The Suicide Shop (3 page)

Vincent’s emaciated body is swamped in a grey djellaba patterned with drawings of explosives: sticks of dynamite and black ball-shaped bombs with fuses spitting out yellow and green flashes of light. He is twenty years old. The walls of his bedroom are entirely devoid of decoration. As he sits facing a narrow bed, elbows propped on an overloaded table backed up against a wall, a tube of glue trembles in his hand. The Tuvaches’ elder son has striking bushy eyebrows and sports a short, spiky red beard. His breathing is laboured and quivering, and his fixed sidelong look reflects the tragedy of his inner torment. Crêpe bandages compress the entire upper part of his head; he still suffers from violent migraines. Brown crusts swell his thick lower lip, the result of frequently being bitten hard enough to draw blood, while his upper lip is very red and delicate. In the middle it lifts into two points, like the scarlet canopy of a tiny circus tent. In front of him on the table lies a strange, macabre model under construction, while behind him, on the other side of the dividing wall, can be heard:

‘
Da-da, doobi-doobi da-da-da!
’

‘Mother!’

‘What now?’ demands his mother from the kitchen.

‘Alan’s playing happy songs!’

‘Oh no, give me strength … You know, I’d rather have given birth to an entire nest of vipers than bring up that ridiculous child!’ grumbles Lucrèce, coming into the corridor and opening the door of her younger son’s bedroom. ‘Will you give it a rest? How many times have I told you we don’t want you to listen to those stupid cheerful ditties? Were funeral marches composed for dogs? You know how much it upsets your brother, having to listen to those cheery songs, and how much it makes his head hurt.’ She leaves the room and enters Vincent’s, where she’s confronted by the debris of the exploded model. ‘Oh, well done, you’ve really done it now!’ she says, still talking to Alan. ‘Look at this catastrophe your music’s caused. You’ve really done yourself proud this time!’

It’s not long before the father of the family arrives. ‘What’s happening?’

Then Marilyn appears, dragging her feet. All three of them – Lucrèce, Marilyn and Mishima – are here now, surrounding Vincent.

‘What has happened,’ yells Madame Tuvache, ‘is that
your
younger son has been up to his usual tricks again!’

‘He’s not
my
son,’ retorts her husband. ‘
My
son is Vincent. He’s a real Tuvache.’

‘And what about me?’ asks Marilyn. ‘Where’s my place in all this?’

Mishima strokes his elder son’s bandaged cranium. ‘So, what happened? You broke your model?’

‘A model of what?’ enquires the Tuvaches’ daughter.

Vincent sobs. ‘The model of a suicide theme park.’

‘Of
what
?’

‘It would … It would be like a big fair for people who’d had enough of life. At the shooting gallery customers would still pay, but to be the target.’

As he listens to Vincent, Mishima sits down on the bed.

‘My son is a genius.’

‘It would be the most deadly amusement park. On the walkways, among the smells of frying chips and the poisonous mushrooms we would sell, tears would trickle softly down the customers’ cheeks.’

‘Death caps!’ cries Mishima, and Lucrèce and Marilyn get carried away too, breathing in the smell of the chips …

‘Barrel organs would grind out sad songs. Ejection carousels would propel people like catapults, right over the town. There would be a very high palisade from which lovers could throw themselves, just like they’d throw themselves off a cliff, hand in hand.’

Marilyn joins her own hands and rubs them together.

‘In the din of the ghost train’s wheels, laughter punctuated with sobs would spin off into an imitation gothic castle full of comical traps, all of them deadly: electrocution, drowning, sharpened portcullises that would slam down into people’s backs. The friends or relatives who had accompanied a despondent person would leave with a small box containing the desperate person’s ashes, because at the end of the fairground attraction there would be a crematorium, into which the bodies freefall one after the other.’

‘The lad is amazing,’ says Mishima.

‘Father would feed the furnace. Mother could sell tickets …’

‘And what about me – how would I be of use? Where would I fit in?’

