Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’, in the wider sense of the word; both...

The poets K and G live on neighbouring islands. They have never met, but they follow each other’s writing and know the look of each other’s haircuts, vacations, spouses, G’s child and K’s nieces and her friends’ children who chalk her garden walls, pots and statues with flowers, faces and I RULE. The two poets know the look of their mutual commitment to bodybuilding. The two poets write about traumatic historical and personal events. Rather than coming up with their own words, they locate language that has been used already to write or speak about these terrible things. They carefully separate parts of this language from the body of the texts, shaping it to reveal the form of what is really there, what is really felt. Eventually another poet remarked upon their respective gym photos and suggested that K and G write about the body and its building. This sort...

I am, in this memory, five years old. I do tap-and-jazz class with my little girlfriends: Lindsey, Fiona, Karen (latterly, in Australia; a yoga teacher; last seen stealing boyfriends at the debs). We return from the hired lodge by the Protestant school – where we dance to ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’; where the air is grainy with dust motes and fragrant of sweet, decaying orchard fruit – via the drained mill pond and contained land-water cataract known to the small town as the canal. We do this every week and the route remains in my memory with strange vividness. On this day I skip ahead of the group and the mother-chaperone to cross a concrete bridge which, if you run through it, produces a tinny echo not unlike the tup-tup-tup of tap and jazz. Spinning out at the end I veer left into a green space,...

7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair of legs – my mother’s, probably. Growing up,...