Her boyfriend’s friend
her boyfriend’s friend
Boom. Boom. Boom. Three pumps on the heavy door knocker and they’re in, Tristan rolling off the street and on to an antique Anatolian rug, then straight up the narrow stairs of Pippa’s parents’ townhouse.
Her folks live in Primrose Hill, but they’re spending the summer in Cap d’Antibes, so this is where the party is, where the parties have been all summer long.
Tonight, Tristan enters to a bevy of jeers, Basshunter rattling the floorboards.
Ludo is bouncing around the cluttered living room, swigging from a bottle of Malibu, wearing an oversized pink shirt with a popped-collar yellow polo underneath it.
Freddie is sporting a large and itchy-looking jumper, fiddling with the aux cable.
Pippa is taking pictures with a digital camera, while Liv is passed out in a minidress, draped across a pouffe beneath a mantelpiece of precariously teetering busts.
Tristan heads for the fridge with his plastic bag of tinnies.
He squeezes past Ren in the hallway, fringe over her eyes, not talking to anyone.
‘It’s style over substance,’ Jacob is saying, in the kitchen. ‘Not to mention self-indulgent.’
‘Just because you don’t like something—’ Clara begins.
Jacob cuts her off. ‘No one actually wants to watch anything in black and white.’
‘The greatest films of all time are black and white.’
‘Because they had to be,’ Jacob says. ‘You know they’ve invented colour since then?’
‘You’re such a wanker,’ Clara says.
‘Is it going to be silent, too?’
‘If it shuts you up,’ she says.
Clara slouches, standoffish in denim shorts and a black waistcoat, eyes smudged out with angry eyeliner.
Jacob sits on the kitchen counter in a white shirt and a thin scarf, smoking out of the window even though Pippa keeps popping her head in and telling him to stop.
Tristan gets to work stashing his cans before the argument starts.
He’s spent enough time around Clara and Jacob to know it’s a when, not an if.
‘You think I’m going to be in it?’ Jacob says, smirking around a drag of his cigarette.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Because I’m not going to be in it if it’s black and white.’
‘I’ll find someone else, then.’
‘Be my guest,’ Jacob says, dropping the cigarette into a half-full beer can. ‘I’m busy, anyway.’
‘You’ve got, like, two roles,’ Clara says. ‘You’re no busier than anyone else.’
‘I’m busier than you,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘You got fired.’
‘I didn’t get fired,’ Clara says. ‘I was made redundant.’
Tristan unloads the last of his beers. If they’ve noticed that he’s here, they haven’t acknowledged the fact.
He opens a can, risks a look. Jacob, as ever, is spotlit.
The under-cupboard bulb illuminates his hollow cheeks and marble skin like a statue’s in the British Museum after-hours.
Clara’s back is against the polished granite counter, her arms crossed.
Jacob reaches out, twists a lock of her silvery hair between his long fingers.
‘Don’t be like that,’ he says. ‘You hated that job.’
‘I need the money,’ Clara says.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she says. ‘We can’t all have our parents pay our rent.’
‘Yours could, though,’ Jacob replies. ‘If they wanted to.’
Jacob likes to push Clara’s buttons. He likes to say that Clara’s true passion is feeling sorry for herself, that the only thing Clara loves more than a fight is losing one.
Were they always like this? Those university nights blur together, but Tristan can remember one of them very clearly.
He and the boys ditching the RADA bar for an old pub on Goodge Street, being rewarded for their efforts with a crushing crowd and two Central Saint Martins’ girls who didn’t seem overly fond of aspiring actors.
Ren, the would-be fashion designer with the fringe and the all-black outfit, warning Ludo that he decisively wasn’t her type.
And Clara, the fine art student who couldn’t keep her eyes off Jacob as he did his thing, the thing that everyone else had already seen him do a million times before.
Like a light switch, Jacob flicked on his charm.
‘A Fellini fan?’ he said, green eyes glinting and hair like spun gold. ‘Let me guess. You’ve only seen La Dolce Vita.’
She couldn’t help but bite. The conversation is still ongoing.
Clara and Jacob, always the last two awake, still talking and drinking and making grand plans for a future that leaves everyone else behind.
Jacob and Clara, who don’t just argue about films, who have spent all the time that Tristan has known them either off or on, broken up or breaking up, getting back together or trying to get their own back on one another.
By the time Clara dropped out after her first year at Saint Martins in favour of film studies at King’s, she and Ren were a permanent fixture in the RADA crowd.
That was four years ago, and Tristan still doesn’t know if Clara and Jacob have ever actually liked each other, or if they’re both just attractive and ambitious and addicted to their own uniquely dramatic form of mutually assured destruction.
‘Tristan,’ Jacob says.
Jacob is looking at him now, and Tristan feels a warmth spreading through him, like he’s been caught in a hiding place and accidentally wet his pants.
‘Hm?’ Tristan says. ‘What?’
‘What do you think?’ Jacob says. ‘Is Clara going to reinvent the film world by shooting in black and white?’
Tristan looks from Jacob to Clara. Her eyes are cold, defiant. She’s daring Tristan to come to her aid.
‘It’s a bit played-out,’ Tristan says, meekly.
‘Played-out!’ Jacob says. ‘Exactly. The worst thing you can do is try too hard.’
Clara is glaring, so Tristan averts his eyes. He can see Ren through the doorway, still in the corridor, fiddling with her Motorola Razr. He understands her desire to be anywhere but here. Ren never makes eye contact with anyone. When Clara stares at you, she waits for you to look away.
‘The script is good,’ Jacob says, hopping spryly off the counter. ‘I have some notes,’ he adds. ‘Let’s run through it this weekend.’ He kisses Clara on top of her head. ‘No black and white.’
Then he heads for the door, not looking back, knowing that she’ll follow.
Knowing that they’ll dance, then fight again, then end up in the same taxi after all of it.
Like clockwork: Clara’s running mascara, Jacob’s rolling eyes.
Here in the kitchen, Clara turns away for a moment, and Tristan catches a glimpse of the freckles across her bare shoulder, the porcelain skin beneath her armpit, the hint of a black lace bra peeking out under her waistcoat.
Ren has arrived in the doorway, soundless as ever.
She’s looking at Tristan, amusement and judgement mingling on her face.
He flushes at both, buries his own face in his beer.
Clara hasn’t noticed. She was reaching for her bag, from which she has pulled a BlackBerry and begun to type furiously.
‘What are you doing?’ Ren says, crossing over to her.
From the other room, the opening salvo of Cascada’s ‘Everytime We Touch’, and a raucous cheer to accompany it, Jacob’s voice right at the centre.
Clara doesn’t answer. Ren lifts herself on to the counter next to her, stares over her shoulder at the phone screen.
She pushes her dark fringe out of her eyes, furrows her brow.
‘Who’s Seb?’