Kathleen is just a word we’ll never settle

When Kathleen came home my father died.

When Kathleen took off her clothes at the wake I saw, for the very first time, the whole of the island of Ireland.

Conversations about Kathleen.

Kathleen staring in an oily puddle in a bog, comparing herself to money; notes and coins: weight, texture, shape, mobility and so on. As well as that, she forgets things, and the names of things. Whatever is not tied on to her she forgets. For months now, I have been calling my mortgage Kathleen.

As for the harp, most of the time Kathleen has no one to carry it. It must stay in the house of the nobles she plays for when broke and dejected.

At a party in Doolin, where Kathleen floats around, a change to the ukulele is suggested.

Kathleen tells lies all night at the party but everyone believes her. “It’s your face,” said the Donegal actor under the yew, walking her home through the graveyard at dawn. Everyone enchanted just nods.

Kathleen remembers the nod of the enchanted the next time she sees it.

Kathleen reels in a flash-bellied trout on a Monaghan lake the colour of greased tin. The aluminium rain passes through her. Neutrinos in billions pass through her.

Kathleen has a crush on the North.

Kathleen’s perched on the wall of an Urlingford garage eating half of a sausage, the other half she gave to an Urlingford crow that sat down beside her.

Kathleen scavenges. She finds Zola in the bin. She boils dandelions. She knows where to harvest periwinkles in the winter months; she knows how to prepare them and eat them without poisoning herself. She has kept more than herself alive with this knowledge.

She tries hitching to Derry but by Longford she’s wrecked and so she breaks into a derelict hotel to sleep it off in a four-poster crawling with ants she doesn’t heed. The next morning her head is at her so she traipses towards Mass for the noise and the company. A man in black tweed in the doorway gives her a cigarette. “It’s a funeral of a suicide,” he says. “D’ya fancy a pint?” Kathleen is not too sure of herself here.

Kathleen put ten thousand into the post office in Dundalk but came back in a ski-mask and with her cousin’s first sawn-off an hour later to rob it all back.

Kathleen paints landscapes with pylons and hawks, but others don’t see them like that.

Kathleen keeps a rained-on mattress in the woods surrounded by empty wine bottles. The next time she attends at the nobles’ house she gifts them a black and white photograph of this, which they frame and hang in the music room, in view of the harp.

Kathleen knows that her life is a kind of antique that will be paused over and traded for centuries hence.

Kathleen plays harp as if her fingers are dreaming a new, beautiful world into being. In a lapse between melodies, while the dreaming lingers, she tells a story about an Irish monk a thousand years ago who trusted completely in God. The monk set himself adrift into the Atlantic on a small rowing boat without a map or provisions or any idea of a destination. He wished only to end up wherever God mysteriously chose to direct him and to build there a church of bare stone in which to worship in fervid solitude for the rest of his days. Nobody knows, or at least nobody says, if the monk ended up in America or Iceland or Madagascar, or at the bottom of the sea. Nobody knows if he kept his covenant to God or if he gave in to the devil on the battering waves, promising his soul in return as long as the devil saved him from drowning. Nobody knows if he was back where he set out the next morning and quit his vows in dismay, or if he came back fifty years later without aging a day, speaking Old Flemish and Maths, a fearsome, inscrutable changeling.

Any one of thousands of outlying ruins could be his. “Was not the sea at the time full of such monks on the drift, common as mackerel in those crazy-visioned days?” said a member of the audience. “About that I don’t know a thing,” said Kathleen. “But I do know that I too am a drifter by faith, trusting in the unknown holiness that lies ahead of us, just beyond our reach.”

Kathleen feels pity for the peasantry of Europe in the fourteenth century. She sees them in her head at night, alone in their fields and their hovels, at war with all nature, all the animals and man.

When the soldiers come to the village scouting for conscripts, Kathleen dresses up her uncles as her aunties and they nearly get away with it. Her aunties have already been taken away and discarded by soldiers from one of the other sides in the war. Kathleen tells the soldiers on the way to the base that we can only survive by pretending. She says we must try to do what the dead would do in our places, if they could ever come back. We must behave as if the dead are watching and waiting to receive us or else we are lost. “It all comes down in the end to the dead,” says Kathleen. “Are they coming or going? Are they present or absent?”

Kathleen on the boat with hundreds of others, cast off with no destination.

Kathleen pressed in a throng behind a wire fence with her stumps stretched through it. The people on behalf of the angels are giving her presents of chocolate and soap. Her eyes are still beautiful. Her white little teeth are beautiful and sad.Test Layout