The Other Ida (19 page)

“Don't you dare call your bloody father. Haven't you seen the news? They've bombed the pier, or tried to. And Waterstones, of all places.”

“In Bournemouth?” Ida asked, unconvinced.

“Yes, bloody Bournemouth. That pier is cursed. Remember I took you there? My last hurrah?”

“I remember. But I don't think they'll have come for you specifically, Ma. Just stay where you are.”

“You don't know anything,” Bridie said, and put down the phone.

Ida went into the sitting room. Eight of them lived there, shift workers and students, unpopular ones who couldn't get a house-share anywhere else. The room was filthy and unloved – a couple of faded postcards were stuck up above the mantelpiece, two ripped sofas were pushed against the wall, and a film of grime covered everything. She switched on the TV.

It was true. At least the bombing bit was.

She called her father and after an hour he called her back. He hadn't been able to get through to her ma.

Ida lay on her single bed looking up at the lone glow-in-the-dark star some previous tenant had left. Her old room, her room at her mother's, had been covered in them.

Perhaps that was it, really it, and Bridie would be sectioned or top herself – maybe she'd do it tonight. Off the pier if there was still anything left of it.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture her mother's face. Thin, stern with a heavy fringe, that was how she always remembered her. But if she concentrated hard enough, there were other images too.

Bridie brushing Ida's hair when she was small; that time just the two of them had gone to the zoo; her wide, rare smile.

If she was a good, kind daughter she'd go down there tomorrow. She should call Alice, get her number from Terri, but she couldn't quite make herself.

There was too much between them. It had been far too long.

Chapter twenty

~ 1999 ~

Ida was singing badly and loudly when she got back to the house. She hadn't been shopping for years and had enjoyed the experience far more than she'd expected to. And the things you could nick! There wasn't much scope for theft in the corner shops near her bedsit, but a department store was a whole new ball game. She'd hidden make-up in her boots and a new woollen hat in her pocket. And her funeral outfit wasn't bad; a close fitting black dress and three inch heels, a totally un-her look that would surely make Elliot love her, if just for the night.

No one was home and she walked into the kitchen, lifted the lid off the saucepan on the hob and pretended to be sick into the lumpy beige soup. She took some bread from the cupboard and cheese from the fridge, made herself an enormous sandwich and walked towards the study, imagining herself in her new dress and shoes, pretending she was someone different, annoying Alice with her wit and charm.

It was only when she entered the room that she realised what she wanted to do. She found the Magical Days Book behind her bed, ate the last of her sandwich in one big bite and held the book to her face and kissed it. Then she sat on the floor, cross legged, vowing to read it properly, not be embarrassed like last time.

It didn't take her long to find what she'd been looking for.

9th September 1984 – 9.30pm

Ma is out of hospital! Hurrah! Should be pleased but she's harder to look after than Alice really. More tricky – at least you can tell Alice what to do and she'll pretty much do it. As soon as she got home she made me get in the car and drive into Bournemouth with her. I thought we were both going to die. She wouldn't tell me what we were doing but had this weird determined look on her face. We went to the pier, all the way up the pier (she always said she HATED it there) right to the theatre at the end. Bobby Davro is in some show and I honestly thought she'd gone mad and wanted to go to it, but then she got all grumpy and I worried she was going to jump in and top herself. Honestly. It was horrible. And who can I tell? I could tell Ray from pub or Danny (who has made me realise there are different kinds of love. It's not ANNIE love or anything. But he's nice and I like it when he plays me songs on the penny whistle. And he's really kind to his dog who is SO SWEET. I'm MORTIFIED I ever got involved with that square Martin twat. You live and learn...)

Anyway, Ma was doing that annoying twitchy pleased-with-herself face and I couldn't talk to her about it. It was all so annoying – her getting pissed beforehand (despite being told NO BOOZE) and then dragging me out there when Alice was going to be spazzing out at home.

