The Drop Outs by Áine Greaney - A Fish short stories contest finalist

The Drop Outs

Áine Greaney

“She’s bound to put on condition,” Father says nodding toward me. It’s the same thing he says of his bullocks, suck calves, his year-old heifers.
I’ve been summoned up to the sitting room for another school uniform fitting – seams let out, tucks undone, hems taken up. The straight pins clasped between her teeth, Auntie Miriam turns me this way and that, then herds me toward the front window for the better light.
Draped across the sitting room armchairs are the cut-out school blouses – pale beige, a white for Sundays. And there have been trips to town for cardigans in a shade that the boarding school nuns have specified via a letter to the house.
“And better too long than too short,” Father adds. He is leaning against the door jamb. Never allowed across the sitting room shag-pile carpet in his work boots. A whiff of cow dung, yes, and the milky smell of young calves. He is a cattle dealer, a man of means in our village. And Auntie Miriam is not an aunt really, but my dead mother’s first cousin.
Even in this modern age, she cycles from a neighboring village to keep house for us, to do bookkeeping for Father’s business. Arrives on the dot each morning to dole out our Rice Crispies, then scoops my hair up into pony tails for sixth class in the village school. Little cock of the walk, she calls me, laughing.
Already by this age (I am eleven), I know that Miriam’s own convent education was interrupted by tuberculosis, but she’s a dinger for the shorthand, the bookkeeping and typing, and that once, a long time ago, she was let down by a man, a commercial traveler.
So there it is, this scene – an April sun through the net-curtained window, shadows along the embossed wallpaper, the sideboard, china cabinet, matching settee and armchairs. On the good table, Auntie Miriam’s Singer sewing machine black and shiny.
Darling, I’m sure you’re saying. Precious. No place like a west of Ireland village.
In a later decade, town, country, it would stand in my own mind not as a scene or snapshot, but as a prelude to what would follow, the antechamber before the burial grounds.
I should tell you that it’s the 1970s. Ireland has joined the European Union, Gary Glitter has strutted across our telly screens, and our village evenings have been enlivened by TV shows like “The Brady Bunch” and “Here’s Lucy”.
An hour later, after my dinner – probably one of Miriam’s stews or casseroles – she returns to her sewing, Father to the yard, and I to my school lessons at the Formica table in the inside kitchen. The clack, clack, clack of her Singer machine fills the house.

She comes holding an empty bobbin. Navy-blue thread she’d bought in the town all gone already. Black, she says. Will have to do. And of course, God forbid would the shop at the end of our village street ever stock the likes of colored thread. White blackbirds. Pigs might fly.
I am dispatched then, as I am most evenings, to the smaller of our two village shops for a reel of black machine thread plus treats for our evening supper. The usual warnings: Take care would they take advantage of a child. Don’t let those wretches pawn off their day-old bread, their Castlebar sausages already soured.
So there I am, a pound note, a fiver sweating in my hand. A girlish canter down the village. Hardly a village at all, but a stripe of tarmacadamed road with eight houses one side, six the other, privet hedges, garden gates and net curtains, a renovated church, a post-office, a presbytery. At the end, two shops: one with whitewashed walls and red windows that tourists sometimes stop to photograph, and next to it, a garish, 1970s-style shop-lounge-petrol-pumps outfit.
This establishment is run by two spinster sisters, one fatter and bigger chested than the other, both of varying moods depending on the day or the caliber of customers sitting along the bar. Both are chain smokers, both known parish-wide for a dry, disarming wit.
When the door clicks open, it’s shop to the right; pub to the left.
There’s a breath-stopping stench, a smell more fetid than anything before. And there, on the red, vinyl seats under the pub dart boards are five strange men with their two dogs stretched asleep at their feet.
I peer at them: pony tails, long hair, beards, and one with a bandana around his neck like a sailor. All wearing big, laced up boots. Not farmer’s work boots like Father’s, but needless, hippy things. The dogs have rangy, mottled coats that reek like their human owners.
The men are smoking thick, weedy cigarettes, drinking pints of stout, and such talk! Posh English tones, loud laughter – their own, impromptu party on a weekday afternoon in a small pub at the end of a dreary little village.
The shop woman thumps around behind the grocery counter, reaches to a yellowed, smoky display card for the reel of thread. She weighs some early, overpriced, tomatoes, then crosses to a high shelf for a sliced pan of bread in the red waxed paper. Cagily, she notes the exact ounceage, prices, then tots it all up on the back of a paper sweet bag.
I know now that I am somehow implicated in the sudden mayhem of her afternoon, her premises invaded by bearded, hairy men with ludicrous accents, too much drink and dogs.

