The Other Ida

by Amy Mason

  WINNER OF THE 2014

  DUNDEE INTERNATIONAL BOOK PRIZE

  Judging panel:

  Neil Gaiman

  Kirsty Lang

  Scott Pack

  Stuart Kelly

  Felicity Blunt

  The Dundee International Book Prize has been running for 14 years and provides a chance for debut authors to have their voices heard. The prize is £10,000 and a publishing deal with Cargo. It is supported by the University of Dundee, Dundee, One City, Many Discoveries Campaign and Apex Hotels. For more information about the prize please visit www.dundeebookprize.com.

  Praise for The Other Ida

  “A brilliant debut. Fresh, lyrical, fearless, and very funny.”

  ~Emma Jane Unsworth

  “A brilliant first novel about the ultimate dysfunctional family. Truly original and exciting – a must-read.”

  ~Viv Groskop

  “A fine debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.”

  ~Scott Pack

  “The Other Ida is a wild, exuberant ride through booze, Bournemouth, family, funerals, soul-searching and sisterhood. It’s singular, inventive, warm and deeply affecting.”

  ~Beatrice Hitchman

  “Ida will ‘always do what needed to be done for fun and adventures and art.’ Relish her story and Amy Mason’s sensuous writing. Both have a dazzling spark and a delightful bite. I love this book. It is a winner.”

  ~Tiffany Murray

  THE OTHER IDA

  Amy Mason

  Cargo Publishing

  The Other Ida

  Amy Mason

  First Published in 2014

  Published by Cargo Publishing

  SC376700

  Copyright © Amy Mason 2014

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form or binding other than that in which it is published.

  The moral right of Amy Mason to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-908885-24-1

  Printed and Bound by Bell & Bain in Scotland

  Typeset by Cargo Publishing

  Cover design by Kaajal Modi

  Cover photography by Michael Gallacher

  www.cargopublishing.com

  www.dundeebookprize.com

  Also available as:

  Kindle Ebook

  EPUB Ebook

  For my family and Stef

  Chapter one

  ~ 1982 ~

  Standing up to her knees in the sea, Ida spread her long arms wide against the freezing wind.

  “The sky is bruised and low,” she shouted, over the shrieks of the gulls above.

  It was still very early and the sky was marbled with colours she’d hate on her bedroom walls – princess pink, vein violet, fairy-wing grey – while the usually soupy sea sparkled with the greens and golds of a fish’s tail. Far to her right, at Sandbanks, the silhouettes of houses had been transformed into dragon’s teeth and treasure.

  She sucked hard on her cigarette and turned towards the smudged black line of Bournemouth Pier. They could go there afterwards and muck about on the empty rides. It would be properly scary with no one about.

  “The sky is bruised and low,” she said again. “The gulls swoop and squeal their secret songs, there is nobody else around.”

  “It’s ready, Ida – it’s on,” came a small, strained voice from the beach.

  The wind was blowing her hair across her face, but through it Ida could just make out the figure of her sister. Alice was holding the ancient square black Standard 8 high with both hands and visibly shivering in her nightie.

  Ida squeezed her eyes shut, prayed quickly for inspiration, and dropped her damp cigarette butt into the sea.

  “Here I am,” she roared. “This is my home now. I have given up my ugly shoes and my cardie – given up the trappings of modern life.”

  She pulled at her hair.

  “See the seaweed of my hair, my iridescent limbs flailing,” she said, flailing them.

  She grabbed her new breasts.

  “My breasts are jelly fish… my eyes are giant pearls.” She opened them wide. “I am the sea. My breath is the slow creep of the tide. I am at peace.”

  Flinging her arms into the air, she fell back, the icy water a rock against her skull. But she had done it. She would always do what needed to be done for fun and adventures and art.

  She stood up and waded towards the beach, her mother’s blue kimono heavy against her skin.

  Alice looked like she was going to cry and jiggled one arm around wildly. But she had filmed it. And that was all Ida cared about. She was sure she looked fantastic.

  “There you go, nothing to it. Do what I did – remember the lines from the play but add in your own stuff too.”

  Ida’s hands were stiff with cold and she could hardly hold the old cine-camera, but her determination to make Alice do what she’d just done was so strong that she couldn’t give up.

  “Right in it, Ida? What about my grommets?”

  “Fuck your grommets – think of Joan of Arc. And you don’t have to put your head under. Or put your head under but put your fingers in your ears.”

  Alice walked forwards slowly, tucking her hair behind her ears again and again. She was wearing one of Ida’s nightdresses and it was far too big for her; against the enormous sky she looked like a toddler. She put one foot in and pulled it straight out.

  “It’s freezing! God.”

  “Do it,” said Ida.

  The filming plan had been fully formed when Ida had woken up that morning, as if it had been shoved right into her brain while she’d slept. She imagined Our Lady, or someone else magical, leaning over her bed in the night and whispering make a film on the beach, Ida, it’ll be fantastic. And she’d done what they’d said, of course.

  Alice had stayed quiet as she was lifted from her bed, crusty eyed and floppy with sleep, denied even her jacket and shoes. Then she’d followed on her battered pink Raleigh as they headed through the chine, while in front Ida peddled like crazy on her rusty red shopper, their mother’s kimono brushing the spokes.