She wanted to stop reading but she knew there were things in here she needed to look at. Things she had forgotten. And after meeting Martin, and remembering she hadn't always been such an unlovable disaster, it was comforting in a way to rediscover her stupid teenage self. She'd been so enthusiastic, was that the word? Changeable and difficult, but perhaps more up than down. She was still like that she supposed, but now her ups were, pretty much always, artificially induced.

There were pages of drawings, some of them not bad, photo after photo of Anna DeCosta cut out from magazines, then postcards, leaflets, things she'd found.

At the back of the book were four blank pages. It seemed a shame for it not to be finished. Ida picked up a pen but had no idea what to write.

There was the noise of someone coming back into the house, and a knock at Ida's door.

It was Alice, carrying bags of shopping.

“Is everything okay?” Ida asked.

“I'm knackered. The bank were so unhelpful. And we need to look through Mum's stuff properly, we need some kind of ID. I realised I don't even know her real date of birth, I heard her say it was anywhere from '38 to '45. God knows how old she really was. Probably 270 like some kind of vampire. Perhaps we can look tonight? Did you have some soup? ”

“It was delicious,” Ida said.

Alice closed the door and Ida looked back down at the book. She had no memory of writing any of it. How odd that these things, these bits of herself, only existed in this strange old notebook.

Towards the end, just before the blank pages, were a series of questions, clearly listed in block capitals:

WHY DID MY MOTHER TAKE ME TO THE PIER?

WHAT WAS SHE GOING TO TELL ME?

IS IDA IN THE PLAY REALLY MEANT TO BE HER?

(Same hair, both mean)

Ida picked the pen back up and added:

What was Ma's real birthday?

Four small questions. Perhaps she could try to answer them.

Chapter twenty-one

~ 1984 ~

Ida sat biting her fingernails at Bridie's bedside while their least favourite doctor did some final checks, inexplicably examining her mother's eyes, which were glistening with a combination of anger and barely suppressed laughter. After scribbling a brief note on a clipboard, he perched on the edge of the hard bed and leant towards Ida, his big knobbly hands resting on his knees.

“If we're going to let her go you have to make sure she eats properly. And she has proven she absolutely cannot be trusted around alcohol. There must be none in the house, do you understand me? She needs to be monitored constantly, fed calorific and nutritious food. Can I trust you Miss Irons?”

Behind him Bridie rolled then shut her eyes.

“I'll do everything I possibly can,” Ida said, as convincingly as she could, painfully pulling on the safety pin she'd pierced her ear with the night before and was trying to hide with her hair.

He nodded, seemingly satisfied with this not-quite lie. Ida attempted a grin but she felt sick and nervous, too tired to be amazed by the stupidity of doctors. Surely this man had spent enough time with Bridie over the past few weeks to know the most anyone could do for her was fetch her things and laugh at her mean jokes? And if he'd bothered to ask the fat nurse, Carol, who lived above the pub, she'd be sure to tell him that, despite her height, Bridie Adair's eldest daughter was only fifteen and out washing dishes in a stinking kitchen almost every night of the week.

The doctor smiled briefly at them both and left the room. Ida began to pack her mother's bag according to the strict instructions being barked from the bed. Then she helped her into her coat and down the smelly orange-lit corridor while Bridie swore in a stage whisper about her unfortunate fellow patients as they wheeled along drips or held hushed conversations. The glass double doors loomed closer as they walked, each step another lost chance for someone to call out to them, to carry her frail mother back to bed where she belonged. Ida's red motorcycle boots – a recent charity shop buy – were heavy and uncomfortable as she dragged her feet across the tiles. She was determined to wear them in.

“Thank God for that,” said Bridie as she stepped into the sharp air, holding out a shaking arm for a cab. “I'm never, ever, ever going there again. You hear me? You can tell your bloody stepmother to shove it up her tight proddie arse. Where's a bloody cab? Don't they know there are ill people waiting?”

As she often did, Ida tried to take a film to store in her mind; her strange, shaking mother in her smelly camel coat, squinting defiantly at the weak autumn sun.

The cab drove straight to the off-license, and Ida found herself cradling her mother's broken carpetbag while Bridie chose bottle after dusty bottle of cheap red wine. Mrs Dewani even gave her one on the house despite Ida's eye signals. Could she not see Bridie's hospital band, her marbled skin, or notice the rotten smell that seemed to surround her like a force field?

