The Suicide Shop / Магазинчик Самоубийств

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 onetime 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 rubellusmushrooms, 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.