ANDREW FLOWERS:
I think up until that moment, my father’s greatest disappointment in life was that I’d chosen to study in Manchester. I’ve given him a few more body blows since then. I’d say I’ve even stepped into the role of world’s greatest disappointment myself, but it was certainly the most strained that our relationship had been up until that point, and, well, not to get into it, but my mother was freshly off the scene. All that to say, I turned up a day or two late. And the whole time I’m in the housing office collecting my keys, I can just hear this alarm going off for what feels like miles around, like an air-raid siren or something. It’s mid-September, and the woman behind this plastic screen’s just sweating intracellular fluid, asking me to sign here, as though none of it’s happening. I asked for directions, you know, “Where do I live?” and she sort of just wearily waved me out, like, “Follow the noise.”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
For the first few days, the fire alarms were going off constantly. Even if we’d been evacuated and gone back in five minutes before, we could never just ignore it. I think for people in the lower blocks it was all fun and games. They walked out their front doors into these massive gatherings, but for us, coming from the tower, it was fifteen floors down, slowly, with the staircase rammed, then the same again going back in, but now trudging all the way up. All it did was make me realize how slowly we’d be leaving if there ever was an actual fire.
LIU WAI:
It got old fast.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
So Owens Park is this gated, leafy-green area in Fallowfield where I suppose the main halls are. Five or six houses, each containing a few hundred people, then the tower block in the middle with a thousand-or-so more. And I arrive as every single one of them is being evacuated out onto the lawn on this baking hot day. Just this melting pot of chaos en masse, hundreds of clueless kids and girls in towels, all wandering around stunned like they’ve just found out that they’re adopted or something.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Yeah, Andrew got there on like the fourth or fifth fire alarm of that day. I’m standing outside Tree Court taking pictures, and this private-school boy starts asking me what’s going on, looking like Paddington Bear or something, still holding a suitcase in each hand. We realized we lived in the same flat and I started filling him in, essentially saying, “Fuck knows what’s happening,” when some guy from housing with a loudspeaker starts talking over us. He says there’s some fault in the system, so when one alarm goes off in one block, it trips all the others. They were trying to fix it, but in the meantime, like, “Stop burning bacon.”
FINTAN MURPHY:
There was this brilliant sun that day, an anomaly in Manchester. Everything felt like promise and light to me, and I thought I might even have made a friend. I felt as though I learned a lot about Zoe on our walk, some of it from what she told me and some of it from what she didn’t. I was already starting to see that you had to meet her more than halfway on some subjects. The way she was polite but reserved when speaking about her twin sister surprised me—they didn’t sound particularly close. And of course the way that she skirted around her musical experience and aspirations. I’d heard her singing in the church. I knew she meant business, but I could sense that there was some pain there as well.
During the course of our walk, we happened to pass the Royal Northern College of Music, and she actually blanched, I’ve never seen anything like it. I sort of mentioned how I’d idly considered studying there at some point myself, and she immediately changed the subject. Kind of physically changed direction and almost got mown down in a bike lane. I noticed it, I remembered it, because I could see that I’d upset her, and I was careful not to bring it up again.
JAI MAHMOOD:
So I don’t know how we got talking about it, but I do know it was that day. A surprise blast of Mancunian sunshine, which was why the alarms didn’t seem like such a big deal. I guess I must of been telling Andrew that I’d tried to get into the tower, and he must of been asking me why. I said how weird and ugly it was, how it had this otherworldly vibe, and he seemed interested. We were talking while our housemates were busy being “lads.” Like, starting drinking games and stuff. Andrew just looked at me and said, “I bet I can get you inside that tower right now.” I was like, “Go on, then. How?” He just got up and broke the glass on our fire alarm. [Laughs] Evacuated the whole fucking place again.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Once we were all outside, Jai and I just stood around with the blockies, then followed them into the tower twenty minutes later. We spent that whole night wandering between floors, going into people’s rooms, introducing ourselves, the group growing everywhere we went. By the time we got up to fifteenth, there were probably ten or twelve of us. That’s how we ended up meeting Kim, Alex and Liu Wai. That’s how we nearly got ourselves arrested the following morning.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Geography wasn’t Zoe’s strong suit, and she was brand-new in town, so after she’d had her funny turn over the Royal Northern, I offered to walk her home. We went almost all the rest of the way in silence. This was a lonely old time for me. Here I am in the gay capital of England, too scared to go and participate. Not drinking, not going out. I can’t tell you how many nights I spent on my own in my room. Zoe was the first friend I’d made in a long time, and I treasured her, but I was really afraid that we might not speak again. I was afraid that I’d pushed a button somehow. So I walked her right to the door of her building, that awful tower in the center of Owens Park, but I didn’t go in when she invited me. I didn’t want to overstep the mark.
LIU WAI:
There was this crazy racket, so I went out into the communal space to see Kim and Alex among all these strange boys in our kitchen, some of them drunk, all of them weird. I know Zoe definitely wasn’t around at the time, so I felt a little bit overwhelmed? The first person I spoke to was this quite tanned, posh-looking guy who told me his name was Andrew Flowers. I remember thinking at first, like, Wow, Flowers, that’s such a fun name. He looked really smart and had this incredible accent, and I thought, He must be so nice.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
My first impressions of Liu Wai? Amazingly cynical about class but quite na?ve with it. If you told her that piss was perfume, she’d rub it behind her ears.