Fiona Barr, “The Wall-Reader”
Fiona Barr, born in 1952 in Derry/Londonderry, depicts a young mother who reads political murals for pleasure while strolling her child through the streets of Belfast. “The Wall-Reader” illustrates Northern Ireland’s tense political environment, where seemingly harmless and everyday activities such as walks, conversation, and pleasure reading can instigate the threat of violence and lead to flight and exile.
‘Shall only our rivers run free?’ The question jumped out from the cobbled wall in huge white letters, as The Peoples’ taxi swung round the corner at Beechmount.
‘Looks like paint is running freely enough down here,’ she thought to herself, as other slogans glided past in rapid succession. Reading Belfast’s grim graffiti had become an entertaining hobby for her, and, she often wondered, was it in the dead of night that groups of boys huddled round a paint tin daubing walls and gables with tired political slogans and dichés? Did anyone ever see them? Was the guilty brush ever found? The brush is mightier than the bomb, she declared inwardly, as she thought of how celebrated among journalists some lines had become.
‘Is there a life before death?’
Well, no one had answered that one yet, at least, not in this city.
The shapes of Belfast crowded in on her as the taxi rattled over the ramps outside the fortressed police barracks. Dilapidated houses, bricked-up terraces, splintered chaos and amputated life, rosy-cheeked soldiers, barely out of school, and quivering with high-pitched fear. She thought of the thick-lipped youth who came to hi-jack the car, making his point by showing his revolver under his anorak, and of the others, jigging and taunting every July, almost sexual in their arrogance and hatred. Meanwhile, passengers climbed in and out at various points along the road, manoeuvering between legs, bags of shopping and umbrellas. The taxi swerved blindly into the road. No Highway Code here. As the woman’s stop approached, the taxi swung up to the pavement, and she stepped out.
She thought of how she read walls – like tea-cups – and she smiled to herself. Pushing her baby in the pram to the supermarket, she had to pass under a motorway bridge that was peppered with lines, some in irregular lettering with the paint dribbling down the concrete, others written with felt-tip pens in minute secretive hand. A whole range of human emotions splayed itself with persistent anarchy on the walls. Messages: ‘Ring me at eight, don’t be late’; declarations: ‘Two bob and she’s yours’; exclamations: ‘Man. Utd. are fab’; political jabs: ‘Orange squash – great’, and notes of historical import: ‘3rd Tank Regiment wuz here’. Oh how she longed to linger under the bridge taking each wall in turn, studying the meanest scrawl, pondering sensitivity, evaluating character, identifying subconscious fears, analysing childhoods.
‘One could do worse than be a reader of walls’, she thought, twisting Frost’s words. >> note 1 Instead, though, the pram was rushed past the intriguing mural (‘murial’ as they call it here) with much gusto. Respectable housewives don’t read walls!
Her husband had arrived home early today because of a bomb scare in work, as he explained. Despite the bombings which had propelled Northern Ireland onto the world’s screens and newspapers, most people regarded these episodes as a fact of life now; tedious, disruptive at times and only of interest when fatalities occurred. The ‘Troubles’ as they were euphemistically named, remained for this couple as a remote, vaguely irritating wart on their life. They were simply an ordinary (she often groaned at the oppressive banality of the word), middle-class, family – hoping the baby would marry a doctor thereby raising them in their autumn days to the select legions of the upper-class.
Each day their lives followed the same routine – no harm in that sordid little detail, she thought. It helps structure one’s existence. He went to the office, she fed the baby, washed the rapidly growing mound of nappies, prepared the dinner and looked forward to the afternoon walk. She had convinced herself she was happy with her lot, and yet felt disappointed at the pangs of jealousy endured on hearing of a friend’s glamorous job or another’s academic and erudite husband. If only someone noticed her from time to time, or even wrote her name on a wall declaring her existence worthwhile, ‘A fine mind’ or ‘I was once her lover’. That way, at least, she would have evidence that she was making an impact on others.
