And I got into this trying not to sound na?ve…
Although, sadly, it seems I’ll never realize those hopes with Zoe, I still try to keep the spark alive through my work with the charity we founded in her name, the Nolan Foundation. I basically try to put good things and good thoughts into the world on her behalf, because I think that’s what she’d be doing if she were here. In that sense, you could say that my relationship with her is still one of hope.
JAI MAHMOOD:
And then there’s Liu Wai…
LIU WAI:
I just saw Zoe as this sort of perfect, flawless angel?
JAI MAHMOOD:
[Laughs] Liu Wai idolized her. Think Nazi propaganda posters from World War II. She looked at Zoe and saw things that weren’t even there, bro. This aspirational savior figure with anatomically impossible proportions and sunbeams shining out of her arse. The überwomensch.
LIU WAI:
I should probably point out that I was really close with her at the time, like, we always had a lot in common. We only lived together for a few months, but we just completely connected. I’m not one of these spiritual people. Not superstitious or woo-woo in any way whatsoever, but I did always get this sense that we’d met in a past life, perhaps even past lives plural? And it was clear to me that Kim, who I think would have been much less popular than her sister even in Tudor times, was really threatened by that.
JAI MAHMOOD:
And then there was one. It’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking true, but if I hadn’t met Zoe, I probably wouldn’t have ended up sleeping rough. I mean, I might still be talking to my family, my sister. She had kids a couple of years ago. Didn’t even want me to meet them. But whatever. That wasn’t Zoe’s fault. It was just a shituation that the press and the world made worse.
Everyone wanted someone to blame, and there I was, man.
And honestly, it was me, wasn’t it? I made a fuckup of my life and then I found a reason for it after. I would of found a reason even if I’d never met her, and it’s probably the same for the rest of them. Like, maybe Kim would have always found a reason to back away from taking that big chance in life. Maybe she’d always find something to blame for not quite becoming that great person she could have been. Andrew definitely would have found a reason to treat people like shit. I met him before he laid eyes on Zoe and believe me, he was a natural. Fintan would have found a good cause and something to believe in, because he had to replace God, didn’t he? And Liu would have found another hero, another supergirl who looked like she wanted to, or whatever that was all about. Zoe’s parents would have found a different reason to get divorced, Daily Mail readers would have found a different reason to hate Pakistanis, and on and on.
Maybe I’m talking shit, yeah, and everything would have been different. Maybe we all could have been somebody, but I doubt it. And anyway, this is the world we ended up with.
3.
“Melting Pot”
Zoe and Kim make the move to Manchester, where they meet their three new flatmates and fatefully cross paths with Andrew and Jai.
LIU WAI:
That actually happened in our first week of living together. Zoe walked into my room, which she never normally did without knocking, closed the door and sat down on my bed. I could see she was really shaken up about something, so I asked, “What’s wrong?” She looked at me and said, “I think someone might be stealing my clothes.”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
We moved to Manchester in mid-September, 2011. We were eighteen years old, and we’d never lived away from home before, so it was great, whatever drama we’d both been through. There was something new in the air. It was six months after Zoe’s incident, her suicide attempt, and three months before she went missing. I see pictures from that time now and can’t believe how happy we all look. I can’t believe that none of us know what’s coming. We lived in Tower Block, which was a tower block—their imaginations must have exploded when they named it—on Owens Park in Fallowfield, the same one she went missing from.
JAI MAHMOOD:
You’ll say I’m a sadist, man, but I’d actually called ahead and asked to be assigned to the tower. For whatever reason, I ended up in one of the normal buildings instead, Tree Court. The tower’s just this fuck-ugly brutalist block. Looks like it was picked up in Soviet Russia and dropped into Owens Park, like a leftover prop from the film of 1984 or something. Falling down for decades, always about to be demolished, always petitions and protests to save it. I saw it for the first time when I went on my open day, before I actually moved to Manchester. I was studying photography, and because everyone else was so obsessed with taking pretty pictures, I’d always try and find the ugliest things I could. That’s how I originally came to the tower. Destination ugliness. And I’d heard the inside was even worse, so I was dying to get through the doors.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Even before Zoe went missing, I thought there was something a little bit Heart of Darkness about the tower. A little bit Lovecraftian or Apocalypse Now. Rumor was that people used to go mad in there for some reason, I mean actually mad. They dropped out or they disappeared, and the fail rate was something like 40 percent, way, way above average. I didn’t live there, but whenever I visited it felt like such a novelty to me. After Zoe went missing, the press went arse over tit to suggest I’d been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Frankly, I’d say my father stuck it in a different orifice altogether, but I suppose the point still stands.
The tower was unlike anywhere I’d ever been before. It stuck in my mind. The thing had been up since the mid-60s, so the walls were just cobwebbed with jail cell scratches from down through the years. You’d find initials in love hearts, carved into obscure places with dates from decades before, and find yourself thinking, I wonder if J and M 1993 are still together now.
LIU WAI:
My first response to being placed in the tower was to immediately try and get out of it. I was actually working my way through the complaints process, I was trying to get moved, when I met Zoe and decided that maybe it was worth staying. I think I was scared of all the mythology around it more than anything? Like, people said it was haunted or had this weird psychosomatic effect on occupants. The fail rate was through the roof too, which people seemed weirdly proud about for some reason.