The Walls Are Starting To Crack

 
This house has seen too many things. There was a man who prayed all-day only to gamble his life away at night. James was his name. Jim. Cards were not his strong suit. Imagine the lonely sight of an old man walking with a shopping bag and you’re halfway there. But the bags were more often blue than white, the man less like a widower and more like someone who had given up long ago. He once brought a prostitute home to the same room that his uncle died in. He was an odd man too, but kinder. He painted the walls and ceiling black to hide the stains from his cigarette smoke from his sister’s prying eyes. It seemed like the only reason for her afternoon visits was to test his nicotine cravings. Tea with biscuits, a list of this week’s dead – delivered with more enthusiasm when she actually knew the person – and then she’d leave and he’d light up. Unfortunately, the stains showed up on his lungs instead and it was too late to do anything but give in to it.

Jim was an only son so his sisters sold the place when he passed on, splitting the profits between them. It was then rented out for ten years. Two young families made it their home before it became too tattered for anyone else to raise kids in. And who rents accommodation otherwise deemed unliveable? Sixteen students had 42 parties over the course of those four years. Every kind of drug was consumed and every sexual act known to teens was carried out between these walls. They really have seen it all. If only they could speak. But they’re inanimate and dried out cement can’t talk. Wallpaper, on the other hand, isn’t quite as silent. It’s like that young brother who gets a kick out of letting things slip out. One bedroom wall has never been stripped as the dampness was always too thick to treat. So it was hidden behind layers of other people’s additions with years of neglect and stories to tell.

Right at the back is the black that Jim’s uncle hand-painted. It attracted the attention of a student called Sara who saw a splash of black poking out above the corner of the skirting board. She made the mistake of asking the landlord if she could strip the whole wall back but – knowing all too well what was lurking behind – he said she’d be kicked out immediately if she so much as peeled back an inch of it. Needless to say, she never did go near it again. Well, not until now. Her ‘lease’ is up and she finally wants to see what’s beneath that chunk of wallpaper beside her bed. She has already lost her deposit for overloading the washing machine one too many times and plans on bolting out of there before her last rent is due. Screw the reference; it wasn’t going to be glowing anyway. She took down her Sebadoh and Ministry posters and sent them home with her Dad and the rest of her things. Then she called her friend Eve over and told her, “wear something you don’t mind making a mess of.” Eve was at her boyfriend Ian’s, eating the meal he’d been promising to make her for the 6 months they’d been going out for so far: spaghetti Bolognese. It stuck in her teeth a bit but she managed to chew her way through it and to smile at the end. But Eve was not about to miss out on Sara’s strip and neither was Ian – though he would’ve preferred it to be another kind of strip; perhaps the one performed briefly by Lisa, the biggest splurge Jim ever made away from the poker table.

Sara opened the door to them and noticed right away that they all wore black.
“I can afford to mess it up as it’s the one thing I’ve got a lot of”, said Eve, as if she needed to explain her situation to two people in the same boat. It seemed fitting that when all was done they might match the wall in front of them. Sara had already applied the paste with a roller but left one section to be stripped by hand so she could see each layer rather than having just one big jumbled heap of wet paper. The yellow outer layer she’d lived with for the last 8 months peeled back like a banana skin to reveal a sky blue shade underneath. This belonged to the second family. It was the third home they’d lived in with their three children before Tom, the father, was laid off from a bottle factory on the Coes Road and they went to live in Dunleer with Denise’s parents. This was something she’d wanted for some time as it allowed her to go back to work as a nurse with her mother there to baby-sit. But Tom considered it the ultimate defeat and only gave in to it when he knew that he couldn’t even afford the next month’s rent. The room belonged to their sons, 6-year old Mark and 9-year old Tom Jr., who shared a bunk bed for the 2 years they lived there. Their older brother Paul now attends the same college as the people currently stripping their sky blue wallpaper. For Tom Jr. it was the closing they got to a view in their room, though he always thought it was too pale and therefore ‘girlie’, an irony not lost on their mother who chose the colour as ‘blue is for boys’. For Mark that wallpaper was one of the reasons – whether he knew it or not – that he went on to become a Manchester City supporter. So it wasn’t the luckiest of wallpapers.

Beneath the blue was a light orange paper with Winnie the Pooh sprinkled over it. All three wallpaper strippers giggled at the sight of this with both girls saying, “aw, cute.” Of course, Mark wanted to keep it but Denise gave in to Tom Jr.’s – louder – demands and bought something that very democratically displeased both boys. The Winnie the Pooh motif was chosen by the first family who rented the house. They had two children, both girls, and were due a boy so chose this wallpaper for when he’d be old enough to have a room of his own. His father couldn’t contain his excitement at finally having a boy and thus decorated the room before the kid was even out of his mother’s womb. He was finishing it off on a Saturday afternoon when his wife went into labour. He stayed in hospital until the Monday afternoon when his baby boy, Carl Long – named after his grandfather – , was pronounced dead after being unable to breath on his own due to complications with his delivery. That final strip of Winnie the Pooh wallpaper was never added and the Longs left the wall unfinished, leaving the house two months later to be closer to their family in Wicklow.

The three DKIT students continued to peel paper as the sound of the Secret Machines – the closest thing to prog rock in the 21st century – blasted out bass-heavy from Sara’s iPod speakers. They saw the subdued cream the Long family first laid for a dining room and yawned at its blandness, not realising it was an attempt at luxury that a young family could ill-afford at the time. Its subtle pattern was lost completely on these 3 art students.

They then made it to Jim’s blanket of green. When he inherited the house from his uncle in the early ‘80s he attempted to paint white over the black. But as soon as he splattered one blotch of white he realised it would take too many coats and far too much effort to cover the black completely. His uncle was refusing to leave. So he bought the thickest and darkest paper he could find and it just so happened to be green; the colour of money in America and even some over here. But it didn’t remind Jim of money or of the covers of casino poker tables – as he never made it to one so fancy – but of the thick forests in the Cooley Mountains where he once went camping with the scouts. He often wondered why those lads he shared beans and tents with went on to have wives and children while he was left behind. And he couldn’t help but think of his uncle who did exactly the same thing. What was it that made them give up on that? Maybe it was the same comfort that all giving-up provides. Once you’ve given in to it there’s no more disappointment.

Sara stripped back the green to see the scariest black she’d ever seen: black mould on black paint that hadn’t seen the light of day in 26 years. It was a disgusting disappointment for the student who had imagined that some dark lord had inscribed his darkest secrets into this wall. And he had: they just weren’t written in English or any other language that the naked eye could ever understand.