‘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 calledSonder. 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’sBlade Runnermonologue, 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 aRomeo and Julietquality 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 thePopbitchpiece about them, if she’s aware of the articles on theDaily 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 toThe 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 theconcierge about security, he strokes Clara’s short, wet hair and traces a figure of eight on her damp shoulder bones.
