True Crime Story(78)
When you get a bit older, you don’t mind blending in so much, and I felt a lot older. When things did get oppressive, I just went out walking. I had a mountain range—Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Red Screes and Scafell—on my doorstep. If I wanted to I could walk forever, some days I nearly did. It was all those soaking hills and fields that saved me, because they reminded me that my problems weren’t the end of the world. Those mountains had been there since before I was born, and they’d still be there when I was gone. They’d stayed standing through every tragedy I could think of, all the way right back through time, and for me, that meant something. Maybe that beauty can’t really be beaten, that good things endure somewhere. I hardly looked at my phone, and I didn’t take a laptop or watch TV. At night, I just read the yellowing bonkbusters that women left on the bookcase downstairs in the pub. I never looked at the newspapers, and I didn’t tell anyone where I was.
One night, I came back from a walk, soaked through as always, and stoked the log burner in my room. The barmaid had given me a tip for drying out. You screw up old newspapers and push them inside your boots in wads, then you put your boots by the fire. The newspaper absorbs all the moisture with the heat and then the next day, they’re good as new. Ambleside’s a babe, a real beauty spot, a tourist trap because of all the walks, so the pub always had old newspapers lying around, some of them from all over the world. I always took the foreign ones when I could, to safeguard against seeing something I didn’t want to. I was going through the motions one night, ripping out pages and screwing them up, when something caught my eye. It was a picture, half of Zoe’s face, so I knew something must have happened. And I knew it had to be something big if it was in the foreign press. She’d been gone for four months by then. I couldn’t do it, though, I couldn’t look. So I screwed it up as tight as it would go and forced it into my boot.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Well, if you want to hit rock bottom, you start off by staying with friends, then friends of friends, then friends four times removed, until you look up one day and realize you’re not staying with any kind of friend at all anymore. Bedroom floors all over town, man, the box rooms of Hulme, every fold-out sofa in Salford. I did about ten thousand different shitty jobs: serving drinks, collecting glasses, wiping tables, cleaning toilets.
I was always working my way down.
I’d start front of house, then get moved sideways, out of sight, then into the back, and then out of the business. I got recognized every so often, and it always caused trouble. People complained or asked me what I’d done with Zoe, where I’d put her body. I was washing dishes in a bar on Bridge Street for the longest, but I got fired when they found out I’d been filling my water bottle from the vodka optic. My boss picked up my Evian by mistake one night and chugged half of it down before he realized. Fired me on the spot. Then a week later, the whole place burned down, faulty electrics, and all four of the kitchen staff burned with it.
By then, that kind of stuff just seemed normal to me, though, man. All these near misses and brushes with mortality. I was still using. I slept rough when I had to, and I snorted everything in sight. Jai the Inhaler. The only person I ever saw from the old days was Fintan.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Well, I wouldn’t say we stayed in touch exactly. I was volunteering at a soup kitchen in Ancoats and saw a guy casing parked cars on my way in, clearly on the rob. As we came alongside each other, he gave me this scary look, you know, the flash of the eyes that generally precedes a mugging. He didn’t do anything, happily, and a few steps on, I remembered where I knew him from. I glanced back and thought for a second I shouldn’t get involved. Then I thought, Now, Fintan, is that really what Zoe Nolan would have done?
JAI MAHMOOD:
He got me something to eat.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I bought him some lunch in a greasy spoon. He couldn’t keep his hands still, constantly tapping and twitching, looking over his shoulder. I asked if I could help get him into a program or something, a place to stay, but he started crying and telling me he didn’t think he deserved it. He said it would be time and money better spent on someone else, that his life was behind him. I found that incredibly hard to hear. Someone so young giving up on themselves. But I couldn’t talk him around. In the end, I just gave him what cash I had on me, my number as well. I said, “Call me if you need anything.”
JAI MAHMOOD:
Yeah, I started sleeping in a storage locker, illegally, out in Hale near the airport. To give you some idea of the place, there was another homeless guy staying there who told me a story. He said the garage I was in had belonged to this bloke who used to come out and visit it most days. He got done for speeding or drunk driving or something. Nothing serious, but enough to get him put away for a few weeks. Only it was high summer, and this smell started coming out of the garage while he was away. When they broke the door down to get in, they found this mentally ill girl he’d kidnapped and had chained up in there. She starved to death because he never told anyone he had her. Look, I don’t know if that’s actually true. I hope to fuck not, but my point is, in that place, it felt plausible.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
The next day, when my boots were dry, I pulled out all the rolled-up newspaper and put it on the fire ready for that night. Then I went out to work and broke my back trying not to think about it. I came home ten hours later, showered and went down to the bar. I got drunk on whisky, which I never did, then went back up to my room with every intention of starting that fire. It was the first time the story had crossed my path since I’d left, so it felt like a test, and one my life might depend on passing. I built the logs up around the newspaper, got it going, then left the room.