Holloway Falls Read online

  Escaping one life was not enough.

  While resident in the hotel, Shepherd avoided social intercourse as far as he was able. He didn’t want to speak to anybody. He feared that conversation might press him into shape like a thumb printing its whorls into a ball of clay.

  He spent his days repetitiously: breakfast in the Moonshine café on Blackstock Road (two scrambled eggs, beans, sausages, grilled tomatoes, two fried slice and three mugs of bracingly strong tea), while reading the classified advertisements in the local papers and Loot. He propped the papers awkwardly against tomato-red ketchup bottles with red coagulate spouts as he shovelled food into his craw. Then he would pick a direction and wander. He noted launderettes, pubs, cafeterias, DIY stores, betting shops, pizza shops, North African patisseries. He walked streets he had no wish to walk again, although he was not assaulted, and streets that reminded him of the life he’d left, which he also never wished to walk again, for an altogether different reason. He walked streets where loud music pumping through upper-storey windows inexplicably filled him with profound contentment. He walked council estates whose architecture made him dejected and whose tenants he feared. He stumbled upon peaceful, tree-lined roads whose quiet, suburban peculiarity, adjacent to such deprivation, seemed grotesque. He imagined that such proximities could prevail only in London. Sprawling and unplanned. Impartially ravenous.

  Wandering, he stopped and read advertisements in newsagent windows, looking for a room to rent. He needed a landlord willing to disregard his want of references. This proved more difficult than he’d anticipated. He was angry with himself. He could at least have rented a Bristol bedsit for three, four or six months prior to his departure, leaving it exactly as he’d found it (perhaps even have had it professionally cleaned!), and thus picked up a good referee. But it had never occurred to him to do so and the books from the classified pages of the Fortean Times had not so advised him.

  He didn’t have a devious or even a calculating mind, and he required guidance in such matters.

  He’d assumed that landlords, being landlords, would happily compromise references for rent in advance, cash in hand, plus a cash deposit against damage. Somewhat surprisingly, this seemed to have an effect quite contrary to that intended: over the telephone, the proposal made him sound forlorn and suspicious. Soon he came to hate London landlords, distended parasites on the hunched, scabrous back of their bountiful mother.

  The hotel didn’t qualify as a previous address. His previous address didn’t count as a previous address, since it belonged to the person he’d previously been. His entire existence lacked corroboration. He felt spectral and temporary.

  On the Saturday at the end of his third week, he jotted down the number listed on a room-to-let card posted in a newsagent window on Holloway Road, found a telephone kiosk and dialled the number. After four rings, a woman lifted the receiver. The voice was clipped and very English. She seemed to be addressing someone else. Shepherd heard: ‘—fucking message, you arsehole.’ Then, harassed: ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m calling about the room. Is this an inconvenient time?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not at all.’

  This did not sound altogether true and a short silence followed.

  He said: ‘Is it still free?’

  ‘Yes. Two rooms. Doubles. Listen, there’s no point us talking about this over the phone. Would you like to come round for a cup of tea?’

  It had just passed 11 a.m. They made an appointment for 12.45. Shepherd stopped off at Woolworth’s and bought a digital watch. He didn’t want to be late.

  After consulting the mini A–Z, he decided there was enough time to walk to the address he’d been given, stopping off on the way for a cold drink. In shirtsleeves and sunglasses, a black nylon briefcase from Next slung over his shoulder, he defied the rabble and the heat and exhaust fumes that pooled like industrial soup in the windless heat. He turned from Holloway Road on to Seven Sisters Road and headed into the shimmering distortion.

  On the way, he stopped off for a cold drink, but still arrived ten minutes early. He killed time by leaning on a lamp-post and pretending to consult the A–Z. The house was a dilapidated Victorian structure; three story and an attic conversion, set on the corner with Stroud Green Road, within sight of a Tesco Metro. Behind a low wall, the concrete front garden was cracked and overgrown with etiolated weeds. Behind open windows, undrawn curtains hung inert in the heat.

