Zenith Hotel Read online

  Praise for Zenith Hotel, winner of the Prix de Flore, 2012

  ‘Oscar Coop-Phane oozes affection for his characters, from their beautiful humanity to the depths of their weaknesses’ Huffington Post

  ‘One of the most intriguing and exciting new voices on the French literary scene’ Seymour magazine

  ‘The best first novel of the year’ Le Parisien

  ‘He’s only 23, but Coop-Phane’s sparse style cuts to the bone and reveals a sensibility far beyond his years’ Le Point

  ‘A melancholic and earthy novel that marks a rigorous, vigorous entrance into contemporary French literature’ Le Figaro

  ‘Coop-Phane has achieved the modest and moving prose of Calet and Bove – not a copier, but an extraordinary amateur paying tribute to his readings. His poetic text is as sad as a lonely Sunday’ Télérama

  ‘Zenith Hotel is a melancholy portrait of desire and radiant grace’ Olivier Mony, Sud Ouest

  ‘In this astonishing first novel, Coop-Phane has brought alive the inhabitants of the dirty, poor streets of Paris, compiling a spare yet tender portrait that is never sentimental. An unbelievable discovery’ Coline Hugel, Page des libraires

  ‘It’s beautiful. It’s sad. It’s pure poetry’ Eva Bester, 28 minutes

  ‘A short and thought-provoking book that lays bare the unvarnished heart of city dwelling. It’s populated by people trying to manage their lives, and their footsteps reverberate across the hard tarmac of the arrondissements – the unforgiving structure that underpins each vignette. Astutely observed and told with care’ @tripfiction

  ‘Zenith Hotel is pure poetry. It’s a one-sitting read that manages to fit more emotion into 105 pages than most novels do in 500’ Amanda Horan @gobookyourselfx

  Zenith Hotel

  Oscar Coop-Phane

  Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz

  When I wake up, my teeth feel furry. There’s a foul taste in my mouth – a nasty sort of animal taste. Still, it’s better than at night, when I have the aftertaste of other people and their filth. My body is a hindrance. It spreads out on my sheets like a poorly inflated old sack. I try not to touch this sick body too much, too many hands have pawed it. It needs to rest a little longer in my grubby sheets.

  I smoke in bed. Sometimes the ash drops on to the sheets making little grey smudges which I don’t bother to rub away. I sleep with my ashes, like in a casket.

  In the mornings, my nails ache. The tips of my fingers are cold, slightly numb. Apparently it’s the alcohol. Whatever.

  My hair’s greasy and it sticks to the back of my neck.

  I sit up a little. Feathers escape from my pillow when I move it, fluttering gently down on to the white-tiled floor. I lean back against the wall, scratch my head then light a cigarette. To wash it down, I drink a little water from the old plastic bottle lying at the foot of my bed, which I fill every night from the little sink on the landing.

  I don’t have a proper bed. I sleep on a sofa bed. I don’t bother to fold it away any more.

  Then, I have to go and pee. The toilet’s on the landing, and I have to put on my shoes because the floor’s wet. It’s not a proper toilet, just a hole in the ground with two little white ceramic footrests. People say that in Turkey, you always have to shit crouching down. You have to squat in a ridiculous position over those toilets, too. My pee makes a loud tinkling sound as it hits the water, and that makes me laugh. I pull the little chain hanging from the huge cistern. You have to watch out – sometimes the water splashes your ankles.

  I go back to my room, dragging my feet on the hexagonal red tiles. The door’s open – I never close it when I go to the toilet. If someone came in, I’d hear them.

  I splash my face at the sink on the landing and then wipe it with the hem of my nightie. It’s a bit torn, but I like to feel its roughness against my skin. There’s something sort of pure about it. The men don’t see it.

  I never start the day without a coffee. At night, when I run out, I walk to the store on Place Clichy to buy some more. Coffee’s expensive there and I have to go up Rue d’Amsterdam. That’s how badly I need caffeine in the morning.

