The Suicide Shop (7 page)

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!’

‘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 extraordinarily 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.’

On the other side of the adjoining wall, in the bedroom to the right, Ernest dances lovingly above Marilyn’s belly. He bends over to caress her. And when he feels the liquid of his sweetheart’s mouth on his teeth, he drinks it, and tells her: ‘You have entered my heart like a knife.’ The beauty of their caresses is shrouded in rose-scented vapours. The Tuvaches’ daughter moves her lips. In a corner, flowers swoon with rapture. The sounds and scents circle in the air; a melancholy waltz and giddy, painful fever. Marilyn’s breasts, like shields, catch flashes of light. These make the cemetery warden stumble over his words as though they were cobbles: ‘I-I-I love you!’ He embraces her and cradles her soul. The eternal smile of the girl’s perfect teeth leads him into uncharted places. To him, she is like a beautiful vessel in full sail. Laying bare her breasts to him and lying with one elbow in the cushions, his bare-chested siren looks resplendent. Fervently in love too, she raises her head and lies back. Pinned up on the wall is a postcard: ‘You are the most beautiful of all.’

*

Lucrèce, Marilyn, Mishima, Vincent … All of them miss Alan; life has no meaning without him.

‘Cuckoo!’

Monsieur Tuvache looks up in surprise and eyes the shop’s clock – ‘Gracious me, has it started working again?’ – then lowers his gaze.

‘Oh, it’s you! But what are you doing here?’

In front of the poisons display, Madame Tuvache is wrapping up a phial for an old lady with a twisted body. The misshapen monster that used to be a woman complains: ‘Getting old takes such a long time.’ It seems that the fragile being, who has become as small as a child, is gently progressing, carrier bag in hand, towards a new cradle. Her tears could fill a river.

Lucrèce turns round. ‘Alan!’

Bundle of belongings on one shoulder, hair all over the place, her youngest child is standing beside the cash register and suddenly a ray of summer sunshine seems to pass through the shop. His mother rushes towards him: ‘My little one, you’re alive!’

His outfit, spectacularly colourful in places, is like a summer flowerbed, and hope seems to shine in through the window. Over in the fresh produce section, Marilyn hastily shakes a customer’s hand and gets rid of him. ‘Off you go! Death says hello to you too!’

Then she runs towards her little brother, her wide skirt sweeping the air and her heart beating like a drum. ‘Alan!’

She kisses him, strokes his cheeks, shakes his hands, slides her bare fingers beneath the child’s sweatshirt, touches his skin.

Marilyn’s customer is astonished. ‘Are you killing your little brother too?’

‘What? Of course not!’

The dejected customer pays twelve euro-yens, but doesn’t understand. He brushes past Alan, dazzled by the health that radiates like bright light from his arms and his shoulders. He makes his exit behind the downcast grandmother.

Madame Tuvache calls out: ‘Vincent! Vincent! Come and see! Alan is back!’

Box of chocolates in hand and munching, Vincent appears at the top of the stairs by the little door leading to the spiral staircase of the old religious building (church, temple, mosque? …) The north wind, blowing under the door, puffs up the bottom of his djellaba, decorated with atom bombs.

Alan climbs the stairs and embraces his big brother. ‘Hey, City’s Artist, you’ve put on weight!’

The latter – this turbaned Van Gogh – peers at his younger brother’s sweatshirt, illustrated with a design that intrigues him. It depicts an aquarium with a letter at the bottom reading:
Goodbye
. Above the opening of the glass tank, a goldfish drips and flies away, attached to the string of a balloon. Another fish, which is still in the water, is making bubbles and shouting to him:
No, Brian!
Don’t do it!

Vincent doesn’t laugh.

‘What’s that?’

‘Humour.’

‘Oh.’

Arriving at the bottom of the steps, Mishima throws back his head and shouts up to Alan: ‘Why have you come back early?’

‘I was sent home.’

The child, who astonishes everyone with his frankness, who is at ease everywhere like the air in the sky and water in the sea, walks down the staircase, his laughter covering it with a triumphal carpet.

