The Other Ida

by Amy Mason

  “It’s his gallery.”

  “Not any more – as you well know he sold it to the current owner in 1996. You can see why we might be a little concerned – he has two prior convictions for theft, and many more for drug-related offences. And you have your own convictions, Miss Irons.”

  “Shoplifting, years ago,” she said.

  “The gallery have said they had some issues with you at Christmas. Damaging some work?”

  “For fuck’s sake! I fell on a sculpture at the Christmas party… I was pissed.” Ida could hear she was slurring her words. Her cramps were still bad and she’d taken three codeine before leaving the house.

  The man’s mouth twitched as he tried not to laugh. He composed himself, opened the file and cleared his throat. “I am showing Miss Irons the contents of Mr Hill’s bag,” he said towards the tape recorder, removing a pile of documents.

  “Fuck me,” said Ida.

  “Miss Irons said ‘fuck me’ when viewing the first item,” the man said. “I am now placing on the table the script for the film Ida, signed by Anna DeCosta.”

  Ida’s hand hovered above it.

  “Now, a number of pencil sketches by Jacob Collins,” he said, laying them down.

  Ida looked at the man, confused, hoping this was some kind of trick and knowing that it wasn’t. She remembered one of the sketches now though she hadn’t seen it for years – it had been Blu-tacked up in the study when she was little – Bridie in two poses side-by-side, naked and sprawled across a bed, a study for the painting Ida guessed.

  “A tin believed to contain cannabis and prescription medications,” he said putting down Elliot’s battered tin and reaching back into the file. “An envelope containing a letter addressed to Miss Irons herself, from her late mother. And a collection of notes, again believed to have belonged to the late Bridie Adair.” The man placed a pile of papers near Ida’s right hand.

  Ida couldn’t make anything out, they were scribbled, faded, and upside down. They must have been in the brown envelope they’d found, the one he’d said was ‘just full of bills’.

  The man looked at her sadly. He pitied her, she could tell. She didn’t speak.

  “Do you recognise these items?”

  “Some of them,” she said quietly.

  “Did you give these items to Mr Hill?” he asked.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Miss Irons did not respond,” the policeman said.

  “Well, ummm, he was looking after them I suppose, making sure no one else got them,” Ida said, her eyes on the cream envelope and the spidery letters that spelled her name.

  The man reached back into the file and removed the last item, another letter, crumpled and without an envelope. He held it up to Ida. It was Elliot’s writing.

  Dear Jim

  Sorry about everything – bit of an emergency. I’m going to pick up some amazing stuff for you (a Jacob Collins painting hopefully) and we’ll call it quits?!

  E

  “Oh God. You stupid bastard,” Ida said, as though to herself, feeling like she might be sick.

  “Can I ask who you’re referring to?”

  Ida didn’t reply. “What does the letter to me say, the one from my mother?” She pointed at the envelope on the table. “It is mine after all.”

  “You answer first.”

  Ida sighed loudly. “Elliot Hill.”

  “And did you give him these items or did he take them from you?”

  She looked at the table.

  “Miss Irons?”

  She looked him in the eye. “I didn’t know he was going to take them but –”

  The man shook his head.

  She realised what she looked like, a desperate, deluded, ugly girl, defending her horrible boyfriend no matter what. This man saw women like her every single day. Never had she felt so depressingly ordinary, so pathetic or so small. She took a deep breath.

  “I didn’t give them to him, no, they were my mother’s things. My mother recently died.”

  “And do you know anything about the theft from James Walsh? From the gallery?”

  “No. I really, honestly don’t.”

  “Right. I think we can have a break. Do you want some water? Interview ending at 22.26 pm.”

  “Can I take the letter? And the notes?”

  “Not yet, sorry.” He looked embarrassed. “We have to photograph it and keep it as evidence. You can have it back eventually though,” he hesitated. “I can show it to you, so long as you keep it on the down-low.” He opened the wallet containing the letter and removed it. “I’ll go and get us a coffee.”

  “Wait,” Ida said, “please. Could you photocopy them? I promise I won’t tell anyone. Please.”

  “Unfortunately not,” he said and turned off the tape recorder, then whispered, “Is that Peter O’Shea, outside? He wouldn’t sign something for my mother, would he?”

  “Of course. He’ll probably go round and kiss her,” Ida said.

  “I’ll go and chat to him and see if we can get these photocopied, shall I?”

  They drove home in silence. Peter seemed curious about the photocopies, almost anxious, but she wouldn’t show him, not until she’d read them all herself.

  Peter finally spoke. “It’s always the mothers,” he said sadly and seriously.

  There was a pause before they both started laughing, unable to stop until they were coughing and gasping for breath and Peter had to let Ida get out for a wee.

  Ida didn’t look at any of it until she got to her room. Had Elliot read these things in the house, locking himself in the bathroom?

  It was amazing how cunning he must have been, perhaps he’d sneaked back into the room the time she’d gone to the beach with Peter and Alice. She breathed slowly through her nose as she started with the letter.

  April 1999

  Dearest,

  I wonder where you are, you maddening girl. I do hope you’re alright. And I do hope someone’s told you I’m really on my way out this time, not playing around like I have done in the past.