Vincent Tuvache pivots his head so that he almost faces his sister. Oh, the piercing power of his gaze, the ravaged radiance of his anguished eyes beneath his head bandages! Outside in the darkness, through the panes of his sombre room’s small window, a neon advertising sign suddenly dazzles him with a crazy intense yellow light. Then the shadows of his face become a very pale green and his short, now pink, beard seems painted by brushstrokes arranged in a star formation. Overexposed in the artificial brightness, he is also haloed by the vibrations of an incredible self-destructive passion. The three people around him are moved by the sound of his heart-rending cry. The light changes and becomes red. It is as if Vincent, who lowers his head, had been caught in the blast from a bomb:

‘It would be like when I’m dreaming and I wake up, then I go back to sleep but I’m still forever dreaming of the same fairy tale, the same setting …’

‘Have you had this project in mind for a long time?’ asks his mother.

‘On the walkways, employees disguised as evil witches will offer poisoned toffee apples – “Come, Mademoiselle. Eat this poisoned apple …” – then they’ll go off and see someone else.’

‘Actually, I could do that,’ suggests Marilyn. ‘I’m ugly.’

The elder son sets out all his plans: the cabins on the Big Wheel – the floors of which would give way at twenty-eight metres above ground – and the incomplete Figure of Eight rollercoaster with ascending rails that, after a dizzying descent, would suddenly stop in full flight. He explains the model, which he demolished moments ago with a blow from his fist, while his little brother leaves his room, and passes Vincent’s open door humming and snapping his fingers in time:

‘
Don’t worry, be happy
…
!
’

His appalled mother, curses at the ready, turns round and clenches her fists at him. To her and her husband, Alan’s castanet fingers are an aberration.

‘In fact, to be honest, Monsieur, we didn’t actually want a third child. He was born because we tested a condom with a hole in it: you know, the ones we sell to people who want to die of a sexually transmitted disease.’ Lucrèce shakes her head in dejection at this blow from fate. ‘You must admit it was pretty bad luck – the
one
time we tried out one of our own products.’

‘Well, condoms from Don’t Give A Damn About Death are guaranteed porous. You should have trusted us without testing them,’ answers the sales representative.

‘All the same …’ sighs Alan’s mother as the boy himself suddenly appears in the shop.

‘Hell-ooo, Mother! Hell-ooo, Father! Hell-ooo, Monsieur …?’ he continues, coming over and spontaneously kissing the representative on both cheeks. ‘Have you theen? It’th raining. That’th good. We need water, don’t we!’

‘How was school?’ his mother asks him.

‘Very good. In the music lethon, I thang and made the whole clath laugh.’

‘You see, what did I tell you?’ exclaims Madame Tuvache, meaningfully to the rep.

‘It’s true that he doesn’t seem the easiest of lads …’ acknowledges the representative, wiping his cheeks. ‘I take it the other two aren’t like that, though?’

‘No, they would have gone past sighing and pushing you out of the way without apologising. Although the elder son has no appetite, he gives us complete satisfaction, almost always shut away in his bedroom as he is, but poor Marilyn, who’s almost eighteen, feels oafish and useless here. She’s always hot and sweaty. She’s searching for her place in life.’

‘Hm, mm …’ mutters the new Don’t Give A Damn About Death representative, opening his briefcase and taking out an order book. He looks around him, examining the shop from top to bottom. ‘A very fine shop you have here. And it comes as a surprise, all alone as it is, surrounded by tower blocks. Oh yes, the prettiest shop really on Boulevard Bérégovoy! And then there’s the outside; your facade is most curious. Why is there a narrow tower on the roof, like a bell tower or a minaret? What was this place before? A church, a chapel?’

‘Or a mosque, a temple perhaps. Nobody knows any more,’ replies Lucrèce. ‘The rooms along the upstairs corridor could have been monks’ cells, which were later turned into bedrooms, a dining room and a kitchen. And then the little door on the left-hand landing leads to the worn stones of the tower’s spiral staircase, but we never go there. Down at the back, in what must have been a sacristy, I make my in-house poisons.’

The sales rep raps his knuckles on a wall that sounds hollow.

‘Did you have everything covered with plasterboard?’ Then he examines the displays, commenting on them to himself: ‘Double unit in the middle, a simple unit against both of the two lateral walls … Old-style Delft tiles, good mortuary lighting on the ceiling, an air of cleanliness and on top of that, good heavens, there’s a choice … The slip-knots are here …’

‘By the way, we’ll take some hemp from you,’ declares Mishima, who’s been silent up to now. ‘Of an evening, I like twisting the ropes myself while I watch dramas on TV. And, besides, people appreciate handcrafted work. One year, we took some machine-made ropes. A lot of people just ended up falling off their stools.’

