‘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 theGQpiece,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.
nora, 1
Nothing could please her as much as this.
A rare kiss from her mother, planted in the soft sticky folds of her neck. It makes her giggle. It makes her gurgle. And her mum says, shall we go, then, you and I? Shall we get some lunch?
Nora laughs.
Her mum nods. Let’s get you some lunch.
Nora doesn’t need anyone, but one person. Nora’s mother is all that Nora needs.
Mama, mama, mama, was the first and easiest sound she learned, so now she says it all the time.
Mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama.
She does not like to be apart from her mum. She does not like to be away from her, at all. Not in a cot. Not in the pram. Not in a high chair. She will kick up a fuss about this.
Her mum is nipping off to grab a napkin. But what is a napkin? And how long will she be gone?
Nora cries. It starts as a wobbling lip and turns into a high-pitched whimper and then becomes a shuddering wail. The whole café is staring. The whole world is turned upside down.
And, oh. Her mum is back. Her mum is sweating, and red, and saying I’m sorry, to them, I’m sorry, to Nora. I’m sorry I brought you here, I’m sorry I left.
But Nora doesn’t understand. She can’t stop crying. She knows that her mum can leave, and the thought will always terrify her.
Her mum, her mother. Her anchor. Her base. Her fixed point.
The tears keep coming. She is crying so much that they have to leave the café.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhhhh now. It’s alright. It’s all going to be alright.
But Nora’s mum is crying, too.
