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The Suicide Shop Page 3
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8
‘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.
9
‘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,’ a
dmits 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.’
10
Night has fallen. In her room, Marilyn has undressed and, standing naked, she plays with the large square of white silk before her reflection in the panes of her window, which looks out onto the City of Forgotten Religions estate. People fall from the balconies of the Moses, Jesus, Zeus and Osiris towers like autumn drizzle.
Monsieur and Madame Tuvache’s daughter makes the scarf fly around her. As the silk brushes her shoulders it provokes shivers that arch her back. She lets the pure fabric slide down her buttocks, catches it in front between her legs and throws it into the air above her. There, the white square spreads out like the gracious movement of a principal dancer. It floats down like a slow parachute onto her upturned face. Eyes closed, she breathes out and the silk floats up again. Marilyn catches a corner of it, which she winds around her belly, her hips, like the arm of a man holding her by the waist. Aaah … the swish of the scarf rising further between her thighs and catching in her hairs. Aaah … Marilyn, ordinarily stooped with drooping shoulders, straightens up. Aaah … She arches more when Alan’s gift, gathering momentum, rises up her chest and brushes her breasts of which, wrongly, she is ashamed. Their nipples harden, becoming erect. Her breasts are large and magnificent and, with fingers joined behind the nape of her neck, Marilyn is astonished to discover herself like this, reflected in her bedroom window, as the scarf falls back down. She catches it as it reaches her shapely calves, and bends forward. Her backside is splendid, broad beneath a waist that is only the tiniest bit fat. And the silk travels again, revealing to the mixed-up girl the unsuspected harmony of her body. She is the most beautiful girl in the whole district! Not a single girl in the City of Forgotten Religions estate can hold a candle to her. Her little brother’s gift, better than a dream … And the scarf continues its hypnotic, sensual dance across her quivering skin. Marilyn’s eyelids lower in an expression of ecstasy unknown to her. But what else is she discovering? Is she becoming Monroe? She parts her lips, revealing a thin strand of … deadly … saliva.
11
OPEN OWING TO BEREAVEMENT. The little sign, turned towards the outside and fixed to the front door with a sucker, moves as something above it tinkles. Hanging high on the frame like a little bell, a minuscule skeleton made of iron tubes picks out the mournful notes of a requiem. Then Lucrèce turns her head and spots a young customer entering.
‘Hm, you’re not very old, are you? How old? Twelve, thirteen?’
‘Fifteen!’ lies the adolescent. ‘I would like some poisoned sweets, please, Madame.’
‘Well, listen to you, with your “sweets” in the plural! You can only take one of our fatal delicacies. We couldn’t have you distributing them to all your classmates. We’re not here to decimate Montherlant High School or Gérard de Nerval College!’ says Lucrèce, unscrewing the large lid of a spherical glass jar filled with sweets. ‘It’s the same with bullets for revolvers – we only sell them singly. A man who shoots a bullet into his head doesn’t need a second one! If he demands an entire box, it’s because he has something else in mind. And we are not here to supply murderers. Go on, choose … but choose well, eh, because in this jar, only one sweet in two is deadly. The law demands that we give children a chance.’
The very young girl hesitates over
the chewing gums, paper-wrapped fortune sweets and deadly caramels – half clamshells filled with hard yellow, green or red confectionery, to be licked for a long time because they cause a slow death. By the window, there are large paper cornets: lucky bags, blue for boys and pink for girls. She doesn’t know what to choose, but finally seizes a fortune sweet.
Young Alan is sitting beside his mother, drawing large suns on pages from an exercise book. ‘Why do you want to die?’ he asks.
‘Because life isn’t worth the trouble of living,’ replies the girl, who is around the same age as the Tuvaches’ youngest child.
‘That’s what I half kill myself trying to tell him!’ cuts in Lucrèce, filled with admiration for her young customer. ‘Here, take a leaf out of her book,’ she continues, addressing her son.
The schoolgirl approaches Alan, and confides: ‘I’m alone against everyone, misunderstood in a cruel world, and my mother is such an idiot … She confiscated my mobile, all because I went over the time allocation by a few hours. I mean, what’s the use of a telephone if you can’t call people with it? I’m sick of it. If I had an allocation of fifty hours, I wouldn’t have exceeded it … In fact, she’s jealous because she doesn’t have anyone to call, so she takes it out on me: “Blah, blah, blah! Why do you spend hours calling Nadège? You could just go and see her, she only lives opposite.” So I don’t have the right to stay in my room, is that it?’ demands the girl indignantly. ‘Why should I go out? I don’t want to see the sun, that crummy star. It’s good for nothing, the sun …’ she continues, looking at Alan’s drawings. ‘It’s too hot and nobody could live there.’
She turns back to the cash register and pays for her fortune sweet. ‘My mother doesn’t realise how much time I have to spend getting dressed, doing my hair and putting on my make-up before I go out. I wasn’t going to spend all that time in front of the mirror when I could just pick up the phone!’