Laura and Helen are drunk on Smirnoff and memory. They lay down on the bed together and held hands when they were fifteen… when they got up again to face the world they were twenty-five. Those little white hands with exquisite teacup fingers, entwined in understanding – an iron-deficient latticework with petal white satin finish, tipped with those little rosebud nails, lacquer patina black cherry and electric blue respectively. What a pretty pretty pattern.

Fifteen years old and the world seemed so small they could get it into their schoolbags; eyeliner and glitter and a half bottle of voddy and ‘Dog Man Star’ and ‘The Holy Bible’ – loud guitars and dangerous dreams. Getting changed in the disabled cubicle of the public lavvies and sneaking off to pretend to be 19 in pubs, getting chatted up by louche skinny boys with panda eyes and leaving them behind in time to get the last bus. Now at 25 they’re still pretending to be 19 in pubs, only the world won’t fit into a schoolbag anymore – it’s seeped all over the floor. One thing has changed though; faded glamour can sparkle brighter on a professional budget – they can climb into a shiny black cab and slide around in smooth skirts on leatherette long after chucking out. “Like big stars on the back seat, like skeletons everso pretty…”

In the quarter-light they stare up at the stars through the ceiling, surrounded by the ephemera of their lives, the stuff that leaked out; it’s not what we do that defines us, it’s what we have. Stuff.

Black eyeliner, casing cracked by a gold shoe with Tequila splashed on the toe… Spineless copy of Anais Nin’s ‘Delta Of Venus’, folded open, imprinting its wisdom onto the scabid carpet…

Large convex mirror with chipped silver frame which Laura bought yesterday because it’s like the one Dirk Bogarde was polishing in ‘The Servant’. The price sticker is still on the glass, they tried to get it off but it left a mark – £4.50 from The Marie Curie shop…

One of those postcards of a girl that winks at you if you move, stained with a ring of cheap russet Rioja…

Records – ‘Francoise Hardy Sings About Love’ and ‘Funhouse’ by The Stooges, placed on the carpet in a strategically casual fashion to impress a new male acquaintance…

Tigerstriped hatbox, sans hat but overflowing with ‘bits’ – lipstick, eyeshadow and nailvarnish in fifty shades of undress, bracelets, brooches, drunkenly discarded earrings, packets of home hair-dye, false eyelashes, hairpieces, hairbands, wristbands, necklaces.

These stupid things that we do…

And the stars stare back through the ceiling at them, pinned and mounted delicately amongst stuff, installation still life anthropological study entitled ‘English Roses With Stuff’. On first glance we know art but we don’t know what we like – and this isn’t art. What do these lives have to do with anything at all? This tableau is vacuous and self-indulgent.  We move on, perhaps discuss the flogged horse in formaldehyde – what daring use of space and unexpected scale… but something pulls us back.  We were too busy looking at the bigger picture to notice the details. See, there, for instance – look at Helen’s forearm, the raised criss-cross pattern of livid scar tissue, tiny lines that enlace, like a map of the city where she vanished, dazed and numb, when Laura went to Italy with her parents.

At first it was just to see if she could. The first incision was the hardest – as the skin scratched apart like a torn hem she bit her lip on a sharp intake of breath. She tensed and her midriff rode up – she reigned herself in, cursed Freud and licked the point of the compass before pushing it deeper on the second pass.

Once she was underway it was the colours that fascinated her most, the spectrum of her insides on their way out; deepening angry scarlet chink at the epicentre, elevating into rusting seams, already coagulating at the raised edge of the miniature furrow. Then a healthy pink giving way to a callow border intersected with the rough, canvas white of old wounds. All those lovely colours – She is a work of art after all – a very exclusive piece, with selected viewings.

Laura has marks too, two of them. They’re more refined though, scars made by a more intent blade. There’s one thin white sliver on her left cheek which carries on, if she holds it in the right position, onto the palm of her right hand – a souvenir of the blade Gavin took with him the night he went away and didn’t come back.

Gavin was a twenty eight year old white boy with dreads and ‘small man syndrome’. Being – in his eyes – an undesirable colour and height gave him issues that needed resolving one way or another and when he lost his job at an electric gate factory he invested his redundancy money in Moroccan Black. Thus his status was elevated… if not his stature. Wee Gavin had intense brown eyes which used to bore into Laura from across the grotty benches and tables of their local. His smouldering intensity could have been what drew her in, but it was far more likely to have been cut price dope and speed and acid and Temazepam and – before they moved out from their parents’ watchful gaze – a flat to experiment with them within.  In time Laura’s drugs became attached to a less monetary price tag but that was of little consequence for her. What was important was getting caught up in a constancy of moments that made her tingle and buzz and slip and slide around in her consciousness until what she was doing in return for it didn’t matter anymore.

