The Suicide Shop Page 6

  ‘Weather! Things are getting worse. Sulphuric acid rain is expected …’

  Monsieur Tuvache switches off the radio and faces his surprised younger son, who takes the earpieces out of his ears in order to hear his parent thunder: ‘Right! I’ve had it with you!’

  Up above, on the wall, the Grim Reaper continues to play out his series of nine irritating double ‘Cuckoos’ indicating the hour. Mishima throws a poisoned apple at the clock. Taking a hit, the Reaper loses his lime-wood head and the fatal fruit becomes impaled upon the blade of the scythe. ‘Cuck–!’ The apple and the unbalanced, decapitated figure block the little arched doors, preventing them from closing, while the fruit drops its juice onto the Reaper’s robe.

  Alan’s eyes narrow against the blast of Mishima’s fatherly wrath. His parent’s tongue twists in his mouth like the blades of a fan, and Alan’s curls fly back from his sweet little face. ‘You will spend your two-week school holiday this winter in Monaco, training as a suicide commando!’

  Lucrèce suddenly joins them, holding her head in her hands.

  ‘Oh no, Mishima! Not Monaco. Please not there!’

  ‘Yes!’

  The mother of the family pleads with her husband: ‘But, darling, the people there are all nutcases, mad with hatred and brutality, whereas he’s so … very …’

  ‘Maybe they’ll put a hole in his head, so his vocation can sink in!’ shouts Monsieur Tuvache, who then says to his son: ‘Go and get your things ready! Do not take any CDs. This is not a place where they listen to songs – no, that’s not what kamikazes do!’

  Lucrèce is devastated, but Alan looks on the bright side of this punishment: ‘Monaco? Well, it’ll be warm there. I’ll take some sun cream too, and a pair of trunks in case we go swimming …’

  19

  ‘What on earth is wrong with you, Ernest? You’re all pale!’

  ‘Ooooh … It’s that mask! I thought I would die of fright when I saw it,’ replies Ernest to his future mother-in-law.

  ‘The mask Vincent designed has that effect on you?’ Lucrèce is astonished.

  ‘But why does he build such horrors?’ trembles the young cemetery warden, sitting down on a step to try and recover his composure.

  ‘It was my Alan, before he left for his training camp – poor little chap, let’s hope … – who advised him to purge himself of all his anxieties by building masks that represented the monsters from his nightmares.’

  ‘Well, I must say …’

  Marilyn is in raptures. ‘My fiancé is so sensitive!’ She comes to sit down beside him and takes him in her arms. ‘Baby …’

  ‘Well, I must say, for a cemetery warden …’ comments Mishima, joining them.

  ‘No, but honestly … Vincent really ought to warn people!’ Marilyn’s true love justifies himself. ‘Because it’s serious …’

  ‘Come on,’ Lucrèce downplays it, ‘he’s finally found his appetite and now he never stops stuffing his face. That’s real progress. And besides, Ernest, you know that we Tuvaches … well, we don’t really like psychiatrists very much …’

  ‘Yes, but all the same … I don’t suppose you have a small glass of eau de vie by any chance?’

  ‘Eau de –? Oh no, we don’t keep that in stock,’ apologises Mishima. ‘On the other hand, those masks … I’m wondering … if they can produce this effect … for people who are oversensitive or have a weak heart … we’ll have to see!’ he concludes, as the skeleton door chime begins to tinkle.

  A plump, curly-headed lady enters.

  ‘Well, Madame Phuket-Pinson!’ trills Lucrèce, heading for her. ‘Have you come so that I can pay off our little butcher’s account?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s for me …’

  ‘Oh, really? What’s going on?’

  ‘I’ve found out that since I’ve been ill my husband has been having an affair with the waitress at Vatel’s. So I want to put an end to it all. I was already suffering with my health problems …’

  ‘Oh yes … heart problems, I believe …’ murmurs Monsieur Tuvache with false sympathy as he approaches, carrying a carrier bag containing Vincent’s mask. ‘Now, Madame Phuket-Pinson, close your eyes and don’t peep, while I check something out for you …’

  The rotund, docile butcher’s wife, resigned as an animal at the abattoir, lowers her eyelids with their long, cow-like lashes. Mishima ties the cords of the bulky mask behind her neck and head, then hands a mirror to her. ‘Now look at yourself.’