  Before, I used to have it sitting at the bar at Jeannot’s. Always cheerful is Jeannot – always cracking jokes. He lost his wife in an accident. He smiles when he talks about her, remembering the good times, her little feminine ways. And there are the guys – small-time delinquents, lost souls, the old men from the neighbourhood. All on Pernod or white wine. But you can’t smoke at Jeannot’s any more, and I need a fag with my coffee, so I’ve stopped going there. I did tell Jeannot why, but he doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m going to another joint, the competition he calls it. He says I’m too stuck-up for his place, that I’m being a princess. When I walk past, he acts like he doesn’t see me. It’s really sad, this business, these anti-smoking laws. Lulu, my neighbour, she still goes there. She’s the one who told me Jeannot thinks I’m being a princess.

  I drink my coffee all alone in my room, smoking my fags. To cheer myself up, I tell myself I’m saving money.

  I’ve got an Italian coffee pot, a metal cafetière. You put in the water, the coffee, and then you screw on the top part. When it boils, you have to take the cafetière off the cooker. I’ve got an electric hotplate. It’s covered in grease and stinks a bit when you turn it on, but it still works. Maybe one day I’ll buy a new one.

  I drink my coffee and smoke a cigarette. No TV, no radio. I listen to the sound of the tobacco sizzling when I take a drag. It’s relaxing. I try not to think. I’ve moved the table next to my bed. I sit there, puffing away and drinking coffee.

  I get up, take a towel from the chest of drawers and go to my neighbour Lulu’s. I haven’t got a shower. She lets me use hers, and it’s nicer. Before, I had to use the shared bathroom. No lock on the door, just a dribble of water and filthy floor tiles. We’ve asked the landlord to replace them hundreds of times, but he doesn’t want to know. He says, Isn’t it enough that I rent out rooms to people like you? So get off my case. He never wants us on his case, except when it’s to pay the rent. He wants to know about that all right, the bastard. I know, everyone has to make a living … but that’s still no reason to be such a shit.

  His eyes are wide-set, like a fish, and he’s bald. He taps his pudgy fingers on his counter and says he’s a hotel-keeper. He talks of his ‘establishment’ with pride. He’s mixed up in all sorts of dodgy deals.

  When he kicked Valente out, we all refused to pay our daily rent. He said he’d call the police. We told him the cops would be more than happy to stick their noses in his business and inspect the showers and his books. Then he turned the heating off. It was January. After three days, we started paying again. We never saw Valente again. He wanted to go back to Brazil.

  I wash with a mini soap. I like feeling the roughness of my skin, the way it goes taut and chapped after washing. Shower gel’s too gentle. It leaves your skin slightly greasy, like when you oil it. I prefer it when my skin’s dry. I feel cleansed – disinfected. I soap my face too. I frown. My skin feels tight – I like that sensation.

  I’ve got little zits on my neck, apparently it’s the rubbing because I always wear a scarf. Not acne or blackheads, but dry little zits. I scratch them and scrape them off with my nails. Sometimes, there’s one that won’t come off, so I save it until the next day. When I go back to my room after my shower, that’s my little task.

  After that, I’m hungry. I boil an egg or heat up a tin of food. I breakfast in front of the TV. It’s a load of rubbish, but I like watching it.

  I’m a streetwalker. Not a call girl or anything like that, no, a common streetwalker with high heels and menthol cigarettes.

  This morning, I’m going somewhere to do someone a big favour. I don’t intend to go into detail and tell you about my childhood, my love life and all my woes. I’m not going to tell you how I ended up like this – you’d get too much of a kick out of it. All you’re going to get is my day. If you were expecting me to talk about rape, being abandoned, HIV and heroin, you can fuck off, pervert. You’ll get nothing more than my day, which is just like all the other days of my life and just like all the days to come until I die. There’ll be no family tragedy, front-page news or armchair psychology.

