True Crime Story(11)

My goal is that by the end of this book you’ll understand Zoe. I don’t want to wince away from what made her too messy for the press.

Let me know if I need to re-send the first third again. It’s all from interviews conducted last year but like I said, I’m still talking to them. You could even take me for a drink and blow some royalties if you want to hear about it firsthand. I could be your muse, Knoxy. I’ve read your stuff and believe me you need one…

(KIDDING, love to XXXXXX. Hope to see you soon.)

Ex





Part One


Zoe Nolan Was Here


1.


“Separate Ways”

Zoe originally intended to specialize at the School of Vocal Studies and Opera at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM). Kim, meanwhile, was eager to strike out on her own, studying English at the nearby University of Manchester. An unfortunate event, however, would permanently alter the course of both their lives.

LIU WAI:

The first thing that really struck me about Zoe was her voice. I’ll never forget the sound of her singing on our first night living at Owens Park. Manchester felt like a long way from Essex, and I think where a lot of people my age were dying to break out and get into trouble—to find themselves or whatever—that was all quite alien to me? I always felt like I already knew who I was. Who else would I be? And I didn’t want to get into trouble. So sitting in my room on my own, yet to make a new friend—wondering if I even could—to hear this voice was really comforting. I actually moved my chair so it was closer to the wall, and I left it there for the whole term. That probably sums up my friendship with Zoe at first. She was just there, and I got as close to her as I could.

FINTAN MURPHY:

Growing up in Ballymena, just this knock-kneed waif kind of grappling with his sexuality, I learned early on how to hide inside myself. My family’s quite religious and as you may have noticed, I’m rather gay. Adolescence is a slightly different experience for someone like me, because until the day you come out, you are essentially this walking secret, and depending on who you tell, you might be a dark secret or you might be a bright one. You might be welcome or you might be unwelcome. I still wasn’t out when I met Zoe, still nowhere near it in all honesty, and I think I saw something similar in her somehow, as though she was carrying something extra.

When we met at the Choir and Orchestra Society, we were both eighteen years old, but I felt, in some sense, as though I was meeting an old friend. It felt like we understood each other immediately.

LIU WAI:

At first, I struggled to connect this quite self-possessed voice with the shy, skinny blond girl who could hardly meet my eye in the kitchen. I mean, sometimes you had to kind of smile and nod at Zoe because she talked so quietly. Then I hear her in the next room just summoning this song up from nowhere, something I could never do. And where most girls our age might have been singing “Someone Like You” or whatever, this was classical, sung in Italian.

And it sort of confirmed something I thought I’d picked up on…

Zoe had obviously arrived at university with her sister, but her and Kim seemed so wary of each other. Like, my first impression of Zoe was that she was lonely. Why was she singing alone in her room when her twin sister was just down the hall? It seemed so strange.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

My relationship with Zoe was always complicated. Basically, I struggled with feelings of inadequacy, and I take my share of the blame for that. So much of it came from the way we were raised, though. We were never really allowed to function as a unit, we were always pitted against each other, and I think that’s really sad for two twin girls. Whenever one of us would try and voice it or resist it in any way, Dad just shut us down, said, “You’ll thank me when you’re famous.”

ROBERT NOLAN:

Well, you’ll always see parents in our position saying how special their kids are, but in our case, with Zoe certainly, it was true, it really was. She just had this gift, this voice that felt like it had the power to change the course of someone’s day. It was like she gave the unspoken some physical presence. I think if she’d been allowed to reach her full potential, her voice could have changed the course of whole lives.

SALLY NOLAN:

Rob was musical when we met. One of the things I liked about him. He was singing at a wedding, I forget whose. Suit and backup band, though—the works. There was something different in him from the boys my age. No drinking after he’d played—saving his throat he said—then he spent all night talking to me, which can’t have helped it. Then life happened and we were pregnant with two kids. And full credit, he put his dreams aside. Worked in factories, on assembly lines, at construction sites. Nights and days and continental shifts. He wanted something better for them, and he thought the way was to pass on his music. He started them both, Kim and Zoe, on piano lessons and singing lessons and dancing lessons. They were happy for a time. But Kim didn’t want it. Or, in fairness, she didn’t have it. She just didn’t have it in her.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

People think of self-harm in a really simple way, teenage girls cutting themselves as a coping mechanism, taking one kind of pain and making it into something more manageable. Then there’s self-harm as a cry for attention or help, making spiritual scars physical because you can’t articulate what you’re really going through, which is what Zoe went on to do. For me, it was effective, for me, self-harm was like an evasive measure. I wasn’t interested in transferring my pain from one account to another. I just wanted it to stop.