Holloway Falls Read online

  Holloway shut the door behind him and stood for a long second in the front garden, squinting. He patted his pockets, checking the whereabouts of wallet and keys.

  He wondered what Rachel Taylor thought of his visit. What use in looking again at photographs of a dead man?

  Drowned men did not return from the sea.

  He patted his breast pocket, removed his sunglasses, slipped them on. Checked his watch. He thought about the £38,000. He had a sense of something loosening in his chest. It was almost relief. In the fatiguing heat of the late afternoon, he began to walk.

  He walked towards Whiteladies Road, then turned left and downhill for a few minutes, in the direction of the city centre. He quickly became overheated. Not far from the children’s hospital, he turned on to another quiet, tree-lined road. He followed the street as it hooked back uphill, and stopped at a once-grand, detached Victorian house that stood behind a low wall with black metal gates. He closed the gate behind him. He walked to the tall, blue door and rang the bell.

  He waited half a minute before a short West Indian woman of prodigious girth answered the door. She was middle-aged and wore a white uniform.

  Her name was Hetty and it had occurred to Holloway more than once that this woman was probably the best friend he had left in the world.

  ‘Hello love,’ she said, Caribbean West Country.

  ‘Hello sweetheart,’ he said. ‘How you keeping?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Not so bad.’

  Holloway leaned forward to kiss her cheek.

  ‘How are those legs?’

  ‘Oh. Mustn’t complain.’

  Still, she liked to be asked. She smiled, good and broad. A proper smile. He saw so few.

  ‘And the Tiller girl in there?’ He nodded over Hetty’s shoulder.

  ‘Not so bad,’ she said. ‘Not so bad.’

  Hetty turned and led him into the coolness of the home’s hallway.

  Inside, it was cool. The original floor, tiled, decorative, cracking here and there at the edge. A reception desk. NHS posters, bleached pale and brittle with age. Purple shadow and the faint smell of institution, a sweet undercurrent.

  He followed Hetty to the television room. Three of the four walls were lined with chairs and wheelchairs. This is where those residents who were able spent their days. Those who sat before the large, double bay windows had turned their backs to summer outside.

  He felt the sweat cool on him.

  He saw Grace in the far corner. She was etiolated and delicate, graceful in indignity, white-haired and swan-necked, heavily liver-spotted. She sat primly in a wheelchair, a tartan blanket across her lap. She wore a knitted white cardigan and sheepskin slippers. Sometimes her hands made feeble motions, as if knitting.

  As ever, she seemed galvanized by his approach. Something pale ignited in her eyes. She reached out a palsied hand and greeted him, beckoned him to sit by patting her lap twice.

  Pulling up a chair and excusing himself to the old man on her left, he enjoyed or endured another moment in which it occurred to him that today, for a moment or two, she might know who he was.

  Gentle, he touched the back of her hand with two fingers, patted it. He could roll her cool skin between his fingers like kid leather. He was aware of her faint palsy.

  ‘Hello, sweetness,’ he said. ‘How’s my glamour girl?’

  She smiled. Her eyes widened in delight.

  ‘Are you Mary’s lad?’

  ‘I’m your Lizzie’s boy,’ he corrected her again. ‘Billy.’

  She looked him up and down. ‘Our little Billy? Apple cake Billy?’

  He patted his belly, rubbed it, smiled.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a little devil with that apple cake,’ she said, and her face softened.

  They sat alongside one another, watching Countdown. Every now and again she spoke an irrelevancy and he hummed his agreement and patted her hand. At 5 p.m., Hetty brought him tea and biscuits on a plate. He invited her to join him, as ever, and for ten minutes they chatted, each with one eye on Ricki Lake: Shape up or Ship Out!

  At 5.30, he kissed his aunt goodbye, told Hetty he’d see her soon and left the home. He hurried towards the city centre.

