by William Boyd
Mme D’Amico and Mme Franchot sit in armchairs. I bring a wooden chair in from the hall and sit behind them looking at the screen between their heads. While the TV is on all other source of illumination is switched off and we sit and watch in a spectral grey light. Mme D’Amico reads out loud every piece of writing that appears on the screen – the titles of programmes, the entire list of credits, the names and endorsements of products being advertised. At first I find this intensely irritating and the persistent commentary almost insupportable. But she speaks fairly softly and after a while I get used to her voice.
We watch TV in Mme D’Amico’s bedroom. She has no sitting room as such. I think that used to be the function of my room. Hugues sleeps in what was the kitchen. He has a sink unit at the foot of his bed. Mme D’Amico cooks in the hall (I was right: it was a cooker) and washes up in the tiny bathroom. This contains only a basin and a bidet and there are knives and forks laid out alongside toothbrushes and flannels on a glass shelf. There is no bath, which proved something of a problem to me at the outset as I’m quite a clean person. So every two or three days I go to the municipal swimming baths at the Place Magnan. Formal, cheerless, cold, with pale green tiles everywhere, but it stops me from smelling.
The fourth room in the flat is a dining room, though it’s never used for this purpose as this is where Mme D’Amico works. She works for her son, who is something – a shipper I think – in the wine trade. Her job is to attach string to a label illustrating the region the wine comes from and then to tie the completed label round the neck of a wine bottle. The room is piled high with crates of wine, which she sometimes calls on me to shift. Most days when I come back I see her sitting there, patiently tying labels round the necks of the wine bottles. It must be an incredibly boring job. I’ve no idea how much her son pays her but I suspect it’s very little. But Mme D’Amico is methodical and busy. She works like hell. People are always coming to take away the completed crates. I like to think she’s really stinging her son.
There are lots of girls I’d like to fuck who do courses with me at the Centre. Lots. I sit there in the class with them and think about it, unable to concentrate on my studies. I’ve spoken to a few people but I can’t as yet call any of them friends. I know a Spanish girl and an English girl but they both live outside Nice with their parents. The English girl is called Victoria and is chased all day by a Tunisian called Rida. Victoria’s father was a group-captain in the RAF and has retired to live in Grasse. ‘Out to Grasse’ Victoria calls it. Somehow I don’t think the group-captain would like Rida. Victoria is a small, bland blonde. Not very attractive at all, but Rida is determined. You’ve got to admire his persistence. He doesn’t try anything on, is just courteous and helpful, tries to make Victoria laugh. He never leaves her side all day. I’m sure if he perseveres his luck will turn. Victoria seems untroubled by his constant presence, but I can’t see anything in Rida that would make him attractive to a girl. He is of average height, wears bright-coloured, cheap-looking clothes. His hair has a semi-negroid kink in it which he tries to hide by ruthlessly brushing it flat against his head. But his hair is too long for this style to be effective and it sticks out at the sides and the back like a helmet or an ill-fitting wavy cap.
There are genuine pleasures to be derived from having a room of one’s own. Sometimes at night I fling back the covers and masturbate dreamily about the girls at the Centre. There is a Swedish girl called Danni whom I like very much. She has big breasts and long white-blond hair. Is very laughing and friendly. The only trouble is that one of her legs is considerably thinner than the other. I believe she had polio when young. I think about going to bed with her and wonder if this defect would put me off.
My relationship with Mme D’Amico is very formal and correct. We converse in polite phrases that would not disgrace a Victorian drawing room. She asks me, one day, to fill out a white fiche for the police – something, she assures me hastily, every resident must do. She notices my age on the card and raises her eyebrows in mild surprise. She says she hadn’t supposed me to be so young. Then one morning, apropos of nothing, she explains why she reads everything that appears on TV. It seems that Mme Franchot is illiterate. If Mme D’Amico didn’t relate them to her, she would never even know the names of the old films we watch nightly on Monte Carlo TV. I find I am surprisingly touched by this confidence.
