Some things take an army. Making a film. Raising a child. Nora is sixteen months old now, and those solitary days have left their mark. She sticks to her mother, finds it hard not to share the same space. Anita is glad that Clara still comes to these sessions. That she’s accepting her sister’s help again. Who else can she turn to? She has told Anita about the friends she’s lost along the way. Maisie, bundled out of a Hyde Park hotel by heavy-handed security guards. Ren, left crying in the rain outside an Amsterdam auditorium. Neither of them knows about Nora. Cee is a force of nature, and has done her best to shelter Clara from the prying eyes of the world. But people will talk, when Clara comes back out into the open. Ever sinceThe Sons, she’s been pulled apart between gossip blogs and sanctimonious rebuttals. Everyone knows a different version of the story. No one knows Clara’s.
‘If I’m not working, I’ll always be what they say I am,’ she says, to Anita, now. ‘The director who had an affair with her star. All the work, all the awards, everything I sacrificed and poured into that film, and all I have to show for it is a bunch of headlines calling me a whore.’
Clara will not be a victim. Jacob didn’t make her do anything. She wasn’t even going to tell him about the baby, but Anita had advised one short conversation. Though Clara never shared with Anita exactly what went down that day in Battersea, it’s clear she came away with the closure she needed. Nora’s father hasn’t been mentioned since.
‘That’s not all you have to show for it.’
WhereisNora in all this? They both look down at the little girl, who is busy buttoning and unbuttoning the chest of Clara’s shirt. Clara seems momentarily ashamed, either at her language or at something larger. She raises a stiff finger to one of Nora’s tiny ringlets, and as she does so, they talk about how the girl will adapt to being away, on a film set, far from the security and the routine she holds so dear. It’s like Clara hadn’t even considered that Nora would have to come with her. Anita sees the idea creating a frisson of panic behind Clara’s previously fierce eyes. A film crew’s prying eyes upon her daughter. Whispers about the girl’s unruly tangle of conspicuously ginger hair. So, Anita takes calming measures. She asks not what Clara dreads, but what she’s excited about.
‘Filming at Cinecittà,’ Clara says, without hesitation. ‘It’s always been a dream of mine.’
Clara is happiest when she’s talking about directing. She has told Anita that her most sacred time is spent on thestoryboards, which she draws herself. Peaceful days of turning her words into exact images, costumes and sets and close-ups all configured in her mind’s eye. The script changes entirely at this point. These images become her bible. The work itself, Clara says, is all angles, all repetition. She spends her life studying masters, overs, closers, and in that same way she’s become an expert at studying her own life in retrospect, replaying everything from all angles. She zooms in on her mistakes, repeats them over and over in her head. One gets more screentime than the rest.
‘Do you still draw?’ Anita asks her. ‘Not storyboards. People.’
Clara smiles sadly. ‘Who has the time?’
‘We could find the time.’
‘I try, sometimes,’ Clara says. She adjusts her daughter on her knee. ‘I always end up staring at a blank page.’
They’re still searching for the old Clara. They try things like this: a thought exercise, useful for a client who loves to talk while hiding the things she really wants to say. Anita asks Clara to indulge her, to excuse her for being morbid. Imagine you were in an accident, she says. Imagine you were in a coma, and you woke up in hospital after a while. You’re in a ward, flooded with dappled sunlight. You’re safe, you’re well, and you look to the door. Who do you see walking through it?
Clara’s answer is progress in itself.
‘Nora,’ she says.
Nora has only just started walking. She’s still unsteady on her feet. Anita adjusts the question: who’d be holding Nora’s hand? This one takes a little longer. The thin curtains flutter gently, the light on Clara’s lap undulating as she twists therings on her thin fingers. Then she gives an answer, and the answer leads Anita to a question she’s been waiting to ask for a while.