‘How much shall I put you down for – a bale?’ The representative makes a note.

‘And some cyanide too,’ says Lucrèce, standing in front of the display unit by the left-hand wall, where the phials stand in rows. ‘I’ve hardly got any left. And some arsenic: a fifty-kilogram bag.’

‘Put us down for one kimono, size XXL,’ adds Mishima.

The representative walks further into the shop, writing down the orders, and arrives at the fresh produce shelves, which astonish him.

‘I say, it’s oddly empty here: a few digitalis petals, black holly berries, some splendid
Cortinarius
rubellus
mushrooms,
Galerina marginata
, but not many creatures in boxes with holes for them to breathe through …’

‘Ah yes, we’ve always had a problem with wildlife,’ admits Mishima, ‘whether it’s with golden frogs, trigonocephalus vipers or black widow spiders … You see,’ he explains to the representative, ‘the problem is that people are so lonely that they become attached to the poisonous creatures we sell them. And, curiously, the creatures sense this and don’t bite them. One time, do you remember, Lucrèce …? A lady customer who had bought a killer trapdoor spider came back into the shop. Now, I was very surprised and she asked me if I sold needles. I thought they were for her to put her own eyes out. Well, not at all: they were to knit little bootees in pearlised cotton for her spider, which she’d named Denise. They had become friends and, what’s more, the lady had her at liberty in her bag. She took her out and let her run over her hand. I said: “Put it away!” And she laughed and said: “Denise has given me back my taste for life.”’

‘Another time,’ cuts in Lucrèce, ‘a depressive bought a venomous spitting cobra that never spat at him and which the customer ended up calling Charles Trenet. Couldn’t he have called it Adolf? We carefully gave our children the names of famous suicides: Vincent for Van Gogh, Marilyn for Monroe …’

‘And why Alan?’ asks the representative.

‘If he’d called his snake Nino Ferrer,’ goes on Lucrèce, still following her train of thought, ‘that we could have understood too.’

‘Oh no, really, creatures are disappointing,’ intervenes Mishima. ‘When the golden frogs escape, they hop all over the shop. And it’s really complicated trying to catch them with a net, especially when you mustn’t touch them or you’re dead. We won’t be taking any more wildlife and I don’t know what we’re going to do with the fresh produce section.’

Sitting on the steps of the staircase that leads up to the apartment, young Alan is holding a small plastic stick topped by a ring, into which he is blowing. Soap bubbles are flying up from it. They rise and fall, float, coloured and shining, in the Suicide Shop. They find their way, carelessly, between the shelving. Mishima’s neck sways and bends as he follows their journey.

One large bubble of soapy water happens to burst on the representative’s eyelashes. He wipes his eye and, grimacing, heads for his briefcase on the counter: ‘I may perhaps have an idea here for your child who’s in difficulty.’

‘Which one? Alan?’

‘Oh no, not him … for the girl. At Don’t Give A Damn About Death, we’ve just launched a new product that would hold no dangers for her.’

‘No dangers for her?’ repeats Lucrèce.

‘The first of November … Happy birthday, Marilyn!’

Her mother emerges from the kitchen carrying a metal tray, on which lies a birthday cake in the shape of a coffin. Her father, who is standing beside the round table in the dining room, pops the cork of a bottle of champagne and addresses his daughter as he pours her a glass:

‘Hey, that’s one year less you have to live!’

The bubbles climb up the glass. Marilyn Tuvache places her index finger on the edge and the bubbles subside. The cake holds mournful sway at the centre of the table, among the remains of the family dinner and in front of Vincent’s untouched, empty plate. Mishima tries to serve him some champagne too.

‘No thank you, Father. I’m not thirsty.’

His father pours a few drops into Alan’s glass. ‘Go on! Take it, you ever-happy soul … to celebrate the coming of age of your sister, who’s finished with childhood and adolescence. It’s a start.’

The sides of the cake, covered in milk chocolate, are in imitation of the varnished poplar wood of a coffin. But the dark cocoa-coloured lid, decorated with mouldings, looks like mahogany. About two-thirds down its length, it is open revealing a pillow of Chantilly cream, on which rests a head made from pink marzipan. Curls of lemon peel represent bright blonde hair.

‘Oh look, it’s me!’ exclaims Marilyn, her hands rushing to her lips. ‘How beautiful it is, Mother!’