  Madame Phuket-Pinson opens her eyes and discovers her new appearance in the mirror:

  ‘Aaargh!’

  Cheeks made from a chicken carcass that Vincent must have retrieved from the kitchen bin and scraped clean, skin made from a worn-out floor-cloth on the forehead and chin, a nose made from the beak of a cackling hen. On either side, the eyes are windmills in green and pink plastic, like the ones which have been sold for centuries around the lakes in parks. They turn round and make music. Two lines of teeth blink on and off – the lights from a battery-powered Christmas tree decoration – between shattered lips made up of bone fragments from a leg of lamb which had suffered an open fracture! Vincent’s nights must not be restful ones. The vision of his nightmares terrifies the plump heart patient, who catches sight of the multicoloured tangle of the mask’s ample head of hair, dotted with imitation spiders and other poisonous creatures. By means of a clever system, smoke escapes from the eyes and spirals up as the eyes move.

  ‘Aaargh … !’

  The butcher’s wife falls to the ground, rigid. Mishima kneels beside her, then leans over: ‘Madame Phuket-Pinson? Madame Phuket-Pinson?’

  He stands up and has to admit:

  ‘It works!’

  20

  Marilyn Tuvache poisons through her sweat, at least that’s what she says. She shakes customers’ hands. ‘Death salutes you, sir.’

  One scrawny, desperate young man with a mischievous look, the only customer in the shop and standing right in front of her, is surprised – ‘Is that all? You think that’ll be enough?’ – while Marilyn slips the fingers of her right hand into a fleece glove, to make her palm sweat.

  ‘Oh yes, yes,’ she replies with aplomb. ‘My lethal sweat will have penetrated your pores and soon you will be …’

  ‘Can’t I have a little kiss from Death too?’ the other demands.

  ‘Fine, a little kiss, yes.’

  She bends forward, and leaves the sensual imprint of her lipstick on one cheek. The customer shows his disappointment. ‘No, but, I meant there, on the mouth, with the tongue and the saliva, like you did before … It’s so I can be really sure.’

  ‘Oh no, that’s finished …’ The curvaceous blonde sits up on her throne, in her lamé dress. ‘Because now I am engaged to the cemetery warden,’ she confesses, blushing and fluttering the lashes of her heavily made-up eyes.

  The customer, telling himself that he never has any luck, goes to pay at the checkout: ‘How much do I owe?’

  ‘Twelve euro-yens.’

  ‘Twelve?! Blimey, some people really earn a good living … They shake your hand and they’ve earned twelve.’

  ‘Yes, but afterwards you’re dead,’ justifies Monsieur Tuvache.

  ‘Well, I hope so! At that price …’

  And the customer, whom everything disappoints, leaves, pushing through the little metal tubes of the skeleton that tinkles on the door. Back in the shop, Monsieur Tuvache shakes his head, uncomfortable. Five o’clock on the dot! In the cuckoo clock, the wrecked headless lime-wood figure of the Grim Reaper, which is still stuck between the doors, splutters as he shakes the blade of his scythe, embedded in a mouldy apple. ‘Cuck—!’

  Mishima lifts his head and comments: ‘That clock’s ridiculous now … And, in any case, nothing here works properly any more.’

  The radio switches on: ‘Catastrophe! The regional government promises terrorist attacks by our suicide comma—’ He switches it off. ‘That radio’s starting to get on my nerves too.’


  ‘But, darling, you’re the one who wanted us to programme it so that it would come on automatically at news time and go off automatically as soon as the songs and variety shows came on. You said that for the custom—’

  Lucrèce, sitting anguished at the cash register, chews her lip and wrings her hands in anxiety, because she really wanted to hear the rest of the news to find out what was happening.

  Her husband, handsome as a Roman emperor even though he is semi-bald, looks closely at Marilyn at the back of the shop. Wearing her polar fleece glove, she is carelessly flicking through the pages of a women’s magazine in the fresh produce section. ‘What we’re doing isn’t honest. My ashamed ancestors must be turning in their graves. And to think that in addition we’re now selling comical carnival masks … This shop used to have quality; now it’s looking more and more like a stall selling jokes and novelties.’