‘Who is Seb?’
the sunbather
Most days, they are the only two people on the beach. She, lying on a thin cotton towel with the uneven pebbles pressing into her bare back. He, wading out under a warm sun into cold water. He is younger than her, but he is not young. His coarse beard is shot through with silver whiskers. His hair is shaved close to his skull. His head shines when he surfaces from the waves. He sits on the stones and he stares out to sea.
It is not her first time in Italy. She came once, as an impressionable student, for a semester in Venice. She remembers a long evening trailing around thecicchettibars on the cusp of Carnevale, wading through St Mark’s Square in the pouring rain. The man she’d been with had lent her his jacket, and she remembers the sodden weight of that dripping velvet blazer like chainmail. She remembers the weight of the man on top of her, though she can’t recall his face. Since the divorce, Toronto has felt like dead space to her. She’s been drawn back to Europe, to memories of first times, of being impressionable. The warm places. The weight. So, she drinks her morning cappuccino alone outside a café, then she meanders down to the beach fora solitary day on the pebbles, under the relentless southern sun. On these pebbles, she finds him.
He ploughs through the water, his broad, tanned back emerging with each stroke, revealing a glistening canvas of tattoos. Today is no different. They do not speak, though she will smile and nod as she covers herself with a loose shirt and makes her way up the shingle, doing her best to stay upright and graceful as she imagines his dark eyes on the backs of her legs. Back to her hotel room, where she will wash off the salt in a warm shower and lie alone in a bed freshly made up with Egyptian cotton sheets. That evening, she will dine alone once again, then cross the piazza for a drink at a hole-in-the-wall bar.
She hadn’t expected to see him there. She definitely hadn’t expected him to be serving her drink. He lays down a napkin, then her martini. Her eyes travel the length of his forearms. There is a darkness to him, an unspeakable sadness that lopes after him like a stray dog. She will try to start a conversation in terrible Italian, and she’ll learn that his isn’t much better. He isn’t from around here. She doesn’t want his story. She has no interest in fixing him, nor in being fixed. She is interested only in the way that he shone as he rose from the water, her desire to run her fingers across his shorn head.
That night, she will do just that, with her bare legs wrapped around him and her bare back flat against the cold plaster of the bedroom wall. She will let him take her on the Egyptian cotton, and she will feel things that she hasn’t felt in a very long time. Things she felt in Venice, in the rain. The next morning, he will leave in the half-light, and she will be glad of it, because they’ll already have said everything there is to say.But in the time between, as night bleeds into morning, she will trace her fingers across his tattoos as he sleeps and wonder at their meaning. The statue on one arm. The faded letter ‘E’ on the other. The coiled snake around a ladder on his shoulder. Or this, the tombstone on his chest and the writing inside it, around where his heart would be.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
her brother
When he was fifteen, Augie had taken his life for granted. He’s tried to make up for it since. Is there such a thing as too much living? His early twenties had been something to colour in, a passport to fill with bright stamps and beautiful faces. He’d drifted across the continent, fallen into girls’ beds in Bucharest and boys’ bunks in Berlin. He’d danced on stage with drag queens in the backstreets of Riga, had plunged into an icy lake with a Viking goddess on the outskirts of Reykjavík, naked as the day he was born.
Now he’s thirty-three, and he’s still not ready to grow up. He wakes, this morning, in a narrow bed in a Roman apartment next to a naked archaeologist from Palermo. Domenico? Damiano? Two days ago, it had been one of Clara’s actresses, a rushed affair before she flew back to her family in Provence. She’d never told him her name, but she’d still made him sign an NDA. Now he kisses Domenico or Damiano a sleepy goodbye, throws on last night’s shirt and steps out in open-toed shoes in the vague direction of the restaurant, closing his eyes against a sun that never fails to bring him back to life.
‘You’re late,’ Clara says, as he slides into his seat.
‘You sound like our sister.’
‘Oh god,’ she says. ‘I’m turning into her, aren’t I?’
She gives him a hug. Nora isn’t quite so forthcoming.
