That Girl From Nowhere by Dorothy Koomson

to translate words in her head before they leave her mouth. ‘Tell me about you.’
    ‘There’s really nothing to tell. I’m here to help you, anyway.’ We’re sitting in the large community room in the retirement village where she lives. It’s bright from the stark overhead lighting, and airy from the glass floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the large courtyard. Several blue easy chairs are placed around small, low coffee tables. Apart from the lack of a counter and leather seating, it could be Beached Heads.
    On the table in front of us is a light-wood box with a hinged lid that is carved with different types of musical notes. Inside, she has a collection of gold and silver items, brooches, pieces with precious gems that look like real sapphires and emeralds. Pearls, too. Mrs Lehtinen, a widow who has lived at the home for a few months, is the third person I am seeing here today and she has by far the most extensive collection of jewellery. The others had modest assortments of jewellery and talking to them, seeing the condition of their hands, I knew I would make their pieces into elasticated bracelets or simply necklaces so they could wear their collections with no catches to negotiate, no clasps to undo.
    Apparently one of the staff saw my advert in the local magazine and asked the residents if they’d be interested in having me look at their jewellery. Six were interested. Mrs Lehtinen is one of those people who seems to exist in a soft-focus glow: her hair is white with a candyflossy haze, her skin is the colour and consistency of a peach, her eyes are a gentle blue. I don’t recognise where in the world her name might come from, just like I can’t place her accent.
    ‘You look like one of the girls who works here,’ Mrs Lehtinen says. ‘Abi is her name. You look so much like her.’
    ‘Do I?’ I say. I always look like people apparently. During my second year of college, I had people coming up to me constantly telling me they’d started a conversation with me in the library, the canteen, the bar, the car park, only to find they were talking to another girl. ‘She’s your absolute double,’ they’d say. When I finally met her, we discovered the only similarity between us was that we were both brown-skinned, and even then, not the same shade of brown. Other than that, we were different heights, weights and had completely different features. But apparently none of the people around us could see that. We’d both raised our eyebrows at each other, nodded sagely, and had to stop ourselves from laughing out loud. ‘You look nothing like me,’ we both said at the same time.
    ‘You are her double,’ Mrs Lehtinen says.
    ‘I hear that all the time,’ I say diplomatically. ‘I think I must look like a lot of people.’
    Mrs Lehtinen smiles at me. ‘You think I’m a silly old woman, don’t you?’
    ‘No, I don’t.’ I really don’t. ‘Do you want to show me some of your jewellery? Tell me about the different pieces if you don’t want to tell me a story about you.’
    ‘I collect jewellery like I collect ailments,’ she says. ‘I am never really sure where any of them come from or when I am going to get rid of them.’
    I grin at her. I see she is one of those people who needs to be dealt with differently. She won’t tell me her story until I’ve told her something about me.
    I remove the butterfly pendant from around my neck. I hold it out to her. I notice Mrs Lehtinen’s hands as she relieves me of the necklace. The rest of her – right down to her powder blue twinset – may be soft-focusy but she has lived. Her wrinkled, weathered and
used
hands tell me so. Her mind must be a treasury of stories, as varied and interesting as her chest of treasures in front of us.
    She’s surprised, as most people are, by the lightness of my pendant. It looks heavy, solid, its strong, thick lines create an expectation of heft, but it has very little weight because it is hollow.
    ‘This used to be a