Nice

Nice the beautiful.
I'd sort of taken a vow - made a promise if you will, to give up reading. My fellow vagabonds Fred, Markus and Sauie thought I was a fun person to hang out with when I was drunk or tripping but totally boring when I found a book and disappeared in it. This was Juan-les-Pins where clothing wasn't even an option. And though I had no hesitation about ripping my kit off like everyone else, you could bet your arse that if I'd found a book, I'd be sitting on the sand or stone walls reading it instead of playing drunken dunks or whatever the fuck those crazy Germans were doing out in the water.
We all had our respective talents. Sauie could walk into any restaurant in any town and immediately find kitchen work, then proceed to pass bottles of cheap Calvados brandy, and on one occasion a crate of Champagne over the back fence to us. Fred couldn't speak a word of anything outside his incomprehensible Kölner accented German (Ja'g'eisseFredabernichtHorst...) but had this unique gift of turning a roughly potted sunflower or orange pumpkin or melon flower in a rusty soup can into 5, 10 or occasionally even 20 francs. And Markus tricked. He'd fuck anything that so much as swayed in a light breeze. One time he made us all hang about on the central roundabout over in the Bois de Boulogne while he went off for an orgy that had pulled up when he gave them some kind of bisexual masonic signal.
I just busked.
So, at their inveigling, I didn't read. For weeks and weeks I didn't read. Until we all wound up back in Nice. We ran into some familiar faces when we hit the railway station and the bottles of cheap vodka and stolen scotch appeared and the street urchin parties began all over again. We all seemed to prefer the Cote D'Azur to base ourselves. I can't think why. The compagnies républicaines de sécurité were no less hawkish or brutal than their thug counterparts up in La Rochelle or Paris, Lille or Longwy. Perhaps it was simply the sunshine.
It all went to shit one perfect August day, of course, when I was busking up in the old city. I still blame a beautiful cleaning woman whose name I never knew but who would always lean out of a rickety balcony and tell me to sing louder! Louder! And I also remember she insisted you can never simply call this city Nice. It has to be Nice the Beautiful!
"You! You! I have something for you!"
And she disappeared for a second into the dark colours of the room. She re-emerged and threw a tattered paperback down to me. I fumbled the catch and to cover my ineptitude I said, "I love your accent!"
"What accent? I do not have one!"
I looked at the cover. John Braine's 'Room at the top'.
"I saw you didn't have a book these days but you always have a book. Somebody left this at the bus stop and I thought of you."
I smiled, thanked her, looked for the right words, failed, smiled again and walked away.
And I was never allowed back into the boys club again.

Beat. With heart. Just like this.