Where the Halling Valley River Lies, Carl Halling [urban books to read txt] 📗

his room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes survived, some incidents that may once have been committed to paper stayed fresh in his mind.
There was the time he sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when he was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities. “She” was a slim white girl, dressed from head to toe in denim, who gazed blissfully, with lips coyly pursed, into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared straight through him with eyes in which desire and menace seemed to be mixed, until one of them spoke, almost in a whisper:
“Qu'est-ce-que t'en pense?”
He came to recall the night he took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where he slowly sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of '30s Paris. At the same time, a bewhiskered old alcoholic in a naval officer's cap, his table strewn with empty wine bottles and cigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name, "Phillippe!" until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man's glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious:
“Voilà, mon Capitaine!!”
And then there was the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, he joined an anti nuclear march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may have filled him with longing for a time when he treated his well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text...
A day spent as a flâneur would often end with a few hours spent in a movie theatre, perhaps in the vast soulless Forum des Halles shopping precinct, and there was a point he started to hate the movies he chose, as he struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in his life, he was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia, which is a reduced ability to enjoy activities found pleasurable by the majority.
He grew bored of watching others perform. What joy, he reasoned, was to be found in watching some dismal movie, when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the civilised world?
He'd never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may have started to change in his first few months in Paris. If his travels failed to produce the desired uplifting effect, he'd fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause.
As a means of protecting himself, he started squandering his hard-earned cash on endless baubles and fripperies. These wholly pointless trinkets included a gaudy short-sleeved shirt by Yves St Laurent, a retro-style alarm clock with the loudest tick in Christendom , a gold-plated toothbrush which he never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching slim fit lighter, a portrait drawn of him at the Place de Tertre which made him look like a cherubic 12 year old and a black vinyl box jacket procured from the Porte de Clignancourt flea market.
Mention must also be made of the many books he bought, such as the three Folio works by Symbolist pioneers, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Joséphin Péladan; as well as the second-hand books of poetry by such obscure figures as Trakl and Delève…part of Seguers’ Contemporary Poets collection.
Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at him from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious David who looked like a lost member of Wham or Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive?
Could they ever have known he was a collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents...and a social discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder?
The simple answer is not in a thousand years…for he was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one. Little wonder, therefore, that he was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to him, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality.
It wasn't long before he tired of the solitary existence of the flâneur, but then becoming more sociable may have simply been the result of being in one place for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In fact, he'd befriended twenty year old Theresa “Tessa” Evans, English assistant in the neighbouring town of St Genevieve des Bois, while they were both attending classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare them for the year ahead; and they went on to see more and more of each other as their Parisian sojourn proceeded apace.
She’d been a close girlhood chum at convent school of his own great Westfield friend, Ariana Hansen…in fact, one of the first times they met up was with Ariana, when they saw "Gimme Shelter" in some dinky little art house theatre; this being, of course, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which, culminating in the infamous Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, marked the end of the Hippie dream of peace and love.
Another close friend was Jules Cendrars, a maths teacher at the LEP who was the rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the Rock and Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians. There was a vision that never left him…of Jules, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black hair, dressed in drainpipes and Cuban heeled boots, playing the bass guitar - but brilliantly- at some unearthly hour with friends following a night's heavy partying before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke.
His best male friend was Milan Curkovic, another teacher at the LEP. He was the son of Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux, whose impassive manner belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love with Tessa at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He referred to David’s and Tessa’s elegant swan necks as being typical of what he called "le charme anglais".
So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make David feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids, some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever he appeared. He felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people.
However, if he was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself he was at times as much a magnet for menace and hostility as approval.
In fact, he was hysterically threatened in the streets of Pigalle only days after arriving in the city; and then verbally assaulted later in the year, this time on a RER train by some kind of madman or derelict who’d taken exception to his earrings and was furiously urging him to go to the Bois de Boulogne, but what he suggested he do there is too obscene to print.
He spent an entire train journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Bretigny with a self-professed “voyou” with chilling shark-like eyes, who nonetheless made no attempt to threaten him. He even gave him his number, telling him that unless he phoned him as promised, he was merely what he termed “un “anglais c**”.
And mention must also be made of the sinister skinhead who called him “une tapette anglaise” for trying on Tessa's wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Ariana. But as ever, he was mysteriously protected against all the odds.

David left his beloved Brétigny without saying goodbye to so many people that it was painful to think of it afterwards, but frenetic last hour socialising had left him exhausted and demoralised. However, there was one final get-together, organised by Tessa and a few other friends. Milan was there of course, as well as well as several mutual friends of Tessa’s and his. Sadly though, Jules wasn't, although he bumped into one of his girl friends, who, her voice dripping with incredulity, asked:
“Où est Jules?”
Seized by guilt for having failed to invite him, David phoned him at his home to ask him to make a last minute appearance, but in a muted voice, he told him:
“Nah, I’m in the bath, man, it’s too late…”
It was the last he ever heard of him. As for Milan, he was to phone him in London a few months later, but he never saw him again. On the other hand, Tessa and he stayed friends until the early ‘90s, by which time she'd got married to a fellow church-goer and former Cambridge University alumnus called Peter, who also became a good friend.
His parents stopped by that night to pick him up on their way to La Ribera where they were due to stay for a few weeks before returning to the UK, and after a day or so spent sightseeing, they set off. Soon after arriving, it became clear to David that eight years after Franco’s death, with Spain’s beatific innocence long gone, his beloved pueblo had changed beyond all recognition.
In Murcia, while quietly drinking in a night club with some very dear friends of his from La Ribera's golden age, he found himself in the surreal position of being visually threatened by a local Punk who clearly objected to the bootlace tie he was wearing which immediately identified him as a hated Rockabilly. Such a thing would never have happened ten years before; or perhaps even five.
As for the youth of La Ribera itself, where once they'd been so endearingly naive, now they seemed so worldly and cool that David was in awe of them, as they danced like chickens with their elbows thrust out to the latest New Pop hits from the UK, such as King’s ”Won’t you hold my hand now, these are heavy times…”, which David endlessly translated for them.

Chapter Six

David Cristiansen returned to Leftfield College, London in the autumn of 1984, and it may be that it was soon after this that his recent past started haunting him for the first time. After all, was it not only a few years previously he'd known legends of sport and the cinema, mythical figures of the theatre, blue bloods and patricians, and they'd been kind, generous of spirit to this nonentity from the outer suburbs. Now he was nearly 30, with a raft of opportunities behind him, and a future which looked less likely than ever to provide him with the fame he still ached for with all his soul.
At first he lived off-campus, thinking it might be fun to coast during his final year as some kind of enigma freshly returned from Paris; but before long, he desperately missed being part of the social hub of the college, even though this was a virtual impossibility for a forgotten student in his fourth year.
His time as one of Leftfield's leading prodigies had long passed, and other, younger wunderkinder had come to the fore since his departure for Paris, They included the handsome young blond whom his long-time friend and champion Ariana described as being some