has to leave to watch their daughter’s performance, then someone else leaves for the same reason. And someone else.

You are alone in the room.

JC, 2S +2TF. FSSp (n)1, Stsq1, 1A+1A+2Lo+CCOSP (no, crossed out). -4, -5, -2, +1. S: 1.5, P: 1.75. C: 1.75. Not very good numbers, or perhaps absolutely excellent ones. And the pictures keep rattling into your phone. It never ends. You sit on a wooden chair by the coffee machine and stare down at the screen, like a drugged bingo caller, with no idea how you would begin even if you were to pretend to begin, what means what, how SkateCal means, is, or works, and least of all what it wants. Girl’s name after girl’s name. Protocol after protocol. You simply look. Nothing is filled in. Because no one returns.

Perhaps they thought this was enough, there were so many others working too, everyone thought, in other words, it is a simple thing after all to help out a little extra at the weekend with the girls’ competitions, nothing to get worked up about, and besides you are all doing this to show goodwill, and then it was just you left, whose daughter’s performance had already taken place yesterday. You could just as well have skipped the whole thing, but duty called, because your name (that is: the daughter’s name + dad) was in the notice.

You could just as well have become the announcer, but.

Cut.

This does not happen, of course. Not in this way. You wake in the middle of the night with a heart ticking as quickly as a fledgling’s. Your unconscious has views on your emotional world’s overreaction, and since you have somehow become stuck in a space between dream and waking, it can reach you without a filter. Certainly, parts of this episode really did take place, but the interesting thing, the unconscious thinks, is the hysterical stress you experienced at being the one who had accidentally given a child a possibly lower score simply because you had keyed in the composition figures beforehand rather than afterwards. The unconscious should not really have been surprised at all, since it knows better than anyone that the event is related to a memory from when, as a young adult, you got an extra job magnetising all the school library’s books and spent several days on the task, only to be told in the end that you had done everything wrong, whereupon the job had to be redone by someone else, someone who understood better.

There is, so to speak, a trigger.

You need to talk about this, you and even more you. And right here, at 03:50 in the night, you can reach one another, have a real conversation, as long as you do not reach for the phone or begin dressing fear in logic. “Who are you?” you ask, and the answer comes wordlessly, with an association to the arms of an octopus, which you understand exactly. “And who am I?” Here too only words without letters are needed, explaining that you are the tip of the iceberg you, and therefore see exactly what you need in order to understand decisions already made. It is as if you are never quite you, you feel now, as if you have been pushed onto the stage with a script in your hand, written by all that mass beneath the surface of consciousness that you never see, but with which you can now at least converse, as long as you do not wake any more than you already have.

“What do I learn from this?” you ask, and soon receive a new wordless wave meaning that it is your job to understand and interpret, because that is how things work here. You as a Rubik’s Cube. On the other hand, that is how it is for everyone. Then, despite everything, you reach for your phone, hoping to fill your brain with other people’s words and pictures, and the conversation dies, but what remains of the dream, the conversation and yesterday is instead a persistent, sweaty and all-encompassing stress. You almost die of shame, you feel, even though what happened is not the end of the world, but it still feels that way. It is as if you had got every answer wrong on the national exam, and worse besides, with accompanying deaths and promissory notes, and inherited guilt on top of that. And it is not the end of the world, you know that. But it feels that way. It feels that way. It feels that way.

Like standing naked in front of the whole class.

You scroll and scroll yourself clean, yet still think that perhaps a girl is lying awake at the same moment as you are trying to free yourself from the stress, awake because the young figure skater, after a flawless competition, has unjustly been named the loser. She is having a conversation with her unconscious about the matter, which does not know either about the injustice within the injustice, about what this would come to mean for the so-called identity. Nothing good, of course. It is not in her nature to lose, winner that she really is.

But perhaps she will get used to it.