One evening I go to a café with Rida after our courses and meet up with some of his Tunisian friends. They are all enrolled at one educational institution or another for the sake of the carte d’étudiant. They tell me it’s very valuable, that they would not be allowed to stay in France if they didn’t possess one. Rida, it has to be said, is one of the few who actually tries to learn something. He shares a room with a man called Ali who is very tall and dapper. Ali wears a blazer with brass buttons that has a pseudo-English crest on the breast pocket. Ali says he bought it off a tourist. The English style is très chic this year. We drink some beer. Rida tells me how he and Ali recently met a Swiss girl who was hitch-hiking around Europe. They took her back to their room and kept her there. They locked her in during the day. Rida lowers his voice. ‘On l’a baissé,’ he tells me conspiratorially. ‘Baisser. Tu comprends?’ He says he’s sure she was on drugs as she didn’t seem to mind, didn’t object at all. She escaped one afternoon and stole all their stuff.
The café is small, every shiny surface lined with grease. It gets hot as the evening progresses. There is one very hard-faced blonde woman who works the cash register behind the bar, otherwise we are all men.
I drink too much beer. I watch the the Tunisians sodomize the pinball machine, banging and humping their pelvises against the flat end. The four legs squeal their outrage angrily on the tiled floor. At the end of the evening I lend Rida and Ali twenty francs each.
Another phone call when I’m alone in the flat. It’s from a doctor. He says to tell Mme D’Amico that it is all right for her to visit her husband on Saturday. I am a little surprised. I never imagined Mme D’Amico had a husband – because she always wears black I suppose. I pass on the message and she explains that her husband lives in a sanatorium. He has a disease. She starts trembling and twitching all over in graphic illustration.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Parkinson’s disease.’
‘Oui,’ she acknowledges. ‘C’est ça. Parkingsums.’
This unsought for participation in Mme D’Amico’s life removes another barrier. From this day on she uses my first name – always prefixed, however, by ‘Monsieur’. ‘Monsieur Edward,’ she calls me. I begin to feel more at home.
I see that it was a misplaced act of generosity on my part to lend Rida and Ali that money as I am now beginning to run short myself. There is a postal strike in Britain which is lasting far longer than I expected. It is quite impossible to get any money out. Foolishly I expected the strike to be short-lived. I calculate that if I radically trim my budget I can last for another three weeks, or perhaps a little longer. Assuming, that is, that Rida and Ali pay me back.
When there is nothing worth watching on television I sit at the window of my room – with the lights off – and watch the life going on in the apartments round the courtyard. I can see Lucien, the patron of the Cave Dante, sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Lucien and his wife share their apartment with Lucien’s brother and his wife. They all work in the café. Lucien is a gentle bald man with a high voice. His wife has a moustache and old-fashioned, black-framed, almond-shaped spectacles. Lucien’s brother is a big hairy fellow called Jean-Louis, who cooks in the café’s small kitchen. His wife is a strapping blonde who reminds me vaguely of Simone Signoret. One night she didn’t draw the curtains in her bedroom properly and I had quite a good view of her undressing.
I am now running so low on money that I limit myself to one cup of coffee a day. I eat apples all morning and afternoon until it is time for my solitary meal in the university restaurant up by the fac du droit. I wait until the end because then they give away free second helpings
of rice and pasta if they have any left over. Often I am the only person in the shining well-lit hall. I sit eating bowl after bowl of rice and pasta while the floors are swabbed around me and I am gradually hemmed in by chairs being set on the tables. After that I wander around the centre of town for a while. At half nine I make my way back to the flat. The whores all come out at half nine precisely. It’s quite amazing. Suddenly they’re everywhere. Rue Dante, it so happens, is right in the middle of the red-light district. Sometimes on my way back the girls solicit me. I laugh in a carefree manner, shrug my shoulders and tell them I’m an impoverished student. I have this fantasy that one night one of the girls will offer to do it free but so far I’ve had no success.
