Well, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I was drawn to the idea of an active parent, even one who could be as domineering as Robert. In a strange way, I think we each fulfilled a need that the other had. He became a father figure for me, and I suppose I became a kind of surrogate child for him. We kept each other going. It was trying, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, but at the end of the day, at least we were doing some good. The division of labor made itself apparent quite quickly. I was working behind the scenes, and Robert was out front as the spokesperson. That’s not to say we didn’t have our disagreements.
He was always more drawn to immediate rewards than the rigors of running what amounted to something like a small business. So where I might want to pool our resources and pour them into our originally stated goal of establishing a scholarship in Zoe’s name, assisting young women from working-class backgrounds in getting an education, Robert wanted to release a charity single of his own composition, “Zoe’s Song,” to put her image, rather than her spirit, at the forefront of our operations. Where I wanted to spearhead Zoe’s Law, to make it illegal for teachers to engage in relationships with students, Robert was more drawn toward lobbying celebrities to join the appeal. You said that Sally told you Robert believed everything he read? I’m not sure that’s quite fair, but I can see where she’s coming from. The way I’d characterize him is to say that he realized a lot of other people believed everything they read.
Perhaps even the vast majority of them.
And so he was always gearing his message toward the largest populace he could. I’ll admit now that I had some fear about his motives buried at the back of my mind. That probably helped me stick around through hard times when I might otherwise have walked away. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I’d just gone through my first real breakup. Us weirdos from fucked-up homes are always so desperate to start families, to right the wrongs that have been done to us, and I guess I’d imagined adopting with Connor, or at least with someone, somewhere down the line. I knew if I stuck around the foundation that I’d be giving up that kind of future, at least for a time. The thing is, I worried that, unchecked, Robert might turn it into something garish. At first, we each recognized that the other’s response to the situation was valid. At first, our two approaches complemented each other. But I suppose time isn’t particularly kind to any type of relationship.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
When I thought about what I loved, it came down to my greatest achievement, Chihiro, my bonsai tree, and the hikes I used to take in the back fields behind our house when we were kids. So when I left Manchester, I tried to move toward those things. I got a job in Ambleside, in the Lake District, somewhere we’d gone a lot when we were kids. It’s a beautiful gray town filled with English spaniels where it almost literally never stops raining. My job was with the National Trust. Conservation, a lot of outdoor work, gardening and learning simple repairs. How to be a handyman basically. I didn’t have any money, and I lived in a tiny room above a pub at first. No one knew who I was, and when I went down to the bar on Sundays for my weekly pint, I’d be so tired I could go whole minutes without thinking about things.
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.