Her ex
Jacob Steele can see the future.
That’s the headline of the GQ piece, laid out on the Vitra coffee table in front of him. And though it refers to his supernaturally astute choice of roles, to the sliding scale of increasingly expensive watches they’d made him model on the day of the shoot, he thinks they’re on to something.
After all, he always knew he’d end up here.
Time works strangely for Jacob. The more famous he gets, the faster everything moves.
It feels like yesterday that he arrived in that audition room wearing his most penitent face.
He knew he’d outpaced Clara in the decade since he’d last seen her.
His HBO show was a hit, renewed and renewed again.
His team wanted his next project to be a backdoor audition for Bond.
Jacob had another idea. ‘What’s Clara Cowan working on?’
Gone are the days of needing an appointment.
If Jacob Steele wants a role, all he has to do is walk in and take it.
Pre-production felt like foreplay, helped along by the fact that her current boyfriend was already persona non grata.
In France, at dinner, Jacob and Clara got drunk on Sancerre and talked like no time had passed at all.
Jacob thought of the things they used to do together, the things she’d let him do to her.
He wondered what her body looked like now, under that loose linen shirt.
He waited until the wrap party to make his move.
The pre-wrap party. What difference could one night make?
Clara cried when her boyfriend fled the chateau. So Jacob said, ‘Paris,’ and she didn’t say no. He sees himself, now, his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Jardin des Tuileries and the Eiffel Tower beyond. Behind him, under rumpled white bedsheets, the bare back of Clara Cowan.
He wakes up with scratch marks. She always bruised easily. At a bar in Montmartre, Jacob sits in large Persol sunglasses, his hat pulled conspicuously low.
‘No one’s going to recognise you,’ Clara snaps.
Two teenage girls approach.
Paris can’t last forever. After only a week, they start to rub each other up the wrong way. Jacob knows the real problem is this particular penthouse. They’re stagnating.
‘My show’s about to start filming again,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’
‘Why would I do that?’ she replies, seething. ‘I’m not your groupie. You’re in my film.’
He shouldn’t have suggested it in the first place.
And he definitely shouldn’t have told her that people are only going to watch the film because of him.
They part unhappily, don’t speak for months.
Then Jacob finds himself bored in Budapest towards the end of filming, swaddled and sweaty in a fur cloak hewn from a repurposed IKEA rug.
He sends a text on the phone he keeps hidden from the cameras.
He can find anything – anyone – these days. He has people to do it for him.
‘Fancy seeing you here.’
This is what he says, when Clara opens the door to the edit suite and finds him standing on the other side of it.
He should have known that she’d hole up here as soon as she returned to London.
Her hair is a mess. She looks all the worse for seeing him.
And yet, he’s brought macarons fresh from Paris, procured by an assistant.
‘The ones you like,’ he says, making puppy eyes over the pale pink box. ‘Let me in?’
She doesn’t invite him over the threshold. Her insomniac eyes dart past his shoulder, down the corridor.
‘What’s the matter?’ he says, masking his annoyance. ‘Hoping for a better offer?’
Jacob wasn’t this confident as a child. He was scrawny. The colour of his hair made him an easy target. His father gave up early, started another family. His mother resented having to stick around.
But puberty was good to Jacob. He grew a jawbone. He began to invent himself, then never stopped. The hair transplant under his cap. The expensive new teeth in his mouth.
‘Jacob,’ he’d said, smiling through that first audition, shedding his surname like another layer of skin. ‘Jacob Steele.’
Jacob is nineteen. He meets Clara for the first time in an old pub on Goodge Street. She calls him a sociopath, but Jacob can tell that it excites her, to find someone else who won’t let anything get in between them and the self they are creating.
Jacob is twenty-one. He and Clara make a short film together, and the film is called Sonder.
It is the first step on a long journey that is only going to end in one way.
The pair of them, famous, and together. First love burns brighter than anything after.
They are like phosphorus. They are like magnets, flipped on end.
Even when they repel each other, they attract everyone else.
Jacob is twenty-three. He and Clara break up.
Years later, he’ll try to remember why, or if they were even together enough in the first place to warrant a break-up.
He remembers a party at the family home of a girl whose name he’s forgotten.
He remembers an unfinished argument in Golden Square.
He remembers every word to Rutger Hauer’s Blade Runner monologue, and every time he used it for a self-important self-tape. Like tears in rain.