‘I had a lot of fun there but that annoyed the instructors. And I knew how to make the other pupils who were learning to be human bombs like me relax. When we were sneaking through the darkness, dressed in white sheets and a pointed hood with two holes for the eyes, I told them jokes that made them crack up, all over the cakes of plastic explosive taped to their bellies. While they were peeing in the dunes of Nice, I was gathering desert roses and when I told them they were made of camel’s piss mixed with sand and carved by the wind, they thought life was marvellous. They went back singing: “
Boom! My heart goes
boom
…
!
” The director of the suicidecommando course was devastated. I pretended that I didn’t understand any of his technical explanations. He was tearing his hair out and his beard. One morning, when he was at the end of his tether, he put on a belt of explosives, took the detonator in his hand and told me: “Look closely, because I’ll only be demonstrating this to you once!” And he blew himself up. I was sent home.’

Mishima first nods his head up and down, in silence. He is like an actor who can’t remember the words of his part. Then he shakes it from side to side: ‘What on earth are we going to do with you?’

‘You mean for the rest of the holidays? He can help me make the poisons!’ enthuses Lucrèce.

‘And he can make masks with me,’ says Vincent from the top of the stairs.

‘Ha ha! Oh, that’s so funny, tee hee! Oh, my stomach’s hurting. Ha ha …! I can’t breathe! Oooh …!’

A small, scrawny man with a moustache and a hat, dressed all in grey, had walked sadly into the shop. Lucrèce had shown him a mask made by Vincent and Alan.

‘Oooh! Oooh! Oh, but that’s funny! Ha ha ha …! Oh, that moronic face, oh …!’

Mishima is sitting slumped on a chair, feeling oppressed. Forearms resting on his parted thighs, with his fingers interlaced between his knees, he raises his head with an effort to look at this morning customer, the first of the day. He watches him face-on, guffawing at the sight of the mask Lucrèce is showing him, with her back to her husband.

The laughing customer puts a hand to his mouth. ‘Oh! But how could anyone have given birth to that?! Oh!’

‘My boys made this mask last night. It’s well put together, don’t you think?’

‘Oh! But what a stupid-looking face. And the eyes! Tee hee! And nose! Oh good grief, look at the nose … I can’t believe it!’

The customer bends double with laughter at the sight of the facial disguise, which Madame Tuvache is holding at chest height right in front of him. He’s suffocating, coughing, belching.

‘Oh no, I mean, really, living with a face like that! It’s not the kind of mug to win you friends, is it? And what about women? Do you know a single woman who’d want anything to do with a guy like that? Oh! Not even a dog or a rat would want him!’

The customer laughs until he cries, attempting to get his breath back. ‘Show me again. Oh, I can’t take any more!’

‘Then look away,’ Madame Tuvache advises him.

‘No, my decision is made. Ha ha ha! And how seedy-looking he is. He must be some kind of bloody idiot, that guy there! Even a goldfish would rather fly out of its bowl than stay looking at him! Aaaah!’

The customer laughs so much he wets himself:

‘Oh, forgive me! I’m so embarrassed. I’d heard that you had grotesque masks but this one … Aaah!’

‘Would you like to see others?’ suggests Lucrèce.

‘Oh no, nothing could be worse than the one you’ve shown me. Ha ha! Oh, the idiot! I hope he dies, the damn fool! Nobody will miss the bloody idiot!’

Up to now, Mishima’s gaze has been vague and demoralised. Now, he fixes his attention on the unusual customer who is killing himself with laughter at the mask.

‘My heart! Aaaah …! Oh, how stupid he looks! Ha ha ha!’

He turns red, becomes rigid, arms folded across his chest and his fingers outspread like the points of a star, then collapses onto the floor, yelling at the mask. ‘Idiot!’

Mishima stands up and checks him over:

‘Well, that makes two … But what did they dream up this time?’

Lucrèce turns round and shows him a mask in impersonal white plastic, onto whose nose Alan and Vincent have stuck a mirror.