Céilí Club

A Short story about a Céilí baron running illegal Céilithe in defiance of Covid-19 restrictions.

She has a custom-made sign hanging above the AGA - Hell hath no fury like Ms. Furey! She’d reverted to her maiden name, Furey, after her divorce in 2009, Sliabh View House her prize in the settlement. It’s a big farmhouse, without the farm. A six-bedroom beast of a building built in the 1800s, meticulously restored and modernised in the early noughties, and bought by Ms. Furey and her then husband for a song in late 2008 after the Celtic Tiger went tits up. The intention was to tolerate each other in retirement there and operate a low-key B&B, if for nothing else to have someone to talk to from time to time, but they never welcomed a guest – within four months the would-be innkeepers had finally parted. It was just as well, there wasn’t much to attract guests to the area; barring the faint outline of  Sliabh Cnoc like a hiccup on the horizon, and the somewhat dilapidated cottage next-door, willed to a U.S.-based emigrant nephew of the long-deceased owner, there wasn’t a notable thing to bounce an echo off for miles. Besides, Ms. Furey had no real intention of running a B&B in the back of beyond anyway, it would have seriously conflicted with her céilí schedule which, up until last March and the stranglehold of the Corona virus, was jam-packed.

Ms. Furey left the final three plates of poached salmon and boiled potatoes on the floor outside the master bedroom and knocked twice on the door before retreating five strides, pulling her two-tier teak & melamine vintage serving trolley with her and adjusting her face-mask. The bedroom door opened and the three Grogan sisters appeared, each letting out a ferocious “yahoo” and howls of laughter as Ms. Furey began set-dancing solo in the hallway, joyously lilting a jig. Two of the Grogans began swinging each other around in the room as the other bedroom doors along the hallway opened and expelled applause and cheers of merriment. An enthusiastic “Hon ya boy ya” was shouted up from the bottom of the stairs before Ms. Furey tapped a hush-inducing final step to her dance on the hard-wood floor. “Now, there ye have the last dinner I’ll be cooking ye. Ye’ll be cooking my dinner from here on in!” she yelled before resuming her lively lilt and dance.

Sliabh View House was now hosting seven guests, set-dancing addicted céilí hounds the lot of them.  Along with Ms. Furey, they’d spent the last twenty-odd years scuffing the floors of parish halls the length and breadth of the country at céilithe. There was no céilí too far, the eight of them venturing off together four and five nights a week to far flung corners North, South, East, and West. Age hadn’t slowed them down either - since they’d all retired, they danced more than ever; that is, of course, until the pandemic stuck their feet to the ground. As the weeks of restricted movement slowly dragged on and the novelty quickly turned to tedium, the prospect of not knowing when the next céilí might be was too much to bear for the set-starved eight. Ms. Furey, with her big empty house and an idle garage of dance-hall dimensions, decided there was only one thing for it. “Come to Sliabh Cnoc and isolate here for 14 days, then we’ll live here and dance seven nights a week until the virus dies off or we do!”, read her message in their ‘phone sets’ Whatsapp group.
The group didn’t need a second invitation, the seven of them arrived the next day: the three Grogan sisters, identical twins Cynthia & Hyacinth, and Jacinta two years their junior – spinsters all three; Greg and Monica Mulhall, an adorable married couple who wore matching tracksuits when out walking; Matthew Devine aka ‘Hatchet’, not because he was sharp or dangerous but because his stumpy nose, thin upper lip and underbite meant he resembled a deep-sea hatchet-fish. And, last but not least, Robert ‘The Sloth’ Bourke. Unlike Hatchet, The Sloth didn’t look like his moniker – he was just agonisingly slow in his movement owing to arthritis. Though he would remind one of a sloth when the happy, stoned, wide smile appeared across his face, his eyes narrow and pupils dilated. “Stiff joints for me stiff joints” he’d say, giggling at himself. He was a fiend for the ganja. He’d tell you he wasn’t, but he was. He even cut a 75ml empty Fanta bottle in half and kept the top end, like you might improvise to funnel engine oil, and bore a hole through the bottle cap so he could thread the roach end of a joint through it and screw it back on, all so he could smoke spliffs in the shower - that’s a fiend if ever there was - but a few tokes and he’s buoyant on the dance-floor,  in two three, out two three, ‘round the house and not a bother on him.  He, and his houseplants, were in the down-stairs bedroom, sparing him the climb.
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The salmon dinner marked the final day of their two-week quarantine in their respective bedrooms at Sliabh View House and they celebrated the following evening with a mighty night of set-dancing in the garage. They’d spent the day getting the space ship-shape - they screwed sheets of plywood to a wooden frame to make a sturdy dance-floor with just the right amount of spring to bounce the heels of their set-dancing shoes, a decent sound system that Cynthia Grogan had from her wedding-singing days, and even a tea station complete with Hatchet’s burka boiler and a mini-fridge for the milk. The fluorescent lights hummed until the sun came up as the Kilfenora Céilí Band, Seán Norman and Eddie Lee all nearly melted in the CD player. The eight of them danced like they’d never dance again. They danced the alphabet from the Aran set to the Williamstown set, and relished every step.
 