  The Watershed was an arts centre. Its bar and restaurant, on the first floor, overlooked Bristol’s redeveloped docks. Holloway bounded up the stairs, past Spanish movie posters. Inside the bar were eleven or twelve people: a disproportionate number of goatee beards and unflattering, narrow spectacles.

  Kate waited for him at a table. Chrome and glass.

  For three years, Kate had lived with a man called Adrian in a Clifton mansion flat that overlooked the suspension bridge. Adrian had not reported Holloway or pressed charges for assaulting him the previous New Year’s Eve.

  ‘Kate,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He was breathless.

  She had ordered drinks. A bottle of Chablis, a large bottle of mineral water. A half-drunk glass of each on the table before her. He sat, poured a tumbler of water, drained it. Then poured a glass of wine. Drained half of it. Looked up.

  ‘Oops,’ he said, and set the glass on the table.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Why the delay? Armed siege?’

  He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. Taste of salt.

  ‘Ha. No. No: I popped in on Grace. I hadn’t been for a while. Sorry.’

  Like his great-aunt’s, his wife’s face softened.

  She said: ‘It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t remember, anyway.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Oh, the women in your life,’ she said.

  He smiled, trying to be good-natured.

  ‘Have you been waiting long?’

  ‘Five minutes? I knew you’d be late.’

  Seeing her smile for knowing him well made his stomach tumble. The previous weekend he’d bought a new suit and tie from Next. He’d worn it for the first time this morning. He hoped he looked OK.

  Kate was tanned. She wore a summer dress and flat, strappy sandals. Her hair was dark, cut short: a blunt fringe, feathered across her ears. To him she looked very beautiful.

  He remembered similar summer days, similar bars. Since the final dissolution of their marriage, she had acquired a certain serenity, a contentment the profundity of which hurt him.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘How are you keeping?’

  He leaned his forearms on the table, knitted his fingers.

  ‘So-so. You know. Broken heart. Not sleeping.’

  She sipped chilled wine.

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Really really?’

  ‘Really really really.’

  He smiled. Deep, fond lines at the corners of his eyes, radiating. ‘I’m not sleeping too badly. Considering. Still seeing the hippie counsellor.’

  ‘You’re still going?’

  It was nice to surprise rather than disappoint her.

  ‘Still going. Once a week. Twice, if I experience an urge to take a brick to someone’s head.’

  ‘That’s really good.’

  ‘That’s really embarrassing.’

  She laughed, and he laughed and for two or three seconds they were husband and wife.

  He wiped the corner of an eye with a knuckle.

  ‘You’ll tell him that?’

  That Holloway see a counsellor was Adrian’s condition for not pressing charges and losing Holloway his job.

  Adrian was a barrister.

  She shook her head.

  ‘He still has nightmares. He wakes up at night. He thinks you’re in the flat.’

  He laughed, and his snaggle tooth caught briefly on his lower lip.

  ‘Come on. He’s six feet fucking two inches tall and he bench-presses Volkswagens.’

  She sm
iled.

  You’re smiling because I was able to hurt him, he thought.

  ‘You know what it’s like.’ The smile fell and weather passed behind her eyes. ‘Imagine how he’d feel. Me here, drinking with you.’

  A pleasant, sinuous twist of vitriol inside him.

  ‘He doesn’t know you’re here?’

  ‘He doesn’t want me anywhere near you. He thinks you’re deranged.’

  The pleasure modulated in less than a second to something like agony.

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’

  He read her face, closed his eyes.

  ‘Sorry. Forget the Wurzel.’

  ‘He’s not a Wurzel. He’s from Bath. He went to Cambridge.’

  With that, he laughed. Later he would sob into his knees, as he did every time he saw or spoke to or sometimes thought about her.

  She said: ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ and slapped the back of his hand, gently enough. ‘You arsehole.’

  He drained the wine, poured a second. He lifted the glass and examined the light through it. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘See?’ she said. ‘You’re learning to enjoy it.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of taking a class. In the evenings.’