  I have been thinking that it would be good for you to see me like this for a few reasons:

  1. It’s always good for creative people to have witnessed death – you can’t make any art without it.

  2. It would be nice for you to see how terribly fragile and ugly I’ve become. I’m an insect, a creepy old bug with a few of his legs missing and a nasty broken wing, no longer scary but pitiful, I promise.

  3. Perhaps it would stop you going the same way yourself.

  I won’t say I’m sorry because I can’t say that I am. If I started saying sorry, when would it possibly end? We can all only do what we have it in us to do, and I had in me a lot of funny, nasty things. Not the things a mother should have.

  You might find some things out about me when I’m dead and I am sorry about those. Yet I’m still so angry. There seems to be anger in the two of us that comes from nowhere. Maybe you’re the one who’d understand. I did try to tell you (remember the pier! Ha!), but perhaps it wasn’t the time.

  Please know that you weren’t named for a hard girl in a silly play, but after a real, soft woman. I wish at least I’d told you that.

  Goodbye darling, you were always such a good girl.

  Your terrible, loving Ma xx

  Ida pressed the letter to her cheek. She kissed it before putting it down, laying her hands flat on the table and closing her eyes, expecting to feel shocks and sparks, but there was nothing except the gentle beat of her pulse in her skull.

  She remembered the wardrobe upstairs. Maybe, just maybe, he’d left something behind.

  As quietly as she could she slid open the door, kneeling down and feeling the space with her hand, pulling out the brown envelope. It was a lot flatter now, and she knew why that was, but there was still something inside.<
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  It was an old theatre programme, it couldn’t have meant much to Elliot.

  Strippingly Saucy!

  (La Revue De La Sauce)

  Islington Green Music Hall

  Week Commencing May 25th 1959

  Monday-Friday – continuous

  Saturday – two distinct houses (6.15 and 8.25)

  The Boys and Girls Show You Paris

  Peachey Keen Petey

  The Gypsy Twins

  In The Mood for Love (a song and dance spectacular)

  “The Case of The Flooded Privyy” – A sketch by Mickey B

  She went back downstairs, kicked her clothes and dirty mugs out of the way, and laid out what she had on the study floor.

  A programme

  Two letters

  A pile of notes

  A certificate of baptism

  The notes were almost illegible and her eyes were tired but a few things were underlined and some written more than once.

  Bridie Adair

  Bridie Brigid Adair.

  Brigid Catherine Adair

  Kate and Ida

  Agnes Ida

  Why can’t I remember?

  Who is dead? Make list.

  Rodas = door

  Laicin = girl

  Tobar = road

  Lagadi = dirty

  Get cat put down – won’t drink – kidneys’ gone.

  Judie Dench – good actress.

  Agnes

  Agnes

  Agnes Adair. Still in Soho?

  She remembered the lists Mary had insisted she make, all those years before. She remembered thinking she’d found her ma’s possessions amongst the junk in the shop.

  She had been wrong then, but she knew she wasn’t now.

  These few things, these few pathetic things, were somehow her real ma. She wouldn’t spread them out over the house, or burn them or throw them away. She didn’t want her to escape. Instead she’d keep them all together, in one place, and try to conjure her up.

  She opened her Magical Days Book and wrote down the list of things she’d found.

  Maybe Peter wasn’t asleep. She gathered up all the papers and knocked on her old bedroom door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  She stepped inside to see him sitting on the bed in the dark room, pale and crying.

  “I know why you’ve come,” he said, looking at the paper under her arm. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask. I’m glad you’re going to. Sit down sweetheart. Let me say sorry, first of all. ”

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Ida sat next to him on the bed without turning on the light. She knew Peter wouldn’t want it on, not with him crying and looking so tired.

  He put his hand on Ida’s and spoke quickly.

  “Your mother wasn’t exactly who she said she was. She was a traveller, part traveller at least. Her father was from an Irish travelling family. And she had a sister. They were very poor. And unhappy, I think.”

  He paused for breath and Ida didn’t speak for a moment.

  “Where is she now? The sister?” she asked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

  “Agnes, well she’s in London. I knew her, I still know her. You met her once though you probably don’t remember?”

  “I don’t know. What? When?”

  “In London, the day of the storm, she’s the one who found you. She never moved out of the flat your mother and she had shared, the little one on Greek Street. The painter bought it for her, Jacob. The only good thing he ever bloody did. It was Agnes who called me up.”

  “Oh God. That’s mad. I wish she had said. Why didn’t she say?”

  “She and your mother didn’t speak. They’d had an… argument, of sorts, in the past. When she phoned me she was sobbing, she hadn’t known what to do. She might have told you if you hadn’t conked out.”

  “We should get Alice,” Ida said, and went downstairs, to the sitting room, to wake her sister up.

  Peter had washed his face, the light was on, and the three of them sat on the double bed.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Alice asked.

  “You know your mother would have bloody killed me. I tried, the other day, on the beach. I mean, of course I should have told you then. But you were having such a horrible fight. Anyway, she says she’s going to come, she’s booked a train.”

  “Come where?”

  “To the funeral,” he said.