  At 12.45 according to his new watch, he collected himself and marched to the front door. He was hot and damp. Even minor exertion on such a day was fatiguing. Beneath the beard, his skin itched like prickly heat rash.

  He rang the bell. Waiting, he adjusted his shirt tails.

  The door opened. Behind it stood a woman. She was pale, perhaps­ in her early thirties. She wore a blunt bob, dyed black, with a severe fringe. It iridesced in the sunlight like a magpie. Her eyes were big and her mouth was small. She wore 501s, faded almost to white and holed at the knees; a black shirt, open at the throat, cuffs unbuttoned. She clutched the door at head height and set her weight on one hip. The shirtsleeve fell back. Her inner arm was blue-white, like fresh milk. Her feet were bare and summer­-dirty. On each foot, the second toe was longest by a knuckle.

  She came up to Shepherd’s chest.

  The hallway in which she stood was scented in ways he could not yet specify: the antique pungency of incense and cannabis. Petuli oil. Cigarettes. Some old cooking. The musk of cats.

  She smiled, perhaps with some irony, and extended a hand. With her left hand, she shielded her eyes. Wedding band on the third finger.

  ‘You must be Jack.’

  At once, he recognized the woman on the phone. Her accent belonged to another era. He imagined her in a flapper dress and low-heeled pumps.

  ‘I must be,’ he said, and shook her hand.

  She retreated half a step. People often did this, unconsciously calibrating his dimensions.

  She said: ‘God, you look really hot.’

  She stepped aside to admit him. He followed her down a long hallway with worn floorboards. To his left, the hall opened on to a sitting room. Immediately to his right was a stairway with a peeling white banister and uncarpeted stairs. At the far end, the hallway opened on to the kitchen.

  It was a layout he recognized.

  Islamic rugs were laid upon the floorboards. Heavy with dust and worn threadbare, they curled dangerously skywards at the corners. Bulbs hung on bare cords. Various framed prints were hung on the walls: a Dalí that Shepherd recognized; a melancholy Rembrandt self-portrait; Elvis Presley as the risen Christ; Leonardo’s androgynous Baptist with his Giaconda smile and obscurely eerie raised finger; Hitler as Grail Knight. Three separate prints depicting Arcadian, pastoral shepherds leaning over and variously gesturing towards a rock set heavy in the earth.

  She followed his gaze and arched a slow eyebrow.

  He smiled and tried to indicate that he understood although he did not.

  Instead, he told her it was a nice place.

  At the foot of the stairs she explained that two rooms were available to let: one on the second floor, on the half-landing, next to the bathroom, at £320 a month. Bills included, except telephone. There was also an attic room. More expensive, but with a bit of a view. £440 a month, payable on the first. You could see Canary Wharf from it. The bomb that exploded there on 9 February 1996 had rattled their windows.

  He liked the sound of the attic. Apex of the triangle. Point of the pyramid. He was becoming increasingly sensitized to incidental symbolism.

  She said he might want to glance at it before he decided. He had already decided, but didn’t say so.

  Would he like a cup of tea first?

  ‘It’ll cool you down,’ she said.

  He followed her to the kitchen. It was long, high-ceilinged and church-cool. Mauve shadows and cobwebs in
high corners. Compared at least to Shepherd’s experience of domestic kitchens, it was seriously disordered. There was a white stoneware sink filled with battered pots and pans, cutlery and mismatched, chipped mugs. A half-glazed wooden door with a cat-flap and near it a litter tray set on a brittle yellow newspaper. There were two litter-dried turds in one corner. The floor tiles were cracked, with a motif faded past legibility: original Victorian, protected for many years by linoleum and vinyl. The grouting was crumbling and one or two see-sawed under his weight. There was a geriatric gas cooker with eye-level grill.

  At the scarred oak table sat a gaunt, skinny man with unkempt hair. He wore a ragged pair of army-surplus trousers, a ripped pair of skateboard shoes with no socks, a faded T-shirt. Two plaited leather bands hung about one knobby, thick-veined and hairy wrist. He looked like a once-boyish pop star who, through unusual circumstances, had spent ten years as a prisoner of the Viet Cong.