  The pine trees smelled so strong in the damp, early morning that Ida could taste them. Beside her the stream whispered as she rode – go girls, go go go! – while in the distance gulls made inky shapes against the fading moon.

  “Drown or burn?” Ida had asked as they rode up the hill, wobbling over branches and through patches of mud.

  “Drown, I reckon,” said Alice, panting.

  “Shag Peter Green or Daniel Sears?” Ida asked.

  “Ummmm.”

  “Neither. You’re nine. Kill Ma or Me?”

  “Errr, Ma, I suppose.”

  “Right answer,” said Ida as they got to the top. “Now take your hands off the bars. Don’t be a wuss.”

  As they’d gone over the brow of the hill they’d stopped peddling – their legs out, their hair glowing under the brightening sky, the icy wind against their skin making them hard and reckless and wonderful.

  “This is how I want to go!” Ida had roared as they flew towards the beach. “Gliding down a hill then BAM, hit by a truck or something. Perfect.”

  Alice stood at the water’s edge with her arms out, her fingertips touching the horizon. Slowly, wincing, s
he started to walk in. “I’m in the sea,” she shouted back half-heartedly, close to tears.

  “You’re a poet aren’t you, Alice? Be a bloody poet.” I am lying, Ida thought, she is a scientist, or something else boring.

  “I am as cold as ice, as a dead person, a fish,” said Alice, drowned out almost entirely by the sound of the birds above. “The sea is salty and grey like my tears, the sand is yellowish like my skin… and… and…” she started to sob.

  Ida almost wanted to hug her. She left the camera by the bikes, waded into the sea and grabbed her sister’s shoulders, staring into her eyes before pushing down, hard.

  Alice’s knees buckled and she slipped sideways into the water, her silent open mouth the last thing to disappear beneath the waves.

  Ida knelt and held her sister there, pressing her hair and face as Alice began to struggle.

  There was a sharp pain in Ida’s palm and she pulled her hand away, amazed to see deep teeth marks filling quickly with blood as the small girl emerged, her hair covering her face, panting violently and clawing at the sea as though it was earth.

  Chapter two

  ~ 1999 ~

  Ida woke up with her leg over her boyfriend’s naked thigh and instantly felt the bare mattress with her palm. Dry. She had recently developed the terrible habit of wetting herself when drunk. Still, there was a haze of what felt like embarrassment, and it was only when she lit a cigarette that she remembered what Terri had said on the phone the night before. Her mother had finally died.

  She walked across to the sink to pee, pulling down her shorts and hopping up onto the kitchen unit, which creaked beneath the weight of her. Ida was used to the creaks and had tried to prepare herself for the day it would actually collapse. She mouthed the words to herself as she sat with her legs dangling.

  “Mum’s dead. Ma is dead. My mother, Bridie, is dead.”

  The ceilings were low in Ida’s new bedsit and she hunched her shoulders instinctively as she walked back over to Elliot, despite the three-inch gap between the plaster and her head. The floor slanted to the right making her feel even wobblier than the hangover would have done on its own. Although it was morning it was very dark – Ida’s room had once been the roof space and the tiny window was almost entirely covered by the sign outside that read ‘rooms to let, DSS no problem’.

  Ida sat on her bed. The room was pretty empty, she didn’t have much stuff, but what she did have was brightly coloured – a rainbow of scarves hung from her wardrobe door, while the wardrobe itself remained empty apart from some tissues and books on the bottom slats. Her clothes were on the floor – floral Crimpolene dresses, stretched out t-shirts with holes in them and white stains under the armpits, hand-knitted jumpers that had belonged to old boyfriends, a couple of stringy, ill-fitting bras. At the end of the bed stood her huge red motorcycle boots.

  Canvases lined the room, new ones facing outwards, ones she had painted on against the wall to hide her shame. For a while she’d liked painting and still had a cardboard box full of art stuff on the shelves by the door, tubes of oils and acrylics mixed in together with gold pens and stiff brushes and broken pencils.

  They were pictures of her flat, or self-portraits sometimes, her hair piled high on her head and wrapped in a scarf, her big bottom lip hanging in an expression of artistic disinterest. She didn’t do much of that sort of thing now.

  “Hello, yes, I’m the daughter of the late Bridie Adair,” she said quietly to herself. Would they make a documentary about her mother? Would she get asked to be in it? That would be bloody brilliant.

  Perhaps, even better, she’d find things in the house, important things about the play, and write a book about her mother or even make a documentary of her very own. She’d become a millionaire, maybe. Or a thousandaire at least. She hoped it happened before the millennium came and the whole world fell apart.

  On Ida’s bed lay a bare duvet, and a yellow sheet – translucent with age – was crumpled up into a ball. The mattress was stained with dark shapes that had only bothered her the first time she’d slept on it.

  By her pillow was a cabinet where important things were kept – her collections of pills, her ashtray and her fags, tampons, bottles, some books.

