The Suicide Shop (9 page)

Several evenings later Mishima, in tired old slippers and wearing the kimono with the red cross (for self-disembowelment) instead of pyjamas, has regained a little strength and the will to get up and attempt a few first weary steps.

Unshaven, with dark rings round his eyes and with his face all crumpled from the folds in the bedcovers, he drags himself along the corridor as if drunk, reaches the little door that gives access to the tower and stands at the top of the stairs that lead down into the shop. And there on the landing, holding onto the banister, he looks down.

And what does he see?

He just can’t believe it. The shop, the beautiful shop that belonged to his parents, grandparents, etc., which has been as sober as a hospital mortuary, clean, tidy … look what it has become!

On a long banner stretched from one wall to the other above the display units, a slogan is written: ‘
KILL
YOURSELF
WITH
OLD
AGE
!’ Mishima recognises Alan’s writing.

Underneath, a joyous crowd is debating, laughing, gathering on tiptoe to watch three young men in the fresh produce section, singing, playing a lively tune on the gui … guitar.

They’re clapping their hands in time, ordering skull-and-crossbones pancakes from Vincent, who is making them on a production line, using an electric hotplate placed on the counter. The smoke rising from the frying pan blurs, softens, renders opaque the light of the neon tubes amongst the fragrance of powdered sugar caramelising, of chocolate which sometimes drips, falls, stains the tiled floor. The batter ladle rises, falls, traces crossed tibias across the pan, and Lucrèce operates the drawer of the till. ‘One pancake? Three euro-yens. Thank you, sir.’

On the razorblade stand, where the blades have been cleared away, Marilyn is cramming apples (not the ones from the Alan Turing kits) into a juicer, which she uses to extract the fresh juice straight into glasses: ‘One euro-yen, please.’

Ernest is giving a demonstration of seppuku, but the blade of the tanto pressing on his belly twists, loops and bends into a figure of eight. Mishima rubs his eyes, and walks down the stairs. The cemetery warden sells three sabres to beaming customers, rolls them up and puts them into bags bearing the word: ‘
YIPPEE
!’ Monsieur Tuvache has to duck down to get underneath the garlands, and bumps his head on some festively coloured Chinese lanterns. He tells himself that perhaps he is dreaming. But no, for his wife is calling to him.

‘Oh, darling, here you are at last! Well, so much the better. You can help us, because we’re worked off our feet. Do you want a pancake?’

A genuinely desperate individual – one who is not aware of the changes at the shop – enters and naturally heads for Mishima, who is wearing the same overwhelmed expression as he is. ‘I would like a breeze-block so I can sink to the bottom of the river.’

‘A breeze-block … Ah! Quite. I’m glad to see someone normal at last. Have they moved them? No, they’re still here.’

Monsieur Tuvache takes a deep breath and bends down to hoist one up with both hands, but he’s astonished at being able to lift it so easily. The block of mortar seems extraordinarily light to him. He could balance it on one fingertip and spin it round. The few days’ rest couldn’t have given him so much strength. He examines its texture, scratching it with his nails:

‘Polystyrene …’

The customer also weighs the breeze-block in his hand.

‘But this floats! How am I supposed to drown with it?’

Mishima frowns, raises his eyebrows and shakes his head. ‘I suppose it’s no good holding onto it with your hands … but, if the chain is fixed to an ankle, you must be able to drown under the polystyrene breeze-block floating on the surface.’

‘What’s the point of selling that?’

‘To be honest … I don’t know. Do you want a pancake?’

The disconcerted customer looks at the gaudy masked crowd hooting party blowers and dancing idiotically to the loud music.

‘Don’t these people ever watch the news on TV? Don’t they ever despair for the future of the Earth?’

‘That’s what I was wondering,’ replies Mishima to the man who was hoping to spend his night at the bottom of the river. ‘I’d willingly accompany you too.’