  She said: ‘How are you doing? In yourself?’

  I am coming apart at the seams.

  ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘Work?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘What can I say?’

  They had met to discuss the twenty-first birthday of their daughter. Caroline Holloway was in the second year of a media studies degree at Leeds Metropolitan University. She was at an age, he knew, by which she’d have taken many legally proscribed drugs: cannabis certainly, probably ecstasy or a derivative. Amphetamines, some cheap cocaine, maybe ketamine. Possibly LSD. Not heroin.

  She was doing well. She’d met a boy.

  He pinched his nostrils. Took a long breath. ‘She didn’t tell me.’

  Kate shrugged. ‘She probably didn’t think to. It’s probably nothing.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing, nothing. She doesn’t want the third degree about the long-haired lover from fucking Liverpool.’

  At the corner of his wife’s mouth and eyes were lines that were new to him, who mentally had mapped, and physically had kissed every line, every crease and fold of her body.

  He filled her glass. She had to leave in half an hour. Meeting Adrian. They were going on to the theatre.

  That evening, Jack Shepherd arrived in north London.

  For three months, he’d worked his way along the south coast of England. He stopped in Brighton for three days.

  That week there were thunderstorms across Britain. Shepherd sat on the sea wall between the two piers, watching the rain drive into the sea. While traffic hissed behind him, he planned his future.

  He walked to the station, head bowed, and caught the next train to London Victoria. He was still damp when he arrived. The Adidas bag slung over his shoulder, he walked along the dirty, wet station concourse, past the diminutive Our Price and large W. H. Smith, to the tube station.

  On the Victoria line northbound, he chose Finsbury Park at random and stepped off into the London night. Finsbury Park did not smell like Bristol. It smelled rich with warm rain and exhaust fumes and half-rotten fruit.

  Within the first two or three minutes, he believed himself to have seen at least one representative of each ethnic group and major religion represented in Britain. This made him smile as at a grand adventure.

  He passed a Kwik Save, no less than three Sunrise Food Stops, the Happening Bagel Bakery, a dilapidated post office, a KFC Express, a Shell garage. It seemed perfect. On Seven Sisters Road, alongside a tower block called Park House, he found a small bed-and-breakfast hotel.

  He stopped here and booked himself in. Paid cash. One week in advance.

  Bone tired, he fell asleep, fully clothed and steaming gently, on the candlewick bedspread.

  He awoke, refreshed, at 8 a.m. and did not remember that he had dreamed.

  He set about finding a place to live.

  3

  Apparently, Rex Dryden wasn’t Rex Dryden’s real name, but that didn’t much bother anybody, least of all Rex Dryden himself. Still less did it vex those five, seven or nine hundred individuals (exactly how many varies according to which newspaper you read) who joined him in the Temple of Light, Illuminus, in Excelsis.

  ‘All good churches need at least two names,’ said Rex Dryden.

  Nor was the question uppermost in the mind of the one, three or five hundred (again, reports vary) who, beguiled by his recognition of their spiritual awareness, took into their mouths and swallowed the soft drink laced with lethal poison he supplied them with shortly before Christmas 1999 in order to speed them into the emancipation of bodily death.

  Rex Dryden was built like a bouncer; not tall, all shoulder and chest and forearm. His legs had bowed beneath the prodigious heft of torso. Yet his movements had about them an unhurried grace whose quality belied the brute fact of his construction. His head was meatily spherical as a watermelon: balding, shaved to stubble. His beard was coarse and close-cropped, silver and black. It extended towards his eyes and into the vigorous snarl of grey hair that sprouted within the fecund hollow between his clavicles.

  He wore Savile Row suits and rimless spectacles which lent him the air of a dubious small businessman grown respectable; the kind of man, rude-born, who finds himself, silvermane and bald, clasping spatulate finger and thumb about bone-china handle, taking tea with the Queen.

