Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

to talk to, so she goes to see Iris King, who already knows that something is amiss, as she had seen the police car parked outside the Brown house (Barker, “Union Street” 36). While the cover blurb describes Iris as “mother to half the street,” the reader is nevertheless left with the impression that Mrs. Brown has chosen to confide in Iris not so much on the basis of friendship and trust, but rather because Iris is the least bad choice among Mrs. Brown's options. Iris herself admits as much: “She had never thought that Mrs. Brown would come to her, for she was apt to play her mouth on the subject of women who neglected their children and didn't care who heard her,” although Iris gives her neighbor a sympathetic hearing (36). Iris gives off a sense of security and stability largely because she internalizes the dominant codes of the way things ought to be. She worries, for example, about her reputation regarding her daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When she discovers that Brenda has been hiding it from her, she reacts violently: “The little cow…And immediately she wondered how many other people knew” (Barker, “Union Street” 181–182), as she flies into a rage and attacks her daughter in the daughter's hospital bed:

This same Iris King is the woman who maintains a deep sense of pride at having escaped Wharfe Street, the lowest of the low. She had been abandoned by her mother, beaten by her father, and then married, “just to get out” (189), to a man who also beats her and who brings home two drunken friends that he sends up to her room for sex (193–194), yet Iris overcomes her pride to seek a back street abortion for Brenda on Wharfe Street, sees her daughter through the late-term miscarriage that results in the birth of a live baby, then allows it to die, and finally assures its burial in a pile of rubble (205–216; see also Brophy 34, calling our attention to the fact that Liza does the opposite, removing her daughter Eileen from the abortionist's and offering to help raise the child). This is the kind