Nice

It was the first time I’d really lived anywhere except London. You could choose between being an assistante in a school, or you could enrol at a French university – any one would do. I didn’t fancy the idea of actually working and so I dropped the idea of a school immediately. Where to go though?

Paris was the obvious choice. I knew it quite well, and I loved the way it was so different to London – the smells, the sounds, the pale golden colour of the buildings, the great wide avenues, the tiny little cobbled alleyways. I even liked the mad driving – it made crossing the road into an adventure.

Then I had another idea. Somewhere hot. With a beach. If there was a beach, and the course turned out to be boring, I’d have an instant, free, alternative thing to do. I’d been to Nice the year before, briefly, to visit friends. There was another degree they ran at my college – European Studies – and they all had to go to Nice, so I knew I would have a few friends there if I needed them.

My boyfriend was going back to Geneva for his year – it was kind of cheating for him since that was where his parents lived, in a strange little bubble of rich expats who ran big multi-national companies and didn’t pay much tax. His parents were nice but I’d met some of their friends and they were weird. Many of the corporate wives pretended they didn’t live abroad at all. Some of them had been there years and years and didn’t speak a word of French. They ordered everything from England and complained endlessly about the Swiss, although the only Swiss people they had any contact with were the ones they employed to run their houses.

All they seemed to do was go to functions, and country clubs where the menus they gave to women would have the prices left off, and endless dinner parties where they would meet the same small circle of people. The only Swiss thing I ever saw any of them show a liking for was fondue and after the first few times, for me, the novelty of it wore off, the forfeits you had to pay if you dropped the bread – so predictable. I couldn’t understand why they stayed so long.

Geneva was horrible. Cold and grey and clean and tidy. No graffiti anywhere. They even stopped you, physically, when you went to cross a road, if the pedestrian light was red. There’d be no traffic – nothing even near – and so you’d step out – and then someone would grasp your arm to restrain you. It wasn’t even any good pretending not to understand them – they’d only switch to English and explain all over again, how it was not permitted. God it was boring. I’d go mad if I ever had to live there. I liked Sam, but not enough to stick out a whole year in Geneva.

I also knew I’d be dragged into his circle of ski-bum Anglo-American school friends. Whenever we’d been there before he’d altered slightly from the person I lived with in Leyton. His voice got louder, he used more Americanisms, and he slapped people on the back a lot. Anyway – it was only across the Alps – easy on a train for the weekend, so we agreed to go our separate ways but meet up often.

Before Nice I didn’t really understand how different it would be, actually living in a small town. My first hint was as the train travelled further and further south from Paris. I thought I looked completely normal – denim jacket, grey ra-ra skirt, thick black tights, slouchy boots, an old silk scarf Joel had given me wrapped around my forehead like a headband. I never ever took that scarf off. It soon became clear that normal in London was head-turning anywhere past Paris.

I got more and more embarrassed – the looks got more and more disapproving. I tried slouching lower in my seat to be less noticeable but it didn’t work. I pulled my skirt down to make it as long as possible but it was very short and there wasn’t much I could do with it. I couldn’t even take off the jacket to cover my legs up, since I only had on my ripped vest underneath with “wild untrammelled youth” across the front.

It was a very long, uncomfortable journey – a whole night. I took one of the sleeping pills I’d stolen from my father’s drawer at home, to try to make the time pass a little quicker, but then I woke up to find some man with his hand travelling up my leg. He did stop when I opened my eyes and glared at him, but all the same, I forced myself to stay awake after that.

I think it must have started to get light somewhere in Provence because I remember seeing fields of little grey stumpy tree things and wondering what on earth they could be – they were so ugly. I couldn’t believe it when I found out they were vineyards – somehow I’d thought vineyards would be beautiful, wild places you could wander around in. As the sun came up, it began to look a little nicer. We went past prettier fields of lavender, you could see it was hot outside, and I drank some bitter coffee and began to get slightly more excited about arriving.