LIU WAI:
Kim totally flipped. Like, I enjoy Drake’s music as much as the next person, but I think outside of art, there’s not really a call for that kind of language? I’m convinced that Kim bullied Zoe out of calling the police that day, and I can’t help but wonder why. And, I mean, I hate to say it, but I’m convinced that if I had called the police, Zoe would still be here now.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
She might be right.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I met Zoe the next day for coffee. I think she was just glad to get out of the madhouse to be honest with you—that tower was no place to live. She’d often come to me when things got too much between Kim and Liu or between her and Andrew. Anyway, she was in bits and pieces about the whole thing. I kept saying she should call the police, she should speak to the authorities. If you can’t leave your flat empty for a few hours, what can you do? She just downplayed it all. Now I know that’s at least partially because of the nonsense she’d gone through the last time, when the police had only made matters worse. But another part of me wonders if she was afraid of who might have done it…
I’m certain that at the time, Zoe had her eye on the people who were coming and going from that flat. When I saw the note itself, I couldn’t quite imagine Andrew Flowers articulating this chilling body-swap scenario. Whoever wrote it was a deeply disturbed individual. My dealings with Andrew have all been with a simple man who’s trying hard to appear complex. If he’d been getting his rocks off in her room, he’d have just spunked into the desk plant or something.
There was someone in that flat who had a rather more complex relationship with Zoe, though, someone who was studying English at the time and might have picked her up on her writing style. I know for a fact that Kimberly was the first one back in the flat that day, Zoe told me. It felt like neither one of us could just come out and say what we were both thinking, but when Zoe said she “couldn’t” call the police, I felt like she was telling me who she thought the most likely culprit was. I felt like she was telling me she had to protect Kimberly.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I’ve really tried to be honest about my hang-ups around Zoe. That’s not because I’m proud of them, because I’m really not. It’s a part of me I’d physically cut out of my body if I could. I’ve been honest because I know what’s coming. I know what people think. I know I need to try and make them understand that I didn’t want to be her. I didn’t want to be inside her head or her body or her heart or whatever. I need people to understand that, whatever they see or hear to the contrary, that was someone else’s fantasy. It wasn’t mine.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Yes, I had a key. And yes, I got some severely cockeyed looks from the girls at the time. I knew some of them thought I’d written the thing on Zoe’s computer. I was over there enough, had easy access, all that. So what’s the idea? I was so mad with, what? Lust? That I wanted to, what? Take the girl I was consensually sleeping with by force? Rape seems like a strange fantasy for a boyfriend to have. You know, not to be crass, but there’s no need to crack open a safe when you already know the combination. Zoe can’t have given it much credence anyway, because our relationship didn’t change a jot, even though I’m sure some people around her would have quite liked it to. She found the note on Halloween, and we spent that night together. We even went out dressed up. I was the psycho killer from Scream and she was a bloodied Drew Barrymore, my first victim, so she clearly wasn’t quaking in her boots about proximity to me.
And to anyone out there who still has their doubts, I’d point them to the text of the thing itself, which I feel quite clearly exonerates me. You’re Zoe Nolan, after all—well, I’m afraid that didn’t mean so much to me. I didn’t think Zoe was gifted or talented, not in any way whatsoever. That’s not to say I consider myself some kind of hot shit by comparison. I just think, by and large, people aren’t that special. You’re lucky if you meet even one special person in your life. No, you should be looking for people who idolized her and thought she was the second coming of Christ. That’s the substance of that essay. I’d look for a person who used to sit with her ear to the wall between their bedrooms, just so she could hear Zoe’s every cough and fart.
LIU WAI:
I think what Andrew might be struggling with here is that I loved Zoe? Maybe you could drop a definition of the word into your book somewhere for him?
HARRY FOWLES:
That was when we had our one and only flat meeting. I know it was November 1, because Andrew was still hungover, still wearing the black gown from his Halloween costume, letting us all know how seriously he took it. None of us wanted to call the police, but stuff was going missing. Still. And not just from the fridge or the kitchen either. Someone was going into our rooms and ripping us off left and right. And what was weird was that you never heard Andrew or Jai talk about it. We weren’t blaming anyone, just trying to have the conversation.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Money had been tight for me, yeah. The rest of them had rich parents, but mine couldn’t help me out like that. I’d always had to work. When I first moved to Manchester, I transferred from the Caffè Nero I’d been working at in Birmingham but got fired a few weeks in. I was never employee of the month, but the last straw was when this tweaker came through demanding the code for the toilet. There were people using it to shoot up in all the time, and I’d spent my whole morning cleaning up this modern art installation of diarrhea. So I said, “Sorry, man, paying customers only.” While I was talking to the next person in line, the guy got a chair, climbed up onto the counter and shit on it. They fired me the same day.
HARRY FOWLES:
It was impossible to talk to Andrew about money. He’s the classic example of someone who’d believe a pint of milk costs a tenner. He was in our flat meeting wearing Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, which he wouldn’t take off. Jai was still bloodied and bruised. He’d been really wary of us ever since he got beat up, like it was us who’d done it or something. He was locking his bedroom door, cutting himself off. Anyway, at some point, Andrew asked what time it was and then realized he couldn’t find his ridiculous gold Rolex anywhere. There was this second where you could tell he wanted to ask Jai if he’d seen it, like, he’d just been lecturing us, saying we were all imagining things going missing, but he clearly suspected Jai of taking his watch. And who the fuck even has a gold Rolex at eighteen anyway? In the end, he just muttered something like, “I must have left it at Zoe’s,” and slunk out. He put the mask back on with his costume to walk over there.