Read Online Holloway Falls by Neil Cross - Free Book Online

have telescoped into history.
    Although the present generation’s taste for kitsch and nostalgia sought to deny it, there had been little of worth in that half-lit, cheerless decade. There lurked at its axis a recondite absence. For every pair of loon flares, for every Stylophone, for every platform boot, for every Bay City Roller, for every Saturday Night Fever or Dancing Queen , he remembered a Bobby Sands, an emasculated government, a three-day week: power strikes, postal strikes. He remembered refuse rotting in streets and cadavers left unburied. He remembered National Front marches in English cities and Armalites and petrol bombs in Belfast. And at the decade’s dreary fag end, he remembered that hectoring voice; the vulture beak and cartoon stalk from a child’s nightmare. Margaret Hilda. In his mind she was married forever with Peter, her fervent Other: dark Peter, a shadow invoked by druidic energy, by the tidal surge of past against future. On street corners, under lampposts, in Bradford, in Leeds transported Dianic priestesses were unzipped, spilling out the future again and again for those who had eyes to see.
    The bleak occult seeped into the moors: crooning its song to quiet, mad Peter, in his donkey jacket, his jeans and his clay-clegged boots. His breath steaming, horselike, in cloudless cold. Grave-digging spade in one raw, red hand. Arcane and horrible knowledge coiling and spitting behind his blank eyes. Blooding the decade, the century to come, with a ball-headed hammer raised like a dagger above him.
    The Ripper lurked deep in the shadows cast by Holloway’s memory: The Ripper was present in his photographs. He was the pyramid of black cast across concrete by an oblique sun hammering on red brick tenements, outside which he and half-forgotten friends stood, smiling, squinting, their eyes lost in shadow. Their pasty skin, the low Yorkshire skies at the end of England. It was an England in which he was twenty-one, and in which he met Kate, who would be his wife.
    After leaving the army, he found a job training to repair lifts. He took a room in the Harold’s, a Headingley estate of back-to-back tenements. Laundry dried on lines strung across narrow streets.
    Late November 1978. Beans on toast on his lap, watching The Two Ronnies with Ted and Dot, the couple with whom he lodged. Ted was off on the sick: emphysema. He wore Brylcreem and a grey cardigan with brown leather buttons. Dot’s hair was dyed black and lacquered into a beehive. As far as Will could tell, she was almost perfectly spherical. Will’s own crew cut had yet to grow out and, too short to style, it sprouted ragged and uneven at his nape and round the ears.
    After tea, he stepped outside into the cold wind, turned up the fleecy collar and set off like Shackleton, hands buried in pockets, to meet his mates in the Faversham.
    He stepped through the door into a burst of pub noise, blue smoke and moist body heat. The Faversham was crowded with university and polytechnic students. Greasy hair, National Health spectacles, military greatcoats. Hippies in tatty crushed velvet and greasy denim. Punks. It didn’t take much to qualify as a punk in 1978; short hair and drainpipes were enough to do it. But there was a preponderance of black, too. The occasional safety pin, a mohair sweater or two. One or two daring mohicans.
    Tony was there, and Ian, and whoever else. (His memory was full of half-remembered Tonys and Ians.) They’d be moving to town later, where they would sit round the edge of a discothèque dance floor, supping pints and watching girls.
    He’d been there perhaps half an hour when Kate arrived. She was in a group that gathered noisily at the bar, counting out change in their palms and yelling and laughing and pushing. Her hair was short and shone blue-black (she would cringe now, to think of it). She wore a black mohair sweater that slipped alternately from each shoulder.
    Looking at her made Will hurt. He told the story often, in