Overwhelmed, they fall into each other’s arms with a wail, and blubber on each other’s shoulders while in the fresh produce section Alan, who has hung up a sheet, presents a puppet show in which everything is wonderful, beautiful, unrealistic and inevitably stupid. Vincent looks at home in this country-fair atmosphere with its smoke. With his bandaged cranium he’s not smiling, of course, but he does look better.

Lucrèce, who discovers her husband in floods of tears, rushes forward and blames the customer who is holding him in his arms. ‘Leave him alone! What have you said to him to get him into this state? Go on, get out!’

‘I only wanted to find something to kill myself with tonight,’ the other man defends himself.

‘Didn’t you see the banner above the shelves? Here we don’t kill ourselves any more, except with old age! Go on, bugger off.’

And, moving through the happy crowd, she walks back to the staircase with her faltering husband, who asks: ‘What are the new tanto blades made of?’

‘Rubber.’

‘And why did you change the materials for the breeze-blocks?’

‘Because when the customers dance, if they bump into the central gondola, I was worried that one of the blocks would fall on their feet. Can you imagine the damage? It’s like with the ropes; now we sell the same ones as for bungee jumps. It was Vincent’s idea; he says that when people jump off the stool and then hit their heads three or four times on the ceiling, they won’t want to do it again. Did you know that we’ve changed suppliers? No more Don’t Give A Damn About Death. Now, we buy everything from Laugh Out Loud. And, since we changed, our turnover has tripled.’

Mishima’s knees give way. His wife catches him under the armpits.

‘Go on, off to bed, my gloomy one!’

Later, when the shop has emptied of customers and the silence of night has descended once more, Madame Tuvache is in Alan’s room. Seated on a chair, she watches him sleep. With hands joined and flat on the top of her head, elbows triangling above her shoulders, the arrangement of Lucrèce’s arms traces in the air the outline of a great eye on top of a body. The pupil – Madame Tuvache’s head, leaning over to one shoulder – seems to be turned and lowered towards Alan’s face, which is as delicate as if it were entirely surrounded by gauze and whose every feature speaks of the joy of living.

One day will he have to be put in irons and thrown into the sea, this inventor of brave new worlds? His little snub nose in the air, he dreams of shining paradises. He is an oasis in a desert of boredom. His neck in the hollow of a synthetic pillow, he moves his lips a little, caught in one of the stories of his dreams. His eyelids, as soft as the moon, are closed, rimmed with long lashes, and everything about him engenders a kind of hope that is so anachronistic in this era.

The boy who by day makes human minds dream, asleep looks as innocent as a babbling brook, spilling its happy insouciance over everything. He resembles those beautiful horizons that lead you to unknown places. And his feet under the covers seem ready to run an adventurous race. The smell of his room … Few perfumes are as fresh as the scent of childhood. He is dreaming up his singular miraculous schemes. Oh, the mind of a child, where fairy tales are constructed!

Tonight, the moon is dreaming more lazily. Madame Tuvache stands up, and caresses Alan’s blond curls. He opens his eyes and smiles at her. Then he turns over and goes back to sleep. Life, at his side, seems to be played on a violin.

Lucrèce is in bed, beside her husband. Lying on her back with her arms at her sides, an eternal silence hovers above her. The shapes have faded and are no more than a dream now, but then the horrible cloud of her past rises up again, making her slowly bend her knees within herself.

When she was a little girl – four or five years old – her mother would ask her to wait for her after school, sitting on a bench in the playground of the infant school, and promised her that if she was very good, she could have a go on the swings.

Her mother was often late, and sometimes didn’t come, so the headmistress of the school would tell the child to go home on her own. Her father, despite his promises, never came. And often in the evening the little girl waited, behaving well, so well; waiting for her mother and the go on the swings.

Did she ever have a go on the swings? Lucrèce doesn’t remember. All she can remember is the wait, the wait for her mother who, she imagined, would watch her on the swings.

