"I never wanted it to go this far, I swear." The mask has well and truly dropped, no fucking lie. Me and Stella, as she's now called, are in the lounge. I'm holding a bag of ice cubes wrapped in a tea-towel against my throbbing knuckles which have come up a nice shade of red. Stella is working her way steadily through a box of tissues, a little mountain of them screwed up in balls on the sofa next to her already. She's halfway through her life story and I'm just willing her to get to the part where she decided to come and play my dead ex-girlfriend. "My dad walked out on us when I were five, and my mam had four other kids to look after so I just started going a bit off the rails. I ended up with this guy. He was seven years older than me and a smack addict. We got into debt and, well, I ended up doing these films, you know. That's when I met Dean." "My dad walked out as well," I find myself saying, and taking her cold hand for a moment. It's the second time we've held hands – the first was when I'd helped her to get up off the floor, and she gripped me, shaking like hell.