If I’ve saved up my cup of coffee for the evening my day ends at the Cave Dante. I sit up at the zinc bar. Lucien knows my order by now and he sets about making up a grande crème as soon as I come in the door. On the top of the bar are baskets for brioches, croissants and pizza. Sometimes there are a few left over from breakfast and lunch. One night I have a handful of spare centimes and I ask Lucien how much the remaining bit of pizza costs. To my embarrassment I still don’t have enough to buy it. I mutter something about not being hungry and say I’ve changed my mind. Lucien looks at me for a moment and tells me to help myself. Now every night I go in and finish off what’s left. Each time I feel a flood of maudlin sentiment for the man but he seems uneasy when I try to express my gratitude.
One of the problems about being poor is that I can’t afford to send my clothes to the ’pressings’ any more. And Mme D’Amico won’t allow washing in the flat. Dirty shirts mount up on the back of my single chair like so many soiled antimacassars. In a corner of the wardrobe I keep dirty socks and underpants. I occasionally spray the damp heap with my aerosol deodorant as if I were some fastidious pest controller. When all my shirts are dirty I evolve a complicated rota for wearing them. The idea is that I wear them each for one day, trying to allow a week between subsequent wears in the faint hope that the delay will somehow have rendered them cleaner. At least it will take longer for them to get really dirty. At the weekend I surreptitiously wash a pair of socks and underpants and sneak them out of the house. I go down to an isolated part of the beach and spread them on the pebbles where a watery February sun does a reasonable job of drying them out.
One Saturday afternoon I am sitting on the shingle beach employed in just such a way. I wonder sadly if this will be my last weekend in Nice. The postal strike wears on, I have forty-two francs and a plane ticket to London. Small breakers nudge and rearrange the pebbles at the water’s edge. This afternoon the sea is filled with weed and faeces from an untreated sewage outlet a little way up the coast. Freak tides have swept the effluence into the Baie des Anges. The sun shines, but it is a cool and uncongenial day.
The thought of leaving Nice fills me with an intolerable frustration. Nice has a job to do for me, a function to fulfil and it hasn’t even begun to discharge its responsibility.
I hear steps crunching on the stones, coming towards me. I look round. It is Rida with a girl I don’t recognize. Frantically I stuff my washing into its plastic bag.
’Salut,’ Rida says.
‘Ça va?’ I reply nonchalantly.
‘What are you doing here?’ Rida asks.
‘Oh . . . nothing particular.’
We exchange a few words. I look carefully at the girl. She is wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She has reddish-blonde medium length hair and a flat freckly face. It is not unattractive though. Her eyebrows are plucked away to thin lines and her nose is small and sharp. She seems confident and relaxed. To my surprise Rida tells me she’s English.
‘English?’ I say.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘My name’s Jackie.’
Rida has literally just picked her up on the Promenade. I don’t know how he singles them out. I think he feels he has another Swiss girl here. He saw me sitting on the beach and told Jackie he knew an English guy he would like her to meet.
We sit around for a bit. I talk in English to Jackie. We swop backgrounds. She comes from Cheshire and has been living in Nice for the last four months. Latterly she has worked as au pair to a black American family. The father is a professional basketball player, one of several who play in the French leagues now that they’re too old or too unfit to make the grade in the US.
With all this English being spoken Rida is beginning to feel left out of it, and is impatiently throwing pebbles into the sea. However, he knows that the only way for him to get this girl is through me and so he suggests we all go to a disco. I like the sound of this because I sense by now that Jackie is not totally indifferent to me herself. She suggests we go to the ‘Psyché’, a rather exclusive disco on the Promenade des Anglais. I try to disguise my disappointment. The ‘Psyché’ costs eighteen francs to get in. Then I remember that Rida still owes me twenty francs. I remind him of this fact. I’ll go, I say, as long as he pays me in. Reluctantly he agrees.
We meet at nine outside the ‘Psyché’. Jackie is wearing white jeans and a scoop-necked sequinned T-shirt. She has pink shiny lipstick and her hair looks clean and freshly brushed. Rida is wearing black flared trousers and a black lacy see-through shirt unbuttoned down the front. Round his neck he has hung a heavy gold medallion. I’m glad he’s changed. As we go in he touches me on the elbow.
‘She’s mine, okay?’ he says, smiling.
‘Ah-ha,’ I counter. ‘I think we should rather leave that up to Jackie, don’t you?’
