A pink toothbrush

Ialways joke that Sarah's toothbrush moved in before she did. It was there in the bathroom that first morning, already ensconced next to mine. It's remained there ever since.

Gradually the rest of her moved in, as if to keep the toothbrush company. A white towel splayed above the radiator. Deodorant, make-up, Tampax. Just a few clothes at first, which were balanced out by my T shirts disappearing. Slowly my bathroom and bedroom changed gender.

By this time I was completely freaked out, as you can imagine. I thought the toothbrush was a joke, a friend mocking my single status, but I'd checked and double checked that all the windows and doors were locked the night the towel appeared. That simply couldn't be explained. I had a ghost, a ghost that was concerned about its dental and bodily hygiene.

The next day I changed all the locks in the house, just in case it was a vindictive ex-girlfriend, though I knew I didn't have a vindictive ex-girlfriend.

It didn't stop her. I woke up the next morning to find that my new leather sofa had been swapped for an old purple one, which smelt slightly of cats. Crowded House CDs started to appear in my collection and romantic fiction ousted Dickens and Tolstoy from my bookshelves.

The weirdest experience was waking up in a four-poster bed, the sort you see in costume dramas. Who even knew that four-poster beds still existed? It sounds like a funny tale it, but it scared the living shit out of me, realising that Sarah could change the very world around me as I slept. To wake up in a strange place, in my own fucking bedroom.

I knew she was called Sarah as her mug had her name on it, as did her key ring. Her full name's Sarah Mulligan, which I found out when post started to arrive for her - when she started getting more letters than I did. The bills remained in my name though.

I asked around and found the name of a local ghost-hunter. He'd written 17 books on the subject and had a machine that detected paranormal activity. According to my friend he'd sorted out several similar problems and had another machine that scared the ghosts off. Perfect!

He agreed to call round and spend the night at my house. "If Sarah exists I'll find her," he promised. He was dedicated, you have to give him that, sat up the whole night taking readings from his machine, looking out for signs of anything unusual. "Nothing doing," he said, the next morning, "not a peep all night."

When I pointed out that the chair he was sitting on wasn't mine and certainly wasn't the chair he'd started out sitting on the previous evening he accused me of lying and stomped out. No help at all!
Curiosity got the better of me and I started opening her mail, to find out more about her. Several of the letters were from her friend Stacey in Ireland and from these I discovered that Sarah was a nurse at the local hospital, was divorced, though still on good terms with her ex, and that she had a tabby cat called Speedy.

Speedy arrived the next day, curled up on the purple sofa as if he'd been there forever.

It wasn't so much Sarah's things appearing that bothered me, it was my things going missing. I was down to a couple of shirts and my last pair of trousers, no books or music of my own. When I got home from work I'd sit on Sarah's sofa, with her cat on my lap watching her DVDs and eating the food she'd prepared while I'd been out at work (I didn't say it was all bad).

All this and she'd never once appeared, not so much as an unexplained shadow or a wind-blown curtain. I'd never heard her, smelt her, let alone touched her, yet evidence of her was all around me.
I don't know what possessed me to reply to Stacey's letters, I think I wanted to find out more about Sarah's life and it seemed the best way to do it. I ended up writing a long, detailed letter, the first letter I'd written since I'd discovered email. Her reply arrived a few days later and we started corresponding regularly, like we were old friends.

I was just desperate to find everything I could about Sarah Mulligan. I googled her name of course, but there were loads of Sarah Mulligans, none of them living in my house. I started going to the hospital, posing as her, trying to find out about her from her colleagues.

It took me a long time to realise that I'd become her. That I was now wearing her clothes, her make-up, her Tampax. That I was now a woman, a nurse, a divorcee with a cat called Speedy and a collection of Crowded House CDs.

I tried, but I couldn't even remember my own name, who I'd been, what my job was who my friends were, or what I'd done with my life. There was no evidence of my ever having existed, or should I say no evidence of him ever having existed, whoever he was.

No evidence, except that unexplained toothbrush next to mine in the bathroom.