Verbal Magazine

The Burning Woman

I didn’t stop to read it, just turned it over and saw that the signature was unfamiliar.

A John someone, whom I did not immediately know. I bundled it together with the two bills, something from the bank, into my bag, and drove to the station, making it just in time for the Dublin train.
Once out of the sidings the train sped past the fields darkened by the floods of the past week. I took out the Alex Katz card, which, in a black spindly hand read:

Dear Tony and Anne,
Bad news - Quigley is dead. He’d developed diabetes and when he refused to take his insulin they locked him up. Terrible end. He’s being buried at Kensal Green next Friday at 3. Be great to see you, but understand if you can’t make it.
John.

The woman beside me had been embroidering a piece of silk. A short pressured entry into the dust-coloured material, a drag of the thread upwards then over and back to begin the next stitch. As I watched her deft and repetitive movements the message on the card began to sink in.
The John of the card was John Traynor, an ex-pat artist living in London for the past 40 years or more. Nowadays he eked out a living teaching in Adult Education and, before I left London, I would occasionally see him in the library, temping. He painted guns and baseballs, was obsessed with the Beats and Jack Kerouac. He’d had nothing to do with the whole Goldsmith’s scene of the 90s, though he could have done because his work had a Sensationalist quality, and he had taught there once. But he was a cantankerous character and, as long as I had known him, had refused to ally himself to any group that might have been able to help or develop him. Anyway, I never thought he was much good. Quigley, on the other hand, was entirely different. His talent was immense. In the new house in Dundalk I’d made the most fuss about where I would hang the Quigley triptych.
The card had shaken me. I could not believe Quigley was dead, yet I’d made no contact with him in the past ten years. I’d been in London several times and not gone to see him. Even though I knew he was broke and living in Victoria Mansions, a decrepit Gothic folly only a short walk from the flat we had retained in Brondesbury. We could easily have visited. I knew about the diabetes. On one of my visits I had bumped into John on Staverton Road and he had told me about it. The card suggested he had forgotten about that meeting, or at least was pretending to, perhaps so as to give me a chance to pay my respects without feeling too guilty.
Staring out at the still spring morning, I thought of the time Tony and I had first arrived in London. We had just graduated from art school in Dublin (and remaining in Ireland had not been an option, racked as it was then by recession and the Troubles) and we were very naïve.
We had been given the keys to view a flat on Portland Road by an agency. Once inside, we discovered it had been used for some kind of occult practice. A five-pointed star had been painted crudely with black paint on the living-room floor. Photographs with the eyes of women and children blacked out were scattered around, and there were two or three large books, written in Latin, filled with cabalistic drawings. I remember there was a foot deep of a glutinous red substance in the bath, which made a fizz sound when I stirred it with a coat-hanger – probably some kind of acid. Having speedily departed that property, we found ourselves with nowhere else to go. Until a friend suggested the squats where John and Quigley lived in Maida Vale.
They had met at the Slade. Quigley claimed no Irish heritage despite his name, and John’s Irishness was meaningless to him as he had left Limerick at 14 and never returned. To find as neighbours two young Irish ‘artists’, was, John told me later, an enormous relief to him. We gave him hope, he said, that a gay man with no interest in hurling, in Leinster vs. Munster or the Irish language, might be able to go home one day without fear of being strung up. On the basis of our mutual disregard for any particular nationalism, we four formed a strong friendship, avoiding Irish haunts in London like the plague. John made us welcome - but it was Quigley who was the mentor, the guru – whatever is the correct term for an individual who teaches you the big truths of life, quickly and selflessly.
When I first saw him I thought he was a member of the National Front. His thick bald skull sat squat between his muscular shoulders, his back and neck covered in tattoos.  A closer examination of these and you saw sea images: the pearly inside of an oyster-shell, shrimp, a bone-coloured conch and a pair of olive-skinned sirens on rocks with blue eyes and red lips, waves, boats – as well as numerous small birds and butterflies. In fact, from his neck to the base of his spine was one prodigious poppy-red moth with intricate black markings. Quigley had got it done in Jamaica, where he said he had been happiest.
The two Edwardian squats belonged to a housing cooperative that had gone bust, so were in some kind of administrative limbo. This meant that the properties were in bad condition. And over time I came to believe that the top floor of the house we occupied was haunted. We would hear sounds at night, and from the moment we arrived there was a faint but distinctly bitter smell of smoke. We rarely used the top floor, though occasionally, when people came to stay we would let them sleep in the bed we’d placed in the top back room. I certainly remember I never liked to go up there; I would get a creepy feeling, and it was always cold even though the windows were kept shut and an electric-fire occasionally left on.
