How to describe her…
She was kind of quite painfully thin? Sometimes she’d eat junk food all day, and sometimes she’d go, like, forty-eight hours on water alone. She was definitely pretty, but in a kind of damaged way that can attract really scummy men. By the end of the first week, she had two different boyfriends to suit whatever mood she happened to be in, which totally scandalized me. One of them, Sam, was this sweetheart who always helped her, then the other, who I only ever saw once, was this sort of dark, drunken loser who only came out at night. Like, she had a good guy and a bad guy depending on how she saw herself at the time. Real split-personality stuff.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Poor Alex. She was two years older than the rest of us. She’d had to get a job after college and save up because her mum didn’t want her to leave home. We thought that meant her mum must be a control freak or something, but I think Alex had problems. There’d been a bad experience with a boy, some body issues, and she just couldn’t quite see her own worth. She was lovely, though, and that’s not hindsight talking. She was the only one of us who ever tried to keep things tidy or do some decorating. She bought potted plants for the communal space, put pictures up on the walls that none of us even noticed. Liu Wai immediately gravitated toward Zoe—they both had pink clothes and hearts in their eyes—and I think Alex and me drifted closer as a result. Alex wore black and listened to Psychocandy by the Jesus and Mary Chain, which I thought was really cool, because it really, really was. I don’t know about a second boyfriend—I only ever met Sam—but Alex definitely moved in mysterious ways.
LIU WAI:
There was a guy on the third floor who’d hacked into the housing records or something and could give you all the previous occupants of your room? It was like a really shit map to the stars—you know, “Here’s the grotty seven by ten where a member of Radiohead was wetting his bed for a year. Here’s where the Chemical Brothers rehearsed before their first gig.” So I looked at ours but they were all fairly unexceptional, all except for Alex’s. A girl who’d been in Alex’s room two years before had committed suicide over the Christmas break, then only been found by her flatmates in January. I’d have been straight out of there, but she didn’t even seem to mind.
I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, but she said she was glad to have a ghost for a roommate. That kind of made a chill run up my spine. Like I said, Alex could run hot and cold, but I remember thinking at the time that this dark side, like, this sort of alter ego she sometimes had, could easily be the result of being possessed or something. Obviously in light of what we know now, her “roommate” comment is just incredibly upsetting.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Then the only other person was Lois Best. Except Lois realized quite quickly that she didn’t really want to stay there.
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.