KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I wouldn’t say we were born in competition with each other, it was more something that was thrust upon us. We were still sisters first. And I don’t struggle in any way to say that Zoe had a nice singing voice. All this stuff you see and hear about me being jealous of her, it’s not true. Fintan, Liu, Andrew, Jai, they knew Zoe for three months. I knew her for nineteen years. I’m not saying they weren’t her friends, but they’re not the authority on my relationship with my sister.
What made things complicated was my guilt.
Guilt about not shouldering my share at home, not absorbing as much of Dad’s madness as she did. Once I got out of the singing for good, I always felt like Zoe was suffering for me, on my behalf, like she was carrying my weight as well as hers. When your dad makes it clear to you that you’ll be a disappointment to him unless you fulfil his dreams, when he forces you to define yourself by this thing you just aren’t that spectacular at, he’s setting you up to fail, whether he knows it or not. And that’s what he did with Zoe. That’s what the Royal Northern stuff was all about—it flowed completely out of his madness.
LIU WAI:
Right, yes, Zoe almost went to the Royal Northern College of Music instead of the University of Manchester. Or something?
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was the cautionary tale to Zoe’s success story. The failed project who couldn’t have time and money invested in her because she didn’t indulge her dad’s fantasies. Zoe was more of a go-along girl, so that’s what she tried to do. And she really did try, even when it was killing her. Her weight and body issues, her paranoia about her throat.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Yes, the low-talking thing. Truthfully, I could never hear what Zoe was saying. At the time, I used to tell people that was the key to our relationship.
JAI MAHMOOD:
She could be quiet at times, yeah, but I think that says as much about the people around her as it does about Zoe. Why talk when no one’s listening?
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Everyone always had to lean in to talk to her because she was so, so quiet. And they used to think it was this ego thing, like those people who speak in tiny voices so everyone has to stand close and listen carefully. But really she was just terrified of damaging her throat like I had. Dad had drummed it into her that her voice and her body were the sum total of her worth. Without those things, she was just like her talentless twin sister who he couldn’t really be bothered with. I never once heard her raise her voice except to sing.
SALLY NOLAN:
The Royal Northern was too much, but we thought it was what they wanted. Kim at Manchester and Zoe a mile down the road. They’d still have each other but get their own space. And space from us as much as anything. There was this fault growing, all that pressure was pushing them apart.
ROBERT NOLAN:
Artists aren’t like the rest of us. They’re sensitive people. Their antennae are finely tuned from years of training, they’ll pick up on the slightest emotional signals from people around them. That was Zoe. She was learning how to take everything in, and in time, she’d have learned how to use it all too. But negative forces are like viruses for that kind of mind. You see it time and time again, these great artists overwhelmed by their own talent, by the burden of all the bad energies around them. They pick up on these negative wavelengths and they get infected. I can speak with some personal experience on that.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Negative forces? I think that’s Dad’s polite way of referring to me. The negative forces I saw in Zoe’s life were all men. That was what he really trained her for without even knowing it. To be a doormat to some older man and to isolate herself from anyone who saw things differently. Without all that in her head, without where it eventually led her, would we even be sitting here?
He’d always use one of us as a stick to beat the other. That’s what made me and Zoe keep secrets from each other, and that was a slippery slope. She’d always attracted a certain kind of male attention, even as a kid. Not always flirtation at first, but fascination, and that turned into flirtation as we got older. And I mean, it was almost always one-sided, most of the time she didn’t even notice. Grown men standing too close to her, teachers leaning in over her shoulder and stuff. When we had pay-as-you-go phones, we used to top them up at a corner shop near school. You’d put, like, a fiver on and get a receipt out of the till, only the guy serving Zoe started keeping her receipts, and back then it printed your phone number on there.
He started sending her dirty messages—we’re like thirteen, fourteen at the time—and Zoe would politely ask him to stop because she had no equipment to push back and say, “Hey, dickhead, fuck off.” Which was what I did as soon as she told me. It got so bad I had to tell Mum, she had to call the police. What I’m saying is Zoe and me used to talk about this kind of stuff. She’d tell me things, I’d tell her things. She helped me with my anxiety and I helped her work out what she actually wanted, instead of just doing what she was told. We were the yin and yang, we needed each other to fully function. But because Dad saw that as him losing his grip, losing his dream, he just pushed her harder and harder, and that ended up pushing us apart. So getting older, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, she stopped talking to me that way. She turned secretive.
And I remember it because there were things in her life I really was jealous of. She had this whole other world through her music stuff, a way out of that house. Sometimes she’d be travelling, performing with ensembles or choirs, private functions on weekends, whole groups of people in her life I had no idea about. At home, she’d get calls, and I’d go, “Who shall I say’s calling?” Then get a name back I’d never heard before. Or you’d hear her whispering on her mobile in the bathroom with the tap running, trying to cover up whatever she was saying. Or her phone would go off while we were eating, and she’d disappear for twenty minutes. This was all stuff she would have shared with me once, but that impulse had been beaten out of her. If it hadn’t been, she might not have been such a mystery to us when she went missing.
One thing that really sticks out in my mind now, for obvious reasons, is when we were getting ready for college one day and she left her phone on the dresser. It went off, and when I looked at the screen, it was a withheld number. I don’t know why I did it, maybe a joke, maybe just to feel like someone exciting for a second, but I picked up and said, “Zoe speaking.” Silence. Then breathing, then a man’s voice, not a boy, not someone our age.