Most of the time no one noticed them. They could blend in. At first, people were interested, but not much. There were only a few of them and most of them were not women people took much notice of – drunks, sluts, crazy.

There’d been one of them and then, in an amount of time which was too small to measure, that one had divided into two.

One night, eighteen months ago, about two-thirty in the morning, something happened. Maybe to the world, maybe just to them. A handful of women, among four avenues, who’d been very drunk and blacked out and probably split inside themselves – conflicted, broken – split into two identical women. These few, drunk women found themselves one in one moment and two in the next – shoulder to shoulder, or face to face, as if the seams hadn’t quite finished. Maybe they’d been in the bathroom or the kitchen or walking somewhere. One second, they were drinking by themselves and the next they felt the warmth of someone next to them and they weren’t drinking alone anymore. It only happened to the drunkest and the most ruined. It was a shock – but an embarrassing shock, like coming to halfway when shouting at someone, or suddenly realising you weren’t wearing any pants. So, they quietly took up slightly more room. In the wardrobes, in the single beds, they all just wandered around with each other, arrived at their jobs together, took buses together and bought cigarettes together. Everyone who saw them knew what it meant and wished they hadn’t seen them. No one talked about it. If you acted like nothing had changed, everything was the same. If you pushed it down, they read like one person, like they always had, except for the odd feeling you got when you were around them, like something was a bit off, maybe by a couple of centimetres. It was worse when they tried tricks like the one Heidi was pulling now, because it threw everything sideways a bit. You had to readjust your eyes.

There was very little interest to begin with, and by now what interest there had been had almost completely worn itself out. It was a handful of women who had made bad decisions and couldn’t be trusted. Women who would do anything for drugs or a drink. But everyone knew it was rude to stare, no matter how strange they looked, so they stopped staring and when they stopped staring eventually they stopped seeing them.