That afternoon she dressed the baby and started out for her walk. ‘Fantasy time’ her husband called it, ‘Wall-reading time’, she knew it to be. On this occasion, however, she decided to avoid those concrete temptations and, instead, visit the park. Out along the main road, she pushed the pram, pausing to gaze into the hardware store’s window, hearing the whine of the saracen as it thundered by, waking the baby and making her feel uneasy. A foot patrol of soldiers strolled past, their rifles, lethal even in the brittle sunlight of this March day, lounged lovingly and relaxed in the arms of their men. One soldier stood nonchalantly, almost impertinently, against a corrugated railing and stared at her. She always blushed when she passed troops. ‘Locked up in barracks with no women’, she had told her husband. (He remarked that she had a dirty mind). Hurrying out of the range of his eyes and possible sniper fire, she swung downhill out onto Stockman’s Lane and into Musgrave Park.
The park is ugly, stark and hostile. Even in summer when courting couples seek out secluded spots, like mating cats, they reject Musgrave. There are a few trees, clustered together, standing like skeletons ashamed of their nakedness. The rest is grass, a green wasteland speckled with puddles of gulls squawking over a worm patch. The park is bordered by a hospital which has a military wing guarded by an army billet. The beauty of the place is its silence. It has only this. And here silence means peace. Horror, pain, terror do not exist within these railings. Belfast is beyond their boundaries, and past the frontiers of the eagerly forgetful imagination.
The hill up to the park bench was not the precipice it seemed, but the baby and pram were heavy. Ante-natal self-indulgence had taken its toll – her midriff was now most definitely a bulge. With one final push, pram, baby and mother reached the green wooden seat, and came to rest. The baby slept soundly with the soother touching her velvet pink cheeks, hand on pillow, a picture of purity. The woman heard a coughing noise coming from the nearby gun turret, and managed to see the tip of a rifle and a face peering out from the darkness. Smells of cabbage and burnt potatoes wafted over from behind the slanting sheets of protective steel.
‘Is that your baby?’ an English voice called out. She could barely see the face belonging to the voice. She replied yes, and smiled. The situation reminded her of the confessional. Dark and supposedly anonymous, ‘Is that you, my child?’ She knew the priest personally. Did he identify her sins with his ‘Good morning, Mary’, and think to himself, ‘and I know what you were up to last night!’ She blushed at the secrets given away through the ceremony. Yes, she nervously answered again, it was her baby, a little girl. First-time mothers rarely resist the temptation to talk about their offspring. Forgetting her initial shyness, she told the voice of when the baby was born, the early problems of all-night crying, now teething, how she could crawl backwards and gurgle. In fact all the minutiae that unite mothers everywhere.
The voice responded. It too had a son, a few months older than her child, away in Germany at the army base at Münster. The voice too talked with the quiet affection that binds fathers everywhere to their children. The English voice talked out from the turret as if addressing the darkening lines of silhouettes in the distance beyond the park. Factory pipes, chimney tops, church spires, domes all listened impassively to the Englishman’s declaration of paternal love. The scene was strange, for although Belfast’s sterile geography slipped into classical forms with dusk and heavy rain-clouds, the voice and the woman knew the folly of such innocent communication. They politely finished their conversation, said goodbye and the woman pushed her pram homewards. The voice remained in the turret, watchful and anxious. Home she went, past vanloads of workers leering out past the uneasy presence of foot patrols, past the Church.
‘Let us give each other the sign of peace’ they said at Mass. The only sign Belfast knew was two fingers pointing towards Heaven. Life was self-contained, the couple often declared, just like flats. No need to go outside.
She did go outside, however. Over the weeks the voice had become a name, John. It had become a friend, someone to listen to, to talk to. No face, but a person removed from the city’s grotesqueries and colourlessness. She sat on the bench, the pram in front, the baby asleep, listening, talking, looking ahead at the hospital corridors stretching languidly before her. He talked of his wife, and the city he came from. In some ways, remote as another planet, in others as familiar as the earth itself. Memories of childhood aspirations grown out of back-to-back slum, of disappointment, the pain of failure, the fear of rejection in adolescence. Visions of Germany, Teutonic efficiency and emotional hardness; Malta and Cyprus, exotic, crimson, romantic, legendary, the holiday brochures come to life.
She told him of her family, of escaping through books, longing to endure noble pain and mysterious wildness, to experience outrageous immorality, to be as aloof as Yeats himself. To be memorable, sh