Back up at the house, do I relay what I’ve seen and heard?
First, inside the back door there is the usual inspection for possible hoodwinking, accuracy of pricing, poundage, freshness of bread, but after that? Do I tell Auntie about these men that I have seen drinking at the bottom of the village?
Certainly not. Come now, think back on your own childhoods, especially around this age, weren’t there things so lascivious that they were for holding onto, not divulging, for hoarding as guilty, delicious secrets?

By the end of that week, here comes the news. Three, four village women whom Miriam deems discreet enough not to carry stories from our house. They arrive for the nightly chat, the clink of teacups and sherry glasses around the range in our front kitchen. Nine, ten o’ clock before one of them will glance at the electric wall clock, bid the others for the love and honor of Jesus would ye look at the hour of the night it is already; sure, time and past time to be making tracks.
In truth, it is not the kitchen clock but Father’s imminent return that is the women’s curfew. I have watched how they bristle at the sounds of his homecoming: his car in the back yard, the slap of the back door, his step across the back kitchen tiles. And there they are, shuffling with coats and scarves, helping Miriam with the dirty cups and sherry glasses. Sudden smiles and sweet talk for a widower who, they say, is forever “at it”.
At it, I know, means making money, being what they call all biz.
Drop-outs, that’s what these people with the long hair and smelly flesh are called. And it’s not just men like I saw in the pub, but women in flowing skirts and bare feet, goats go leor, dogs, and more children than anyone can count. They have arrived in horse-drawn caravans, camped at the opposite end of our parish near the lake, brazenly squatting in some commonage with their vans and caravans.
Drop-outs. The word comes and stays. Wafts over fields, stone walls, sheep cocks of hay, water barrels, and calf sheds. Down the road it goes, gathering like a dust storm, off into the town and the cattle mart to which, each Thursday, Father sets off before daybreak. It billows through pubs, a supermarket, a butcher’s, the drapery, a creamery. And back again to its rightful place – our two village shops, Mass, devotions, funerals in the church and then home to kitchen and parlour.
On the tail wind come the stories, dead-cert information, heard it for a fact within in such and such a shop or hairdressers within in the town.
These unkempt men and women with the uppity accents have dropped out of life over there in England. Oh, and look at what they have forsaken, dropped out from! Doctors’ sons and daughters, mark you, English university professors, these youngsters themselves with degree up on top of degree, boarding schools, silver spoons, semi-detacheds with shag carpets.
And their women – oh, whisper it in front of the child – not wives at all, but living as if they were.
One of our visiting women explains about the body smell. Part of their religion, she says, not that it can be called that, but a rite of membership, that they never wash. Not even the wash-cloth, the splash of water above on the face, a tinker’s bath. Not a drop since they left their semi-detached bathrooms, a leafy English suburb to take a boat to Ireland with their entourage of animals and children.
New reports arrive, sightings in other pubs – these men drinking and smoking their strange-smelling cigarettes.
As the weeks wear on it nettles me, the suppositions around the kitchen range at night, the stories Auntie Miriam relays to Father over his morning tea. Whispered as if our emulsioned walls and faux wood paneling have ears. Scandalous tidbits and theories are trotted out because, it is agreed, surely anything is possible?
Upstairs, in my front bedroom that looks out on our village street, I rehearse the day, the hour, when Father will have a trailer of calves to deliver back by the lake. Jauntily, he’ll invite me and Miriam to sit in for the spin. Just for the bit gas, he’ll say. And anyways, sure what would it cost us? Surely we’d like to see for ourselves?
Nonchalantly I’ll bring a cushion from the kitchen armchair to put under me in the car that reeks of livestock. Act cool and groovy as if it’s all the same to me whether I see these mad drop-outs or not.
For amidst all these news and theories, amn’t I the only one who’s actually seen and smelled them? Yes, here at last I’m keeping something from them, as they so often have from me: the burr of women’s talk after I’ve been hunted up to bed, the rise and fall of the voices through the ceiling. And about what? Men, babies, having babies, men who let girls with tuberculosis down. All of it happens without me.
As the weeks wear on it writhes within me, this amorphous, sexual world of men and women who aren’t husbands and wives, with children not young Murphy or Walsh or Moran, but nesting in their colored caravans … doing what? Around the range, there are knowing glances, words on an indrawn breath. Tantalize but do not tell.
One night, another publican has to call the guards to get these reeking men and their dogs off his licensed premises.
One afternoon, a horde of their long-skirted women band together, a streel of vile language, back cheek and lip to a lakeside farmer who for years, has had right of way through this commonage where they’re squatting.

