My new neighbour arrived on a humid summer morning, parked her rental van in the driveway, and started unloading boxes right onto the footpath. She cut an impressive figure in her workmen’s boots, with the sleeves of her flannel shirt rolled to the elbow, and her face concealed beneath the rim of a sports cap.
I didn’t like to think of myself as some kind of voyeur, peering down at her from my window, and so I returned to my computer to work on a conference paper I was supposed to present the next month.
After working for an hour or so, a knock came at my door. My new neighbour stood before me, her cheeks flushed pink, fanning herself with her cap.
I was astonished, struck dumb.
We were like sisters, like two beads of water. Our hair was exactly the same shade of red, mine tied back in an unruly knot and hers woven neatly into a braid. We shared the same pale complexion, although her face was as delicate as porcelain, while I always looked as lifeless as a drowned flower.
Yet she acted as though she didn’t notice our obvious resemblance. She simply introduced herself with a handshake and a honeyed smile, asking whether I might help carry her dining table upstairs. What could I have said? With her casual, easy manner, she set the terms of our encounter, and I was forced into silence, unable to acknowledge our strange likeness.
I did my best to recover from my shock, and followed her downstairs in a daze. The table was heavy, made from a whorled piece of solid timber, and as we heaved and negotiated its edge around the banister, I looked over at her to verify the truth of what I had seen, although she kept her gaze downturned, placing her feet carefully on each step.
We eased the dining table through her doorway, and I felt an eerie sense of recognition, like coming home to find an imposter living in my apartment. Our units shared the same aspect and layout, yet somehow hers seemed lighter, more spacious. We set the table down, and I glanced surreptitiously at the hay-coloured walls, dark timber floors, and elegant linen curtains. I admired the charming side tables and mid-century armchairs, which she had somehow managed to carry upstairs by herself. Lush green plants were arranged around the room, standing in heavy ceramic pots. The air was pleasantly cool, and I noticed a sleek air conditioner humming from a discreet corner of the ceiling.
She offered me a glass of water, searching around for her box of kitchenware, but I just wanted to leave, to return to my own place, to ground myself in normalcy.
Back in my apartment with its worn navy carpet and scuffed white walls, I looked around at my furniture, constructed from flat-packed boards with a single Allen key. Dull and functional, oppressively utilitarian.
I began convincing myself that we couldn’t have been identical, just similar in appearance. She was merely another pale, red-headed girl—there were probably thousands of us in the city around the same age and height. It was simply a matter of random chance, nothing more than a strange coincidence.
I sat at my desk and tried to focus on the notes for my conference paper, searching for the thread of my argument. Beneath me, I heard the scrape and shift of her solid timber furniture. It was strange to imagine her down there, living in an apartment that mirrored my own. Like a landscape inverted in the glassy surface of a lake. An unattainable reflection, rippling in the water beneath my feet.
The invitation, if one could call it that, was slipped under my door a few days later, scrawled on a torn piece of paper with a ragged edge. Housewarming in Unit 7 this Friday!
I wasn’t really one for parties, but I wanted to see her again, to reassure myself that there was nothing to fear, nothing to envy. On Friday evening, I closed down my computer, slid a linen dress from its hanger, applied lipstick, and found a bottle of wine at the back of my cupboard.
The sky was stained pink, the air was warm and smelled of summer. There was a burst of laughter in the hallway, and music began playing downstairs.
I stood at my door, nervous, clutching the torn slip of paper. It occurred to me that perhaps the note was not an invitation at all. Housewarming in Unit 7. Did it seem more like a notification? I hated to think of imposing, embarrassing myself by arriving uninvited. I went out to my balcony and sat alone in my linen dress, poured a glass of my own wine, and listened to the conversation drifting up from below.
Everyone was full of praise for my neighbour’s wonderful new apartment, for the dress she was wearing (found at a vintage shop in Paris), and for the hummus she had apparently made herself (so easy, she said, promising to send everyone the recipe). Perhaps it was the effect of the second glass of wine or the hazy summer air, but I began to imagine taking her place, sitting in her position with my friends arranged around me like flowers. I leaned forward to kiss my reflection, and lost myself in the water. I forgot about the conference paper and the pile of essays awaiting my red pen, and imagined smoothing down the pleats of my vintage Parisian dress, refilling my glass with a flush of wine, and listening to my friends’ drunken stories, enjoying the summer night.
As the effect of the wine faded, it left a sticky, guilty residue. I shouldn’t eavesdrop, shouldn’t indulge in strange fantasies. I returned to myself, to my own stark life. I changed out of my dress, and lay awake while the party continued late into the night.
The next morning, my head was thick with the fog of a hangover. The empty wine bottle stood accusingly on my kitchen counter. I made myself a strong cup of coffee, sliced a firm, unripe pear into my bowl of granola, and added a dollop of yoghurt. Fighting through the clouds of my headache, I spent the day according to my schedule, grading essays, developing my conference paper, and practising my French, progressing slowly through a hefty book of grammar exercises. I listened out for my neighbour, but her apartment remained silent as a tomb.