‘I didn’t have much to do with it,’ admits her mother modestly. ‘Vincent had the idea and drew it for me. The poor thing couldn’t cook it, because of the disgust he feels for food, but he made the candles too.’

The candles, which are beige and twisted like ropes, have been slightly melted in order to twist them into the shape of two standing numbers which burn side by side: one and eight, eighteen. Marilyn picks up the one and moves it to the other side of the eight: ‘I’d rather be eighty-one …’ Then she blows them out as if she were snuffing out her existence.

Mishima claps his hands. ‘And now, the presents!’

Marilyn’s mother closes the kitchen refrigerator, and returns with a small package that looks like a wrapped barley sugar sweet.

‘Marilyn, please forgive the presentation. We asked Alan to buy some white wrapping paper edged with black, like bereavement cards, and he came back with coloured paper covered in laughing clowns. But you know what your brother’s like … It’s for you, you’re grown up now – from your parents.’

Marilyn, moved by all the attention, peels away the folds of paper at either end of the present and opens it.

‘A syringe? But what’s that inside, the stuff that looks like water?’

‘A terrible poison.’

‘Oh, Mother, Father! At last you have given me death. Is it true, I can kill myself?’

‘No, not yourself!’ exclaims Lucrèce, rolling her eyes to the heavens. ‘But everyone you kiss.’

‘How?’

‘At Don’t Give A Damn About Death, they suggested this liquid that they have perfected. You inject it intravenously and you don’t get sick; nothing happens to you at all. But in your saliva you develop a poison that will kill everyone who kisses you. Every one of your kisses will be deadly …’

‘And as you were trying to find your place in the shop,’ went on Mishima, ‘well, your mother and I decided that we could entrust you with the fresh produce section. You would be there to kiss those customers who were recommended this type of voluntary death: the
baiser de la mort
, the Kiss of Death …!’

Marilyn, who has been sitting limply, gets to her feet, trembling with emotion. ‘But,’ her father makes clear, ‘you must just be careful never to kiss us.’

‘Mother, how is it possible to be poisonous without poisoning oneself?’

‘Think about creatures – how do they do it?’ replies Lucrèce, the specialist. ‘Snakes and spiders live healthily with death in their mouths. Well, it will be the same with you.’

Mishima ties a tourniquet above his daughter’s elbow. She taps the body of the syringe, forces a drop from the needle’s tip and injects the vein herself as Alan watches her. She has tears in her eyes.

‘It’s the champagne!’ she says defensively.

‘Right, and what about you boys?’ demands Mishima. ‘Where are the presents for your sister?’

Vincent, painfully thin and his head bandaged as ever, brings out a voluminous parcel from under the table. Marilyn unwraps the present, the paper decorated with clowns, and her big brother explains the strange object:

‘It’s an integral motorbike helmet in indestructible carbon fibre – I’ve reinforced the visor. Inside, I’ve fixed two sticks of dynamite from which two strings hang … That way, if one day Mother and Father allow us to destroy ourselves, you put on the helmet, fasten the strap under your chin and then you pull on the two strings. Your head will explode inside the helmet without staining the walls.’

‘It’s a delicate touch, thinking of details like that!’ applauds Lucrèce, whose elder son also draws admiration from Mishima: ‘Apparently, my grandfather was like that: inventive. And what about you, Alan? What’s your present?’

The eleven-year-old boy unfolds a large square of white silk. Marilyn seizes it immediately, rolls it up and tightens it round her neck.

‘Oh, a cord to hang myself!’

‘Oh no …’ smiles Alan, showing her. ‘It has to be loose, and pretty. It has to be like a caressing cloud around your neck, your shoulders, your chest.’

‘What have you bought her?’ asks his mother anxiously as she cuts a piece of the coffin-shaped cake and offers it to Vincent.

‘No thank you, Mother.’

‘I bought it with my pocket money,’ replies Alan.

‘You must have saved up for a year!’

‘Yes.’

Lucrèce stands there with the cake-slice poised in the air above the cake.

‘I don’t see the point of it,’ she continues, cutting another slice of cake.

‘It really is a waste of money,’ agrees Mishima.

Gazing round at her family, Marilyn floats the scarf gently round her throat.

‘I won’t kiss you, of course, but my heart wants to.’