When the Lights Come on Again by Maggie Craig

the pot. Haven’t we, Finn, my lad?’ He scratched the dog’s ear, laughing at the soft growl of pleasure the caress provoked.
    ‘What kind of a dog is he?’
    ‘An Irish wolfhound,’ said Finn’s master. ‘Do you have a dog, Liz?’ He gave the animal a final pat and looked up at her. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Liz, do you?’
    She didn’t mind at all. She wished she could return the compliment, but she was still having some difficulty in sorting out Helen’s brothers. She’d worked out that the older ones were called Danny, Joe and Conor, but she couldn’t have said which one of them she was talking to at the moment. Pity she couldn’t have a quiet word with the dog.
    While the whole of Helen’s family seemed disposed to like Liz, Finn’s master had taken a real shine to her. She was pretty sure she knew why. A gate-leg table, pushed back against one wall to make room for all the people in the room, held a generous array of home baking. Alerted for some reason, Liz had turned round a little while ago and seen the big dog, his head on a level with the table, quietly slipping first one and then a second piece of gingerbread into his wide mouth.
    Having swallowed the goodies and licked his lips once or twice, the dog had moved over to join his master, a look of complete innocence on his wise grey face. Liz had smiled in admiration and kept her own mouth firmly shut. Observing both the snaffling of the cakes and the visitor’s reaction to it, his master had spoken out of the side of his mouth to her.
    ‘He’s smart enough not to take too many, you see, Liz. He knows how to get away with it.’
    Liz tried not to frown as she continued to wonder which brother she was talking to at the moment. He was using her name frequently, but she was scared to respond in kind in case she got it wrong.
    Dominic, the youngest member of the family, was easy enough to identify, but the older brothers were more difficult. They were tall, broad-shouldered young men, big and burly like their father, Brendan. Like him, they were all red-haired too.
    Helen had obviously inherited her golden hair from her mother, Marie, a small woman whose husband and. children towered over her. Her personality, however, more than made up for her lack of stature. There was absolutely no doubt about who ruled the roost in the Gallagher household.
    The Gallaghers could not only all talk the hind legs off a donkey - they had clearly all kissed the Blarney Stone at an early age - they were musical as well. Not long after Liz had arrived this afternoon, Brendan Gallagher had brought out a penny whistle and started playing it. His children had then produced from various places in the cramped flat an assortment of musical instruments - an accordion, a fiddle, a bodhran drum - and an impromptu ceilidh had started up.
    Everybody sang along with all the songs, but they also had their own particular party pieces. Helen sang a haunting song called She Moved Through the Fair . It should really have been sung by a man, lost in admiration of his sweetheart, but she did it so beautifully that that didn’t matter.
    She stepped away from me
    And she moved through the fair,
    And fondly I watched her,
    Move here and move there...
    Clapping along to the music of a livelier song, Liz caught Helen’s eye. ‘Don’t the neighbours mind the noise?’
    Brendan Gallagher, leaning back in a rocking chair by the range, gave Liz a lazy smile and a wink.
    ‘We invite them along,’ he said in his warm Donegal brogue. ‘Then we soften ‘em up with some of Marie’s home baking. Don’t we, me lovely girl?’
    He laughed and gave his wife a playful smack on the bottom; at which point she laughed and told him he was a daft Irish fool. Liz tried to imagine her own parents acting in the same way. Her normally vivid imagination failed her on that one.
    Crammed into their two rooms as they were, the Gallaghers played host to a bewildering number of visiting neighbours and