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cash in now before gravity takes its toll, no one fancies you any more, and you’re too poor, tired and infertile to have any children.’
    Claire leant back triumphantly in her seat, knowing full well that she had just added to her pudding tug-of-war victory. Itwasn’t much of a surprise, to be honest. Claire always won these play arguments because she was prepared to go one step further than you would dare. Her conversation rarely played by the rules.
    Not that I minded. Or not that I pretended to mind. I could take a joke – our entire friendship was based on jokes at each other’s expense – but the problem was that I couldn’t help becoming increasingly sensitive about my acting. However much anyone tries to pretend the opposite, the truth is that if you haven’t made it in acting by thirty, you are unlikely ever to make it. And when I say make it, I don’t necessarily mean becoming the latest sub-Bourne action hero or playing the lead giraffe in
The Lion King
. I mean merely making a decent, honest living as a jobbing actor. Acting is a young person’s game – you need to be young to put up with the travelling, the strange hours and the assistant director’s STDs – and few make it to the top of the career pyramid. Decent parts only exist for a tiny number of stars; there are thousands of people coming out of drama schools every year eager to foist their talent on the world. Ten years later most of them are foisting their talents on a photocopier.
    So it was all very well for Claire to mock me for my lack of work.
She
had fallen off at the very bottom of the pyramid.
She
had flunked out of drama school after only a year.
She
had taken the easy option of a secure job. What did she know about anything, anyway?
    Help
, I thought, as Claire paid the bill.
First my worries about losing my friends, and now this. What has happened to happy-go-lucky Sam?
    My poor mood wasn’t improved when, during our walk to the Spiegeltent, Claire mentioned in passing that one of our friends from drama school, Chris Peck, had just been accepted to play the lead in the Old Vic’s touring production of
Hamlet
. Chris was a good guy – we’d acted together, got drunk together, even slept with the same girl twenty-four hours apart without knowing it – but in that moment I could have murdered thelittle fuck. Of all the lies spouted backstage – and there are many – the biggest one is: ‘I’m
so
pleased for you.’ No one is ever pleased for anyone else in acting. You’re jealous, you’re bitter and, quite frankly, you’d like them to fall over during rehearsals and break their neck so you can go on and break a leg.
    Your tutors warn you about rejection at drama school. Actors get told ‘no’ as often as naughty toddlers. Acting, they tell you, is like going to four interviews per week for a job for which you’re entirely unsuited before you even walk in the door. But you can’t get too sensitive about it or you’d start to question your looks, your abilities, your personality – your entire self – until you crumbled into a mess of insecurities. So you console yourself that you didn’t have ‘the right look’; that they were looking for someone a bit younger, a bit stronger, a bit more intense. You’d never tell yourself the truth, which is that they were looking for someone a bit better.
    Jealousy
. That’s what they should really warn you about at drama school. Chris? He and I had exactly the same ‘look’. And now he was playing Hamlet? I could fucking play Hamlet, too. I can do tortured and moody and suicidal. I was born to play Hamlet. Worse, I had auditioned to play the little fuck of a Dane. And the fatuous fuck of a casting director hadn’t even fucking recalled me.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck
.
    I was in a fairly atomic mood, then, by the time Claire and I finally arrived at the