Her ex #2
‘Well, that’s clear,’ they reply. ‘The film is pretty perfect.’
Clara giggles, in the way she only does when she’s drunk and trying to hide it.
The interviewer goes on. ‘And isn’t Jacob Steele just a revelation?’
Jacob doesn’t intentionally steal the spotlight. Spotlights just have a tendency to sway towards him.
Jacob will remember this as a golden era.
He and Clara, in Austin, in Austria, in a plane bathroom somewhere over the Atlantic.
Coming and going and coming back together again.
The rest of the festivals feel like stops on a victory tour.
They collide at each of them. Everywhere, Clara is fêted as an auteur, a visionary filmmaker, a bastion of feminism.
Jacob must have seen it all along. He could have had anyone, and he still chose her.
In Venice, Clara gets into a shouting match with a journalist during a press conference.
She says that she only ever gets asked boring questions or sexist questions.
She says that film festivals make her feel dirty, that the purpose isn’t celebrating movies but whoring yourself out to potential buyers.
She stumbles on red carpets, presses powder into her gums. In Park City, Jacob is asked about #MeToo.
An old co-star has been cancelled for straying too far into a grey area, and he’s expected to issue a condemnation.
He gives the right answer. He’s an active listener.
He’s all for intimacy coordinators. Secretly, he wonders if his name is on some list somewhere, waiting to be published.
He hasn’t done anything, to anyone. Has he?
‘It’s worrying,’ he says, later, in the latest hotel suite.
Clara looks at him, her loathing laid bare. ‘Why are you worried?’
Amsterdam feels like the beginning of the end.
They fight before the festival even begins, only speaking when they’re forced to share a panel.
Ren appears from nowhere, still meddling after all this time, hanging around after the screening like any other hanger-on.
She’s disappointed. She’d expected a different Clara.
And yet, after she’s gone, Clara blames the argument on him.
‘Stop trying to control me!’ she screams.
‘Someone has to,’ he shouts back. ‘You’re a fucking mess.’
He shouldn’t have spat at her. That was beneath him.
Clara has stormed off before. But Jacob can see the future, and he knows that she always comes back.
The premiere of The Sons is in London that winter.
Clara rents a flat, in Islington. They end up in the same bed, the same old rhythm of sniping at one another, of each trying to bring the other down a peg.
This time, four walls can’t contain them.
They argue in the street, because one of them doesn’t want to be seen with the other.
They argue in bed, because the sex is no good otherwise.
Clara spends a long time in the shower afterwards.
One such contretemps. Clara lies on her side like a wounded animal, staring at the door. The sight enrages Jacob.
‘Who the fuck are you expecting to walk through it?’
Another disagreement. She tries to get around him, but he slams his arm over the only exit. He grabs her wrist, hard.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he says. ‘I forbid it.’
‘You forbid it?’ She laughs. ‘You forbid it?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘You’re pathetic.’
How many times has Jacob called Clara pathetic? How many times has he told her that she’s nothing, or that she’d be nothing without him? He watches himself spew vitriol as if he’s outside on the balcony, looking in. This argument has happened before, and it will happen again.
The film comes out in December. The reviews are good. Better than good. They’re all about him.
They don’t plan to see each other at the Claridges Christmas party.
The other guests treat Clara like a messiah.
Afterwards, Jacob tells her that no one would miss her.
That no one would care. He’s sick of her fucking crying.
When the vase explodes in slow-motion against the wall, he has the time to be surprised that there’s no water inside it, that the flowers the hotel provided must be fake.
He’s even more surprised when he realises that he was the one who threw it.
When Jacob wakes the next morning, Clara is standing over the debris of the night before. The broken vase. The torn newspaper beneath it, the five-star review of their film.
‘Look at me,’ she says.
He sits up in bed and looks at her, but not because she asked.
‘I’m done,’ she says. ‘This won’t happen again.’
‘You’re being dramatic,’ Jacob says, reflexively. ‘You’re still drunk.’
Clara hasn’t blinked yet. ‘I’ve never been more clear.’
He can’t think of anything else to say, so he says this. ‘It’s my room.’
Jacob Steele can see the future, and it looks like this.
A barely furnished apartment in the refurbished Battersea Power Station.
A superhero film that made a historic loss at the box office, and only partly because of Covid.
An actor who is worried he’s losing his looks, losing his relevance, losing his mind having spent the best part of the last year alone and in lockdown, writing a script that his agent couldn’t sell.
Jacob got a new agent. He’d felt nothing, listening to Richard crying down the phone.
He’d been busy rereading the GQ piece, wondering if it made him look like an idiot.
Commenters online were surprised he could even tell the time.
He knows he’s better than this. How hard could directing be?
When Jacob hears the knock at his door, he rises like he was expecting it.
But as he heads towards it, he feels a pull of resistance, as if he’s been moving in the wrong direction all this time.
He’s not opening the door of his apartment, but closing it.
He’s catching a vase as it reassembles itself in flight through a Hyde Park hotel room.
He’s stashing his phone in a cloak on the outskirts of Budapest, and he’s falling upwards from a bed in a French chateau, and he’s stepping backwards through the door of an audition room in a part of London he can’t even remember.
He’s turning down the show, the film, the drama.
He’s never becoming an actor, never going to RADA, never meeting Clara Cowan in the first place.
He’s opening the door, and she’s standing on the other side of it. Clara Cowan. Holding a baby with its mother’s eyes and its father’s red hair.
‘Don’t you have anything to say?’
All of his powers of prediction, and Jacob never foresaw this.
He hears himself splutter out an excuse.
Several of them. He’s not feeling well. He’s got lines to learn.
She’ll have to speak to his people. She can’t just turn up like this, out of the blue.
And Clara stares back at him with those eyes, the same ice-blue eyes as the child she is holding.
‘You’re a coward,’ Clara says.
The words still catch in Jacob’s throat. The baby says nothing, but then, the baby is a baby. It has an excuse.
‘Thank you for confirming my suspicions,’ Clara says, without breaking eye contact. ‘We don’t need you. And we don’t want anything to do with you.’
He could run after them. He could offer something token. He could offer them the world. But Jacob Steele can see the future. Can’t he? He watches the lift doors close ahead of him, swallowing back the acid in his throat. He already knows that he’ll never see his daughter again.