Once, I recall, there was a loud, manic rap on our door at about four in the morning. It was Quigley, frightened, white as a sheet. He said he had seen a gossamer-like outline of a woman passing through the wall of his top-floor to ours. Tony ran up, but of course there was nothing at all. Only the vague smell of burnt sticks that had been there since our arrival.
As the train pulled in to Drogheda, I was jolted from my thoughts about Quigley and the days of squatting in London, about which, over time, I had become a little ashamed. The woman beside me had fallen asleep and the needle of her sewing stabbed the flesh of my thigh as the train pulled up suddenly. I passed the embroidery and needle back to her, and gave my leg a rub, glancing again at the Alex Katz on the table. I thought of how the endless cycle of administering insulin must have bothered a man who loved his freedom as much as Quigley had done.
He had always painted women. Not nudes or glamorous women, but the faces and bodies of working women; older women; damaged women. He said he found their worn faces beautiful, and had won himself quite a reputation for that kind of realist work. But his encounter with the ghostly figure on the top-floor led to a growing obsession with a particular face. 
The Burning Woman triptych depicts a dark-skinned woman of about 50. She is staring out the window, sitting on a suitcase, as if waiting for someone to take her home, wherever home is. In the last picture she has hacked up the floorboards and built a fire, no doubt ready to leave her circumstances one way or another. The woman is herself full of colour: pink silk slips from under her black, jet-fringed hajib; her shoes are gold and embroidered, and she has thick red lips and kohl-lined eyes. Yet the room is grey, as are the skies. The series is clearly about displacement of some sort, and made Quigley a lot of money. But no sooner had he made a real mark on London’s fickle art world, when he took to drinking, and began to pile on the pounds, and generally tried to avoid work altogether.
Quigley said he had based the Burning Woman figure on the ghost he had seen. He said she followed him, ‘clung to his soul’ were his exact words (I recall them so particularly because they had chilled me), and that he was unable to relax knowing she would follow him from house to house. Wherever he went he would find her, or she would find him, as if she were not outside him at all, but inside him; an unshakeable phantom that had taken up residence in his imagination, eventually taking possession of it.
From Connolly I walked into the IFSC where I was to meet with an investment bank to discuss the expansion of my company. As I passed the new EAT on the corner, with its four brown awnings sheltering the clientele from the icy winds coming off Dublin Bay, I thought of the card and the insecure world of painting I had long ago left behind. I thought of John and how his was the lesser talent - though he had proved the better at life. John believed in small things and getting through. Tony and I had parted for this very reason, for he was the same. I made a mental note to let John know Tony’s address in Leitrim.
That I had sold the Burning Woman triptych before Quigley died rankled me a little as I walked towards the riverbank: the paintings, which had been placed first in my bedroom, then in the hall had begun to disturb me. The sight of her fragile expression as I left the house could ruin whole days.
I walked by the Liffey admiring the gleaming glass of the new bank-buildings, restaurants and apartments. John would not recognise the country he had left, I thought. My phone vibrated. A reply to a text I had sent Tony from the train. He would go to the funeral and wanted to know if I’d go with him. But I simply had too much to do. And anyway, I knew how it would go. There would be John and Tony, some old girlfriends and children to whom Quigley had not spoken in years, perhaps the Hell’s Angels that had shown up many times before at the squats with their harem of women and Harleys. No, I no longer fitted into that world. Even Quigley, in truth, had left it behind and only fell back on it again due to his ill-health and poverty. I had ‘risen above the hoard’ as Quigley used to say, and it had been a very long time indeed since my heart ruled my head.
Outside the bank, I stopped to smooth down the lapels of my jacket and, glancing across the river towards the docks, beheld an unnerving sight: a dark-skinned woman in a black hajib, sitting, slumped, on a suitcase. She was between two far-apart boats being unloaded of large green crates by a crane. Behind her, a pale, dusty wasteland of bulldozed houses, no doubt awaiting some new development. Before her was the river, dark and deep, slowing as it opened out to the sea. She looked out of place, like a figure left behind in an empty bizarre, and I wondered if she had come off one of the boats. In her hands she held kindling, and below her I saw that there was a small black pile of the same, a line of pearl-grey smoke filing from it into the air.

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