  ‘But it’s so that people can die of fright …’

  ‘Yes, yes, Lucrèce! And who exactly is going to die? A heart patient on the way out of hospital? They may impress a susceptible cemetery warden, but apart from that … You know as well as I do, people buy them from us to amuse everyone at birthday parties.’

  ‘Perhaps they die laughing when they blow out the candles …’

  ‘Well, of course, you always have to be right, don’t you? And also, if you think I haven’t seen you, as soon as my back is turned, sorting through the sweets in the light from the window … I’m certain that there isn’t a single poisoned one left in that jar! When I go down to the cellar, I can hear you offering handfuls of them to the children, and wiping their eyes with a handkerchief. I hear you telling them: “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right. Now be good and go home to your parents. They must be worrying about you.” No, no, everything’s falling apart and even you are standing in my way, my poor Lucrèce. And I know when everything started to go wrong! Why, oh why, did we want to test a condom with a hole in it? What’s that, sellotaped to the cash register in front of you?’

  ‘A postcard from Alan, which came this morning …’ replies Madame Tuvache nervously.

  ‘Let me see. What picture has he chosen? A hologram of a bomb, good … Oh, but, of course, he had to draw a smile on it!’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Hadn’t you noticed it, Lucrèce? Before, you would have noticed it …’ continues Mishima, postcard in hand, going down into the cellar towards a sack of cement used for making the drowning or defenestration breeze-blocks. ‘Oh, that child; I hope they can sort him out for us … or that he’ll be a martyr.’

  Lucrèce, eaten up inside, chews on her fingernails as she gazes far into the distance.

  21

  Mishima closes the trapdoor of the cellar behind him, switches on a pale light bulb then walks down the steep staircase, where his soul founders. In his hand he holds Alan’s holographic postcard and in the wintry, late-afternoon light from the basement window, with his back against the wall, he reads it:

  Dear Mother, Father, I love you …

  This sends a shaft of light through Mishima’s heart. This man who sometimes likes to throw his weight around in the house or upstairs in the shop no longer kicks up a fuss when he’s alone in the depths of the cellar, reading his youngest child’s words:

  Don’t worry about me. It’ll all be fine …

  Oh, that eternal optimist, that cheeky monkey!

  The day fades, the darkness grows. The sky closes slowly like a box. This is the time when the sorrows of the sick become more bitter still, for the dark night takes them by the throat. Underground, just like the dead, Mishima worships at the altar of his distress and lets out a plaintive cry:

  ‘Alan …’

  It’s little more than a thought and less than a whisper. Breeze-block sand flows through his fingers. It is like cold water rising, it is like a shame that grows. For a week now, every night, he has suffered a terrible nightmare, struggling like a drowning man. In his bed, to left and to right, all he can find is insomnia. And even when he is asleep, he cries:

  ‘Alan!’

  Through the cellar’s barred window, he hears the sounds of heels on the pavement above. Hemmed in by this monotonous hammering, it sounds as if someone is nailing down a coffin somewhere. It is dusk. The sand turns bluish. It is always evening, more or less, for someone in the world, always a time when someone is frightened. ‘I can’t take any more,’ says the acid rain. ‘I can’t take any more of all this.’ Mishima had thought he was balancing freely on a steel wire when in fact all the balance came from the balancing pole. He misses Alan. Nothing can act as a counterweight. Outside, a shriek from a tram – a finger caught in the electric wires – and deep in the cellar the pervasive feeling of suicides shying away from the brink. The fine sand, vaguely starry. Mishima feels like the breeze-block in front of him – he no longer has any law but his own weight. One of Alan’s abandoned shirts rests on a chair. He picks it up, buries his head in it, and voids his sorrow in a great flood of tears.

  Did she hear him sobbing? Standing beside the shop’s cash register, Lucrèce lifts up the trapdoor and asks in the half-light: ‘Mishima, are you all right? Mishima!’

  22

  ‘There aren’t many customers this morning.’

  ‘Yes, it’s dead.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because the regional team won yesterday.’

  ‘Maybe …’

  A young tramp enters the Suicide Shop. He is wearing a large, dirty overcoat that fits tightly round him over a mass of ragged knitted jumpers. Stained trousers hang shapelessly down his legs and his feet are enveloped in torn bin bags. He asks in a hoarse, coughing voice: ‘I would like to kill myself but I don’t know if I have the means. What is your cheapest item?’

