Title: Off the Record

Author: Samara McDowell

In: Sport 32: Summer 2004

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, December 2004

Part of: Sport

Conditions of use

Share:

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 32: Summer 2004

Good Night

Good Night

The bar staff are bemused but friendly. Yes, one of the band hangerson can make a cellphone call from the office downstairs; yes, Jonathan can steal an icecream from behind the candy bar; yes, it's time to go now.

Jonathan, standing on the Embassy stairs before the soaring silver of the mirrors, offers the butt-end of his icecream to the girl who's lost her friends, the one who needed to make the cellphone call. ‘I would have got you one, but they're not mine,’ he explains kindly.

Out there is Courtenay Place, what the beleaguered City Council and the recently hobbled-together Dominion Post is trying to rename Wellington's Golden Mile; out there the adventurers of Lower Hutt are tying a load on, experimenting with city cool and the intricate glass pipes of P, getting beaten up by bouncers and vomiting colourfully onto the sidewalk before Kenny's. In here, though, there's just the twenty-foot striped silk curtains, and the grand piano blackly gleaming, and the jazz fading into the walls, and the lights shedding small pools of gold before the bartender leans over and turns them off.

February-June 2003