The taxi waited outside for them, the driver chatty and cheerful, and after a stop at home to stroke the cat and drink two of the bottles of wine, Bridie tied a blue silk headscarf over her dirty hair, found her car keys – which had been hidden in the kitchen cupboard – and walked back outside. Ida hesitated briefly before following, grabbing the purple jacket she'd nicked from Miss Selfridge, during a Saturday morning spree with Tina from the pub.

There was really nothing to say as her mother climbed back down the steps towards their ancient Rover so Ida stayed quiet, following, then sliding into the passenger seat and mouthing a quick prayer. Her mother was so low in the broken driver's seat that Ida knew only her eyes and fringe showed over the dashboard. Through a hole in the floor Ida watched as the ground sped by, stone after stone, yellow line after yellow line. She knew that looking up at the swearing fellow motorists and swerving cyclists would only fill her with useless fear. There was no real need to be afraid. If there was one thing her mother had taught her during all the time she'd been ‘home-schooled' it was that the Adair women were hard to kill.

“I'm taking you somewhere very important,” Bridie said. “Pay attention.”

She sounded so lucid that, if Ida hadn't been in similar situations a thousand times before, it would have been easy to believe her, or to at least consider what she had to say. But no, there had been too many times before. The time, aged forty, Bridie had decided she should model again and sent out home-shot snaps of her in her nightdress. The time she sent filthy, threatening letters about Ida's father to almost every publication in
Writers and Artists Year Book 1970
(so many of the addresses had changed that letters marked ‘return to sender' plagued them for six months, making that particular mistake a difficult one to forget.)

“I'm not sure I know what you mean,” Ida said flatly.

“Of course you don't, that's the point. My last hurrah! You should take notes.”

“Alice will be home in an hour or so.”

“She has a key.”

“Yes, but she's expecting you to be there. She's been excited about you coming home for weeks; she hated seeing you in there. She'll be worried if you're not back.”

“She needs to get a backbone, that one. Anyway, we won't be long. Cheer up darling, for God's sake, life's for living, eh?”

Ida snorted at her mother's back-to-front logic and turned towards the window. She didn't need to look to know that her mother was smiling.

Bridie drove through Westbourne, then past the gardens, towards the Royal Bath Hotel.

The road was wide and busy but as they neared the pier Bridie stopped suddenly then made a U-turn, causing cars all around them to brake and honk their horns. Ida put her head in her hands and Bridie laughed, pulling up onto the pavement and coming to a halt.

“You can't stop here, Ma,” Ida said but she knew it was useless.

“It's my right to park where I choose,” said Bridie. “Traffic wardens are no better than the Nazis.”

Ida glanced at the floor of the car which was already strewn with unpaid tickets.

The road was above the promenade and Ida helped her mother down the concrete steps. At the bottom were an empty merry go round and a closed candyfloss stall.

“Have you ever seen anything so depressing?” asked Bridie.

Ida looked at her yellow, shaking mother and thought she definitely had.

“Don't answer that,” Bridie said, “come on.”

They walked to the booth at the end of the pier, Bridie paid the tattooed old man with exact change, and then they were on the narrow wooden boards, the brown sea visible in the gaps under Ida's boots.

“Let's hope none of them are rotten,” Bridie said and cackled.

It was much colder out there and there was hardly anyone else around. It wasn't tourist season or the holidays and even the few teenagers who came in the evenings – to dive-bomb off the pier or smoke fags at the end – weren't out of school yet.

A few angry-looking seagulls stood on the rusty wrought iron railings, watching them intently as they walked and Ida breathed slowly, trying hard to look straight ahead. Right at the end was the theatre with luminous orange letters saying ‘Fun, Laffs, Bobby Davro!' Bridie couldn't be taking them there, could she? It was her idea of hell. Ida started to get worried; there was nothing out here for them. It was cold and sad and they were so far away from the man in the booth and the few people walking dogs on the beach.