Eight
‘The thing is,’ said the extremely large young man with the extremely large dog, ‘we go everywhere together.’ He stretched down and patted the huge grey beast which lay at his feet. ‘My faithful companion on the hill. He and I have brought home a good few rabbits for 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 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 again, she thought, taking a sip of tea, wasn’t his print of King Billy crossing the Boyne his own version of a religious idol?
Liz liked the picture the Gallaghers had of Jesus. He looked so kind, His eyes beautifully gentle. He had a lantern in His hand and He was knocking at a solid old door in a deep and dark forest.
‘The door to our hearts,’ Helen’s mother told Liz, seeing her studying it. ‘All we have to do is let Him in.’ Then she crossed herself.
They were obviously a very devout family but they seemed to have no objections to Helen having a Protestant friend or, judging from what Conor had said, to one of their sons being an atheist. Remarkable, thought Liz, lifting her teacup to her lips.
The next thing she knew, Helen’s mother had appeared out of nowhere, fetching Conor a wallop on the back of his coppery head. Finn growled, opened one eye, saw who was attacking his master - and stayed where he was on the floor. The big animal had obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Liz didn’t blame him one little bit.
‘An atheist, is it?’ cried Marie. ‘And your brother going in for the priesthood? I ought to wash your mouth out with soap, Conor Gallagher!’
‘Ma,’ protested her large son, putting his hand to the back of his head and doing a fair imitation of a man who’d been mortally wounded. ‘Please!’
Liz took another sip of tea, the better to hide her amusement. Conor’s hair was very thick. His mother’s hand was very small. However, he was obliging enough to pretend to be suffering.
‘Ears like a hare,’ he observed ruefully to Liz. ‘Much better, in fact. I don’t know how she does it, but she always manages to hear the things you don’t want her to. If what Finn and I go after had hearing like that, we’d never catch a bloody thing.’
That earned him another smack.
‘Mind your language,’ said his mother. ‘There’s ladies present - in case you hadn’t noticed. As to how I manage to hear you - our Lord Himself helps me,’ she went on primly. ‘That’s how. Otherwise how would I keep you lot in order?’
She turned with a smile to Liz. ‘Will you have another piece of gingerbread, Miss MacMillan?’
“Thank you,’ said Liz. Then, a little shyly: ‘And please call me Liz, Mrs Gallagher.’
‘So are your parents not like that, Liz?’ asked Helen when she saw Liz downstairs and out on to the street.
‘That,’ said Liz, ‘might very well be the understatement of the century. By the way, do you have another brother?’
Helen looked blank. ‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘Well, your ma said something about one of them going in for the priesthood. I thought maybe he was away studying somewhere.’
‘Oh,’ said Helen, realization dawning. ‘She thinks Dom’s going to become a priest.’
‘And he doesn’t?’
‘Not unless he can travel about his parish in a spaceship,’ laughed Helen. ‘He’s daft about Flash Gordon at the moment.’
‘Well,’ said Liz comfortably, ‘I’m quite fond of old Flash myself.’
Helen smiled. ‘It’s either that or steam locomotives. You know this one called the Mallard that’s just broken some speed record? Last week, in fact?’
Liz was forced to admit that she didn’t.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Helen easily. ‘I only know because Dominic’s so interested in it’ She ticked the relevant points off on her slim fingers. ‘She was designed by a man called Nigel Gresley - chief engineer for the London and North Eastern Railway, and one of Dom’s heroes - she achieved a speed of a hundred and twenty-six miles per hour and she’s built to a streamlined design.’
‘I don’t even know what that means,’ cried Liz in mock despair.
‘Neither do I, really,’ admitted Helen. ‘Although Dom does try to explain it to me. Quite frequently.’
Liz grinned.