Oh! It just galls her, Auntie Miriam says. Now, just look at my poor father driving pel-mel to cattle marts, creameries, waiting for men to wheel in our back yard to haggle, curse, wheedle for cattle bargains. Every bit of it to ensure that me and my likes would never be diddled out of an education and a government pension. And comforts! Mod cons, gas cookers, wash ’n wear polyester trouser suits – comforts that these English maistíns have turned their backs on. Monkeys, she says. Nothing but spoiled monkeys.

The doctor in the town is summoned for a child who, they say, has eaten a poisonous root, a weed from a field. It is the self-same doctor who has come to our house, my upstairs bedroom for years – tonsillitis, ear infections, prescriptions for Miriam’s elastic stockings.
And he is to be pitied, poor man, for surely such a house-call compromises him between what he knows to be proper living, and what awaits him inside those caravans?
The child dies.
The story comes with a nod of the head, a slug of sherry, but without the keening pity of our own, parish deaths. For isn’t this what happens to the untamed who will roam like deer into hazel rocks, down bóithríns or back roads to forbidden places?
No funeral, of course, no black diamonds on men’s overcoats, no sympathizers or high Mass, for really now, what would these people know of incense or Extreme Unction?

The next story comes at one of Father’s card parties.
It is May already, my school uniforms finished, pressed and waiting for September. A Friday night and through our front door come men from the village, from outside the town, from back the far side. They are Father’s sudden friends. Some I’ve seen before, coming to our back door to spit on hands to seal a cattle bargain, root in trouser pockets for twenty-pound notes. They have fresh drink on their breaths, wear Sunday shoes, and sports coats. Old Spice vies with cow dung.
In the sitting room, the Singer sewing machine has been stowed away. The settee is pulled back, the good table pulled out. Father presides over whiskey bottles, cut-glass tumblers from the china cabinet. In the back kitchen the electric kettle is kept on the boil for hot punch. Miriam is all biz with sandwiches, Coleman’s mustard and fruit cakes.
Almost time. She smiles at me conspiratorially. Disappears into the pantry where we keep wellingtons and winter coats.
“The blue or the floral?” Up and down the floor she models her new blouses: a cerise floral with a butterfly collar just like one Marcia Brady once wore. Then a turquoise, gypsy style with leg o’ mutton sleeves. Both of them I’ve seen pinned, draped over armchairs and the Singer machine.
“Floral,” I say, clapping my hands and squealing at the thrill of this grown-up night. “Deffo floral.”