With her chubby little hands, with the turned-up tips of the fingers, laid flat on her thighs and sitting up tall, not slumping at all, her eyes wide open, she looked straight in front of her. She looked straight in front of her but she saw nothing! She was nothing but good, the very image of goodness, so good that her mother must come!

She forbade herself any movement, any word, any breath of a sigh. She waited so perfectly that her mother could not but come. If the tip of her nose was itching or one little sock had slipped down over her ankle, she remained motionless. Mummy would come. She dissolved into herself, breathed in the itch at the tip of her nose, the cool patch on her calf where her sock had slipped down. She had learned how to absorb that. She knew how to gather herself together, was learning how to become Zen. When, later on, she watches documentaries on ancient Buddhists she will realise that already, at the age of four, she knew how to attain the same mental state. From her childhood, she has retained this ability to absent herself, this way of suddenly seeming to look very far in front of her. There is a great space in her head, just as when she waited for her mother on a bench in the school playground. She was turning to stone there, could no longer feel her body, could swear that she was no longer breathing. When the mother arrived, her daughter would no longer be alive.

Outside, it is raining sulphuric acid on the bedroom windows.

‘I know, I know perfectly well, I know exactly! What do you think? Everything has changed here while I was depressed; I don’t recognise anything any more. It’s not the same shop any more – a cow wouldn’t be able to find her calf here!’

Mishima has vaguely recovered. He’s wearing a waistcoat and checked shirt, while on his head there is a white cardboard cone, decorated with multicoloured circles. A piece of elastic stretches beneath his chin, holding on this hat, which is being observed doubtfully by the very serious man to whom he’s speaking and explaining. ‘And yet I had ideas for it to continue as it was before. I’d planned to organise an aeroplane cruise around the world. Nobody would have returned from it! We would have offered a selection of the most dangerous regional airlines in the world and the least reliable pilots. At Don’t Give A Damn About Death, they had taken on about twenty of them – depressive alcoholics on tranquillisers and always with powder up their noses, even at the controls. We made sure all the luck was on our side. At each stop, the suicidal passengers would board a new dilapidated plane, wondering if it was going to crash into a mountain, at the bottom of an ocean, in a desert, on a town … The people wouldn’t have known in what part of the globe they were going to die. Yes, but there you go; we’ve changed our supplier.’

‘You shouldn’t complain,’ comments the man Mishima is talking to, ‘because things seem to be going rather well here.’ He gazes around him at the large numbers of eager customers entering the Suicide Shop.

The customers kiss Lucrèce affectionately on both cheeks. ‘How are you, Madame Tuvache? It’s so good to come back to your shop.’

She, disguised as a phial of poison, with a headdress in the form of a cork, offers them the large dishes containing the culinary specialities of the day – Monday: suicidal lamb, beef stifled in steam, duck in blood – which she has noted down on the slate where she used to write the name of the day’s poisoned cocktail.

She has had the double central display unit dismantled and taken down to the cellar to make way for a long table where the customers meet to think up solutions for the future of the world.

‘To resolve the advance of the desert,’ suggests one, ‘you’d have to be able to transform the sand into a raw material useful to people, such as has already been done with the forests. Coal, petroleum, gas –’

‘Without a doubt, by compacting it and heating it to extreme temperatures,’ cuts in another, ‘we could turn it into incredibly hard vitrified bricks, which would be vital to construction.’

‘Oh yes!’ exclaims a girl. ‘And so each apartment, bridge or anything else that was built would be a small victory over the dunes.’

‘The regions of the world that suffer the most from this calamity would become the wealthiest. That would be great.’

‘I shall note down that idea,’ enthuses Alan, sitting at the end of the table in an Aladdin costume. ‘There’s always a solution to everything. We must never despair.’

Hearing those words in his shop does something to Mishima …

More and more people love to come here to meet, and to hope, in the Suicide Shop, which they now call TSS, like they might say YMCA.

