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camera. The communal knowledge that the marriage was ill advised added a hysterical edge to the reception. Everyone laughed too loud, acted drunk before they really were, danced confidently. Maureen and Leslie were sulking alone at adjacent tables while everyone else congaed in an ungainly stagger around the room, whooping and yanking at one another’s clothes. Leslie scowled over at Maureen, tapped a fag from her and warned her that the band was threatening to do the Slosh. The Slosh is a graceless women-only line dance and nonparticipation is illegal at Scottish weddings, punishable by ritual dragging onto the dance floor.
    “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Maureen, and they retired to the bar for the rest of the evening.
    They drank whiskey and smoked cheap, dry cigars they bought from behind the bar. Maureen thought they were just big fags and inhaled vigorously. She could hardly speak the next day but that was down to the shouting as well; it was the most stimulating pub argument she had ever had. Leslie thought that women and men were born different but Maureen believed that gendered behavior was learned. Leslie made sweeping statements about the nature of men and women on the flimsiest of evidence: all men were bad drivers; all men were arrogant and bullish; all women were kind and helpful. It was like listening to a bigoted misogynist in reverse. Maureen said that if women did have an essential nature it wouldn’t only encompass good things; some characteristics would have to be bad, like being crap at sums or too simple-minded to vote. Leslie didn’t have an answer but got round it by shouting the same points over and over. They swapped numbers and stayed in touch. They went to Lisa’s divorce dinner together. By the time Maureen had finished her degree they had become so close that Leslie and Liam were her guests at the graduation dinner.
    The art history class was not a representative cross section of society. It was an intellectual finishing school for posh lassies, a grounding for careers in auction houses and other jobs so badly paid and highly prized that only the very rich could consider them. Maureen wasn’t molding a career, she just loved the subject, and didn’t think she’d live to see twenty-one. The girls were mostly from London and Manchester, they all had long flickable hair, timeless clothes, family jewelry. The milk-fed girls were slightly afraid of Maureen and she enjoyed it. It was probably the only social group in Glasgow where she would be thought of as a rough local. Leslie, who actually was a rough local, took umbrage at the graduation dinner and tried to insult all of her classmates, picking on Sarah Simmons particularly because she had misjudged the evening and worn her dead mother’s filigree tiara. The girls conceded most of Leslie’s points, taking it all in good part, and suggested moving the evening on to a cheesy disco, looking for a gang of horny medics who were known to hang out there. Maureen, Liam and Leslie deferred the invite. Trying to spoil it for them, Leslie told the girls that the disco was known locally as “a pint and a fuck.” The girls got even more excited and left before the coffee arrived.
    Maureen didn’t work hard for her finals. She knew that something was happening to her. The flashbacks, the disorientation and the night terrors were building to a pitch. All her time in the university library was spent on the sixth floor reading books and articles about mental illness. She thought she was becoming schizophrenic but she didn’t tell anyone what was happening. She was afraid that they would put her away, afraid that Leslie would disappear and take all the cozy, normal nights with her. It was almost a year later, when Maureen had her breakdown, that Leslie’s true nature became clear.
    After Liam found her in the hall cupboard in Garnethill and carried her into hospital wrapped in a blanket, whispering comfort and baptizing her with his tears,