I saw the other me on a rainy morning – at least, I did the first time. The city dripped and surged. Everything smelt of wet dog. She was huddled in the doorway of a pawnbroker’s with a bin bag and a blanket. Her voice creaked when anyone passed by.
‘Spare change?’ she asked a guy in a suit. ‘Spare change?’ she asked the jogger with the bouncy ponytail.
I was walking to work balancing coffee. I averted my eyes from her, loath to see.
‘Nice shoes,’ she said.
I looked down at my shoes, and glanced across. She was familiar, sort of. I supposed I’d passed her before. She wore a baseball cap and a coat like a half-inflated life raft. She was filthy and had a scar on her cheek; there was nothing remarkable about her. Some people all sort of look alike. In the morning I saw her again. Spare change. Spare change. Spare… People rushed. Men with newspapers tossed coins.
‘Nice bag… real nice,’ she said to me.
Something in her voice bugged me. Mocking, judgemental even. My fingers rubbed the phone in my pocket. Silent. Still. I stormed on, then doubled back.
‘Why don’t you ever ask me for change?’ I demanded.
I glared into blue eyes, sort of like my mother’s, but hard as frozen water.
‘You? You never gave me shit.’
She laughed, then coughed. Laugh, cough, laugh, cough. Who was she to judge? It was one of those moments when everything that’s wrong in the world took the form of one person, one old woman in a doorway with the wrong tone.
‘You don’t know I wouldn’t give you money,’ I said.
‘Of course I know. You only give to guys with dogs. Sometimes buskers, if they’re cute.’
She was right. I rifled for change, finding only cash cards and gum. I tossed the gum at her like some sort of horrible-woman repellent and ran.
‘See you soon, Zoe,’ she called after me.
Not if I saw her first.
It hadn’t been long since my birthday, not that it matters. It was all good, as they say. Christian sent yellow roses. It was a sign. I’d been seeing him for months, off and on, but the flowers had to mean something, if nothing more than ‘I’m sending you flowers’. It’s a start.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said.
‘Thanks for the roses.’
‘Now, if you want your real present…’ He took my hand and tilted his head towards the restaurant door. I knew what he meant.
The rain mizzled out. Drops clung to ledges of buildings. Wobbled. Dropped. I stepped out for lunch. How did that old woman know my name? I was sure I’d misheard. I’d decided to switch my panini supplier from the café with the steel tables outside to the sandwich shop with the hippo on the sign, just in case. I turned right instead of left. I was waiting to hear from Christian (Status: In a relationship, without a name.) Instead, I got a message from Louise.
Once, Louise and I had shared a flat at the bottom of a hill. Nappies flowed down the drains from the big houses. Ours were blocked. We peered into the manhole outside like sisters at a rock pool, narrowed voices tunnelling underground, swimming away from us like silvery fish. I held a net on a stick of bamboo. Louise looked down beside me.
‘What do you think’s down there?’ she asked.
‘Could be anything: alligators, drugs, CHUDs,’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we fished out a tiny mermaid?’
‘Like a goldfish? Yeah, I bet people flush mermaids all the time.’
The net scooped up wet wipes, but for a moment we were catchers of mermaids, the only two people in the world fishing a drain who wouldn’t have been too surprised to find a shitty little mermaid on our hands.
I stared at the text from Louise. I only heard from her now when she wanted something. She was moving house and wanted someone to carry her shit. The phone felt heavy in my pocket. So many people carried around all day. Where was Christian? I hadn’t heard from him since… I stepped under the scaffolding in front of the pizza shop. And there she was again, the homeless woman, everywhere you don’t want to be, and on me in a heartbeat.
‘He’s not going to call,’ she said. ‘Tosser.’
She sat with her back to the cushion of a bin bag, an empty burger carton on the floor freckled with copper and silver at her feet. I glanced at my phone, just Josh dressed like Thor. Gotta love a guy with a hammer? (Status: Nice guy, train wreck of a wardrobe, unfortunate goatee, good in bed.) Pending reply: smiley face – the yeah, whatever of our age. Josh wasn’t who I was waiting for. I put the phone away, staring at the woman, eyes the colour of mine, that nose. I recognised it, I recognised her. The bag lady. It was horrible. She looked just like me. She was me, in how many years’ time? I gripped my phone, waiting for a ring to wave in her face. Not a peep.
‘All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey…’ she started to sing as I walked away. ‘I went for a waaa…’
Cough. Sing. Cough. She was singing my ringtone, a throat full of rusty autumn leaves.
So, this is what thirty-three feels like. Birthday cards jostled over the fireplace. Seven. If I was a maths person I’d work it out. One card = one friend retained per X amount of years of my life, but I’m not a numbers person really. My wall online was full of greetings from strangers. Roses were starting to unclench in the vase. I took off the same shirt I had worn at thirty-two, got in the bath and placed the phone on the wire rack near the shampoo. Christian was away at a wedding. The invite included a plus one.
