The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  Footnotes

  * = Until 1990 in Ireland a female garda/guard was referred to as a ban gharda

  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 across 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 forty years or more. Nowadays he eked out a living teaching in Adult Education and, before I had 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 Goldsmiths scene of the nineties, 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 naive.

  We had been given the keys to view a flat on Portland Road by an agency. Once inside, we had 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 had been 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 soon found ourselves homeless and with nowhere to go. Until a friend suggested the squats where John and Quigley lived in Maida Vale.

  They had met at the Slade. Despite his name, Quigley claimed no Irish heritage, and John’s Irishness was meaningless to him as he had left Limerick at fourteen and had 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. And in the centre of these, from his neck to the base of his spine, was one prodigious poppy-red moth with intricate black markings. Quigley had got the moth 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 when people came to stay we would sometimes let them sleep 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.

  I recall that once 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 card on the table. I thought of how the endless cycle of administering insulin must have bothered a man who had 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 fifty. 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 hijab; 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 art world, than 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 had 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 re
staurant 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 had 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 horde’, as Quigley used to say, and it had been a very long time indeed since my heart had 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 hijab, 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 (though it was unusually quiet, suggesting that the rumours I’d heard of an approaching slump might have some substance). Before the woman 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 bazaar, 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.

  Footnotes

  * = International Financial Services Centre

  The Sanctuary

  She wanted to go into the bedroom but was afraid. She knew what she would do if she could not find him (and of course she would not find him): clamber into the bed, burrow under the thick white duvet and the Foxford throw, there since winter, when they had left, when the pain had so tellingly returned. She would turn on her side, clutch at his side of the sheets, at his pillow, attempt to pull something of his life back. Maybe she’d find a hair or a fragment of skin, something. But she would not go in just yet; she did not want to know, for certain, that he was not inside, sleeping, or reading his book with the lamp on.

  She straightened the six Paolozzis in the hall. She was aided by the small pencil marks he had drawn on the wall around the corners of the brushed-chrome frames. His eye was always so precise, a spirit level. She looked up at the sun-filled skylight he’d built to frame the North Star: dust motes swirled in the long rays. She went into the living room and pulled up the coffee-coloured blinds. He had wanted to redesign the windows so that the glass met in a geometric point; a jetty out to the sanctuary during the day, and to vast black skies and the stars at night. He had wanted to schedule the work for May. She expected it would have been finished by now.

  It was as if they’d just left. A black leather glove lay palm down on the coffee table. She picked it up and put her hand inside, half expecting to find his. There was a sense that the house had been waiting for them to return. For they could just as well have been gone for the afternoon; gone for a stroll down Cotter’s Lane to her father’s like they had done in October. They’d picked blackberries along the Lane then, eaten them as they walked. Even at the time, she remembered, she had not wanted to be here in this borderland wilderness, where, she considered, a life could pass without making a mark, become slight and pathetic like the tiny silver moths that came out at dusk and were dead by morning. She wanted to be in the flat in London, helping him with the Practice, shopping in Marylebone on a Saturday (there was meaning for her in that life), and she simply could not understand his love of this place. It was not picturesque like Kerry, nor fabulous and strange like Connemara. It appealed to him, she decided, partly because it was unlikely. He always saw what others could not, what was hidden in a thing, its numinous potential. Living in this house had softened him, and here she had watched his once uncompromising modernism give in, ever so slightly, to the pastoral.

  In the sanctuary a hare squatted tensely behind a rock. She knew it was a hare by its legs and ears and long hay-brown body. (They had come to know the different species of birds, rodents, plants and flowers; had become alert to bird cries.) The hare halted, watching something intently beyond the rock, and she was reminded of him. Ever since the service she’d noticed how certain things, for no particular reason, brought him to her mind. The pink and red pansies in the flowerbed outside Kensal Green crematorium; the grey-haired stranger’s face on the Edgware Road; words in books and newspapers her eye would randomly fall upon. (‘A characteristic of grieving’ somebody had called it, this revelation in quotidian things; though far from bringing her comfort she found the experience disturbing.) Now, it seemed, even the sanctuary reflected him, as if he, with his magnanimous life force, had returned to nature and was down there influencing its flow, whipping up arcane schemes and intrigues like Prospero.

