Ryan rubs his temples, squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, his eyes travel over the wall, the posters for all the venues he once thought they’d play. Dingwalls and the Electric Ballroom, Barfly and the Bull and Gate, the Falcon and the Dublin Castle. He unplugs his guitar, shakes his head. His favourite song? The Cribs. ‘I’m a Realist’. Ryan always knows what’s going on. And yet, the end of his own band has somehow passed him by.
‘There’s no point living in the past,’ Nimesh says.
‘Don’t tell me everything happens for a reason,’ Seb replies.
‘I won’t.’ Nimesh smiles. ‘Even if it does.’ A pause. ‘You really did like her, didn’t you?’
‘It just felt good,’ Seb says. ‘It felt better than anything.’
A silence. After a while, Ryan ventures into it.
‘Shall we talk about the band now?’
Nimesh groans. Seb begins to roll another cigarette. Smudge, who’s already turned back to the TV, puts on his most sympathetic voice.
‘Mate,’ he says. ‘No one wants to talk about the band.’
his agent
In person, Seb doesn’t look like his picture. Perhaps it’s because the headshot, printed out on glossy paper and lying on the table between them, is black and white. It makes his dark eyebrows look darker, his irises even more black. Perhaps it’s because, since the photo was taken, he’s grown a bit of facial hair. He’s obviously handsome. Marlon Brando with a hipster beard, as Richard’s assistant likes to say. Seb has all the accoutrements of an effortlessly cool person, the black denim jacket and the black coffee and the black wraparound headphones. Yet in the flesh, he wears his intensity a little awkwardly. It’s like he knows that people are always looking at him, and he’s uncomfortable about that fact. It’s a simple question, then. Why invite people to look?
‘Why do you want to be an actor?’ Richard asks.
A clock is ticking. On the other side of a glass table in a glass-walled meeting room in a Soho office made almost entirely of glass, Seb struggles with the simplest of questions.
‘Well,’ he says, with an uncomfortable cough. ‘It was suggested—’
‘You don’t want to be an actor?’
‘I never really planned any of this.’
‘But you wanted to be a model,’ Richard says. ‘Or didn’t you?’
Seb makes a face.
‘It’s not a test.’
‘I just want to earn rent,’ Seb says, with an apologetic smile. ‘And to put his food on the table.’
He’s referring, Richard assumes, to the dog in his lap, staring goggly-eyed and snaggle-toothed across the space between them.
‘You know they don’t actually allow—’ Richard begins, but the dog’s glare stops him. ‘Never mind. What do you want, Seb? And money isn’t a good enough answer.’
Seb rubs the back of his neck. He speaks almost apologetically. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what do you like?’ Richard says. ‘What makes you happy?’
Seb thinks for a moment. He clasps his hands together, the tattoos on his wrists just about visible.
‘Music,’ Seb says. ‘Music makes me happy.’
Richard knows, of course, that Seb was in a band. It was Richard’s friend who’d first scouted him at a gig in god knows where, then shepherded him into a series of semi-successful campaigns in which he smouldered under a spritz of Paco Rabanne aftershave or scowled in a pair of DKNY jeans. His crowning moment: a Lynx Dark Temptation ad that turned him into a Michelangelo’sDavidmade of chocolate. But when they’d tried to put Seb on a catwalk, he’d been wooden, shambling like Frankenstein’s monster, far too self-conscious for his own good. He works in a bar nowadays. But he’s still blessedwith strong cheekbones and a six-and-a-bit-foot frame, which is how he first ended up here, opposite Richard, last year. They’ve had a good few auditions since then, a fair few near-misses. Seb is still untested as an actor, but who cares? It’s Richard’s job to see something, and he sees it here. That intensity. Those dark and brooding eyes. Find Seb Bonami the right role, lots of close-ups and minimal lines, and you might just make him a megastar.
Richard leans back in his chair. ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’
Seb looks sceptical. ‘Go for it.’
‘I think that this isn’t you,’ Richard says, waving one well-manicured hand over the glossy headshot. ‘You think it feels inauthentic. You think you’re above such things.’