Dumbfounded, Mishima prefers to stick to the shop’s original ethos when facing the stern man in front of him. ‘I wanted to install a letter box where customers could slip in a message explaining what they’d done. It’s a good idea, don’t you think? The relatives of the suicidal person, and friends if there were any, could have come to consult the letters which the dead person had written to them. I tell myself that doubtless afterwards, in their pain, as they explored the shelves they might perhaps have bought something for themselves. I’d planned for several weeks of promotion: hemp week, etc. And two for the price of one on Valentine’s Day.’

Marilyn, disguised as the sexy and amusing fairy Carabosse in the fresh produce section, now only touches the customers with her magic wand: ‘Zap, you’re dead!’ A small green light switches on and crackles as it throws out sparks from the tip of the wand as soon as it makes contact. The pretend suicides roll about on the floor, miming horrible convulsions, much to the dismay of Mishima, who despite everything banks the twelve euro-yens for the Death Ki—for any old kiss!

The shopkeeper pulls the elastic from under his chin, as it is pinching the skin of his neck. ‘Can you see my daughter’s pregnant? By the cemetery warden. She wants to give life.’

The man replies: ‘You had three children yourself, so you must have felt some attachment to life.’

‘Three children … The third …’ Mishima puts things into perspective. ‘I had planned to implement an idea my eldest had before he was corrupted by the youngest: a simple metal crown placed on the head. At the back there was a small articulated arm, at the end of which a magnifying glass was fixed. And so, in summer, people could commit suicide by sunstroke. All you’d have to do would be to sit in a place with no shade and adjust the magnifying glass until you found the burning point. When your hair started to singe, you’d just have to remain motionless. The concentrated point of the ray would burn the scalp, then the skull. In collecting up the desperate people, wisps of smoke would have been rising from the big, black holes in their burnt skulls … But that’s no longer on the cards, alas. Look at that one – my eldest – in whom I invested so much pride, see what he’s become! A former anorexic with the real psychopathic temperament of a mass killer, he has discovered a new passion for – guess what! – pancakes! Frankly … He stuffs himself with them from morn till night.’

Vincent, with very rounded cheeks and short red beard, eyes still furious beneath the head bandage, is dressed up as Death in a clinging black one-piece painted with white bones. Tossing soft pasta in a large salad bowl, he looks at his father, who comes over and pats his son’s prominent abdomen. ‘The skeleton’s putting on a bit of padding, eh!’

Then Mishima turns to the visitor once again and says: ‘As you can see, I had no lack of ideas. At one point it even made me feel a bit off-colour – and that’s as long as it took the rest of the family to accomplish their treachery under the influence of the other eternally delighted one, the Optimist over there … And now see what’s happened. Look at this: our new disposable pistols fire blanks, and the only harm the Sweets of Death do is to teeth. As for the ropes for people to hang themselves, if I were to tell you … And the sabres for seppuku serve as fly-swatters.’

‘Yes, but … what about our bit of business?’ asks the visitor anxiously. He has the look of an official person who has been sent here on a special mission. ‘It involves the collective suicide of all the members of the regional government! We can hardly give them fly-swatters.’

‘What would you have liked?’

‘I’m not really sure … I’ve heard about that poison – Sandman? – if you have enough left in stock for forty people.’

Mishima calls to his wife, disguised as a twisted phial of poison, who is standing by the meeting table, listening to all the ‘we could haves’, ‘we’d only have had tos’, ‘we’re going to do this and thats’, etc …

‘Lucrèce! Have you still got some belladonna, deadly gel and desert breath in the scullery?’

‘What for?’

‘What for …’ sighs the shopkeeper, facing the government envoy. ‘I can assure you there are times when she loses the plot, that one …’

Then he raises his voice and addresses his wife again: ‘The government, recognising its own incompetence and its culpability, has decided to commit mass suicide tonight, live on TV! Can you prepare what’s needed?’

‘I’ll go and see what I have! Will you help me, Alan?’

‘Yes, Mother.’