  He was reading a back issue of the New Statesman. On the table before him was a blue pub ashtray full of crippled, extinguished rollups, a pack of Old Holborn, some Rizla cigarette papers, several lighters and a scattering of magazines: New Scientist. Nature. The Fortean Times. The Herald Tribune. OK!, Hello! There was also an incongruously sleek Apple PowerBook laptop computer, closed down.

  From a transistor radio set on the table, Shepherd heard the infinitely consoling intonation of Just a Minute. In another life, Andrew Winston Taylor was washing his car or driving to Sainsbury’s, or Ikea. Briefly, he mourned himself: a wave of sadness, rising in the small of his back and breaking just behind his eyes.

  The woman said: ‘Lenny, this is Jack. He’s here to see about a room.’

  The man glanced up.

  Shepherd had the impression they had already met.

  Without getting up, the man smiled and offered his hand.

  He said: ‘How do you do?’

  His voice was a surprising baritone, inflected cockney.

  The woman said: ‘I’m Eloise. This is Lenny.’

  She went to the cooker, picked up the kettle, went to the sink and manoeuvred the washing-up such that she was able to direct the flow of water into its spout. Then she put the kettle on to boil. She explained that she owned the house, but didn’t say how she’d come to own it: Shepherd understood that such property, even in a relatively insalubrious area of central London, would cost considerably more than the family home he’d left behind in Bristol.

  Rather than convert the house into flats, she and Lenny had decided to let out two rooms to lodgers. Shepherd suspected this had something to do with the avoidance of tax. He approved, although Andrew Taylor would not have.

  The attic room was approached via some tremendously rickety stairs rendered life-threatening by darkened, curling carpets that dated to the late 1960s.

  Three stairs behind Lenny, Shepherd observed the gnarls of his spine, an ambulatory diagram beneath the washed-out fabric of his T-shirt.

  Lenny ducked through the doorway, more through impulse than necessity. Shepherd bent almost double. Inside, he straightened. It smelled, mysteriously, exactly as an attic room should. Shepherd took this as an omen. The centre of the room was high-ceilinged, descending into the eaves, much of which had been converted into crawl-space storage.

  Shepherd looked through the window. On the horizon he could see Canary Wharf tower, glittering silver through a white haze of pollution like the distant object of a knightly quest.

  He offered six months’ rent in advance, cash, with an additional­ month’s deposit. He was not invited to sign a tenancy agreement­. He checked out of the hotel the same day, trans­porting what few belongings he had accumulated in two cardboard boxes that fitted­ easily into a black cab.

  Lenny helped him upstairs with one of the boxes, gave him a set of keys. Then he went back to his reading, leaving Shepherd alone to unpack and settle in.

  Shepherd set a box on the bed and wrestled open a sash window. It squeaked. He looked out. Breathed in.

  Held.

  Breathed out.

  II

  He spent a few weeks consolidating his new identity, then making it permanent and semi-official. The brochures from the classified advertisements in the Fortean Times had advised him to start at the bottom and work up, and this is exactly what he did.

  He had not chosen the name Jack Oliver Shepherd at random. Andrew Winston Taylor had been surprised to read in one pamphlet that a legerdemain he’d learned of many years before (in The Day of the Jackal) was still available to him.

  Long before he vanished, he made a single research trip to the Bristol Central Library, off College Green. A quick scroll through microfiche allowed him to find a child with the same approximate birth date as his own, who had died before its first birthday. There followed a trip to Bristol Register Office, where—because it was merely lawful proof that a birth has taken place, not that it was his own—he was legally able to obtain a copy of the baby Shepherd’s birth certificate. In the name of caution he claimed genealogical research, and paid the required fee in cash.

  Thus, many months later, Shepherd now had both a permanent residence and a birth certificate. With this he applied for a provisional driver’s licence. He then arranged to take an intensive course of driving lessons over ten days at a local driving school.

