FINTAN MURPHY:
Yes, well, intellectually, I know you’re right. It’s not fair to compare them. Zoe and Kimberly are different people, vastly different interior lives. But at the back of my mind, a part of me was thinking, How dare you have that face? How dare you have that voice? Those eyes? During the course of that conversation, I came very close to saying, “Perhaps, Kimberly, it’s not a feeling of inadequacy you’ve always struggled with. Perhaps what we’re looking at here is plain inadequacy. Perhaps what we’re staring in the face is the fact that you’re not good enough, the fact that you don’t even come close to Zoe.”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I hung up, then looked out my curtains at the hacks still standing in the street. You see people on the news and they’re famous, with a team around them. But for the rest of us, if your life turns into a story, there’s no guide or help or person in your ear telling you what to do or where to go. So I just called into work and said I wouldn’t be there the next day. If they had to fire me, then that was that, but I wasn’t going to have a photographer following me around while I dug up fucking flower beds. Then I packed a bag, went outside past this idiot in his tent and got in my car. Before I could even start up, my phone was ringing. I answered to a man asking for Kimberly Nolan. “This is DI James calling from Greater Manchester Police. I think, in light of current events, we should probably have a talk, don’t you?” He sounded bad, about a hundred years older, which at the time drove home how long it had been. I said, “Okay, what do you want to know?” He said it would have to be in person, Monday afternoon. So that was it, I had a destination. I was going back to Manchester, seven years later.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Yes, of course, among all the other horse shit, there was the not unexpected but still amazingly unwelcome phone call from the police. Detective Inspector James sounding like he wanted to reach through the phone and throttle me. “Yes, sure, Monday, fine.”
JAI MAHMOOD:
So Vlad, man, he was as gay as the day is long. Like, flame on. That was why he bought me a drink that first time we met outside the Great Central—he thought I was cute. He always called himself a “large fruit smoothie,” said that’s why he’d had to leave Russia. Y’know, Putin’s not into lads, is he? So after work, I took a walk down to Canal Street, the gay quarter. From the state I’d seen him in, he wouldn’t be cruising any clubs, but I thought he might want to be around his people, y’know?
And there he was, sitting on the sidelines, watching the boys go by. He didn’t see me until I sat down on the street next to him, then he laughed. This fifty-year-old ex-bare-knuckle-boxing, Russian, alcoholic shitkicker with a slit nose, just laughing, throwing his wasted arm around me. I said it was good to see him and we caught up a bit. He’d been in and out of prison, made a break for the big time in London and had both his legs broken in response. He’d lived hard and crapped out, found himself out in the cold, back on the streets in Manchester. I told him where I’d been, explained all the gaps in my teeth and my memory. Then when we ran out of things to say, I asked him, like, genuinely curious, “So come on, impale me with it, Vlad. Where’s a guy like you get an antique gold Rolex?”
27.
“Showdown City”
JAI MAHMOOD:
Look, man, it didn’t blow my brains out when I heard about Andrew and Kim. Anyone with a pulse would have picked up on the tension there. I was probably a bit surprised to see Andrew was still in Manchester, that he was looking almost human. All I had to go on was the picture they’d printed of him in the paper. He was wearing a dark polo shirt from his job, and the caption underneath said he worked in the Trafford Centre. I couldn’t tell which shop from his uniform, so I just went out there and walked around a bit. I don’t know if you’ve been, but the Trafford Centre’s basically laid out like a blind dictator’s mansion, so it took me a minute.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Well, of course we were coming up to Christmas again, somehow we always were. And of all the discount electronics-goods stores in all the towns in all the world, he walked into mine. I was in work early, waiting to find out if I still had a job. My consultation meeting with my boss, Keith, was scheduled for that morning, showdown city, except he said he wasn’t quite ready for me yet. So I’d started the day as usual. Booting display devices, putting out the tills, recovering the shop floor. I wish I could say Jai was a welcome sight or even a sight for sore eyes, but I’m afraid on that day he was just a sight. I went over, nodded and smiled, of course. He smiled back, and I saw what a sad state his teeth were in. He looked like he had a lot more than just seven years on the clock.
And that was that.
Before either one of us could say anything, Keith was at my shoulder, looking like he’d just swallowed shit, saying he could see me now. I asked Jai if he could give me a minute and followed Keith into the back, where he began my appraisal before I could even close the door. I interrupted and asked, “Before I listen to all this, do I still have a job?” He smiled and said no. He told me my conduct outside the store had brought them into disrepute, my lifestyle was at odds with the “values” of PC World. He had clippings, examples, the anecdote about teens trying to search for porn in the shop the week before. Then he smirked, nodded at the shop floor and said, “Now you’re bringing in bad sorts too.” So I swept everything off this fucker’s desk and left. I never even sat down.
JAI MAHMOOD:
That’s how a newly sober man and a freshly fired one ended up in the pub before eleven in the morning. Andrew bought two pints, decked his in one, then pointed at mine and said, “You drinking that?”
ANDREW FLOWERS:
When we started exchanging stories about the last seven years, it turned out that neither one of us had exactly split the atom. I’d just lost my job more or less before his eyes, so I didn’t have much to shout about professionally. I still had most of my teeth, though, so it was one-nil there.
It was nice to see him.
It seemed in that moment like he’d swooped down out of the sky at my lowest point, potentially to pick me up. We were sitting in some awful chain pub listening to Christmas songs on a loop, always something I associate with Zoe. I felt like a lot of what had passed between us had washed under the bridge. It was just bittersweet that so much had washed away with it. We were both old men in our midtwenties, coming in joint-last position, just like always. And upon that realization, I think I went back to the bar.