  In life, as on his many television appearances, Rex Dryden displayed both a refined intelligence and a phlegmy, lascivious, east London cackle. He would throw his neckless head far back on expansive shoulders, bark once, broadly and appreciatively. Hah! Then he would lower his head and delicately knuckle the moist corner of one eye, and his outsized body would convulse spasmodically for seconds or minutes. His humour was vast. Rex Dryden found almost everything funny. Even himself. Even the end of the world.

  When he was done laughing, he might lean towards you and fix you with his eyes, which were quite beautiful, luminous blue and artful, and he might tell you that the world was going to end, and now the laughter in Rex Dryden’s eyes was for you, and the guileless simplicity of your disbelief: there would be savagery and disorder, he might tell you, and discord and slaughter and suffering and death, and global destruction and dismay—and for an unguarded, mesmerized moment you might find yourself not quite believing, but trusting in the magnitude of his conviction. Just for a moment. And you might find yourself, like many before you, unable to rid yourself of the thought of him.

  Many of those who determined to leave their lives behind and join Rex Dryden (one did not follow him) in illumination were not the kind of people who had imagined they might be capable of such feats. But follow him they did, in their dozens and hundreds. (Quite how many hundreds, of course, is open to speculation. If records were kept, none were discovered.)

  Dryden did not ask for their money (although the money came from somewhere). He did not demand that his acolytes abstain from sex, either within or without marriage, nor that they marry strangers in mass ceremonies. Nor was he a predatory sexual libertine who availed himself of the conjugal expedience of his converts. All he demanded, at first, was that they listen to him and seek to understand. He told them that life was wonderful.

  He talked of Shiva and Kali; of Orpheus, Prometheus; of Christ and the Buddha and Mohammed; of Knights Templar and Rosicrucians; of Heisenberg and Bohr and Leonardo; of Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong; of the Priory de Sion and the Freemasons­; of the Apocryphal Gospels and the Revelations of Fatima; of Nicaea and Ephesus; of anti-popes; of pyramids; of Akhenaten and Moses; of the Lost Treasure of the First Temple; the cabbala; of Atlantis; the earth and the sky and a land beyond but within; of Jimmy St
ewart and Frank Capra and Bedford Falls; he would talk about history, and Mystery, and what great men had always known: there are those who are greater, and, come the end, the illuminated shall join them.

  He did not claim to be a great man; he was a follower of great men: he was Saul of Tarsus, he was John the Baptist, he was Dr Watson. He was Clarence the wingless angel. He was Sweeney among the Nightingales. Broadbacked, hirsute and human, all too human.

  He was by no means the first to bring the world this news.

  ‘But I am the last,’ he said.

  4

  I

  Jack Shepherd, who once had been Andrew Winston Taylor, was resident in the bed-and-breakfast hotel for two weeks that coincided with the beginning of an uncommonly hot summer.

  On his second day in London, an Armenian barber shaved his head. He kept the black, grey-tangled beard he’d been growing for several weeks. From a dusty local optician, where a small bell rang when he opened the door, Shepherd bought a pair of oval, wire-framed spectacles. They balanced like pince-nez on his big face. He looked like a pioneer; a proud, tall man posing in golden-brown daguerreotype. Something was still not right, but it wasn’t the hair or the beard, which had at last stopped itching, or the spectacles.

  It was the address.

  After ten days, he noticed a second load of Japanese tourists being herded on to a Gatwick-bound coach. He suspected they’d been misled about the location and calibre of the hotel.

  He realized he was becoming a fixture. Short- and long-term hotel residence was a relative concept.

  He remembered seeing a documentary or reading an article featuring a man who (for what reason he could not recall) was resident for a decade or more in the airside departure lounge of Charles de Gaulle airport. The man was a stowaway of some kind, a political prisoner or refugee who didn’t qualify for entry into France but who couldn’t be returned to his country of origin. So he remained trapped in the interzone of the departure lounge; his belongings on a luggage trolley, his meals provided by sympathetic airport staff and airline crew.