Garnethill by Denise Mina Read Online Free

mother by getting into Glasgow University Law School. He dropped out after six months and started selling hash to his friends on a casual basis but he discovered a talent and went professional. He bought a big house. They told Winnie he managed bands. Maureen used to nag him about security in the house but he said that if he started to worry about things like that he'd get really paranoid.
    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: Lynn, Liam's first and last girlfriend, was a doctor's receptionist and as rough as a badger's arse but such great crack even Winnie's snobbishness dissipated when Lynn told a story.
    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 Winnie.
    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.
    The family got worried when Mr. Scobie, the manager at the Apollo, phoned Winnie's as a last resort. Maureen hadn't been at work for three days and hadn't called. Liam went looking for her and found her hiding in the hall cupboard in Garnethill. She had been there for two days and had urinated and defecated in the corner. She remembered Liam wrapping her in a blanket and carrying her downstairs to his car. He pulled the blanket over her face and whispered to her all the way to hospital, telling her she was safe, still safe, be brave.
    One month after she was admitted to the Northern Psychiatric Hospital Una's husband, Alistair, came to visit on his own. He asked to speak to her and her psychiatrist together and broke Una's confidence, telling them that this had happened before. When Maureen was ten she had been found hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. She had been there for a whole day. Her face was bruised down one side and when they gave her a bath they found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened because Maureen couldn't speak. Michael packed a few things, took the checkbook and disappeared forever. Winnie told the children that Maureen had fallen on her bottom and got a surprise. It was never mentioned again.
    Winnie had never forgiven Alistair for telling. She phoned him sometimes when she was drunk. He wouldn't tell Maureen what she said.
    Leslie came to the hospital every day, working her visits around her shifts at the shelter. She treated the hospital