another villa

We thought we’d really lucked out at the agency. We must have arrived just after the details were printed. It looked so perfect though, that we still weren’t sure we stood a chance of getting it until we’d paid the deposit and signed the contract – we thought that every other person would be after that villa. We were also aware that we didn’t really come across as dream tenants.

Before she would accept us, we had to meet our new landlady. She looked so very thrilled we were slightly puzzled. Why on earth hadn’t she shuddered at the thought of her lovely house being ruined by such a bunch of obvious wasters?

After she left, the agency people explained about the inheritance laws in France – how everything had to be divided equally between the children – there was no choice involved. Our landlady had got the upstairs and the sister she hated with a passion had got the downstairs. We were her revenge on her sister. We were exactly what she was looking for. Without specifically meaning to, I think we made her dream come true over the next year.

It was in a small village not far from Nice – St. Laurent du Var - not an idyllic middle of nowhere kind of village, just the next place you came to as you left the urban sprawl of the city along the far end of the Promenade des Anglais. If you timed it right, or if you pretended you hadn’t noticed any of the lights turning red, you could be at the university in about fifteen minutes. It was another five minutes to the old part of town where the good bars were .

I am looking at a photo taken just outside the gates as I write this. I put it on my Facebook page for Reiner a few months ago. There are the iron railings flanking the gateway, with the orange tree beyond, and there are four of the people I lived with, proudly showing off their fancy dress costumes just before leaving for some party.

Karen the Canadian is first in line. She’s dressed as a squaw, her arms folded, smiling brightly, her white teeth shining. She was the youngest of us– perhaps twenty at the time – very, very enthusiastic – determined to enjoy every single second of this year she’d worked so hard for. The list of scholarships she’d won to fund her trip seemed endless. She took so many photos, that quite soon they ran out of free gifts for her at the shop where she took them to be developed.

Standing next to her, waving pompoms made of paper, is Laurie from Oregon. She’s also beaming away. It’s funny – all the North Americans who lived there always seemed so happy, so optimistic. It didn’t matter what horrible thing happened, they would always look for the positive side to it, and that wasn’t such a bad thing – it balanced out the mix.

Karen’s parents had been exactly the same when they visited. Everything was amazing, charming, wonderful! Her mother was full of admiration at how even the little children on the streets spoke such good French. We didn’t laugh at her when she said that – she was too nice to laugh at. Reiner had this theory that it was because they hadn’t been bombed in World War Two.

Next to Laurie in the photo, is her French boyfriend Marco. He is wearing an old raincoat and has a gormless expression on his face. He is pretending to be a tramp. His mouth is half open and he is holding a bottle of wine. When they first got together, he took Laurie to the town hall to get something called a ”Certificat de Concubinage”. She wasn’t sure about that – it didn’t sound very nice, but he explained it was to get benefits, or tax relief or something, and so she let it go, and just hoped her parents would never find out.

Marco worked for his dad who ran a business importing food from Italy. We hardly ever had enough money for food. We spent it all on wine – lots of sour-tasting, cheap, red, local wine in flimsy plastic bottles. Typically, the fridge would have six eggs in it, to be shared out between nine or ten of us, and then Marco would come home with black truffles he’d pinched from his dad’s company, and a big jar of little black olives, and put them in the fridge too, so it didn’t look so bad.

Last of all is Charly, Karen’s boyfriend. He is bare-chested and his face is covered in American Indian war paint – at least that’s what I was aiming for when I put it on for him. I think it looks quite good. I’m not sure what Charly did. I think maybe it was something to do with cars. Charly really wanted to race motorbikes but his heroin habit got in the way and so he was never able to get very far.

Charly had a heart of gold – he would do anything for anyone. Once, we wondered aloud about whether to get some bicycles, and the next day, there was Charly, unloading four bikes from the back of a friend’s van. We were so grateful to him, but we knew he didn’t have much money so we asked, “how much did they cost?” “Deux minutes de peur” he said, and he laughed his lovely deep laugh and his dark brown eyes sparkled.

He was full of useful advice. Whenever I needed drugs, he was always the person I went to. I didn’t do smack at the time – that was the following year, but in Leyton, in the big house I’d had a room in before coming to Nice, we used to do a lot of opium – either eating or smoking it. It was hard to come by in Nice – Charly didn’t know where to go for that, so he said a nice cheap alternative was the pure codeine you could buy over the counter. He told me how to get it – you had to stifle a cough and ask for it by name – neo codion – in case they tried to give you cough medicine or something.

Reiner isn’t in the photo. We’d shared another flat, just the two of us before moving into the villa. Karen had set us up – she’d said “ I think you’ll get along very well together”, and so I’d arrived at the flat with my grandmother’s battered old suitcase, filled with clothes and sketchbooks and sleeping pills, and the typewriter that my father didn’t know I’d taken.

Soon after, Reiner had come. He’d driven from Germany in a beaten up Renault 4 and I couldn’t understand what it could possibly be that was filling the car to the roof. He’d shaken my hand formally, taken off his dark glasses and leather hat, and then I’d watched in astonishment as he had unloaded his car. I’d never seen anyone who had so much stuff before – sheets, glasses, plates, side plates, cheese knives, chopping boards – it was ridiculous.

Karen had been right – we did get along very well together. He had a very strange sense of humour and he made me laugh a lot. The first time we’d gone up to the mountains, to Charly’s family cottage, he’d leapt out of the car, onto a big rock, and just for the joy of it I think, had declaimed, in really, really bad English, the soliloquy from Macbeth.

That was as far as his English went, apart from some David Bowie lyrics, and it was because of him, Charly, Marco and Neslihan that we spoke French the whole time - even if it was just me and Karen in a room we still stuck with French – it would have felt weird not to.

There were others who came later, but Neslihan was the final girl who moved in with us that first day. She was from Turkey and very single minded – not so frivolous as the rest of us. She’d had to fight really hard to leave home. Her father was a rich businessman in Turkey, and a strict Muslim.

I couldn’t believe it when she told me why she didn’t know how to ride a bike – there was some old wives’ tale about how girls ran the risk of damaging their hymens if they sat on saddles, and so her father had forbidden her to. Karen and I had to show her, quietly, in an empty car park how to do it so she could also enjoy the stolen bicycles.

Before moving into the villa, it was Nesli who had shown me how racist it was in Nice. I hadn’t quite believed what she’d said about being treated like a second -class citizen, so one day she took me up to the university office, which dealt with the halls of residence.

“Watch me” she said. She went to the desk and asked if there were any vacancies yet - we were all looking for places to rent at the time. The woman at the desk barely looked up as she answered with a curt “non”. Neslihan came back to me – “now you try". I did as she said – I went over – I asked – and it was the strangest thing; the woman looked up, smiled, welcomed me, gave me a form to fill in and said she was sure she could find something within the week.

I’d seen racism in London before, but it was more of a hidden thing, and when really old people made disparaging remarks about others it was kind of excusable – they’d been brought up like that and it was hard for them to change. In Nice you would commonly hear young and old alike say “moi, je suis raciste”. I hated it.