  “Tomorrow?” said Ida. “Oh, okay.”

  Ida said it so matter-of-factly that she and Alice looked at each other and started to laugh while Peter looked at them nervously. “I can stop her coming, I am so sorry. God, I was never very good at confrontation,” he said.

  “No!” said Ida, near hysterical now and gasping for breath, “I mean, the more the merrier, eh?”

  Peter tried to laugh too but still looked worried and waited for them to stop before he spoke again. “You haven’t still got your mother’s projector, have you? I’ve got something to show you. Something Agnes wants you to see before she comes.”

  They sat on the floor with cups of tea, their backs against the bed base, while Peter fiddled with the spool of film.

  “We shouldn’t sleep tonight anyway,” he said as he worked. “In Ireland they’d have a wake. They’d have her body right here and sit with it all night long, would have done for three nights. That’s what my parents did, and hers too I suppose.” He unwound the film and pulled it through the old machine. “This is the next best thing.”

  “How did you meet, really?” Alice asked.

  “We did all work together,” he paused. “In the music hall.”

  “I thought they closed down years ago?” said Ida

  “Some of the... less wholesome shows went on until the sixties,” said Peter.

  “Fuck. ‘Surprisingly Saucy’,” Ida said under her breath and handed the programme to Alice.

  “They were The Gypsy Twins, of course,” said Peter.

  “Did Da know about Agnes?” Ida asked.

  “No. I don’t think so. I’m not sure he knows any of it.”

  A blurred picture appeared on the doors, a jumble of pinks, dark browns and yellows. He adjusted something and it came into focus – two young women wearing garish make-up and tasselled bikinis, smiling broadly, and standing side on to the camera with their hands on their hips. They grainy footage made them look identical, with thick dark hair, wide brown eyes, and skinny legs. They looked so close, so similar, Ida wondered what on earth could have driven them so far apart.

  “They were strippers?” asked Alice, climbing off the bed and walking towards the wardrobe doors, the silhouette of her almost obscuring the picture, the shape of her fingers enormous as she tried to touch the image.

  “Not quite,” said Peter. “But not far off.”

  Alice turned round – she was covered in the distorted shape of the sisters and the dark hair of one of them quivered behind her. “Who shot the film?”

  “We’ll get to that in a bit,” said Peter, patting the space next to him. “I’ll tell you what I know. What your mother told me at least.”

  The picture stuttered and changed. It was the back of a girl, wearing a pink short-sleeved sweater and straw hat, her arms spread wide towards the distant sea, while walking towards her, smaller and indistinct, was another girl, wearing a pale blue dress, her face cut in half by the edge of the wardrobe door.

  Chapter thirty

  ~ 1960 ~

  Rehearsals had finished early and Agnes had gone back to lie down, but Bridie couldn’t possibly sleep.

  It was opening night tomorrow, which was bad enough, but Jacob was coming later as well, and these two events in combination had sent something like battery acid through her veins. She was certain people could see it, she couldn’t
keep still, and when she talked she was pretty sure her words were coming out in a garbled stream.

  She went through her lines in the mirror for a while, then headed out through the stage door and onto the pier, her new straw hat – a present from Jacob – pulled forwards over her eyes. Men were finishing the gloss work round the entrance, ready for the grand opening of the new theatre, and they nodded as she passed. Miss Collins said Sid James was coming to cut the ribbon but Bridie was certain that couldn’t be true.

  She had never been on a pier before, and it was so odd to have a theatre at the end of one – suspended over the water. It was dangerous, she was sure. She imagined the theatre falling straight through the wood and into the sea, the two of them – Agnes and herself – drowning in their matching French maids’ outfits, of all things.

  As she walked she imagined she was Ava Gardner – they had similar hair at least – and tried to avoid the eyes of the tourists that she passed. She was not going to be nervous. The show would be fine. She hoped Agnes wouldn’t let them both down.

  The sun was hot, but windy out over the water, and Bridie’s cotton dress clung to her legs as she walked, while women held down their A-line skirts and men huddled together to light their roll-ups.

  In the distance the beach was packed with people, and behind them stood pastel-coloured beach huts and a row of chintzy hotels.

  She was going shopping. She knew what she was going to buy. The day before she’d seen a sweater in the department store, a cobwebby pink angora – or at least partly angora – sweater with capped sleeves. She imagined Jacob’s long fingers stroking her while she wore it. It was all too much.

  Shopping without Agnes was far more fun. Bridie could practice properly. Their friend Peter had taught them how. It didn’t matter what you were wearing, or if your hair was badly dyed, you could be anyone you wanted to be if you just believed it with all your heart.

  He had taken them to The Ritz. The game was to sit in the foyer without even reading a paper for a full hour with no one who worked there asking what you were doing. The trick was to ‘exude class’. That’s what he said. Bridie was good at it. Agnes was bloody terrible, as Irish as ever and automatically speaking their own language when anyone in uniform turned up. ‘The sheydogue is suni-in at me Brigid,’ she’d say, and Peter would whisper, ‘what?’ before Bridie would angrily translate, ‘she says the guards are looking at her,’ and then to Agnes, ‘they weren’t but they bloody well are now.’