This is the first short story I ever wrote. I was 17 and studying Advanced Higher English at my high school in a suburb outside Glasgow. My teacher loved the story (thanks, Mrs. Deans!) and I think her support and enthusiasm was a big part of why I went on to study English Lit at university. I honestly don’t know what the fuck I was thinking when I wrote it; I’d often write myself into corners and have to crowbar in awful endings like ‘and then she was a fictional character!’ or ‘and then it was all a drug-induced dream!’ and unfortunately that seems to have happened here too. In my first year of uni, when I was 19 (and probably old enough to know better), I picked this story up again. I filled whole notebooks with chapter ideas and character development for a novel called (and it hurts me to admit this): The Pretty Adventures of Stella and Celeste. I never finished it, thankfully, though it was good practice.
Back then I don’t think I was trying to write like any other writer, even though there were plenty of writers I loved — I read everything I could find by Francesca Lia Block, Nicole Blackman, Tennessee Williams and Poppy Z. Brite. But at 17 I had such a hugely inflated (yet hopelessly tender) ego that it wouldn’t occur to me to try to write like someone else. I wanted to write like ME, because I was fucking brilliant and soon everyone would see that. It didn’t take long for that to be laughed out of me, but I do still try to write in my own voice.
I see many parallels between this story and what I write now. I’m still obsessed with young girls trying to be women, unexpected adjectives, the refuge of art, and the idea that the stories we’re told to expect don’t actually happen in life. Except that now I try to figure out the endings of stories before I start them.
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Stella and Celeste, named for stars, sat quietly. Celeste’s quiet was deep, impenetrable, as she mixed thick liquid with a stick to find the perfect shade of blue. Stella’s quiet was frantic, quick, as she ran down mental lists to find the perfect word to describe the way beautiful people smiled. They both sighed silently and threw down their thoughts. They looked at each other with black eyes and uncurled themselves from the purple-blanketted bed to go and make some coffee.
The two skinny girls barely made a mark on the still air of the beige corridors. The never-ending maze, their bare feet padding silently through the confusion of blankness, following the invisible breadcrumb-trail. Magnolia kitchen, long fingers in a rhythm, water-in-kettle, coffee-in-cup, pale sisters mixed sweet black liquid so thick it seemed like mud. Cross-legged on the table, they shared tiny blissful smiles and curled heavy heads with chessboard hair over the steaming cups. Stella was the black-haired one, hair cut choppy with kitchen scissors and unused leg-razors, braided with silver ribbon and transparent beads. Celeste completed the swirled chessboard: white-blonde hair fell endlessly down her skinny back, tied with purple packaging-string so the ends wouldn’t be stained by imperfectly-blue paint. They sipped the burning black liquid slowly, silver rings clinking quietly on the flowered mugs each time they lifted their hands.
After sufficient scalding mouthfuls of sugary mud, the girls padded silently through the confusion of beige halls to their black-hole bedroom and picked up their thoughts. Celeste added white and smiled at her perfect blue. Stella decided on ‘placid’ and smiled at her scribbled curls of words.
Outside, the sun fell slowly and dragged up the pale eye of the moon. The wet dots of stars echoed the silver smudges in the sky of Celeste’s canvas; the swirled silhouettes of trees mirrored the curls of Stella’s prose. Monochrome sisters yawned, unpainted mouths opening like tiny flowers and snapping shut like shells. The chemical smell of turpentine seeped out into the black room as Celeste cleaned the perfect blue from her brushes, empty coffee jars full of white spirit and the paint-smudged wood of brush handles. Stella sighed and rubbed her hand, the cramp spreading like iron needles from hours of cursive on the white pages. She added her black ballpoint, warmed by her hand, to the small pile on the purple-painted bedside table and threw the notebook with its hidden words down with its twins on the floor. The girls threw their black and purple clothes on the slightly-dusty fuzz of the carpet, replacing it with white lace and black silk that went down to their knees. They crawled under the purple blanket, tired heads resting on their silver-adorned hands as they smiled at each other. Skinny backs not quite touching, black eyes closed and pale toes warming slowly, the girls slept.
After a few long hours of dream-sleep, Stella opened her eyes. Not knowing what could have woken her in this black silence, she reached out an invisible hand to her sister. When she met another hand coming towards her, she quickly stretched out an arm and turned on the light. Celeste smiled blurrily at the sudden light and tucked the arm she had been reaching out for her sister back into the warmth of the purple blanket. The girls stretched, catlike, and rested their sleep-fuzzed heads against the wall. Celeste’s snow-white head slid slowly down to her pillows, warmed from the hours of sleep, as Stella’s arm retraced its path through the air to turn off the light. The girls lay in the silent black, minutes so slow they seemed like hours. Slowly, all the air in the black-hole room seemed to melt into the walls, the vacuum left suffocating in its silence. The black space seemed so thick that the girls slid sideways and stood up, the fuzz on the carpet tickling their toes. The black silk over their skin emanated night-heat as they ventured into the beige maze of corridors for some breathing room. Pale fingers dragged along the seamless walls towards the familiar rhythm: water-in-kettle, sitting-on-table, tiny-blissful-smiling. After four cups of sweet mud, the girls clasped hands, Hansel and Gretel, and made their silent way back to the gingerbread-house of their bedroom.
Long fingers on the endless beige walls, the blind eyes of doors, beige ceiling and beige carpet, above and below. Swallowed by nothingness, the girls looked into each other’s black eyes, framed by the photo-negatives of their hair. As they watched the beige stretch into forever, they began to wonder: left or right, up or down? They had forgotten in which direction the black-hole haven lay. The dreams of starry-night canvasses and curls of prose spiralled away as they stared, panicked, at the beige. How could they be lost in this maze they had defeated so many times? The sweet-mud rituals several times a day had imprinted the breadcrumb-trail on their brains, but the mindless corridors meant nothing to them. Panicked and confused, they turned their black-and-white heads and padded back the way they had come, back to the sweet mud. The beige gave way to beige, never-ending nothingness, and the girls faltered, their bare white feet slowing on the thick carpet. They touched toes and whispered together, strangely loud. Hands clasped, silver rings clicking together dully, the girls glanced down. Stella, black-haired and silent, lifted her skinny arms and stared at the two pairs of white wrists. The purple-blue veins, usually visible like roadlines on a map, were gone. The sisters stared in panic at their blank wrists, the bruise-coloured lines invisible and the whiteness fading slowly like plants decaying. The beige crept in: the ceiling dropping imperceptibly towards their chessboard heads, the walls crawling millimetres at a time towards their bare feet. It swallowed them slowly, their milk-white skin and monochrome hair fading slowly to beige. The more they padded and blinked, every heartbeat, every twitch at the clasped beige of their hands, signalled that they had lost their haven. The girls, monochrome like an old film, curled up on the beige floor and closed their still-black eyes. Things might be different in the morning.