  Mishima, who’s wearing a rust-coloured sleeveless pullover with a V-neck over a petrol-blue shirt, replies: ‘Those who can’t afford anything usually suffocate themselves with our carrier bags. They are very strong. Here, have a bit of adhesive tape too, to seal it properly round your neck.’

  ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing …’ Monsieur Tuvache smiles, with a slight tension at the corners of his mouth.

  The young tramp with the rotten teeth, beneath a red woolly Chinese hat from which dusty, lifeless hair escapes, laments:

  ‘If I could only have met people as unselfish as you more often, I wouldn’t be in this position … or if I could have had someone attentive and protective like you for a father …’

  Hearing this, Mishima becomes irritated: ‘That’s enough!’

  But the grateful homeless man indicates the open carrier bag and persists: ‘To thank you, I shall put it on while I’m sitting on the bench opposite. Passers-by will read the name of the shop round my head and it’ll get you a bit of business. I’ll sort of be your sandwich-man.’

  ‘All right …’ says Mishima wearily, opening the door and feeling how cold it is outside. ‘Come on, out you go quickly, there’s a nip in the air!’

  Once the door is closed, Monsieur Tuvache, who is both feverish and fevered, folds his arms and rubs his hands on his shirt, from shoulders to elbows, to warm himself up. He moves the lucky bags slightly in front of the window by the cash register, and slides his palm across the misted pane.

  Outside, he sees the young tramp walk across to the opposite pavement and sit down on a bench. He sees him slide his head into the bag, arrange its opening around his neck and seal it with adhesive tape. He looks just like a bouquet of flowers in a collar. The bouquet soon begins to struggle. The sealed bag swells, subsides, swells. The name of the shop stands out like the slogan on a rubber balloon: THE SUICIDE SHOP. Legs crossed, hands deep in the pockets of his heavy coat and his head drawn in, he suffocates, leaning to one side. Now you can read the other side of the bag: HAS YOUR LIFE BEEN A FAILURE? LET’S MAKE YOUR DEATH A SUCCESS! The young man falls onto the pavement.

  Lucrèce comes up behind her husband as though sliding on rails. She watches too. She’s extr
aordinarily dignified, and the way she carries her head on that bird-like neck is pure nobility. Above her red silk blouse, open at the neck, a brown lock of hair sweeps down over her forehead, giving life to her hairstyle. She looks as if she’s in a breeze. Her mouth, a little pursed, relaxes and her dark eyes narrow as if she were having difficulty seeing or as if she were looking at something very far, so very far, in front of her. ‘At least there, he doesn’t feel the cold.’

  ‘Who?’

  Mishima replaces the lucky bags and turns round. Through the shop’s ceiling, he can hear convulsive sobs interspersed with sniggers, curses, shouts.

  ‘Vincent is up early creating,’ comments his father. ‘And hasn’t Marilyn come down yet?’

  ‘She’s having a lie-in with Ernest,’ replies his wife.

  ‘Aaah! Wu! Whua!’ Vincent is in his bedroom, wearing his grey djellaba decorated with explosives. He has a headache. ‘Alan!’ He feels as if his skull is about to explode, as if bits of shattered bone are about to be flung across the room. The incredibly long, thick bandage around his head is now so voluminous that he looks like a fakir with a bearded, imploded face. Vincent – this human wound with the blood-red face of an artist in crisis – has eyes like disembowelled sunflowers, and all his distinctive features are a terrific blaze of burning coals which explode into sparks. Although he has put on a little weight, he is still only nerves and flesh laid bare, the violent first casting of someone shredded by life. He has the face, the colour of overfired brick, of an alien suffering from hallucinations. A wave runs up and down him as he looks at a hideous mask furrowed and squeezed on all sides by his intoxicated brush. The tumult of the diverse incongruous materials of this disguise, the radiance and vibrancy of its hues, and the paint that seems to leap straight from the tube, all puke and cry: ‘Alan!’ Hanging from the lamp on his work table is a holographic postcard from his little brother, which reads: ‘You are the city’s artist.’