The word soon spread. Monica Mulhall had let it slip on the phone to her cousin, who everyone but Monica knew to be an insufferable gossip. Ms. Furey was getting calls and texts from set-dancing-famished friends all over Ireland wanting to come to her garage céilithe, and after six weeks of dancing every night with each other, seeing a few more familiar faces wasn’t an unwelcome prospect among the Sliabh View eight. Five new chapters of quarantine houses sprung up within a twenty-mile radius of Sliabh View, each filled with eight dancers from all over the island. Once they’d all isolated in their respective rooms for fourteen days, they were added to the schedule – each house assigned two-hour slots on each day of the week to dance in the garage. It was all based on an honour-system, though each set’s house had an assigned bean an tí who ensured that the five rules established by the original Sliabh View eight were followed:
 
Rule 1. – You do not talk about Céilí club to outsiders.
Rule 2. – You DO NOT talk about Céilí cub to outsiders!
Rule 3. - Once you’ve quarantined for 14 days, you may only interact with your set of eight and those you encounter at Sliabh View House.
Rule 4. - You must restrict your movements to your respective set house and Sliabh View House only.
Rule 5. – If you feel any symptoms of Covid-19, isolate immediately and inform your bean an tí by text and do not attend Céilí club. If someone in your set is suspected of having symptoms, the entire set must not attend Céilí club for a minimum of 14 days.
 
Though they might read as extreme rules, there was no sacrifice too big for the forty-eight members of Céilí Club if it meant they could set dance. The meadow behind the abandoned cottage next door was annexed and mowed for use as a car park as it was well-hidden from the minimal tractor traffic that passed on the road each day. The lawns behind Sliabh View House, also hidden from prying eyes, hosted a marquee and a few tents where people could socialise and recuperate before or after their two-hour dancing slot. Indeed, the mild summer evenings meant that most people stayed-over most nights in the tents, having barbecues and dancing on the lawns to the céilí music booming from the garage. The sloth even cultivated his own little garden patch. It became set-dancers’ paradise in a world where everything beyond Sliabh View House was bleak, uncertain, and confusing.
   
Ms. Furey’s slumber was interrupted one sunny August morning by seven dull thuds. Rising from her bed and peering out her window, she saw a stout man awkwardly handling a short sledge hammer, his tie flapping into his face with the breeze as he pounded a ‘For Sale’ sign into the earth in front of the cottage next-door. “Oh Fuck” she howled, wrestling her dressing gown on as she hurried downstairs. The others were having breakfast together as she barreled down the sixteen steps and raced into the kitchen. “We’re fucked”. The startled seven had never seen her so panicked. “They’re after putting the cottage up for sale”. They all stared in disbelief through the kitchen windows, watching the stout man plod to his car and drive away. No sooner had the sound of the car faded into the distance had Hatchet the sign up and flung into the ditch and an emergency house-meeting was called - if they were to avoid Paradise lost, drastic action was required.
A proposal was sent to each of the other five set houses and was returned with unanimous decision; the forty-eight would purchase the cottage as a céilí club asset. With an asking price of €74,000 listed online, a little over one and a half thousand euros each was a small price to pay to ensure the survival of their secret community. Though it would take some time to draw up agreements between everybody and iron out the details, in the interim the Sliabh View eight committed to preventing the sale to outside parties by whatever means necessary.
For the next few days, only scheduled sets of eight were permitted to visit for their respective slots, travelling in two cars maximum and parking at the rear of Sliabh View House. They took it in turns monitoring the bottom of the boreen from a hideout in the ditch each day. Whenever they’d see the estate agent’s car approaching, the lookout would text an alert to Ms. Furey who then had less than two minutes to call a halt to the dancing and let everyone take cover out of sight from the neighbouring cottage. Because of social-distancing requirements, and the relatively small and pokey interior of the cottage, the estate agent always met the potential buyers at the front, showed them around the outside of the dwelling before entering and, after a few minutes, leave them to look around while he sits in his car. Invariably, the would-be buyers appear out the backdoor of the cottage and it is at this point that Ms. Furey can get their attention from over her fence, unseen by the estate agent.

