‘We still have to stay in touch so much,’ Heidi told them with an exhausted sigh as the spring rolls arrived. To keep their stories straight. It was extremely tricky when Dell got in trouble with the police. They could lose their real-estate licence, Heidi said, dipping the spring roll in the chilli sauce and looking at it. Heidi herself was floating quite close to the wind. She drove illegally. She’d bought a car by doing something dodgy with the ownership papers. Then she’d somehow got a credit card – Peggy and Greta didn’t want to ask. For her work she mostly took taxis but occasionally she wanted to drive.

‘Like a fucking grown-up,’ she said.

Greta and Peggy nodded and smiled, and Heidi said, ‘Am I right?’

‘Yeah,’ Peggy and Greta said for the benefit of the people at the table next to them.

Greta and Peggy thought people might feel more comfortable if they looked different but, really, it didn’t work. They were still identical and sometimes the fact they looked different ornamentally made the way they were similar even more disconcerting. They would never fully fit in. That’s what they told each other sometime late in 2003, a few months after their thirty-third birthday, as they both shaved all their hair off. A fresh start. The older they got the less people really paid attention. Maybe one day it would work, but for now they just wanted to have the same haircut. They’d always shared a wardrobe and the whole different haircut thing had started to look so hard won, like they were trying so hard and it wasn’t working, and having the same haircut was so much easier. ‘Fuck,’ Heidi had said when she saw them. ‘That was a mistake.’ And she laughed and laughed. Peggy and Greta rubbed their heads and looked concerned. Heidi tried to stop laughing, and put a hand on each of their arms. ‘It’ll grow back,’ she said. ‘It’ll totally grow back.’ She called them Seven of Nine and said, ‘Let’s go get a fucking coffee.’ And Greta and Peggy tried not to look at themselves in the glass along the street or at each other.

Their hair was mid-length now, not dyed. It fell into their faces as they looked down at the soup. They both tucked it behind their right ear at the same time.

‘Oop,’ Heidi said, smirking to herself as she twisted some noodles around her fork. ‘Your weird is showing.’ And then she laughed outright.

Peggy and Greta laughed too and then Heidi looked at her phone. ‘What time’s the meeting?’

‘Seven-thirty,’ Greta said.

‘Cool,’ Heidi said and put the forkful of noodles in her mouth.

The waiter came over and asked if everything was okay.

‘Great,’ they all said together.