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.
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.