When we were small and shared a room, my sister and I used to wake from the same nightmare. Sweating, we would prop ourselves up on pillows and recount our versions into the dark, shocked by the similarities.
Nowadays my sister, as doppelganger, looks back at me when I catch a reflection in a shop window or a bathroom mirror in passing. And yet in reality we are so different. She handles her loved ones with slow tender movements. I treat mine with tight squeezes and hundreds of rough kisses.
Often it is our differences that confront me and cause unease. This is more than the anxiety of a younger sister; it is a wish to close the gap and tighten the connection to the way it was when we were children.
Our mother's relationship with her sister is the same. My aunt lived on the land, five hours west of Sydney. What I craved when I visited her as a child was the similarity of my aunt to my mother, coupled with her difference. While the patterns of daily life were alike — breakfast tasted the same, dinner too — it was changed. Some rules varied, the jokes were earthy and the moody silences more pronounced.
My aunt's home was a masculine place. She had three sons and there were always other workmen talking at the gate, driving past on a tractor or urging cattle with a horse. This was a world where mud-caked boots lined the outside verandah and thick khaki work shirts scooped a pattern around the Hills Hoist. The men were gruff: spitting, hitching pants or stamping out boots. So foreign, and yet my aunt made every moment familiar.
But in accordance with the idea of a spirit-double, the similarities were also an illusion. An unexpected sharp word from my aunt would send me staggering.
My sister and I used to nudge each other when our aunt arrived to stay from the country, wearing the same coloured lipstick, the same Peter Pan collars and the same tartan pants as our mother. Little did we realise we would become the same too: mistaken for each other at parties and in the street, sisters who have come to look more alike as the years duck and dance behind us.
While courage and a feeling of wellbeing can be drawn from this sisterly connection, there are pitfalls. Husbands can get jealous, siblings can take