True Crime Story(19)
LIU WAI:
Afterward, we called her Lois Worst. I think she only lasted for less than a week? She was definitely gone before term started. After the first night, she wouldn’t even sleep in her room. Like, she’d hardly even go in there. You’d walk into the kitchen in the morning and find her passed out at the table or lying on the sofa, or maybe—maybe—sleeping on her bedroom floor, but only then with the door wide open.
LOIS BEST, Zoe, Kim, and Liu’s flatmate:
Well, I was definitely homesick, but mainly I hated that building. The situation with the others wasn’t unstressful either. The tower was really old, really badly soundproofed, so you could hear people through the walls and in the ceilings. It got to the point where I couldn’t sleep. There were strange noises and weird smells, things going missing, then reappearing. My room key got stolen on the first day. We came in after a fire alarm one night and found all our furniture had been moved around. At the time, I thought it was one of the others playing a prank. Now we know Alex was right—something was haunting us.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Mercifully, I didn’t live in Owens Park. I didn’t actually get to know the others until later. I met Zoe early on, though, at the very first meeting of the Choir and Orchestra Society. My mother was big on God, but the singing was pretty much the only part of Catholicism I ever really warmed to, a typical fruit. Zoe looked sort of nervous, sort of vulnerable, and I probably looked about the same. So I don’t know where I got the nerve, but I just went over, stuck out my hand and introduced myself. She must have sensed immediately that I was gay, because this defensiveness I thought I’d seen from afar sort of fell away. I think being a young, attractive woman is probably a strange experience. You’re seen as a commodity in a sense and surrounded by the inarticulate desperation of young men—boys, I should say—all but sticking their dicks through letterboxes to try and get laid. So I’m sure she could see at a glance I wasn’t looking at her that way, and I’m sure she was relieved. After the singing, we ended up walking around and talking all day. It was magic.
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.