  The opposite wall was covered with floor-to-ceiling cupboards. Inside were three melamine kitchen units, their green doors bloated and cracked with damp. On the scratched work surface was a two ring electric hob, a kettle, a toaster and a minuscule fridge. Apart from some bits of dry spaghetti a previous inhabitant had left, the units were empty. Ida ate from Halal Fried Chicken around the corner – burger, chips and coke only £1.50! – and empty polystyrene takeaway boxes lay all over the floor. Elliot was appalled and had promised to cook her a meal. In four-ish years he hadn’t yet.

  Out of the room and to the right was the bathroom and loo, and Ida could hear the grunts of the man who lived downstairs as he took his morning shit. The toilet was filthy, the ripped lino streaked and stained with years-old piss and the dust on the cistern so thick you could cover your hand in it, which was why Ida used the sink. Fingers crossed it would hold out on her.

  “Yeah, it’s been a difficult time. But at least she’s at peace now,” Ida mumbled, practicing.

  Elliot yawned, put his hand up her t-shirt, and rested it on her stomach.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  He opened his eyes and reached over her for his packet of fags.

  Ida looked at the faint, ugly marks on the inside of his forearm, a reminder of his recurrent and worrying habit, before catching herself, and moving her eyes to his face. “I’m going to have to go fucking home,” she said.

  Ida threw the paper onto the floor of the coach and then picked it up again, skimming the piece quickly, muttering to herself and sighing loudly as the teenage boy in the next seat eyed her suspiciously.

  In the photo they’d printed she looked beautiful – younger than Ida was now, solemn-faced with shiny dark hair and a thick, straight fringe. She was looking straight into the camera, stern and committed, as though she was acting a part.

  Bridie Adair, the controversial playwright who has died aged 57 from liver cancer, was a major figure in the boundary-pushing British theatre world of the 1960s.

  Nudity, bad language and honest discussions of sex were hallmarks of her contemporaries’ work but it was her strange and haunting depiction of young, working class, Irish women in her debut, Ida, which was truly ground-breaking.

  The play, written when Adair was just 25, builds to a shocking and tragic conclusion. Adair’s writing was influenced by Greek tragedy and in a 1970 interview she said: “I was sick of men’s problems being treated with gravity and respect. I wanted to imagine a universe where the supposedly domestic troubles of supposedly ordinary women could be the subject for high drama.”

  Critic Martin Boyd wrote, in 1972, “Ida is more than the name of a girl. It is something not quite concrete, a feeling or emotion. Perhaps a name for that peculiar, wild spirit that working-class women sometimes possess.”

  The play’s premiere at The Royal Court Theatre in 1967 – in breach of the licensing decision by the Lord Chamberlain – is held up by many as being the final blow to cultural censorship in this country.

  The surrounding controversy propelled the play and its glamorous author to brief, unlikely fame, with a subsequent film starring Anna DeCosta. The film differed in many ways to the play and was a modest commercial, if not critical, success.

  ‘Ida is more than the name of a girl. It is something not quite concrete, a feeling or emotion. Perhaps a name for that peculiar, wild spirit that working-class women sometimes possess’. What a load of snobby, sexist bollocks.

  Ida folded the paper, bit out the sentence and wiped it on the back of the seat in front of her. With a sigh, the track-suited teenage boy to her left stood up and headed towards the front of the coach, evidently deciding that even
the woman with the crying child was better than this. “Fuck this mad bitch,” he said loudly as he walked away and people turned to look as Ida laughed, lifting her filthy bare feet and legs onto the now spare seat and turning her back to the wet window. She flattened the paper out on her legs to read the final few paragraphs.

  Adair briefly worked as an actress before marrying television critic Bryan Irons in 1962. She gave birth to her first daughter, Ida, in 1969 with Alice following in 1973. Of her first child’s name she said: “I spent two days after the birth deciding what to call her before she let out such an almighty yell that I knew she was Ida after all”.

  Christened Brigid Catherine, Adair was born in London to Irish parents, and was an only child. Her mother died shortly after childbirth and her father worked as an engineer before succumbing to cancer when Bridie was 16.

  Adair struggled throughout her life with alcoholism and depression and Ida remains her only major work. She is survived by her former husband Bryan Irons, and her daughters Ida and Alice.

  Bridie Adair, born 12th January 1942, died May 2nd 1999.

  Ida closed her eyes and began to shred the paper into strips, dropping them onto the floor. No one had a clue what the play was about, not really, but people had tried to work it out. Ida had been curious when she was little, she still had some ideas. But now, who cared? The woman was dead after all and the play was over thirty years old.

  Against the top of her neck the sharp cold of the glass was delicious, and even the water trickling down her back felt better than the numbing heat and stench of the bus.

  She woke herself up with a loud snore as they neared Bournemouth, confused for a second about where she was. A woman looked over with disgust and Ida grinned back, tempted to shout that her mother had died. She would leave it – after all, things could be worse. She had downed a mug of whisky with four diazepam and was feeling cushioned and light. As so often in time of supposed tragedy, Ida gleaned enormous comfort from being warm, dry and drunk. Things were rarely as bad as people said.

  At the bus station she marched past the rest of the passengers, carrying a Tesco bag with her things in it while the others dragged their luggage through the spit and rubbish that littered the ground.