Garnethill

Jim Maliano watched from the living-room doorway as the motley crowd walked down the dark hall. When Maureen came past him he reached out and squeezed her shoulder gently. His small gesture of empathy touched Maureen unreasonably and she vowed not to forget it.

The rest of it was a bit of a blur. She remembered Wi

It was just round the corner from her house but Maureen hadn't paid much attention to it before. The three-story concrete building sat on the edge of an industrial estate and was fronted with reflective glass. It looked more like an office block than a police station. They drove round to the back and pulled into a small car park. It was surrounded by a high wall topped with spiraled razor wire. Looking up at the back of the building from the car park, she could see small, mean, barred windows.

The red-haired man helped her out of the car, holding on to her elbow longer than he need have. She must look a bit wobbly. "Now, don't you worry," he said. "That's the worst bit over. We're only going to talk to you."

But Maureen wasn't thinking about that. She just wanted to see Liam.

Chapter 3

Maureen was the youngest of the four of them. They all bore a striking family resemblance: dark brown hair, square jaws and fat button noses. Their build was the same too: they were all short and thin. When they were children, people often mistook Liam and Maureen for twins: they had been born ten months apart, both had pale blue eyes and they spent so much time together they adopted all of the same ma

Marie was the eldest. She moved to London in the early eighties to get away from her mum's drinking, settled there and became one of Mrs. Thatcher's starry-eyed children. She got a job in a bank and worked her way up. At first the change in her seemed superficial: she began to define all her friends by how big their mortgage was and what kind of car they drove. It took a while for them to realize that Marie was deep down different. They didn't talk about it. They could talk about Wi

It happened six months before Maureen was taken to hospital, but the way Marie told it there was only a matter of weeks between one incident and the other. And that explained it. Maureen was mental and Marie forgave her.

Marie was married to Robert, another banker, who worked in the City. They had been married on the quiet in the Chelsea Register Office two years before but Robert had never found the time to come to Glasgow and pay his respects to her family. It was a shame because now he couldn't afford to: he had become a Lloyd's Name at just the wrong time, on just the wrong syndicate, and they were living in a bedsit in Bromley.

Una's husband, Alistair, was an integral part of the family. He was a plumber and couldn't believe his luck when Una agreed to marry him. He was a quiet, honorable man and, to Una's everlasting joy, had proved himself eminently malleable. She began by changing the way he dressed, then moved on to his accent, and at the moment she was trying to change his career.

Una was a civil engineer and made a right few quid. She scheduled begi

When it came time for Liam to go to secondary school, Michael, their father, had lost his job as a journalist because of his drinking, quite a feat in those days. They couldn't afford to send Liam to the private school Marie and Una had been to so he was sent to Hill-head Comprehensive and Maureen followed him a year later. It was a good school but neither of them studied very hard.

Wi

His present girlfriend, Maggie, was a bit of a mystery. She was a model, but they never saw her model anything, and a singer, but they never heard her sing either. She was very pretty and had the roundest arse Maureen had ever seen. She didn't seem to have any friends of her own. Poor Maggie had a lot to live up to: Ly

Maureen did well at school and went straight to Glasgow University to study history of art. She was in her final year when she began to think she was schizophrenic. The night terrors she had always suffered from got progressively worse and she started having waking flashbacks. They were mild at first but escalated in frequency and severity. Because she didn't know what she was flashing back to, she thought they were random delusions. In her more lucid moments she realized something was very wrong. She had never done acid so that wasn't it. She began to read about mental illness and found that she was in the right age group for her first schizophrenic attack. She wasn't very surprised: like many people from unhappy families she'd never assumed the future would hold anything too thrilling. She told no one, got the job at the Apollo Theatre and bought the tiny flat in Garnethill so that when she fell down the big black hole into the hands of the social services they wouldn't make her live with Wi

It took a year and a half of patient panic for the breakdown to come.

She was sitting upstairs on a bus. A fat man sitting behind her was breathing mucousally in her ear. The noise got louder, closer, more rasping, until it was deafening. She waited for him to hit her, a fisted slap on the side of her head. When it didn't happen she screamed for a bit and threw up. The driver came to see what was wrong and found her sobbing and trying to wipe up the mess with a single tissue. He told her to leave it. She ran off the bus. None of the other passengers came after her.