His friend’s girlfriend
his friend’s girlfriend
Seb is one of the boys in the band. But the band aren’t playing tonight.
No one is. So Seb is just Seb, and the boys in the band are just the boys.
There’s her boyfriend, Ryan, who looks like Carl Barat and dresses like Johnny Borrell, holding court about the relative merits of Babyshambles versus Dirty Pretty Things.
There’s Smudge, in a flammable-looking bomber jacket, dishing out noxious-smelling shots of sambuca from a teetering tray.
There’s Nimesh, a vegetarian with his hair backcombed into a bird’s nest, refusing a shot on account of having to be up for work in the morning.
And there’s Seb. She has a soft spot for Seb because, unlike her boyfriend, Seb doesn’t talk much.
Nobody ever knows what he’s listening to in those big black headphones, and nobody will tell you what any of his tattoos mean, not the melting vinyl disc, nor the alien in the cowboy hat, nor the letter ‘E’ with the sun rising out of it.
Seb doesn’t have a girlfriend. He does have a very cute dog.
Ryan trails off, follows her eyeline. He nods. ‘Don’t you think he looks like Animal from The Muppets?’
‘Jasper?’ she says. ‘Or Seb?’
‘Both,’ Nimesh says.
Seb scratches his thick beard in contemplation.
Jasper, who is sitting diligently on his owner’s lap, glances up as if asking him to explain the joke.
Technically, this isn’t the kind of pub that allows dogs.
It’s the kind of pub where the walls sweat and the musicians crumble, where the windows are blacked out and the old carpet squelches like a beer-soaked sponge with every step you take.
But Jasper is always on the guestlist, because Seb works behind the bar.
He’s a fixture of this place, polishing pint glasses with his sleeves rolled up over sturdy forearms, or staring into space with his elbows on the bar while a drunken punter tries to attract his attention over the din of the music.
She can’t help but wonder, in these moments, where it is that Seb goes.
‘I think they’re both adorable,’ she says, leaning over to scratch Jasper’s chin.
‘He appreciates that,’ Seb says. ‘As do I.’
They’re in their usual booth, her legs over Ryan’s lap and his trilby on her head.
Ryan leans over to take a sip of his beer, the feather-shaped pendant that dangles over his low V-neck tickling her shins.
She’s studying abroad in the UK, and Hoxton is a long way from Duke, all of this a far cry from North Carolina.
She’s intoxicated by the usual things: the accents, the red phone boxes, the fact that the boys all look underfed or underslept or a little bit of both.
She’s baffled by other things, like their obsession with soccer, the way they’d all hurled their beers in the air earlier that summer when Beckham had scored the goal that sent England through.
It’s coming home, they’d said, and she hadn’t understood what they meant.
This isn’t their home, either. They’d all moved down to London from somewhere further north, somewhere she’s never heard of and Ryan says she shouldn’t trouble herself to visit.
Smudge still lives there. He’s supposedly visiting for the weekend, though they all know he’ll be crashing on one of their sofas well into next week.
‘It’s not on,’ Nimesh is saying to Seb.
‘When are you going to stop going on about this?’ Seb replies.
‘I’m not going on about it,’ Nimesh says. ‘I’m doing my duty as a vet.’
‘Are you a vet?’ Smudge chips in. ‘You never mention it.’
Seb stays on topic. ‘People have been giving dogs human food for thousands of years.’
‘Scampi Fries haven’t existed for thousands of years.’
Seb and Nimesh remind her of a married couple.
Ryan says that they’ve been inseparable as long as he’s known them.
Both only children, both second-generation immigrants, both sons of fathers who own restaurants and aren’t convinced their sons are up to the task of inheriting them.
Jasper is like their child, adopted by Nimesh only a few weeks into his first placement when the dreadlocked little creature had been dumped on the doorstep of the practice.
Since Nimesh’s landlord didn’t allow dogs and Seb still lived with his parents, Seb got the dog.
Jasper’s true paternity doesn’t matter any more, because the three of them now live together in a two-bed flat above this very pub, a space so small that you can’t unfold an ironing board in it.
Seb making hearty bowls of budget pastas amatriciana and puttanesca for Nimesh to come home to after his late shifts at the practice; Nimesh reading lines for Seb’s auditions from behind a dented camcorder.
Before London, the pair of them had planned out a trip to Sri Lanka, the land of Nimesh’s forefathers.
They were going to work at a sanctuary for street dogs, had no imminent plans to come back.
Then Nimesh got accepted on his course, and Sri Lanka was deferred.
He’s got his practice now, his patients. What does Seb have?
Bzzzz.
She checks her phone. Ryan checks his, too. Seb is allergic to technology, so no one ever expects the noise to be coming from his already-defiantly old-school Nokia brick. Alas, this time it is. And when he reads the text, he does something she’s not sure she’s ever seen him do. He smiles.