  It’s a nice day – not that it makes any difference to me. I walk in the shade. I’m wearing a trenchcoat, and I look like a typist, even though I’m not going to the office. Under my trenchcoat, latex. I like that word. Latex. It smacks in your mouth.

  I wait for the bus, smoking a fag. The 21 to Glacière Arago.

  I listen to the sounds of the city as if it’s music. A folk song with people walking and children playing.

  I like jailbirds. They’re sweet! They want to marry me. They don’t have any other options. I refuse to play the tart with a heart who likes giving pleasure, but for the guys in Santé prison, it’s different. It’s less sad. It’s less sad because it’s sadder.

  I write in the bus. Schoolkids are on their way to lunch. The old people go about their old people’s business. They know all the stops, they know all the streets. I’d like to know what they’re thinking about inside their little old people’s heads. They chew over their memories, they gnaw at them inside their tired brains. They clutch their tickets in their trembling hands. They’re afraid – you can see it in their glassy little eyes. They play their part of old people.

  Dominic

  1

  They were out to kill him. He didn’t know exactly who, he didn’t know exactly when, but he did know it
was coming, that one of them – Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour or Aurélie – would shove his head in the piano and crush his cheeks between the keys and the wooden lid. That’s definitely how they were going to do it. They were going to crush his head in the piano in the living room.

  Dominic didn’t know much, but of that he was certain. The keyboard would be splattered with bits of his brain. The blood would spurt on to the wooden floor. At his funeral they’d play a Purcell march on the evil piano. The maid would have cleaned the keyboard thoroughly and flushed the bits of his brain down the toilet to avoid blocking the kitchen sink. He wouldn’t even have had the privilege of the waste disposal unit. His encephalon would have vanished down the toilet like a big, cumbersome turd.

  Now it was floating in the septic tank, the keyboard had been cleaned, white as snow, his sister Aurélie was learning to play on it. The family no longer thought about little Dominic; he’d been expelled from their minds the way shit comes out of our arses and is sucked into the septic tank.

  Dominic’s childhood was kind of sad. He notched up each day as a little victory, but his anxieties soon came back to torment him. Perhaps they’d kill him tomorrow. It was a crime novel in the making. They behaved as if they loved him, as if their son were the most important thing in the world to them. But Dominic was no fool. He knew very well that beneath the veneer of the ideal family lurked a big monster full of hatred.

  Since he didn’t go to school, a private tutor came to the house three times a week. His name was Joncourt and he had a moustache. He carted all sorts of books around in his briefcase – algebra, geography, hundreds of typed pages, in French, in Latin and in figures.

  Joncourt wasn’t much fun, but at least he wasn’t out to kill him. You could trust him – he wore glasses. Father wore glasses too, but it was a trap, a disguise, to gain his son’s trust, a clown’s mask on a villain’s face.

  Don’t ask Dominic why they wanted to kill him. He had no idea. He could have done without it. It’s not pleasant living in fear, with the expectation of being murdered.

  This situation wasn’t his choice, but here he was, in this evil family bent on crushing his head in the piano in the living room. If he’d said anything, they’d have thought he was mad. Aurélie seemed so sweet, so studious. As for his parents, they were the image of propriety, their place in heaven guaranteed. But they were out to get him and Dominic couldn’t forget it. That was his only certainty, a very sad certainty.

