Page 54 of Main Characters
She wants only one thing.
Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry.
But she has never used her eyes before.
She cannot look, can only see eight inches in front of her,
and even then it is fogged and blurry and barely there.
No subtlety. She thinks everything is one thing,
apart from one thing.
Her mother’s face.
An expression she doesn’t know.
But she knows she is safe,
and she is warm,
and she is
‘Nora.’
her ex
Jacob Steele can see the future.
That’s the headline of theGQpiece, laid out on the Vitra coffee table in front of him. And though it refers to his supernaturally astute choice of roles, to the sliding scale of increasingly expensive watches they’d made him model on the day of the shoot, he thinks they’re on to something.
After all, he always knew he’d end up here.
Time works strangely for Jacob. The more famous he gets, the faster everything moves. It feels like yesterday that he arrived in that audition room wearing his most penitent face. He knew he’d outpaced Clara in the decade since he’d last seen her. His HBO show was a hit, renewed and renewed again. His team wanted his next project to be a backdoor audition for Bond.
Jacob had another idea. ‘What’s Clara Cowan working on?’
Gone are the days of needing an appointment. If Jacob Steele wants a role, all he has to do is walk in and take it. Pre-production felt like foreplay, helped along by the fact that her current boyfriend was already persona non grata. In France, at dinner, Jacob and Clara got drunk on Sancerre and talked likeno time had passed at all. Jacob thought of the things they used to do together, the things she’d let him do to her. He wondered what her body looked like now, under that loose linen shirt. He waited until the wrap party to make his move. The pre-wrap party. What difference could one night make?
Clara cried when her boyfriend fled the chateau. So Jacob said, ‘Paris,’ and she didn’t say no. He sees himself, now, his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Jardin des Tuileries and the Eiffel Tower beyond. Behind him, under rumpled white bedsheets, the bare back of Clara Cowan.
He wakes up with scratch marks. She always bruised easily. At a bar in Montmartre, Jacob sits in large Persol sunglasses, his hat pulled conspicuously low.
‘No one’s going to recognise you,’ Clara snaps.
Two teenage girls approach.
Paris can’t last forever. After only a week, they start to rub each other up the wrong way. Jacob knows the real problem is this particular penthouse. They’re stagnating.
‘My show’s about to start filming again,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’
‘Why would I do that?’ she replies, seething. ‘I’m not your groupie. You’re inmyfilm.’
He shouldn’t have suggested it in the first place. And he definitely shouldn’t have told her that people are only going to watch the film because of him. They part unhappily, don’t speak for months. Then Jacob finds himself bored in Budapest towards the end of filming, swaddled and sweaty in a fur cloak hewn from a repurposed IKEA rug. He sends a text on thephone he keeps hidden from the cameras. He can find anything – anyone – these days. He has people to do it for him.
‘Fancy seeing you here.’
This is what he says, when Clara opens the door to the edit suite and finds him standing on the other side of it. He should have known that she’d hole up here as soon as she returned to London. Her hair is a mess. She looks all the worse for seeing him. And yet, he’s brought macarons fresh from Paris, procured by an assistant.
