This Product Contains Absolutely No Chemicals

It is a universal law that when you set out to look you will find something - even if what you find is not what you were looking for.

Laura Thomas is not contemplating this as she walks beside her new friend. Neither does she notice the seagulls circling above, chasing the tail of a passing plane, or the low winter light glancing off the city skyline. Observation isn't her strong point. Nor is self awareness. In all truth, if asked, Laura would prove unable to point to a single thing about her that could be called a talent. She had, once, been good at history. Not outstanding, but good enough to study it, until she got to a point where her abilities seemed to fall away, outpaced by the level of her tutors' expectations.

It seemed to happen overnight. One day she was passable, and the next left behind. There wasn't much to be gained by carrying on, so she abandoned academia in search of something else and ended up here, walking towards the river with a shiny new companion - a young woman with earnest facial piercings and inexpertly-dreadlocked hair. The woman's name is Femi and the pair met just hours ago, but Femi talks so enthusiastically and acts so decisively that already Laura finds herself following in her wake, adjusting to accommodate her every whim.

Femi is rather inadequately dressed, her only nod to the temperature a blue and silver woven scarf thrown wildly around her shoulders and neck. In her right hand she holds a cigarette; her left she uses solely for gesticulation. Next to Femi, Laura feels awkward and dull, her own scarf neatly wrapped around her throat, her hair fuzzily framing her ill-formed, features. But Laura doesn't mind the unfavourable comparison - Femi's energy is of the kind that a lost person can feed on. In a very real sense, Laura feels saved by her.

They are walking to a restaurant, a vegetarian, whole-foods, hippy-middle-class-organic kind of place, somehow still open despite exorbitant inner-city rents. And Femi is talking, extolling, lecturing hypnotically about chi and karma and a whole mixed bag of half-remembered, exotic-sounding notions. For her, it seems, the words don't matter, only the prefix 'alternative'. Laura's core of common sense raises frequent objections, but she silences them and lets the power Femi's voice invigorate her.

As they walk, Laura's mind drifts back to the distant world of this morning - the feel of her skin against the cold handle of the bathroom door, the soft blush of her breath on the mirror, the emptiness she had registered when she gazed into her pale eyes. This morning there had seemed so little point to anything, so little purpose, and yesterday morning and countless mornings before, but this morning was different. This morning she had run out of shampoo.

A man in a thick, navy overcoat fumbled past her as she negotiated the heavy door to the shop. His breath acrid, he hissed frustration and bundled his bags of shopping around her and out, leaving her inwardly broken and close to giving up. Somehow she made it to the correct shelf - a monumental effort - and was about to place the bottle of own-brand shampoo in her basket when a voice rang out. Femi's voice.

"Oh no, don't get that one."

"Sorry?" Laura replied, half a question, half an apology for existing. Her hand faltered between the basket and the shelf.

"You don't want to buy that brand, it's full of chemicals. They're bad for your hair, and you've got such nice hair."

A giddy nausea rose in Laura. She was noticed, she was someone. She had nice hair. Curling a lock of it around her fingers, she firmly placed the shampoo back on the shelf.

"This one is better." Femi proffered an alternative and Laura took it reverently from her.

"See," Femi continued insistently, indicating the label, "'This product contains absolutely no chemicals'. It's much better for you. Have you heard of reiki?"

That was Laura's new beginning, a rebirth of sorts, and now they are here, a few hours later, walking through the city, united in their movements, framed by the warm glow of their skin smarting in the cold air. As they walk, a rare unbidden thought comes to Laura, transitory, replaced in an instant by the drowning buzz of contentment - when you are looking you will always find something, even if what you find is not what you were looking for.