  The hare moved on under the hedge towards Ramsey’s field. She wanted to warn it, to tap the window and shout: don’t go in there, you’ll get yourself killed.

  She went into the kitchen. All those jars of vitamin pills and miracle cures: dried seaweeds and mushrooms, B17 (a banned vitamin she’d had to buy on the black market), sealed packs of bark from some obscure tree. Cupboards of pills, rows of cancer cookbooks. All that hope and promise of hope: over, over, over. She plunged the books into a black rubbish bag, then gathered the glass jars of beans and pulses – anything that could still be eaten – onto the island. He had built it in November: a solid pine work board atop grille-fronted beech cupboards. Driven, when he shouldn’t have, to B&Q in Newry for the materials and built it himself; a place for her to prepare his coffee enemas, his organic juices, his vitamin cocktails. November. That’s when the pain had come back. That awful pain that she could not truthfully imagine having in her own body. For someone in such a fragile remission, he had done far too much.

  She checked the sell-by dates. Dad might be able to use some of these, she thought, then packed the jars of rice and pulses into the green cloth Superquinn bags.

  He’d come to love her father, had been responsible for her and her father’s truce. (Their move here had brought them into daily contact with him, a familiarity that, over time, had caused her to forget a little her father’s faults; in particular, his drinking.) The old man had been quiet lately up in the house; on his best behaviour. She had decided to stay there with him rather than here, as she didn’t want to be alone.

  Eventually she must go into the bedroom: she needed clothes. When they had left in January, she had not wanted to make a fuss about how long they’d be gone; they’d flown to London with two suitcases, one each, containing no light clothes. But his pain was such, she thought, that he must have known the trip would be for longer. And if so, what was he thinking as he left this house – did he sense he would not be back? Had he come here to die, she wondered? Had that been the point of it all, the hurried relocation, the mad search for a rural idyll? Perhaps he did have such a presentiment; their conversations in the last year had been oddly elliptical, and she had not probed his fears should such talk spoil their fight, for it was always their fight. And so she insisted they take li
ttle: a few warm clothes, shoes. That way he would be bolstered into thinking: this new pain is a small thing, a glitch, and look, she is not preparing for the worst, she believes in me and my ability to conquer this, and soon we will be home. She hoped that in his mind it had gone something like that.

  She went into the utility room and opened the door to the back garden. The high grass almost obscured the garden furniture. All the plants were overgrown and dry. Some had died. She’d have to get the gardens seen to before the estate agent came to view the house; maybe her father would do it if he’d time.

  As she walked down the steps she noticed, on the ground, wrapping around the corner of the house, a trail of yellow rose petals. She turned and looked up at the rose bushes grown tall in her absence. A bird or animal must have caused the petals to fall in this long curve, she thought.

  The trail led towards her own fence, to a small bone with ants marching around it. Pink flesh hung off the marrow. Perhaps it was a hawk or one of the kites, or a ferret that had ruffled the bushes and set down there to eat. She turned around to the trail before her, long and gold, and was suddenly struck. Oh no, no. Not now, not now. The tears, the heaving chest, the throb in the heart. There was no reason rose petals should have had this effect on her. There was nothing about roses that recalled him.

  But she had just glimpsed him. In this lemon-coloured trail, laid, perhaps, to say good morning, how are you today, I am free, I am happy, I am indeed in the next room. She took a deep breath, returned inside and walked resolutely towards the bedroom.

  She entered quickly, looking over at the bed (he was not there, sleeping or reading). She saw head and leg indents, where, she remembered, he had gone for a nap before they had left the house all those months ago. She went to pull up the blind. As light poured into the room, she caught a glint of light refracting off the golden Buddha on the dressing table. From the window she could see the side of the sanctuary, the Cooley hills, Ramsey’s tall trees crowned with crows’ nests, the rocky tufts of Ramsey’s field. Sometimes from this window they had watched men with long guns roam in and out of that field looking for grouse or rabbits. And sometimes, during the day, young hawks would be trained with string around bits of meat. The two fields looked so similar. An uneven gorse hedge with lots of gaps seemed to be the only divide between life in one, and death in the other. (Just how this ramshackle wildlife sanctuary had ended up beside fields where men would come to hunt, members of gun clubs, was an eternal source of conversation for the visitors who came to stay with them.) How they wished they could have erected warning signs for the animals that might wander in the wrong direction.