“I see they like ye” called Ms. Furey to the first couple who came to view the cottage. “Hello there, what’s that?” they responded as they approached the fence. “I say, I see they like ye” repeated Ms. Furey, “the fairies. Did the estate agent not tell ye? Ah shur I suppose he wouldn’t. There was a Hawthorne tree there for centuries”, continued Ms. Furey, gesturing to the top of the meadow, “ a fairy tree, and yer man living here cut it down and that was that, fairies cursed him – he dropped dead the very next evenin’, and sure enough five more people have dropped dead at that very doorstep over the years since. Naer a postman nor milkman dared go in past the gate. Ah, probably all just coincidence, but ye’re still standing anyway so, if they do exist, they must like ye.”
The next day saw a woman and her Jack Russell arrive for a viewing. “Ah hello there”, hollered Ms. Furey, “that’s a lovely dog ya have. Ya’ll keep him in a night though if ya move in, won’t ya? Tis just young Neville up the road there has a bit of an appetite for them”. “Appetite?” quizzed the worried-looking lady, picking her terrier up in her arms. “Aye, ah he was found to have two dogs in the freezer above, skinned and all and chopped up, he said they were two strays he shot cos they were out chasing his sheep and he only kept them to feed to the pigs, but sure pigs’d eat the hair and all, no need to skin them. He was in Cambodia a few years back, and shur ya know yerself they eat all sorts over them parts, I’d say he developed a taste for the local delicacies”.
Later in the day, a couple of fellas arrived – a bright “Cooee” from Ms. Furey brought them over to the fence. “Well, what d’ye think, lovely little cottage isn’t she?” she questioned. “Oh yes, we see lots of potential” responded the lads enthusiastically. “Oh good”, replied Ms. Furey, “the boys will be disappointed, but they’ll find somewhere else I’m sure”. “The boys?” asked the young men. “Ah, the local ‘RA heads’”, said Ms. Furey using finger quotes, “they use it as their ‘secret meeting’ house”, she continued, again with finger quotes, “ah they’re harmless, god-love them, they mostly just drink a few tins and sing auld ballads, though I always thought their tribute to the Maze prisoners' protest every May is a bit much, too literal, though in fairness to them they always do a great clean up after themselves, always painted the walls fresh after, but the smell used to linger, especially if tws a hot May like, I won’t miss that anyway” she chuckled.
 
The next day saw three viewings. The first, a retired couple from Yorkshire. Ms. Furey and Hyacinth Grogan approached the fence completely naked – “Oh yes, we’re nudists. Would you be into the nudism yourselves?” Asked Ms. Furey, the couple’s mouths agape. “Tis more than the saggy cottage roof needs a little lift, wha?” called out Hyacinth as she swung her knockers from side to side, a bit of improv the two women couldn’t help celebrating with laughter, breaking character as the couple turned on their heels and disappeared back into the cottage.
The second viewing of the day saw a young pregnant couple arrive. The sloth, completely naked and smeared head to toe in Nutella, greeted them at the backdoor, grunting, before Ms. Furey came to take him away – “George, you’re okay, I’ll take you home”, she announced, taking him by his hazelnut coca hand. “Sorry, he used to live here, he suffers with his nerves, he turns up here sometimes like this, I’ll get him home”.
There was still a good amount of Nutella left in the 1KG jar so, for the third viewing of the day, Ms. Furey concealed it in an empty bucket of brown house paint and stood by her fence with a thousand-yard stare on her, eating the Nutella using a paint brush as a spoon. The two ladies viewing the cottage retreated in the backdoor as quickly as they had appeared out of it.
Late that night, Jacinta Grogan and Greg & Monica Mulhall went two fields over and herded cattle down into the cottage garden. The next morning, a young couple and the estate agent were greeted by nine Charolais cattle and a cow-shite-covered lawn.
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While all this had been going on, a contract of agreement had been drawn up between the forty-eight, funds had been transferred to Ms. Furey’s account and she put in an offer meeting the asking price on the property she had spent days making most unappealing. As she answered her phone in the kitchen, the faithful seven went quiet. The conversation was minimal on Ms. Furey’s part – “Hello. Yes, this is she. Ah I see, alright well thanks for the call”. She looked heartbroken as she hung up the phone and hung her head, not making eye contact with anyone. “Will someone send a message to the other houses please?….tell them they needn’t come for their scheduled slots today…”, she paused as she stood up from her seat, hunched and heavy and dejected, the seven gathering closer around her, “…..tell them all to get over here right now cos we’re dancing drunk tonight, boys and girls!” The seven erupted in howls and hollers, reaching their hands in under Ms. Furey’s arms and lifting her up onto the kitchen table where she tapped out her dance steps while the others swung each other around gleefully. “Here’s to the Céilí Queen of Ireland”, shouted Hatchet as he shook a bottle of Prosecco and sent the cork towards the ceiling, showering the dancing family in fizz, “may she live long and die dancing!”.
 

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