  He prepared himself for it. He wrote notes explaining the circumstances of his death and hid them alongside the footpaths in the hope that one day an eager hiker would avenge him, savagely mowing down the murderous family with an axe or a machine gun. Justice would be done; there must be a God for that. The murder of a child cannot go unpunished; Joncourt’s moral philosophy teachings would confirm that, no question. Only evil people like Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour and Aurélie would wish the opposite. Oh, they were very cruel beneath their pretence of being the perfect family! Killing their own son, their own flesh and blood, by jamming his head in a piano! A heinous crime, yes, it would be a heinous crime. Compared with them – with what they were planning to do sooner or later – Pierre Rivière, that guy in the nineteenth century who hacked his family to death, was a model of respectability. There was nothing worse than what they were going to do. If Dominic were able to rely on an epidemic, a war or an earthquake, he might have a hope of surviving, of not ending up with bits of his brain floating around in the toilet bowl, floating in the septic tank like a common turd. Only the deaths of Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour and Aurélie could free him from his tragic destiny, save his life, keep his head intact – yes, only all their deaths. If he ran away, they’d be bound to catch him and drag him back to the house by the scruff of his neck, to the piano, the torture instrument on which his very last tears would fall. A few drops would plop on to the shiny keys, his final ordeal. Bang, suddenly, the lid strikes his head. Once, twice, three times, until his skull explodes like a watermelon, until his brains are splattered all over the walls.

  They’d have a good laugh, Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour and Aurélie. They’d all laugh in unison, then they’d link hands and dance around Dominic’s lifeless little body, pale and thin, his head crushed, unrecognizable.

  He could just picture the little party they’d have over his corpse, the morbid celebration they’d long been anticipating.

  It was very cowardly of them. Dominic was only twelve, unable to defend himself. What had he done to deserve such a fate? Nothing, strictly speaking, he’d done nothing wrong. He had been born, and as soon as he was old enough to grasp the fact, he knew in his heart that one day they’d kill him with that evil piano.

  He must be imagining it. Sometimes he tried to convince himself he was, but to no avail; he felt it in his bones as being the only certainty he had ever had. It was his intuition speaking. It was an obvious fact. They were going to kill him. He even knew how they were planning to do it.

  2

  No one has ever understood him. They’d locked him up decades ago for his own safety. Now, he’s protected within these four walls. Here at least no one will kill him. Only a bit of dealing, the occasional rape. But that doesn’t bother Dominic. It’s not packs of cigarettes or anal sex that’ll make him regret what he did. It was self-defence, their deaths were his only way out. And if people can’t understand, then that’s their problem. The judges, the screws, opinion – public opinion, that is – he’s not bothered. Here, he’s at peace. He has his room, they bring him food, he can borrow books from the library. If he’s well behaved, he can even watch television. Here, he’s free; no one’s going to kill him. No, truly, he feels no remorse. He’d taken his destiny into his own hands.

  He’s even made a friend called Georges. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s really cool. He and Dominic take their shower together.

  Georges has saved up a bit of money. He’s the one who buys the cigarettes and medicines, coffee and a bit of dope sometimes. Life’s pleasant here. You don’t want for anything. You have enough to eat, in winter they give you blankets. It’s a bit dirty, of course, but you get used to it. No truly, Dominic has no regrets. It was that or death.

  Today’s his birthday, his forty-eighth spring as Georges says. Dominic really doesn’t like celebrations. Georges promised him a surprise at lunchtime, in the visiting room. Good old Georges, what the hell’s he got up his sleeve? He’s a nice guy, thinks Dominic. He pays for the cigarettes and shower gel, medicines and instant coffee. And he gives me surprises! I’m really lucky to be banged up with him. Lucky to share his room. The guy before wasn’t half as decent. He was a thug and he snored. Sharing a cell with him wasn’t a life. But Georges is nice. All he asks for is a little blow job from time to time. Dominic doesn’t like that, especially when it all spurts out. But hey, it’s soon done and he’s happy to smoke and drink coffee for free. Georges is a good mate, he won’t let him down.

  This morning, Georges has made some little cakes for Dominic’s birthday and has even found a candle. Dominic’s pleased, he blows on the flame; he’s going to see his forty-eighth spring.

  ‘They were trying to kill me. That’s why I’m here. I promise you I’m not bad. They were out to kill me. I had no choice.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart. Tell me, was it Georges who sent you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s for my birthday. Forty-eight springs, as he says.’