‘I knew you’d come,’ Jacob says.
Clara has agreed to a drink, joining him straight from the edit suite. The box of macarons sits on the table between them. He’s picked that same pub on Goodge Street, for old time’s sake. People are taking pictures of him on their phones.
‘It’s not like I had anywhere else to be,’ Clara says.
They sleep together that night. He’s staying at the Dorchester, she at the Berkeley.
There’s a Romeo and Juliet quality to it, their wide windows looking out on separate sides of Hyde Park.
On Christmas Day, he turns up to her hotel room with an expensive bottle of mezcal.
He knew she’d be alone. They lie entangled in plush bedsheets, bicker about how to make the film better.
Clara sends Jacob out into the ice cold while she speaks to her sister. Hood up, he heads to an off-licence for more booze and more fags. It makes him feel uneasy, being approached in public. It makes him feel worse when he isn’t.
Jacob Steele has seen the future. He wonders if Clara has seen it, too.
If she read the Popbitch piece about them, if she’s aware of the articles on the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, if she knows how Twitter tore itself apart on the day that one of the minor cast members did a tell-all to The Wrap.
He wonders what it would do to his personal brand if people figured out how much he googles his own name.
The pair of them share a car to the BAFTAs.
They get uproariously drunk at the Vogue & Tiffany afterparty, bounce off the walls of Annabel’s, argue bitterly all the way home.
They won’t be photographed together. His publicity team says he sells better when he’s single.
The press would call Clara a ‘mystery woman’, and she’d hate it.
Jacob can’t imagine a more accurate moniker.
Jacob’s next project is a big-budget superhero film.
The studio rent him a house in Atlanta with a gym in the garage and a private chef who lingers awkwardly between meals.
Three months on a barren soundstage leaves him profoundly lacking in stimulation, and he returns to London like a man gasping for air.
This time, Clara texts him first.
Should Jacob be surprised? He can see the future. And the future has returned him here, to the city in which they met, to a seat in an empty amphitheatre, next to, of all people, her. She keeps her bleached hair as short as Jacob’s, now. She tucks phantom strands behind her ear.
‘It’s unfinished,’ Clara whispers, after the film is finished.
Jacob has just watched himself become something else, something ferocious. Even Bonami’s performance blazes with what she’s done.
‘It’s remarkable,’ Jacob says.
He’s going to win awards for this. They’d be unstoppable as a power couple, but Clara would never stoop to hang off his arm. Later that night, she traces those arms, the hard contours of a stomach hewn from boiled chicken and steamed broccoli. For a male actor, a six-pack is now part of the job.
‘Poor you,’ Clara says. They’ve been drinking vodka, slimline tonic. Cocaine has no calories at all. ‘It must be so hard. Being a man.’
Time contracts, expands again. Someone is banging on the thick door of Jacob’s penthouse suite. Jacob drifts in and out of sleep, is annoyed at being woken. Where is—?
‘Clara, it’s Maisie,’ says a voice from behind the door. ‘Please let me in.’
He can still taste the Belvedere from last night. He spits in the sink. Clara is crying in the whirlpool bathtub next to him. Jacob sighs theatrically, stumbles to the intercom.
‘She doesn’t want to see anyone.’
‘Please, Clara,’ the voice says, ignoring Jacob. ‘Don’t shut us all out.’
Once Jacob has had her removed, once he’s berated the concierge about security, he strokes Clara’s short, wet hair and traces a figure of eight on her damp shoulder bones.
‘Everyone’s going to want a piece of you, babe,’ he says. ‘You need to decide how much you can give.’
The film debuts at Cannes, in Critics’ Week. One third of their trio is conspicuously absent, and publicists hiss through their teeth at reporters who look like they might bring up Seb Bonami. Jacob finds the whole thing funny. Clara, clearly, doesn’t.
The lights go down, and a title card comes up.
Clara had wanted to call it Sons of the Inferno, but a chorus of execs had told her it sounded like a rock band or a biker gang.
In front of a hundred discerning reviewers and judgemental peers, a huge screen says: The Sons.
Afterwards, a standing ovation in the double digits.
Jacob knows Clara, and he knows that as soon as she’s back in London, she’ll be back in the mix, tinkering until her fingers bleed.
‘I’m a perfectionist,’ Clara says to one interviewer.