As the weeks passed, I became increasingly fascinated by her. My mirror image, flipped and inverted. While I lived according to the clockwork of my routines, she seemed to have no fixed schedule. Whenever we encountered each other in the stairwell, I was always on my way to the university, while she rushed past with dripping hair and sunburnt cheeks from the beach, or wearing a velvet dress, late for a poetry reading, or carrying a suitcase, leaving on a last-minute trip to her aunt’s farm in Cootamundra. She was always rushing away, speaking to me over her shoulder. I could never quite get another good look at her face.
Her friends were always materialising, ringing the bell and clattering up the stairs, playing music late into the night. Their conversations wafted into my apartment like cigarette smoke and I could always recognise my neighbour’s voice, offering plates of food, glasses of wine, cups of tea.
I began to notice that, despite her warm generosity, her tone could quickly cool and harden. She had a tendency to interrupt, to slice through the conversation with a sharp question—What do you mean? What are you basing that on?
I had inherited the manners of my father’s English family, and could never bring myself to be so direct. I was amazed by her daring, impressed by her conversational recklessness, her ability to say exactly what she thought, while still managing to hold all her friends in her thrall.
I skulked upstairs, living by my Apollonian schedule, according to my principles of structure and rationality, while my neighbour lived in brilliant chaos. My routines had always been a source of comfort, like a familiar song heard for the hundredth time, but ever since her arrival, it was as though the colour was slowly being leeched from my life. I read the books on my reading lists, completed my French exercises, graded essays. At my doctor’s recommendation, I swam 20 lengths of the pool a few times per week, gliding through the water. I prepared the same meals on a regular rotation. A raw chicken breast, pounded flat between layers of baking paper, coated in batter and breadcrumbs. A bowl of lentils shrouded in a tea towel, soaking for a vegetable soup. A pumpkin split in half, rubbed with oil, and slid into the oven to soften in its shell. Always the same recipes, prepared in large quantities, and portioned into plastic containers so that I could dedicate more time to my work.
I had woven these habits around myself like strands of gossamer silk, hoping to one day emerge from my cocoon, unfold my wings, and take to the air. Hoping to eventually become a glittering intellectual, speaking fluent French, with a permanent place at the university, the result of all my hard work. But had I become trapped in a life of mundane routines? A moth, imprisoned in its casing?
The night was still and the heat was unbearable, the air as thick as syrup. I was trying to practice le conditionnel, but the pen was slippery in my hand. It felt pointless, writing line after line after line, this endless procession of ‘si’ clauses that marched nowhere.
My landlord had again refused to install air conditioning, after I sent another pleading email to the agent. I was always too polite, hanging my questions on unsteady modal verbs and indirect speech. Would you perhaps consider…? I was wondering whether…?
If my neighbour had written the email, she would insist, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was away visiting the Great Barrier Reef and I thought longingly of the air conditioner in her empty apartment, silent and unused while she was away.
My antipode, my beautiful reflection. She was always in motion, always searching for new experiences, rushing fearlessly towards new ideas, new people, new places.
That night, I dreamt of swimming over landscapes of white coral, an underwater graveyard of bleached bones. I was trying to complete my 20 laps, back and forth, but I kept losing count in my head. I slowed, allowed myself to drift, to float aimlessly through the water, to look upon the devastation of the reef while the sun warmed my back.
I woke groggy, wrapped in damp bedsheets. It was cleaning day. I stripped the bed, sickened by the sour smell of my own sweat. I laboured in the heat, vacuumed, mopped the bathroom tiles, scrubbed at the soap scum that had accumulated in every crevice of the shower stall. My balcony was dusted in a fine pollen from the neighbour’s trees. It was a hopeless battle, cutting back the weeds of grime and mould and dirt that kept growing back each week.
I sat to eat my breakfast in a trance of heat exhaustion. I looked down at my food, wondering how many bowls of granola I had eaten exactly like this one. All the pears, sliced down to the core. The yogurt I had scraped from the bottom of the tub. Always exactly the same breakfast, eaten from this same bowl, cheap and unremarkable, feathered with grey scratches from my spoon. Devoid of personality, indistinguishable from the thousands of identical bowls produced in the same factory. We were trapped together, this bowl and I, locked in our daily choreographed dance. After starting with this same breakfast of fruit and granola, I would rinse the bowl in soapy water, wipe it dry and return it to the drawer for a few hours, only to take it out again and fill it with my leftover lentil soup, place it under the warm glow of the microwave, and then take it to my desk so that I could work while eating. Afterwards, I would carry this thing, this cursed white shell, back to the sink and rinse it beneath a rush of water, clean it and dry it and replace it in the drawer. At the end of it all, I would find myself here in the kitchen again, eating the same brand of honey and walnut granola from this same white bowl, this symbol of the narrowness of my life, which I had whittled down to a stub, reduced to a series of mundane, repetitive behaviours, a life dedicated to carrying out various duties and obligations, memorising French verbs, marking tedious essays on the same tired themes, spending every spare moment at my computer, typing out another article about the same author, on whom I had written two theses and a dissertation, several conference papers and countless journal articles, all examining her three short novellas through different critical lenses, and I was always leafing back through the editions I’d purchased as an undergraduate with their threadbare spines and yellowed pages, spiderwebbed with my handwriting, and at the end of it all, at the end of another exhausting work day, I would find myself eating my dinner from this same white bowl, swallowing briny mouthfuls of lentil soup, prepared in batches to last the whole week, and I realised that it would go on forever, this rhythm of eating, washing, drying, and putting away this terrible bowl, day after day after day, again and again and again, and perhaps it was the heat driving me mad or the thought of my neighbour, my double, swimming in the ocean, seeing the magnificent colours of the Great Barrier Reef, but suddenly I realised I could not manage another bite of my granola, could not wash this damned white bowl one more time, could not bear to think of myself ageing, slowly ossifying alone in my apartment, eventually driven mad with isolation, and as I looked down at my granola, I was so filled with hatred for this plain white bowl that I threw the whole lot into the sink and left it there in a shattered mess. White shards and congealed yoghurt, flecked with honey and walnut granola.