It is my bad luck that Jackie likes to dance what the French call le Swing but which the English know as the jive. I find this dance quite impossible to master. Rida, on the other hand, is something of an expert. I sit in a dark rounded alcove with a whisky and coke (a free drink comes with the entry fee) and nervously bide my time.
Rida and Jackie come and sit down. I see small beads of sweat on Jackie’s face. Rida’s lace shirt is pasted to his back. We talk. A slow record comes on and I ask Jackie to dance. We sway easily to the music. Her body is hot against mine. Her clean hair is dark and damp at her temples. As if it is the most natural thing in the world I rest my lips on the base of her neck. It is damp too, from her recent exertions in le Swing. Her hand moves half an inch on my back. I kiss her cheek, then her mouth. She won’t use her tongue. She puts her arms round my neck. I break off for a few seconds and glance over at Rida. He is looking at us. He lights a cigarette and scrutinizes its glowing end.
To my astonishment when we sit down Jackie immediately asks Rida if he’d like to dance again as another Swing record has come on. She dances with him for a while, Rida spinning her expertly around. I sip my whisky and coke – which is fizzless by now – and wonder what Jackie is up to. She’s a curious girl. When they come off the dance floor Rida announces he has to go. We express our disappointment. As he shakes my hand he gives me a wink. No hard feelings I think he wants to say.
We go, some time later, to another club called Go-Go. Jackie pays for me to get in. Inside we meet one of Jackie’s basketballers. He is very black – almost Nubian in appearance – and unbelievably tall and thin. He is clearly something of a sporting celebrity in Nice as we get a continuous supply of free drinks while sitting at his table. I drink a lot more whisky and coke. Presently we are joined by three more black basketball players. I become very subdued. The blacks are friendly and extrovert. They wear a lot of very expensive-looking jewellery. Jackie dances with them all, flirts harmlessly, sits on their knees and shrieks with laughter at their jokes. All the French in the club seem to adore them. People keep coming over to our table to ask for autographs. I feel small and anaemic beside them. My personality seems lamentably pretentious and unformed. I think of my poverty, my dirty clothes, my shabby room and I ache with an alien’s self-pity, sense a refugee’s angst in my bones.
Then Jackie says to me, ‘Shall we go?’ and suddenly I feel restored. We walk through quiet empty streets, the only sound the rush of water in gutters as they are automatically swill
ed clean. We pass a café with three tarts inside waiting for their pimp. They chatter away exuberantly.
Jackie shivers and I obligingly put my arm around her. She rests her head on my shoulder and in this fashion we awkwardly make our way to her flat. ‘Shh,’ Jackie cautions as we open the front door, ‘be careful you don’t wake them up.’ I feel a rising pressure in my throat, and I wonder if the bed has squeaky springs.
We sit in the small kitchen on hard modern chairs. My buttocks feel numb and strangely cold. The fluorescent light, I’m sure, can’t be flattering if its unkind effects on Jackie’s pale face are anything to go by. Slowly I sense a leaden despair settle on me as we sit in this cheerless efficient module in this expensive apartment block. Immeuble de très grand standing the agent’s advertisement says outside. We have kissed from time to time and I have felt both her small pointed breasts through her T-shirt. Her lips are thin and provide no soft cushion for my own. We talk now in a listless desultory fashion.
Jackie tells me she’s leaving Nice next week to return to England. She wants to be a stewardess she says, but only on domestic flights. Intercontinental ones, it seems, play hell with your complexion and menstrual cycle. Half-heartedly I offer the opinion that it might be amusing if, say, one day I should find myself flying on the very plane in which she was serving. Jackie’s face becomes surprisingly animated at this notion. It seems an appropriate time to exchange addresses, which we do. I notice she spells her name ‘Jacqui’.
This talk of parting brings with it a small cargo of emotion.
We kiss again and I slip my hand inside her T-shirt.
‘No,’ she says gently but with redoubtable firmness.
‘Please, Jackie,’ I say. ‘You’re going soon.’ I suddenly feel very tired. ‘Well at least let me see them then,’ I say with petulant audacity. Jackie pauses for a moment, her head cocked to one side as if she can hear someone calling her name in the distance.