#play on words

Once, when I was living a long way from here, our next door neighbour was a guy who had identical twin daughters – “monozygotic,” as he told me proudly one day, while under the influence of strong drink. He was divorced or separated from their mother, and the girls didn’t live with him, but they visited from time to time, so I was used to seeing them around.

The twins must have been about sixteen at the time, perhaps a bit older, and although you would immediately agree that they were identical, there was a difference between them. They had hair of a typically Scottish red. One of them usually left it loose, falling in curls over her shoulders, but the other one used to tie it back tightly, which made her look severe. Perhaps it was an illusion, but she seemed to be generally surly in contrast to her sister, who smiled a lot and seemed to be cheerful at all times.

Because they didn’t spend much time at their father’s house, I never learned their names, so I thought of them as “the pretty one” and “the other one”, which wasn’t very enlightened of me, but it was the only way I could distinguish between them.

One day, I was staring out of our upstairs window, in search of inspiration, and I noticed the other one in her father’s garden, mowing the grass with a little push mower. It was a warm day and she was getting hot, so she stopped to rest for a while, reached behind her head, took out the ribbon holding her hair and, with a shake of her head, she turned into the pretty one. You probably knew that was going to happen, because you know how stories work, but in reality the transformation was utterly unexpected, and seemed to be like a magic trick. More than that, it seemed that reality had shifted suddenly, as the one girl took on the appearance and character of her sister.

It was a long time ago, and on the opposite side of the country, so I’ll never know the answer to the question that the transformation brought to mind: Were they both identical, or just one of them?