Soon Gavin was the number one dealer in town – but it was a small town. Gavin’s ego didn’t let him keep quiet about his power, and his behaviour was attracting the wrong kind of attention. Trouble is, Laura got carried away too. Frequent freebies and the life of a full-time hedonista were the reasoned trade-off for the occasional fumble with a suspiciously Napoleonic but tolerable enough cicisbeo; a certain lysergic haziness coupled with a belief in an imbalance of sexual power in her favour may have clouded this somewhat. Laura’s eyes became more Kohl-stained and hollow, her full lips more engorged with brash crimson, her skirts shorter and smoother with each sinuously passing weekend. She wasn’t born to be a gangster’s moll though, and it was up to Helen to save her from the third reel finale of Bonnie & Clyde.

Helen got the tip-off from a friend of a friend of her brother who was in the force. They were onto Gavin – the midget Howard Marks, they were coming to take the house apart piece by piece and if they didn’t find anything they would make sure they did anyway… She called Laura and warned her to get away from there and come home right away, which she was trying to do, only Gavin’s state of mind was snarling paranoia and eight thousand calamitous scenarios were playing out in his head all at once, each of them leading to one conclusion – betrayal. Helen and Laura, ‘the Siamese twins’, he had prised them apart at last, and this was how he was to be repaid?

Laura hid in the airing cupboard, stoned and alone, whilst the rabid paramour clumsily stomped around the musty mid-terrace finding bags of chemistry to empty down the U-bend. He found her coincidentally, hallucinating in the warm cubby hole, crouched beside a large jar of semi-dried mushrooms. He backed her into the kitchen where he swiped at her with a knife still stained from the tomatoes bludgeoned for last night’s dinner, ‘chicken paprika abortion with beef tomatoes and undercooked rice’. She put her hand up to protect herself but only partially deflected the blow. Her first thought was, ‘how funny, he had to reach up to do that like he was slaying a giant or something’. Her second was thankfully one of fuzzy self-preservation and in one movement she opened the back door and let herself out, retrieving the key as she did so and locking him in.

Laura crouched in the narrow redbrick passageway, dazed, her hand throbbing ruby red onto the torn knee of her tights. She stumbled into the street in blue suede trainers and fumbled in the pockets of her old Adidas tracksuit top. A two pound coin – fat and clumsy like a pirate’s sovereign. A soggy stick of Juicyfruit with its indented chevrons misshapen and tacky. In the pocket of her red needlecord A-line skirt clacked a clamshell mobile and a scratched pink Ipod Shuffle. The puddles shone jellied amber in the city evening and Laura listened to Scott Walker and watched old films in the city’s shimmering reflections. She walked in cinematic circles until her toes were sodden, her knees were congealing with scabs and her batteries were exhausted. Then she called Helen and they sat in the park drinking red wine from a screwtop bottle until the dawn flickered on the horizon like a fridge light and reminded them they were cold. Helen led Laura by the arm to her musty flat where they drank tea from chipped happy yellow mugs and went to bed until the evening. Helen let her do spoons and lay awake until her friend’s warm sobs on her neck shallowed and subsided.

Turned out sort of fine in the end – Gavin ended up getting away before they got to the house and was last heard of in Spain. Laura managed to get away with a clean scar, a decent sized jiffy of uncut speed and two dozen microdots uncomfortably stashed down her knickers. Helen got her flatmate back, and half a lost weekend fuelled by a large jiffy of uncut speed and two dozen microdots… But that’s another story; another haze of memory, another life lived whilst the other world sleeps. It’s written in the tatty notebook on the bedside table serving as a makeshift coaster to a chipped yellow mug. It’s on the third page, dreamily underlined in wobbly green, some spidery scrawl about love and loss and space and universal time and circles and holes which doesn’t make sense – but did at the time. Pages one and two have accounts of dreams about snakes and painful tattoos she never asked for – Helen’s phase of writing down her dreams for inspiration lasted just a fortnight in the summer. Page four has the e-mail address and mobile number of the singer in a band she thought she might have wanted to sleep with until she spent an hour in his company. The other pages are blank.

Stories don’t need to be written though.  They’re trapped like flies in amber amongst the stuff. They’re in the laddered tights, the cracked picture frame, the old movie magazine with Hedy Lamarr on the cover, the faux-fur hat that stinks of wood smoke, the VHS tape with ‘13’ painted on it in yellow nailvarnish, the empty bottle of Ouzo with a dusty red candle wedged in the neck, the Japanese toy robot, the empty bottle of vodka on its side; the brittle little brown plastic jar with rough seams, upturned, what’s left of its yellow guts spilled in calming dots on the carpet… This is all that we are; all what we are. We are the words that don’t reach the page. We are the stuff, the beautiful stuff.

One of them stares blackly through antique lace eyelids; her lips glisten and twinkle, slightly apart with the illusory flicker of a breathless smile. The other gulps a thick lump of morning breath with a confused start – there’s something strange in her hand, entwined in her fingers – something cold and hard and white like fine bone china.