Paper Alice

by Charlotte Calder

  And on the subject of sisters, thanks to Students as Siblings I now have another one – a very, shall we say, lively ten-year-old called Brittany. But that’s a whole separate story and one that is still very much unfolding.

  I sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I’d never seen that piece in the paper. Would Wilda and I have ever met? Would Mum still be trapped, as they say in the soapies, in her past? Or Andy, for that matter – would he and I have got together? I can’t bear to think of us not. Surely we would’ve, somehow . . .

  And I wonder whether I would have become exposed to all that . . . darker, more difficult stuff, lurking there beneath the surface. Such a lot happened in those weird, disorientating, painful weeks; it’s hard to get a handle on it all now. Almost like a period of insanity, or how mothers describe childbirth – you forget the worst of it once it’s over.

  And Wilda – I know she’s a living, breathing girl who, for example, now I’ve got to know her, loves old Jimmy Barnes songs, swimming and Maltesers, and hates reality TV, sultanas and bigotry.

  Yet somehow in my mind there are still the two Wildas. There’s the flesh-and-blood Wilda of here and now–

  And then there’s that other girl.

  The ghostly double, who shook up my world. Almost a separate being, in her own right.