Redhill spends the downtime establishing Jean’s bona fides as a harmless middle-class Anglo-Saxon type: she likes systems and categorizing things, listens to Radio Two, and is contemptuous of self-help books, but she is also cloistered enough that she takes a pupusa to be an “albino hamburger.” Yet the boulder-sized breadcrumbs are there from the start. Instead, Jean neglects her work and family to set up camp in the market’s park, Bellevue Square, where she becomes acquainted with a “clearinghouse of humanity”-a polite term for drug addicts, the mentally ill, and sundry eccentrics-all of who claim some kind of Ingrid experience. And yet for eighty pages, that doesn’t happen. If Jean comes to the market, Katerina can arrange for an introduction. Katerina actually knows Jean’s doppelgänger-her name is Ingrid Fox-and can confirm that, other than having shorter hair, she is her “absolute” twin. The next is Katerina, a Guatemalan woman who works at a pupusa place in Kensington Market. The first person to bring it up is a shop regular, who suddenly starts screaming and ripping at Jean’s hair, convinced it’s a wig.
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