Maybe it’s because my skin color kept me at a distance, maybe it’s because my brain was always composing shots, but I saw Zoe clearly. When you’re a brown boy in Manchester, you can’t help being an outsider, so that’s what I was. The rest of them were kids, though, yeah. They had no reason to think that the world didn’t revolve around them. What I’m saying is, they all saw Zoe through the lens of whatever their own issues were. She reflected them back at themselves, they thought her story was actually theirs. And her story’s like this epic HBO crime drama, so it makes their stories into crime dramas too. Her story’s heartbreaking, a tragedy, so ditto. It makes them less boring, it feeds their egos, they can’t live without it. That’s why they all had her wrong at the time, and that’s why they haven’t changed their tune since. It’s why they’re all stuck in the past, man. If they moved on, they’d have to actually take a look at themselves, and I’m not sure they’d survive it.
Like, in rehab, we did Rorschach cards, the black inkblots on white backgrounds, and that was Zoe. Everyone who looked at her saw something different. Some of them saw what they wanted to, some of them saw their worst nightmares. So for Kim? For Kim, Zoe was her exact opposite, a rival, this burden. She built her sister up into this massive thing she was forced to orbit.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Half the bookcase at home’s stuff on bereavement. Loss, grief, coping, not exactly beach-read material. If I ever bring a man back, he usually takes one look at the shelves and starts telling me how early he has to get up in the morning. Anyway, one thing that repeats through those books is this feeling the bereaved have of being “defined” by their loss. I can’t sit here and say I’m some great exception, because I’ve just told you about my tragic bookcase.
I am defined by losing Zoe, absolutely.
I just think it’s more accurate to say I was always defined by her, even before she went missing. You know, kids can seem cruel because they can put their fingers on things about yourself that you can’t. On our first day in high school, eleven years old, a boy in our form called me the “pound shop” version of Zoe. Just nailed my deepest fear in life within one hour of knowing me. What made it worse was that Zoe’s relationship with me was never strained because of that stuff. As far as I could tell, the feeling only ever went one way—she never had any reason to be jealous of me.
The three months we were at Manchester were the closest I ever came to breaking free and striking out. We were away from home, spending more time apart, and I felt like I was finding my feet. Then with her disappearance, all that work got undone, everything got put on pause, and because we’ve never had any kind of resolution, everything’s stayed that way. For a few months there, it felt like I had a chance to work out who Kimberly Nolan was, who she could be, then all this happened instead. So now I just have the world’s most miserable bookcase. Now I’m just Zoe Nolan’s sister.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Then you’ve got Andrew, yeah. And Andrew’s gonna say, “Zoe was just a body, just sex.” He was looking at her through the male gaze, simple as that. But is that really what it was like at the time, or has that picture warped a bit in the years since? Seems to me like it must have, man, because I saw things different. I remember Andrew’s stuff with Zoe being more fucked than anyone else’s, but I think that picture’s too painful for him to look at now. He kept it too close to his heart, and it sounds like his heart’s gone rotten. All you’ll get are puns and wordplay, world-class bullshit.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I think by the time she went missing, Zoe would have changed our relationship status on Facebook to “It’s complicated.” I probably would have changed mine to “Single.” Funnily enough, after you called last week I looked her up on there and her profile still says that we’re together, even now, seven years later. That’s not actually funny, is it? It’s actually wretched—I’m sorry, sometimes I can’t spot the difference. You can probably tell from talking to me why we were never described as “love’s young dream.” Call us “love’s young wet dream,” and you’re probably getting close.
JAI MAHMOOD:
You’ve got Fintan, who’s another thing entirely. Basically, he saw Zoe in the exact opposite way to Kim. Zoe made everything harder for Kim, she obstructed things. But for Fintan, yeah, Zoe was like this amazing promise. The rest of them were kids, but he seemed old, like he’d lived one life already and been a bit disappointed by it. To hear him talk, Zoe changed all that. She made everything seem possible for him, she was like a thousand green lights in a row.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Truthfully, I feel as though I’ve come to know Zoe more since she went missing. I was only eighteen years old when we met, and so was she. We only knew each other for three months. I don’t even have a picture of the two of us together. I suppose you’d define us as new friends, but it felt much more vital than that to me at the time. And I don’t mean romantically—obviously nothing like that was in the cards between us. I think that helped. It can be nice to not have the sex question always rearing its head, especially at that age. Not to sound painfully na?ve, but I’d characterize our relationship as one of hope. We each had hopes for the other. To me, that was the same thing as acknowledging that we each had hopes for the world, for life. I don’t think Zoe necessarily had that kind of relationship with anyone else. Of course her parents supported her, thought she’d be famous and stuff, but a lot of that was more about material success than real hope. I just saw this inexhaustible well of goodness that perhaps I’d be lucky enough to draw from for the rest of my life. The world had given us both a bit of a kicking, quite literally in my case, so to me, having hope felt audacious, it felt like a secret that we didn’t dare say to each other. It was like we had this flickering flame between us, and we both had to keep it safe so that it could grow and burn brighter.
And I got into this trying not to sound na?ve…
Although, sadly, it seems I’ll never realize those hopes with Zoe, I still try to keep the spark alive through my work with the charity we founded in her name, the Nolan Foundation. I basically try to put good things and good thoughts into the world on her behalf, because I think that’s what she’d be doing if she were here. In that sense, you could say that my relationship with her is still one of hope.
JAI MAHMOOD:
And then there’s Liu Wai…
LIU WAI:
I just saw Zoe as this sort of perfect, flawless angel?
JAI MAHMOOD:
[Laughs] Liu Wai idolized her. Think Nazi propaganda posters from World War II. She looked at Zoe and saw things that weren’t even there, bro. This aspirational savior figure with anatomically impossible proportions and sunbeams shining out of her arse. The überwomensch.
LIU WAI:
I should probably point out that I was really close with her at the time, like, we always had a lot in common. We only lived together for a few months, but we just completely connected. I’m not one of these spiritual people. Not superstitious or woo-woo in any way whatsoever, but I did always get this sense that we’d met in a past life, perhaps even past lives plural? And it was clear to me that Kim, who I think would have been much less popular than her sister even in Tudor times, was really threatened by that.
JAI MAHMOOD:
And then there was one. It’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking true, but if I hadn’t met Zoe, I probably wouldn’t have ended up sleeping rough. I mean, I might still be talking to my family, my sister. She had kids a couple of years ago. Didn’t even want me to meet them. But whatever. That wasn’t Zoe’s fault. It was just a shituation that the press and the world made worse.