Holloway Falls by Neil Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    He awoke sodden. Tangled in bedclothes.
    Lenny ran up the rickety stairs two at a time. He charged into Shepherd’s room like a milky-grey whippet in Y-fronts and unlaced Adidas.
    ‘Fuck’s sake ,’ he said. His deep voice cracked on a high note. ‘Are you all right?’
    Shepherd was rigidly upright on the bed.
    ‘Something terrible has happened in America,’ he said
    Downstairs, Shepherd hunched in a towelling dressing gown while Lenny made him a cup of