I sit with Kim, Liu, Andrew, Jai, Fintan, Robert, Sally, etc., sometimes for hours at a time, recording everything they say, transcribing it later, then printing it up, trying to get it published. What if one day it hits the shelves and I find out one of them was like Gwynne Evans?
Like, what if there was someone like him in Zoe’s life? Someone who just couldn’t help himself? That would mean he’s in my life now too…
Anyway, I digress. Read the rest of my email.
4.
“Dark Room”
The investigation into Zoe’s missing underwear pulls certain people closer together and pushes others further apart.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was awake early, watering Chihiro, my bonsai, my pride and joy. She was three years old, and I’d grown her from this softwood cutting, so from literally two leaves into something resembling a tree. I got her when I was fifteen, when Dad told me I was no longer required in his vocal classes, when he basically decided I was no longer required at all. I didn’t have many friends outside Zoe, so I was lonely, and I liked the idea of these living things that only revealed themselves over years. They were all about patience, and I guess that’s how I thought of myself, a late bloomer. Or maybe just high maintenance. And I learned as I went that it wasn’t really about patience anyway. It was more about contemplation, effort, ingenuity. I’d named her after the brave little girl in my favorite film, so she felt like my spirit guide or something. I’d usually find myself thinking about life while I worked on her, and that morning, I felt good. I’d taken a chance the night before—I’d tried and I’d made, if not friends, then people who might become friends.
My room was right next to Lois’s, and I could hear she was up early too, murmuring something through the wall.
LIU WAI:
I think I felt violated on Zoe’s behalf? If you see theft as a form of envy, then the theft of someone’s most intimate personal possessions seems like a declaration to the world about what you’d really like to be stealing from them. I just thought it was psychotic behavior, not cool, not a joke. Zoe seemed fine at the time, a little shaken maybe. I said something like, “It’s probably a stupid question, but you don’t share clothes with Kim, do you?” She shook her head. She was distracted by something, and I could tell she hadn’t spoken to Kim about it. I remember thinking it was strange that she was confiding this in me rather than her twin sister. But then of course it occurred to me that Kim had let all those people into our flat the night before…
JAI MAHMOOD:
I’d never be arsed now, but I was really into developing my own prints back then. Just black-and-white eight-by-tens and stuff, but magic to see, like making gold out of nothing. Our place was perfect for it, man, no natural light in the bathroom, nothing to black out, and it had a pretty strong ventilator for all the fumes and stuff. I just swapped the bulb with a red one and wheeled everything else in. There was no room on the counter, so I had this plywood base that sat on the rim of the bath, then I put my enlarger—this old Beseler 23C—on top of that. Drop your developing trays inside the tub and you’re flying. I’d found this roll-around kitchen cart that everything fit into on the first night, so my setup and takedown time was about ten minutes flat. I never forgot I was living with four lads, though. Like, I was up early to make sure I wasn’t in anyone’s way. And I was making prints from the night before. Life always started to feel real for me the next day, when I started developing it, seeing stuff for the second time around.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I don’t remember what I would have been doing—pruning, watering—but Lois’s voice started getting louder. I kind of called through the wall, “Is everything okay?”
LOIS BEST:
I could hear a man in my room. And I don’t mean through the walls and floorboards like normal stuff. When I was in bed, it sounded like someone was whispering through a traffic cone into my ear. And I knew it was probably just some eighteen-year-old boy from the next floor up, someone with no idea his voice was travelling so much, but I’d been awake half the night. I felt like I was losing it.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I knocked on but got no answer. We’d been there a couple of days by this point, and Lois had really kept to herself. I think I wondered if she was struggling. Looking back, I was probably quite keen to find someone more socially awkward than I was, take them under my wing like a bonsai tree or something. So I opened the door and found her kind of staring at her wardrobe. I asked what was wrong, and she said she’d woken up thinking there was someone inside it, someone in her room. We looked at each other for a second, and I just started laughing. I didn’t know she was serious—I mean, I didn’t even know her—but she laughed back, and I think I suggested breakfast as a way of getting her out of there. It honestly didn’t occur to me to open the wardrobe or look in it.
LIU WAI:
As someone who’s witnessed their own mother go through shock, like, be completely normal one moment and then break down in the spice aisle of Waitrose the next, I didn’t feel comfortable letting it go? So while I brewed some coffee and sat Zoe down on the sofa, I called the police to report the theft of her clothes. They clearly weren’t interested, so I was in the middle of convincing them that this was serious when Lois and Kim came in.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Andrew told you some people cast Zoe as a victim after she went missing, but that’s probably because he didn’t know her that well. People had always cast her as a victim. And she knew it too. She could really lean into that too-thin, too-quiet, too-delicate thing when it suited her. So I think wrapped up in Liu Wai’s Zoe worship was this weird need to protect her at all costs.
Basically, I walked in on Liu reporting some missing clothes as a cross between armed robbery and sexual assault, hissing into the phone, demanding they send their “best man” down to take a statement. And all this time, Zoe, in her tiny voice, is saying, “No, no, no, it’s fine. It’s not that big a deal,” just getting talked over. And it’s all news to me, so I’m like, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
We hadn’t talked the night before because she came in so late. I was thinking, fuck, I really can’t let her out of my sight. It hadn’t occurred to me that Liu would be calling the police about the harmless ten-minute gathering in our kitchen the night before. Then she reeled off every name she could remember, including Jai Mahmood and Andrew Flowers, giving me this look like I’d sold my sister’s virginity to them on eBay.