Title: Off the Record

Author: Samara McDowell

In: Sport 32: Summer 2004

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, December 2004

Part of: Sport

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Sport 32: Summer 2004

Patrick

Patrick

Patrick does ironic. Ironic is Patrick's stock-in-trade, his default mode: he wears his irony proudly, the way ageing hippies wear their wilder pasts. Patrick is, in fact, the oldest of the Trio, and the one least interested in the audience: all this, Patrick would have you know, he's seen before. He plays, doesn't talk much to the others: all those searing and seering glances, that intensity that passes between, Patrick rides without much returning. His hands are extraordinary, like large knobbled spiders. They way they gallop and prance on the strings is completely absorbing, page 95 once you begin to watch it. He frowns downward, looking neither at the double bass nor at the floor: some imagined space in between. He does not smile, although he's a big-time (ironic) smiler off-stage. At two in the morning, when Jonathan and Alda are recording, Alda singing intently into the peak of a black microphone the size and shape of a sombrero, her beautiful little half-tomboy, half-femme fatale face half-swallowed by it, Patrick will start shoving and horse-biting and pretend-slapping at Jonathan's sixteen-year-old niece, who previously has been watching and listening in irreproachable silence; she will dissolve into helpless giggles. (Jonathan will look up from the keyboard and frown; and then, seeing it's Bonnie and Patrick, look down again and smile.)