He said, “Are you still into it?”
SALLY NOLAN:
Yes, I think we were all tense before Zoe’s audition, all out of sorts.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
The phone went clammy in my hand because I knew this was out of my league, way too adult. I heard someone coming, so I just said, “Yes,” hung up and put her phone back on the dresser.
ROBERT NOLAN:
Now, I can say with some certainty I should have gotten her out of there, out of that house. Got her away from that bloody environment, all that negativity. I’ll always blame myself that I didn’t. I got to see Zoe in her prime, but the world never did. The world never will.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
One way that call fucked me up was that sometimes after, I’d hear Zoe’s phone go off, then she’d answer, listen for a second and say, “Yes.” I’d ask who it was, but she’d already backed too far away from me by then. She’d always just say, “Oh, no one.” And all I could think was, Are you still into it? Like, are you still into what?
LIU WAI:
I only ever met her after the fact, but from what I remember, she said her audition had gone well? She just preferred the idea of University of Manchester.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
So, with all Dad’s dreams in her head, she applied to the School of Vocal Studies and Opera at the Royal Northern College of Music. You know, this isn’t belting out golden oldies to your parents’ friends after dinner. It’s not small-town, amateur-dramatic stuff. These kids have been raised for it. They show up singing arias out of their arses, references from private schools, known names, the lot. They speak three languages and still have nannies at seventeen years old. It wasn’t fair forcing Zoe to compete against them.
SALLY NOLAN:
We could have handled it better.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
She wasn’t good enough, and that should have been fine. There’s no shame in it. But to be at home around then, you’d think there’d been a death in the family. I mean, for Dad, for Rob, there clearly had been. He went into this kind of tailspin. Finding phone numbers of professors and people on the board of the college, calling them at all hours. Mum just mute and terrified. You’d think Zoe had been diagnosed with a terminal illness or something, like, There must be some mistake.
PROFESSOR MICHAEL ANDERSON, Head of Vocal Studies, RNCM:
I must confess that although I was a part of the panel that assessed Miss Nolan’s audition, I don’t have any personal recollection of her performance per se. I do recall a rather regrettable phone call I received from Mr. Nolan on the subject afterward. It’s probably not helpful to dwell on the substance of that conversation, but he was certainly upset with the outcome. He cared passionately about Zoe’s future.
When I look at my notes now, her scores and comments, everything seems perfectly standard. Each audition lasts around twenty minutes with a ten-minute vocal warm-up. Prospective students are asked to prepare three songs of contrasting styles, to perform them from memory. Although there’s a short written test and a slightly longer multiple-choice examination, the performance is what we’re really looking at. And, to restate, Miss Nolan’s results across all these tests showed a fine student with a demonstrable understanding of some aspects of musical theory. What I suspect she was missing was the natural talent and curiosity it takes to truly dedicate oneself to this level of training. We’re talking about an incredibly competitive course, one where it would be unfair to award places to people without those instincts. Unfair, I should add, for the prospective students themselves. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone flounder through no fault of their own.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
So while Dad was losing it and Mum was busy being a rug he could walk up and down on, my sister got in the bath, unnoticed, and cut both her wrists.
SALLY NOLAN:
Kim found her in time. It was the worst thing I could think of. Up until then, it was the worst day of my life. Zoe kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And what killed me was she wasn’t saying sorry for her wrists. She was saying sorry for this stupid audition and for this stupid school, like it even mattered next to her life.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Well, of course I didn’t know her until later, but I certainly saw the scars when we got together in Manchester. I suppose I thought it best not to ask. I boarded at Harrow when I was a boy and found my roommate hanged at fourteen. There was a family member who had something similar.
Those incidents just jaded me, made me afraid to talk about it.
When Zoe did spill the goods about her suicide attempt, I don’t think it even occurred to me to ask why she’d done it. I was at a low point myself, I suspect that my feeling at the time was, “Well, of course you’d try and kill yourself. Who wouldn’t?” I’m sure it looked like a lack of interest, but it was really just a door I couldn’t walk through, a place I couldn’t find myself in again. I carry some guilt from that. If I’d shown the slightest curiosity in her life, we might have known more about what she was going through, why everything happened the way it did.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
It was a strange time because I’d had my troubles, I’d spent my life in the background, but I was growing up, into something different. Being a twin can be a headfuck. I mean, it always had been for me, but I felt like Zoe only really experienced that confusion at seventeen, after she’d hurt herself.
When I was young, I was looking for an identity anywhere, in books and bands and films and everything, but I struggled because I kept being confronted with my own double every day. You know, I’d look in the mirror and see my sister instead of myself. And because she seemed to handle things so much better than I did, I never really felt like the finished article, just a defective one.
But my body was changing, my mind too. I’d already been through what she was only just starting, and I was excited to put it behind me, to get out into the world. For Zoe, though, for a few months anyway, it was like her life was ending. Dad was heartbroken, Mum didn’t understand. And all the texts and calls Zoe had been getting before her audition stopped dead.