I couldn’t stand to be imprisoned in my sweltering apartment, so I emailed to say I was unable to run my schedule of online classes and took a bus to the nearest cinema. I sat alone, luxuriating in the air conditioning, in the immersive joy of a day-time blockbuster, eating hard candies in vivid shades of yellow, pink, and green, electric colours of pure, mind-numbing pleasure.
My neighbour returned home from her trip around midnight. I was sitting outside, unable to sleep in the heat, when I heard the familiar rattle of her balcony door. I could feel her presence beneath me, my shadow in the night. I felt calm, like the tension between us had broken. I had liberated myself from the prison of my routine. I had slipped my old life from my shoulders, discarded my past self like a skin and intended to reform, to remake myself in her image.
The next morning, while I was sorting through my belongings, throwing all my plain white plates and bowls away, there was a knock at my door. It was her, my neighbour, wearing an oversized shirt and a pair of silk shorts, her red hair hanging limp, her face a little swollen, with dark circles beneath her eyes.
‘Morning,’ she smiled, ‘do you have any coffee? I forgot about the public holiday—everywhere’s closed.’ She held out a dish glazed with a golden swirl.
‘Of course.’ I left her in the doorway, eager to present the coffee beans I’d purchased last week on the barista’s recommendation. Single origin, with hints of lemon myrtle and apricot.
Her face fell when I returned with the beans. She didn’t have a grinder, she explained. In fact, she usually just drank instant coffee.
‘You couldn’t make me a cup, could you?’
What choice did I have but to invite her inside, wringing my hands, excusing the mess of my apartment? After all this time listening to her conversations, peering into her life, suddenly I was exposed to her gaze, subject to her judgement. But she barely glanced at the empty cabinets and piles of kitchenware, the evidence of a life being dismantled. She simply went and sat out on my balcony, as though she felt right at home.
I made coffee for us both and brought out the two plain white mugs, which I would soon replace with something hand-made and ceramic, cups that were more individual.
It was amazing to see her before me, no longer a disembodied voice drifting through the summer air, but a real, material person, blowing on her coffee and looking out at the view we shared of our neighbour’s front veranda, hung with discordant windchimes.
As I examined her face, I noticed the features that differentiated us. Her cheeks were rounder, her nose more aquiline. Her eyes were set further apart, flecked with gold, like the freckles that had appeared across her cheeks, darkened from the Queensland sun.
I almost asked about her trip to the Reef, but caught the question on my lips, realising I shouldn’t know as much as I did about her life. Instead, I asked how she was settling in, how she liked the area.
‘Oh’, she said, ‘it’s a nice enough place, and I’ll be sorry to leave. I suppose I’ll miss the walk down along the river.’
‘You’re going?’ I was astonished, numb with shock. Her voice seemed distant, faraway, as she explained that she’d been accepted into a master’s program in Florence.
‘Florence as in Italy?’
‘Of course,’ she said. She’d applied on a whim after dreaming about the halls of the Uffizi Gallery. She didn’t speak Italian, but she was pretty sure most of the courses were taught in English. Anyway, she wasn’t worried at all. She’d figure it out, once she arrived.
I thought of my heavy French grammar book, and all those hours I’d spent memorising verb conjugations and composing clumsy sentences. I managed to say something polite, to express a kind of mild excitement for the rolling hills of Tuscany. As she explained the theme for her thesis, something to do with sensuality in art, I was surprised to realise that she was not such a wonderful conversationalist in person. She spoke in rivers, in a continuous, rapid flow that left no air to breathe. Whenever I managed to say anything, she kept glancing away, distracted, barely listening.
This girl was unknown to me, so unlike the charming neighbour I had imagined downstairs. Perhaps she was an illusion created in the summer air, a person, glimpsed from afar, raised up into the clouds, beyond reality. A projection of my own insecurities.
When she stood to leave, I noticed she seemed exhausted, the dark circles like bruises under her eyes. I wondered whether it was really so enviable to be incapable of sitting still. To live such a frantic life, with no structure, no solid foundation, no day-to-day routines.
I needed change, to be sure. A little diversity. Perhaps a few more friends. But maybe it would be reckless to upend my life entirely. After she left, I rinsed out my identical white mugs and placed them back in the drawer where they belonged.