The Other Ida (2 page)

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
, be
fore 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.

It was exactly the same as it had been years before – a wide concrete lip over a pawn shop, filthy public loos, a cut-price bookshop and an overpriced sandwich place. In the corner, near the photo booth, a small gang of teenagers stood drinking White Lightning and smoking, the same group, she could have sworn, who'd hung-out there forever. She was still woozy with pills and drink but walked fast with a clear aim in mind.

She'd planned the route she'd take. On the coach she hadn't been able to help going over and over it in her head. She wanted to avoid the beach, to keep to the main streets, and it was about forty minutes she thought if she went down the High Street and took a left through Westbourne, straight to the end of her mother's road.

She couldn't help but notice things. The weird ‘American Golf Centre' was still there, druggies in the car park were still there, and the old church, where someone in her family – her dad's aunt Gill maybe? – was supposed to have got married: that was still there too.

Some things were different though. There was an Asda so big it looked like a minor airport, and her beloved, smelly Hothouse – the only club that would let her in when she was thirteen – had been renamed Extreme. But it kind of felt the same. The area by the train station, the nasty bit of town, had the same flat, grey feeling she remembered from when she was young. Bournemouth had always felt grey, actually. It was like all the colour had been used up on the end-of-pier rides and the ugly bedding plants on roundabouts. The rest of the town had to do without.

She headed into the centre and felt a hot rush of anxiety as she realised she may well bump into someone she knew. And what if they'd seen the paper? The thought of their sympathy – their thinly veiled nosiness – made her wish she at least had the cash for a cab.

A flock of seagulls appeared above her and she froze before she heard them call, bracing herself and closing her eyes. They shrieked as they swooped and she bent forwards, her mouth and eyes shut tight, noticing a strange scratch of memory at the back of her throat as though she had just woken and, for a split second, remembered some extraordinary dream.

It had been an unusual day, she thought, she was bound to feel a bit odd. The sky was turning dark and she dug her fingertips into her palms as she walked. It would be okay. She was sure she'd be relieved, rather than angry or afraid, when she finally reached the house.

At first Ida wasn't certain she was on the right road. The corner house, where Mad Harry used to live, its windows covered in newspaper, had been knocked down and in its place stood a block of cream coloured flats. It was the same all along, the 1930s houses that had stood in vast, tree-filled gardens, had been demolished and replaced by glass-fronted towers looking out towards the sea and filling every inch of space.

But not her ma's. As she neared the house she saw the familiar crumbling wall and the overgrown oak tree that she had swung on as a child.

And yes, it looked the same. Not smaller as she thought it might, but as big and unnerving as ever. A steep path led up to the wide white house, which peered over the woods and towards the sea through its mean slits of windows. The pointing was still crumbling and Ida remembered an earnest builder who – so many years before – had told her mother the house wouldn't last the year.

She ran her fingers along the wall and unlatched the gate. A curled, dead squirrel lay at the edge of the path, and she booted it into a bush.

Above her the curtains were closed and the rooms looked dark, but Ida was sure someone must be in, forgetting for a moment that it was her mother who was always at home, and her mother was no longer there.

With her head bowed she climbed the uneven steps, hammered like a bailiff at the chipped black door, and turned to see the lights on the water.

Behind her she heard the slow creak of the lock and held her breath despite herself.

Chapter three

~ 1975 ~

Despite feeling sick Ida had been singing ‘Daisy Daisy' to her sister for what felt like hours. Normally there'd be someone else in the car – Uta, sometimes their mother – to calm Alice down if she was upset, but today there was only Da, and he was busy driving.

Ma was somewhere behind them in her little car, the roof down probably, putting on lipstick and smoking while people hooted their horns. Ida hoped she wouldn't crash or get arrested. She'd done both those things before.

On Ida's lap lay two
Observer Spotter's Guides
,
Cats
and
Lizards
, bad choices for a journey that had mainly involved straight, fast roads. She wished she has bought
Cows
or
Trees
instead – she'd seen lots of them.

“Well, your books are all packed,” Da said when she had realised her mistake. “You can't have them until we get there. Try to go to sleep.”

Instead she looked through the back window at the van that was following them. The two fat removal men sat in the front and Ida was annoyed that they'd be able to read her books if they wanted to, although at the moment they just seemed to be smoking.

Da was humming songs she didn't recognise. On the dash-board lay the cine-camera, ready to catch their expressions when they first saw the house. He was in a good mood, the best mood he'd been in since Christmas. Ida couldn't tell him that she felt ill.

From where she sat she could see the thin bit of hair at the back of his head, the collar of his pink shirt, and his hands tapping the steering wheel. He was wearing the tan leather driving gloves that Ida liked to smell.

“Wanker,” he shouted, as a red car pulled out in front of them.

Ida had never heard the word before but liked the sound of it and mouthed it to herself. Alice, who had been dropping off to sleep, started to cry again.

“Nearly there sweetheart,” their father said, grabbing at the map that lay open on the seat next to him.

Ida knew that her parents hadn't seen the house, except in photographs, although Da had sent his secretary to have a look. She'd told them they couldn't move in, not until the builders and cleaners had been, but Ma wouldn't talk about it and Da got so annoyed he made them move down straight away.

Bridie didn't want to move at all but they were moving anyway because ‘a change is as good as a rest,' Da said. Ida didn't like resting (especially not when Uta made her lie down after lunch). She hoped this change would be better than that.

She imagined the house to be like Miss Havisham's, which she'd seen in a film, and felt scared but excited too. Mostly she was excited about the mice, and planned to put some in a box and keep them as pets. She could imagine her mother sitting in the dark, her dress ripped up like Miss Havisham's was. But what about Da? She tried hard to imagine all his pairs of shiny shoes lined up together on a dusty floor.