True Crime Story(12)
So I tried to wreck my voice.
That’s probably why I still sound like I smoke a pack a day. Dad didn’t understand what music was supposed to be about. The idea of expression or creativity was just anathema to him. He wanted the same notes sung in the same order, day in, day out, no fun and games, no heart and soul. So I’d walk out into the back fields at night and do these low black metal roars until I was on my knees, retching. Or I’d switch the shower on full blast and then scream as hard as I could into a towel, until I couldn’t do it anymore, just so my voice would be shredded enough that he’d leave me the fuck alone. I think I even got a knife back there once or twice. And I know that sounds insane, but otherwise, it was endless.
He had this program of exercises we had to do before school. Vocal warm-ups, high octaves, scales, dancing. Then at night, we’d move into actual songs. Hits from when he was young but with his idea of real classics thrown in. My dad likes to tell people he was a professional musician, but he was a wedding singer. I think Zoe believed it all for a long time, this idea that she was special or chosen, that she was going on to fame and fortune. I just saw how stupid it all was. And I don’t mean it was stupid for Dad to have a dream. I mean it was stupid for him to push it on someone else.
SALLY NOLAN:
Well, Rob held Zoe up as a good example. He treated her and made a show of her, tried to motivate Kim. Or at least it started that way. It turned into him just treating them differently. And look, I’m not slinging blame, we’re long past all that. Zoe was taking off. She was performing in public and being paid and sought after and wanted by specialist schools. Kim just had to wait. She just had to sit there in second place.
LIU WAI:
I think with social media and stuff, things have changed for the better now, but back then, it was weird. I’m not sure young women would always necessarily take each other’s side? I think for a lot of people when they saw Zoe, this kind of quite strikingly beautiful girl, then went on to learn that she was incredibly talented, their first instinct was to try and tear her down? And I mean the boys as much as the girls. Some of the shit she had to endure at university was beyond ridiculous. I’ve never really understood that impulse, and I wonder if it’s because I was homeschooled, like, I wasn’t raised in competition with anyone. What I’m saying is I always saw Kim as one of those people who never actually enjoys anything, someone who just tears other people down. But I guess her and Zoe were born in competition with each other, and that must be hard if you’re always the loser. Not to speak out of turn, but even meeting them both at eighteen, you could tell how much Kim struggled with Zoe’s talent.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I wouldn’t say we were born in competition with each other, it was more something that was thrust upon us. We were still sisters first. And I don’t struggle in any way to say that Zoe had a nice singing voice. All this stuff you see and hear about me being jealous of her, it’s not true. Fintan, Liu, Andrew, Jai, they knew Zoe for three months. I knew her for nineteen years. I’m not saying they weren’t her friends, but they’re not the authority on my relationship with my sister.
What made things complicated was my guilt.
Guilt about not shouldering my share at home, not absorbing as much of Dad’s madness as she did. Once I got out of the singing for good, I always felt like Zoe was suffering for me, on my behalf, like she was carrying my weight as well as hers. When your dad makes it clear to you that you’ll be a disappointment to him unless you fulfil his dreams, when he forces you to define yourself by this thing you just aren’t that spectacular at, he’s setting you up to fail, whether he knows it or not. And that’s what he did with Zoe. That’s what the Royal Northern stuff was all about—it flowed completely out of his madness.
LIU WAI:
Right, yes, Zoe almost went to the Royal Northern College of Music instead of the University of Manchester. Or something?
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was the cautionary tale to Zoe’s success story. The failed project who couldn’t have time and money invested in her because she didn’t indulge her dad’s fantasies. Zoe was more of a go-along girl, so that’s what she tried to do. And she really did try, even when it was killing her. Her weight and body issues, her paranoia about her throat.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Yes, the low-talking thing. Truthfully, I could never hear what Zoe was saying. At the time, I used to tell people that was the key to our relationship.
JAI MAHMOOD:
She could be quiet at times, yeah, but I think that says as much about the people around her as it does about Zoe. Why talk when no one’s listening?
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Everyone always had to lean in to talk to her because she was so, so quiet. And they used to think it was this ego thing, like those people who speak in tiny voices so everyone has to stand close and listen carefully. But really she was just terrified of damaging her throat like I had. Dad had drummed it into her that her voice and her body were the sum total of her worth. Without those things, she was just like her talentless twin sister who he couldn’t really be bothered with. I never once heard her raise her voice except to sing.
SALLY NOLAN:
The Royal Northern was too much, but we thought it was what they wanted. Kim at Manchester and Zoe a mile down the road. They’d still have each other but get their own space. And space from us as much as anything. There was this fault growing, all that pressure was pushing them apart.