LIU WAI:
Of course, I quickly realized he was dreadful. I was quite impressed with Jai, though. He was handsome in a sort of I don’t care way, and he had a camera around his neck, which made him look somewhere between an artist and a war reporter. There was a misunderstanding between us, which of course everyone else found hilarious…
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I remember something like that. Liu got it into her head that Jai was a barrister or something?
LIU WAI:
And he looked so young and was dressed so street and was kind of a little bit out of it, and I just thought, Wow.
JAI MAHMOOD:
I told Liu I was a barista, and she started asking me all these questions about where I’d got my law degree, where my offices were and stuff.
LIU WAI:
And I was just saying, like, “Oh, my cousin’s a court reporter,” and everyone was gathering around us and starting to laugh. In the end, I just pretended my phone was ringing and excused myself from the conversation. It was like two or three days later when I saw him working in the Caffè Nero on Oxford Road and the penny finally dropped. These days, I’m in HR, so my emotional intelligence is much more developed? But at the time I was a bit na?ve.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I’d always had this sense that everyone my age was gliding ahead of me. They all knew something I didn’t and I had to swim twice as hard just to tread water. But that night I felt like I’d finally, finally caught up. Life had arrived at our front door. Everyone was new there, everyone was starting from the same level.
I thought, I can do this.
And I’ll admit it helped me that Zoe wasn’t there for that, she’d been out singing. I’d texted to ask if she was okay and got a message back saying she was fine, with a friend, on her way home. So I picked my moment, said now or never. I saw someone I liked the look of, walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. I smiled, looked him in the eye and said, “Big hands, I know you’re the one.”
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Well, I love that song. I think I laughed and said, “My name’s Andrew Flowers. What’s yours?” And just as she was about to tell me, the fire alarm went off again. We both sort of rolled our eyes and headed for the door. There was a second where her hand brushed against mine, where we just ever-so-slightly linked little fingers. There was this electricity, this spark. I can’t quite describe it, because I never felt it again, not once in all the years since. Then we got separated in the crowd going down the stairwell, and I couldn’t find her down on the ground. But I thought, Whatever. I knew where she lived and I knew I’d remember her face. I knew I’d find her, I’d get that smile again and I’d pick up right where we left off.
Sadly, it hasn’t happened yet.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Well, when the alarm went off again, so the seventh or eighth time that day, I knew it had dick all to do with fire. We were still in the tower, so I walked into the stairwell with everyone else, but I went the other way—up—to the next floor. I had my camera, and I had the idea to go around shooting empty rooms while the alarm was going off. There was something extra about it, man, Chernobyl vibes. But when I got to the top, there was a door open, leading onto the roof. I didn’t even know you could get out there, then all of a sudden, I found myself walking through into this amazing electric-blue, half-night sky.
I had my camera up taking a shot before I noticed there was someone else out there, this heart-stopping girl standing right on the edge of the building. I didn’t dare move or say anything in case I made her jump. She was lifting one foot off the ground and hanging it over thin air like she might step off into nothing. She always brought it in again, but I was holding my breath until she backed off from the edge. And when she did, I saw she was smiling, she was happy. I kind of leaned into one of the air con units up there, and she walked back inside and down the stairs. So I don’t think she saw me, but that was the first time I saw Zoe. It’s how I still see her now, one foot on the floor and the other one raised up, like, hanging out over the abyss.
LIU WAI:
We got back inside twenty minutes later and that was the last alarm of the night. I was quite glad it seemed to have gotten rid of all the lads who’d been milling around. It seemed like quite a big coincidence to me afterward, though. We’d had all these quite unsavory characters in our place for the first time, and the next morning, Zoe was in my room telling me that her knickers, like every single pair of knickers she’d brought with her, had been stolen. At the time, I thought that was the darkest thing I could possibly imagine.
These days, I have something like seven people working under me, so rest assured, my imagination’s much richer. At the time, like I said, I was still a bit na?ve.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-01-19 18:27
To: you
Hey
Don’t know if you’re there yet—but a quick note about the tower block. Construction work started in 1964, the same year that the last ever execution was carried out in England（！）* and was fully complete by 1966. There were originally only fifteen floors, so Zoe and Kim’s flat would have been right at the top. Four further floors were ADDED in 1974–75 to increase housing capacity. This might help explain certain irregularities later on…
I’m charging ahead, still interviewing, transcribing and assembling part two. Getting seriously dark. I think I might have come into this as na?ve as Liu Wai was. Not anymore.
PS—XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXX
Ex
* By chance, that execution took place a twenty-minute drive down the road from the tower, at Strangeways Prison. The hanged man was a pathological liar named Gwynne Evans, who was seemingly incapable of telling the truth. He’d killed someone he was maybe having an affair with, and he told mainly what they call “prestige” lies, things to improve his standing in the eyes of others, all easily caught out and disproved. These days he could have pled diminished responsibility and gotten a reduced sentence because he literally couldn’t help himself. Something about that really unsettles me though.