I was riding the train to work this morning and gazing out the window, when I noticed a man staring at me. Actually, he was staring at my reflection, so I was actually staring back at his reflection, but you know what I mean.
Mirrors can do your head in if you think about them too much. I can see why Lewis Carroll was compelled to write a hallucinatory children’s book about them.
Anyway, Staring Man started it first.
He closely resembled Creepy Thin Man from the Charlie's Angels movies, a.k.a. Crispin Glover a.k.a. I-Can’t-Believe-That’s-His Real-Nose. The only difference was that Staring Man had light brown hair and wasn’t wearing a pinstripe suit.
He was probably thinking about what my hair smelled like.
After he had scalped me and was wearing the top of my head like a turban.
Brrr.
Anyway, he got off at the next stop and I relaxed the grip on my car keys/improvised brass knuckles.
When the frightened hamster on a wheel that is my brain calmed down, I started thinking about doppelgangers, and how the term traditionally referred to a ghostly double, usually an omen of ill-luck or death.
Some people also use the word to refer to living lookalikes. How often have you seen someone you thought you knew, who then turned out to be a completely different person?
Last weekend, I met a girl who showed me a photograph of her fiancé. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Sean Penn, right down to the nose and the steely eyes.
A girl I went to Uni with knew someone who resembled Pierce Brosnan enough to stand in for him in a movie. She regretfully admitted that it wasn't a James Bond one, though.
One of the Weasley brothers catches the same train as I do in the morning. He never looks very happy, and I often wonder why.
Perhaps he is wearing an imitation dragonskin jacket because he cannot afford the real thing. Perhaps he has read the last Harry Potter book and is a little peeved about the results of the Battle of Hogwarts. Perhaps he is a missing Weasley triplet, and was born a Squib. If I looked like a Weasley but couldn’t do magic, I would be pretty glum too.
Anyway, enough geekery. If you have no idea what I was going on about in that last sentence, just ask the nearest twelve-year-old.
In high school, I had a brief encounter with my own doppelganger. At least, my friends insisted that I had one. I couldn’t see the resemblance myself.
She was a new girl who joined in the middle of term, and was living in a different boarding house. I hadn't met her yet, but I kept hearing strange and eerie reports from my friends.
“Hey! I saw you standing outside the common room, and I shouted, ‘Angie!’ but you just ignored me,” said my friend T, huffily.
“Weren’t you on the oval two minutes ago? How did you get here so fast?” asked A, a horse-mad girl with the straight spine and bowed legs of a dedicated equestrian.
“There she is!” said N one day as we were coming out of 3 Unit English.
I caught sight of a dark bob, much like my own, in the middle of a group of girls ahead of us. I clutched my books to my chest and started power-walking towards them.
My thoughts raced. Would it be like looking in a mirror? Had the machinations of fate finally caught up with me? Would one of us be struck down where we stood?
I finally caught up and glanced sideways at her face.
My heart sank. It was much worse.
She had a unibrow and a moustache.