  He passed the second time (too many ingrained bad habits). Although Shepherd waited a long time before asking him, Lenny proved happy to endorse his driving licence fraudulently, effortlessly faking the signatures of his GP and Eloise’s father. One name he signed in ballpoint, the other with a Mont Blanc ink pen he retrieved from his office.

  While he awaited dispatch of the licence, Shepherd also applied for membership to as many institutions as he was able: the local library, the video shop, the sports club. He arranged it so that each of these had a reason to write to him.

  Soon, with a driver’s licence, a birth certificate and other sundry proofs of identity, he was able to open a bank account in his new name. He did so with a deposit of £1,000 in cash.

  Ten working days later a cash-point card and chequebook arrived in the post.

  For several weeks, he was out of the house most of the day. But he spent the evenings with Lenny and Eloise.

  Often they shared takeaways and watched a video. Sometimes they played Trivial Pursuit around the kitchen table. Usually, Shepherd and Eloise shared a bottle of wine, taking it in turns to pay. Now and again, she rolled a joint. Lenny drank draught Guinness from a can with a widget.

  Eloise’s parents were old money, but they disapproved of her lifestyle (by which he assumed they meant Lenny) and she had little contact with them. She was employed by Hackney council as a music therapist, working with disabled children and adults with learning difficulties. She also composed music, and belonged to various art collectives, of whose shifting, interconnected memberships and political infighting Shepherd could not keep track. But he enjoyed her exasperated gossip.

  Other than Eloise, Lenny had no visible means of support. When Shepherd ventured to ask, he licked the gummed strip of a cigarette paper and claimed to buy and sell shares online.

  In addition to being a financial genius, Lenny had at least one opinion about everything. He was immersed in a personal project, the precise nature of which was enigmatic, but which he pursued with alchemical, evangelical zeal. Everything was part of this exertion; every book he read (and he sometimes read two a day); every magazine; every print he hung in the hallway and contemplated through narrowed eyes. Everything he said, however mundane or gnomic, skirted an immense, unspoken significance. Lenny had discovered something, some deep structure, proof of which he sought to verify by linking into a coherent pattern clues whose very ubiquity (once one knew where to look) served to confirm his thesis: it was in Hollywood movies, in pop videos, in architecture. It was encoded in the flag of the European Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall
; it was encrypted in advertisements carried by cereal packets and the movements of the international stock market. It underlay the structure of the language itself. Beethoven had encoded it in symphonies. It was in the structural correspondence of the DNA spiral to the shape of galaxies.

  The single bedroom on the first floor was Lenny’s office, to which nobody but Eloise was permitted entry. He spent hours in there, buying and selling stocks and shares online, and following diverse lines of inquiry, each of which (as far as Shepherd could ascertain) unlocked a dizzying infinity of further lines of inquiry.

  Tired, Lenny rolled a cigarette and dragged his fingers through hair that stood up and out in every direction. He described the problem as fractal.

  Lenny’s theories interested Shepherd and they became friends. Shepherd learned that, in order to escape the indeterminate enigma that was the pursuit of fractal ontology (or fractal semiotics, depending on his mood), Lenny liked to walk. Together they began to map out their physical and psychological territory. Lenny had steeped himself in the lore of the East End. He was versed in an interlocking narrative of questionable histories: Nicholas Hawksmoor, Jack the Ripper.

  Wrapped in several layers of ragged clothing, Lenny took Shepherd on a three-day pilgrimage. They walked the streets and arteries of the East End and the lines of energy between the Hawksmoor churches. Shepherd experienced the peculiar, pervasive aroma of Smithfields meat market: years of slaughter somehow insinuated into granite. On to the numinous glower of Christ Church. The streets Jack had walked.

  This pilgrimage did not allow for a return to one’s bed, or indeed any bed. They spent two strange nights huddled on the street with the homeless, two nights in which Shepherd saw and heard and experienced things he would rather have not, and was glad that Lenny carried a knife and a can of mace.

  Returning home to a hot bath and clean clothes and daytime television, he felt himself changed.

  In the early hours of 29 July 2000, the dreams located him.