With the big pot of tea, she leads the way up through the front hall. I follow with the sandwich tray.
The sitting room seethes with something secret.
In the fireplace, flames lick up over the turf sods, the light glints off the mirrors and the windows. Father’s eyes are bloodshot and titillating with whatever it is we girls have walked in on. At the top of the table, a man with a florid face slaps down a card.
Feeding the children on the goats, this man says. Seen it with my own two eyes, so I did. Horse’s mouth. Twice the size of a normal child, and why wouldn’t they be?
With the sandwich trays I go from man to man around the table.
Oh, a proper little Miss, they tell Father about me. A cailín bán. Dead spit of her mother, God rest. Briseann an dúchas tré shúile … Nature, breeding will always break through.
A catín, one man tells me. A grand catín at home under the range. Wouldn’t I like to come some day and see his catín?
The man with the florid face winks at Miriam. “That’s a gorgeous frock, Miriam,” he says, munching on a ham sandwich.
“It’s a blouse,” she says with a high, screeching laugh that I’ve never heard before.
Do I see it then in their faces? The purse and smack of their lips?
In the years to come, I would know it. I would think of this night – the pitch of their shoulders, the glitter of the eyes, and know that these men had concocted excuses to drive, to cycle past the lake. They have peered, ogled at these foreign, drop-out women, who even in broad daylight, will duck through caravan doors to pleasure their men.
And afterward, leaning over cattle crushes or stone walls, chewing on wisps of grass or cigarettes, they have hoarded or swapped visions of these women and their suckling children.

A fortnight after this party, it is agreed that something must be done. When publicans are referred to now (including the spinster pub sisters, for there has been another invasion of these men and their dogs) it is with “poor” before their name: Poor so-and-so had to ring the guards on them again the other night.
Do I sense, know it during those final days? No. Another secret they have kept from me, whispered about around the range.

It is a Saturday night, late May. And here they come, just up past the thatched pub – a few garda síochána first – one, then two police cars, elbows resting out the windows, headlights in the twilight.
There I am ironing inside the front kitchen window on the big Formica table around which we have sat, eaten stews and sausages, ironed clothes for years and years.
Three months from now, I will leave this house. Father will scrub the car for the journey to the boarding school, where he will drink tea and eat buns and proffer a cheque book to assure the nuns with their pale, wimpled faces that money is no object. And that I – a cattle dealer’s daughter – am to be treated as well as the next. But on this night, at this age, three months is an abstraction.
Where are the others? Auntie Miriam is in her armchair to the left of the range rustling the Connaught Telegraph and waiting for “The Late Late Show” to come on telly. And Father? A Saturday night hair washing or using the last of the twilight to paint a gate or mend a cattle crush.

I go with the others to the front garden gate.
Here they are, the procession of horses, caravans, ponies, goats, women and children. The men sit up top driving. The goats trot daintily alongside, women and children in their long skirts and unkempt hair staring ahead into the night. One child holds a pony’s bridle; another clutches her mother’s hand. From the gate I angle for a better view. Oh, I have been dying to see these children and their gigantic limbs, their huge, milk-supped faces.
But here they are at the village presbytery now, and they are just children, some my own age, their faces grey in the street lights.
They will not look at us: at our men with their arms folded and ready should the guards need help, nor at our village women with plastic hair curlers under headscarves.
Nothing but a jingle of goat harnesses, the women’s booted steps.

It is late night, and Father has dropped Auntie Miriam and her bicycle home. In my upstairs bedroom I lie awake.
They will come back, I am sure of it.
Their doleful procession through the village was only a ruse. And now the drop-outs have bamboozled the guards, us all, by nodding, saying in their posh accents, “Yes, of course, we will depart from here; never bother, never camp in your territory again.”
But see! There they are dallying down a bóithrín, in a farmyard, watching for the dip of the moon to double back, to descend upon us in the dead of night.
Cover my head with the wool blankets. Pray. Decades of the rosary, the Memorara. Oh, most gracious Virgin Mary. Beseech saint after saint to banish forever this jingle of goats, the women’s steps along a road.

I tiptoe across the landing. Stand outside his door. Listen, count his loud snores. Just this time, shouldn’t I turn the knob and go in? For surely this galloping terror is as urgent as an earache or a tonsillitis?

Years later, in another town and country, I would visit this past upon the present, the present upon the past.
Oh! I would theorize, lay down the law: the hunted shall turn and be the hunter. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. We commend the poisoned chalice to our own lips.
But on this night, my feet grow stiff and cold on the landing linoleum.
For what, after all, is there to say?
Father, I am frightened of things past and passing.

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