‘We never said this was serious,’ he said. ‘Not going to a wedding serious anyhow.’
How serious did we have to be to watch other people cut cake? Seriouser, apparently.
‘No biggie. Weddings are boring anyway,’ I said.
I recalled my mother’s weddings: his side, her side, nervous smiles, glances across the divide. I didn’t want to go to a wedding – I just didn’t want to be someone he didn’t want to take to one. Washing my hair, I pictured the beggar woman’s cap. Is this the sort of shit she thought? Did this shit make her wind up where she was? God, I was nothing like her. I wasn’t. The bath fizzed with raspberry bath-bombs. I had decent shampoo. Drying my hands, I picked up the phone and hit Christian. Thinking of you. God no. Backspace. Delete. The beggar woman’s laugh rattled in my soapy ears. I started typing again. How are you? Delete. Boring. I miss you. Delete. In the bath, thinking of you. That’d do it, dilute the sentiment with nakedness. Send. Count to sixty. One elephant. Two elephant. Christian replied when I got to fifty-one elephants.
Yeah? What you thinking? What you doing?
Pumicing my feet. I put down the stone and typed what he’d like to hear. Somewhere he was reading it. For minutes, the other numbers on his phone didn’t exist.
I didn’t have to go there, but I did. I took clothes off the radiator and pictured the other me outside. Freezing. If I left her out in the cold, I could be killing myself. I buttoned my coat and stepped outside. The road sparkled with frost. Everything looked sharp, metallic. I got in the car and drove.
I found myself outside the pawnbroker’s in town. She was curled under a purple blanket in the doorway. I cranked the car window down.
‘Get in,’ I yelled.
She didn’t move.
‘Get in.’
The blanket twitched. She turned around.
‘What?’
She sounded like I’d caught her in the middle of something, like she had a hundred and one things to dream.
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
She knotted her bag and rustled to the car. The seatbelt stretched over woman and bag. I drove, sniffing fries on her hair, vinegary fingers and the warm stale smell of beer fermenting under her skin.
I opened my door and she marched straight to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and took out the cereal. She ate from the box, shovelling Rice Krispies in her mouth.
‘Milk?’ I asked.
She shrugged the way I did when I was thirteen, so articulately, a whatever tilt of her head. I sat the milk down. She poured and lowered her ear, listening to the snap, crackle and pop.
‘Would you like something hot?’ I said. ‘I could make soup.’
I opened a can of tomato and slugged it in a pan. ‘Take off your coat.’
I wouldn’t ask her to make herself at home. No. Don’t. She cuddled into her coat like I was planning to steal it. I wondered how many layers she had, if she was fat or just dressed all-terrain.
‘Cut the crap,’ she said.
I expected the other me to be grateful I’d let her in, but my only thanks was a belch that billowed from her milk-covered mouth.
‘How many shite cans of soup you gonna try to feed me till you ask what you want? Soup? That’s why you brought me here? Who you fucking kidding?’
She took a hanky from her pocket and made a raking sound in her throat. There was so much I had to ask her. Where did I go wrong? Why am I you? But I was damned if I’d ask now and prove she knew what I was thinking. I poured the soup, glancing sideways. She had that small mole on her chin and, looking close, that tiny hole from an old piercing under her lip.
‘When did you start swearing all the time?’ I asked.
She spoke nothing like me, I was sure of that at least. I’d turned down the music on the party in my mouth for my first job. I couldn’t imagine why I’d let it blare up again, all those conversational shits and fucks.
‘That’s for me to know,’ she said. ‘No bread? Typical. Why do you have a shiny toaster when you never have bread?’
She sprinkled Rice Krispies onto her soup. Slurped. I could see this wasn’t going to be easy. Now the other me was here I didn’t know how to talk to her.
‘How did this happen? You know, you ending up…’
‘A manky old ragbag?’ she said.
‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘Course not, you’d have pussyfooted around, full of shit.’
She laughed again, the ghost of the laugh I had stealing my stepsister’s doll when I was eight and throwing it onto the shed roof.
‘Well? How did you get like this?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said, licking drips off the bowl, red soupy trails.
‘Of course. I’ll get some blankets and make up the couch.’
‘You have a spare room.’
‘Well, yeah, but it’s a mess, it would take me too long to sort it.’
‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want me stinking up your snazzy new sheets.’
She knew me way too fucking well.
I lay in bed, rubbing in moisturiser. ‘Vanishing cream’, my mother used to call it. I wondered if she had met herself too, if she’d had a crazy old woman of her own to make disappear. I listened to downstairs, I could hear snoring. The other me didn’t seem to need the TV on to get to sleep. Did I snore? I sounded like a motorbike revving up to drive through the house, knock down the paper-thin walls.
