17 Zamboni machine comes out to resurface. When I don’t have school, I swim for half an hour and then get back on the ice again until the second training session finishes at 10:15. That’s my life. Spins, jumps, edges, and step sequences. The excitement of starting a new routine. Choosing the music that’s going to be part of my life for the next year, choreographing it with the coach, and then performing it for the first time in competition. All the world is an ice rink! My world, anyway. Not long after I started skating, Hugo joined me, and then it was only natural that the others followed. Now, all my family skate, and I like to think they have me to thank for that. (Not that I think Mum thanks me for anything when her alarm goes off at 4:15 in the morning, six mornings a week, so that I can train before school.) Now that I think about it, I suppose it was skating—that and inheriting a house nobody else wanted—that changed everything for us. Mum says that the best adventures start by accident, like the way my skating adventure began because of a film I saw online. Inheriting a haunted house from my Dad's uncle Basil was an adventure too, but, at the time, Dad said it was just some sort of horrible practical joke on the old man’s part. We never met Great-Uncle Basil, as he managed to fall out with his entire family long before we were born and moved abroad. Grandma used to call him “The Incredible Sulk.” The family home he’d inherited when his parents died had been rented out because he didn’t want to live in it.
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