The Suicide Shop / Магазинчик Самоубийств

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,' admits 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.'