The blankets were gone from the couch in the morning. The bitch robbed me, I bet. I pictured her filling her sack, stealing all my stuff, like some sort of anti-Santa. I didn’t know her well. Who knows what they’re capable of? I rushed to my bag – cash cards intact, nothing missing that I could see. I opened the front door. She was stood on my path, the white wool throw off the couch poking out of her bag.
‘Spare change?’ she said, hand out to the neighbours.
The couple next door looked away, turning back to give me a look. Bastards. You can’t tell who’s a good person by whether or not they recycle. How you do tell? I still didn’t know – the other me wouldn’t say.
I tugged her begging arm. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re my neighbours. I see them everyday. It looks bad.’
‘Ah, yeah, I forgot. It’s so important how everything looks.’
Inside, I made porridge. The woman clawed through the cupboard, tossing glazed cherries into her bowl like bombs.
‘How can you do it?’ I asked.
‘Do what?’
‘Beg. I’d never do that.’
‘You sure?’
She grinned missing teeth. Beep. Christian. Can’t make tonight. No biggie. Catch you next week? The woman sniffed.
‘Do you remember Christian?’ I said. ‘Did you love him?’
She folded her arms, saying nothing. I wondered how to make her to leave.
‘You can have a bath before you go if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you some clean clothes.’
I wasn’t sure I had anything that might fit. Maybe sweatpants, or the cardigan I’d bought for my mother that last Christmas. I went upstairs, brushed my teeth again and brought it down.
‘Try it on.’
‘Thought you didn’t want to end up anything like your mother?’ she grinned.
That gap in her teeth again. Try that new toothpaste, I reminded myself.
I wondered what the other me was doing all day in my house while I was working. I didn’t want to leave her, but she didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. ‘Don’t you trust yourself?’ she laughed. I considered how to make her disappear. I texted almost everyone I knew just to ask how they were, like buying an insurance policy. I couldn’t be that woman if I had someone. Could I? I swirled my keys walking to my front door. I was sure I’d find myself knitting with an old lady smile. Maybe she’d be doing Pilates, or off somewhere on a Caribbean cruise, just wouldn’t be here at all.
She was crossed-legged on the floor holding the phone.
‘Get a proper job, you gobshite.’
Slam.
‘Who was that?’
‘Telemarketers,’ she said.
‘I got bread.’ I held up the bag.
‘That’s not bread, it’s shite,’ she said, squeezing the diet loaf out of my hands. ‘You never call things what they are.’
The phone trilled in the hall. Josh wanted me for the pub quiz. Why not? I wandered back into the lounge.
‘Do you want a baked potato?’ I asked.
I looked around the room. No sign of me, but a squished bit in the loaf, slowly expanding back into shape.
There was a cool moon outside. Crisp, not a cloud. There were shopping lists on the backs of my birthday cards; all that was left of the roses was a ribbon on a stick. Christian had told me he wanted to keep things casual. And I was sleeping with Josh again to kill time. I sprayed on perfume to meet him at the pub quiz. Then it came. Bored. Wanna come round? Christian. I read the message, unsure whether to cancel my plans. It could mean something, it could change everything. Out of the window, I caught a glimpse of the old woman wandering down the street. I raced out with the phone in my hand.
‘Tell me something, please,’ I said, waving the phone.
She glanced at me, walking on.
‘Tell me what to do, please.’
She stopped and leaned in as if she might kiss me. I waited, inhaling beer and something surprising, like soap.
‘Do you want to know something? I’ll tell you…’
Her voice was husky, a whisper. I leaned so close our noses touched like Eskimos.
‘Fuck off,’ she yelled, her breath punching me in the face.
Already, she was walking away, moving faster than it looked like she could, cuddling her sack.
‘I’ll go to the cash machine, I’ll give you whatever you like, just fucking tell me something.’
I was chasing her now in my stupid blue heels. I slipped on the path one step behind her and got up picking something out of my face, a bit of smashed glass from the street. I stared at my wet fingers, dark, blood like ink under the moon. The old woman rustled back, pulling something woolly from her sack. She knelt and held a sock to my face.
‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘See? It could be worse.’
She pointed to a silvery scar on her cheek, a whisker of white under the streetlight. We sat on the kerb side by side, waiting for the bleeding to stop, just looking up at the sky. She stroked next door’s cat and got up.
‘See ya,’ she said.
I watched her get smaller walking down the street towards… who knew what? The phone trembled in my palm. Got plans, I typed. I still don’t know if it was the right reply or not, what those two small words could mean, the brush stroke they made, or didn’t, in the bigger picture of my life. I’d like to say the other me disappeared for ever as soon as I did it, but that’s a crock. Let’s just say I didn’t see her for a while, and when I did we just sat, silentish. Still.