When the Lights Come on Again by Maggie Craig Page A

friends. Several had come and gone since Liz’s own arrival an hour or so before; friends of both the parents and the children, girlfriends of the older boys. Names and banter and jokes were tossed about the room faster than Liz could keep up. That was part of her problem with the boys’ names.
    Her eyes came back to the big grey dog. She was fascinated by the size of him.
    ‘We hide him from the factor, of course, Liz,’ said Finn’s master. ‘I’m not sure if you’re allowed to keep animals here at all - certainly not giants like him.’
    ‘So how do you exercise him?’ asked Liz, glancing up to see Helen approaching her with a cup of tea. Her friend winked.
    ‘The two of them tend to go out after dark. We never ask Conor where the rabbits come from. Some of them taste remarkably like chicken, too, as a few people round these parts could tell you. Particularly a few farmers up Duntocher way, I should imagine. And Finn can’t tell us anything. Can you, my darling boy?’
    She slipped off one shoe, balanced herself with the back of her hand on Liz’s chair and rubbed the dog’s chest gently with her stocking-soled foot. Finn rolled over on to his shaggy grey back, the better to receive the petting, a look of sublime pleasure in his big dark eyes.
    Conor. Right. Conor’s the one with the big dog.
    ‘Does going out at night not make you too tired for your work the next day, Conor?’ It was a relief to be able to use his name at last.
    ‘Och, I’m not working at the moment,’ said Conor, leaning back and putting one ankle up on the opposite knee. He gave Liz a wry look. ‘Sometimes having a name like Gallagher isn’t very helpful in that direction.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, uncomfortably aware of the truth of what he was saying and remembering also her own initial reaction to Helen’s surname.
    ‘Finn and I do all right,’ Conor said easily, ‘and I’ve no great wish to be a wage slave anyway. You see, Liz, the thing is’ - he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his chair, the better to impress the point upon her - ‘I’m an anarchist anyway - and an atheist,’ he added for good measure.
    ‘Oh,’ said Liz gravely, sipping her tea and keeping one wary eye on Finn. If the wolfhound decided to stand up he might well knock the cup and saucer out of her hand without meaning to. She smiled at Conor. ‘You must meet my brother. He’s a communist and an atheist.’
    ‘Sure, it would be a pleasure and a privilege, Liz.’
    What a family. The boys and Helen sounded as Clydebank as herself, but there was something different about the way they used words. In the case of the parents, it was all served up in that rich Irish accent. Helen’s father was from Donegal, her mother from Cork. They argued all the time, so Helen had told her, about where they were going back to in Ireland once their children were grown up.
    She’d observed for herself that Helen’s parents argued with each other about almost everything, but unlike her own mother, Mrs Gallagher gave back as good as she got. And there was affection underlying the fighting - it was all part of the general family banter. Liz couldn’t figure it out at all, but she knew that she liked it.
    She glanced round, taking in the telltale stains of dampness where the walls of the room met the ceiling. That’s what you got for building flat-roofed houses on a wet Scottish hillside. It was a perennial problem in the Holy City houses.
    Despite the damp, the room was immaculately kept, dotted with earthenware pots of flowering bulbs which Helen had told Liz she had grown, germinating them under her parents’ bed over the winter. The walls of the room were covered with religious pictures. There was the Pope, whom they referred to as the Holy Father, and the Virgin Mary in a blue cloak. There was a wee statuette of her on the high mantelpiece over the range too. Liz’s father would have been horrified by what he would have called idolatry. Then