The Other Ida Read Online Free PDF

in agony, and I was the one who found her having a fit and bleeding from the nose the other day. If you look at the sitting room carpet you can still see the blood. There was lots of it.”
    â€œFuck,” said Ida.
    â€œYes, fuck,” said Alice.
    Ida looked up as the man walked over and touched Alice’s hair. She didn’t turn towards him, but instead looked straight and hard at Ida who shook her head.
    â€œI don’t know what you want me to say. It’s over now I suppose,” Ida said.
    Alice grabbed a silver candlestick from the table as if to strike her with it and Ida raised her arm to her face, exposing a hospital band.
    Alice yanked it off Ida’s wrist, and Ida laughed, amazed.
    â€œAlice, Alice, sweetheart,” said the man in a soft, northern voice. He held Alice’s chin in his small hand and twisted her face towards him. “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” he kept saying.
    Alice pushed him away, looked at Ida and held up the white band. “How long have you had this on? Months I bet. Does it make people feel sorry for you? Did you overdose? I wish you’d fucking been here, honest to God. All your self-indulgent bollocks would have gone out the bloody window,” she said.
    Ida was amazed at her luck. There was an audience here and Alice had proven herself, surprisingly, to be loud, angry and potentially violent. Ida looked at the man. She was still wearing only a bed sheet and let it slide down slightly, exposing her cleavage.
    â€œI know you’re upset, Alice. But you’ve got to understand my relationship with her wasn’t like yours. She was horrible to me. I hated her. I was fifteen when I left and she didn’t give a shit.”
    â€œYou patronising bitch,” Alice said.
    Ida stood and took the man’s hand. “I’m Ida,” she said, “nice to meet you.”
    â€œTom,” he said, “yes, you too.”
    Ida had a reason to look nice, now, which outweighed even the chance to annoy her sister by wearing the clothes she’d turned up in. How’d she got him, Ida wondered, her humourless, anal sister with this scruffy, northern man?
    She opened the airing cupboard in the study and was hit by the warm smell of lavender and damp. She started pulling things out – an expensive velvet dress with a tiny, tiny waist, a blue woollen skirt with a perfect, circular hole in it, lots of floral sheets, and some screwed up silk scarves. Her mother had been tall but slim-hipped like Alice and thinner still, and Ida stood at nearly six feet with big hips and breasts and thighs. Nothing was going to fit. It was only when in desperation she pulled at the top shelf that she had any luck. A pale brown tweed man’s suit, crisp from some ancient pressing, beautifully made with perfect stitches. The waistcoat was too small but the jacket and trousers were fine. She found a cream thermal vest, slightly yellowed, and wore it as a t-shirt.
    Now for her hair. She stood for a moment at her mother’s so-called desk – the desk her mother never used – unsure whether to sit down or not. It was a dressing table really, with a dusty mirror attached to the back. She hovered, her fingers inches away from the surface, until reason took hold and with one action she pulled out the chair and sat down. As she cleaned the glass with her palm she could hear the muffled, urgent sound of her sister explaining something, or complaining about something, to Tom.
    Stuck on the corner of the mirror was the typewritten quote that had always been there:
    The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his chimeras, and his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.
    (Antonin Artaud,
    â€˜The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto’)
    Ida