The Suicide Shop (10 page)

‘Who did this? Who dared? Who’s the bastard …?’

Mishima emerges from the apartment, his eyes spinning like flying saucers. He finishes tying the (yellow) belt of a kimono jacket bearing a red cross on the solar plexus.

Legs apart and arms outspread, he is now gripping a tanto with a sharpened, gleaming blade (not a rubber one), which he took down from above the sideboard in the dining room.

He swallows a small glass of sake in a single gulp. At the top of the steps and with flowered slippers on his feet, he is every bit as menacing as a samurai about to attack. He even sounds as if he’s speaking Japanese: ‘Hoo di dit? Hoo?’

He asks who did it, but instinctively descends towards Alan, who is innocently manipulating some marionettes in the fresh produce section.

Lucrèce, hands flat on her head, swiftly lowers them and steps in front of her husband. ‘What’s going on now, darling?’

She seems to be gazing far into the distance while her husband cleaves the air with sweeping strokes of his blade, attempting to reach Alan, who ducks away, slips between his father’s legs and climbs the stairs.

‘Grrr!’

Monsieur Tuvache turns round and pursues him. At the top of the steps Alan, rather than find himself trapped in his bedroom or one of the other rooms in the apartment, chooses to open the little door on the left – the one that gives access to the spiral staircase in the tower. His father pursues him up the slippery steps of worn stone. The blade of his sabre strikes sparks as it touches the walls while he roars: ‘Who is the bastard who put laughing gas into the government’s cocktail?’

Madame Tuvache, thinking that her husband is going to kill her little one, returns from the scullery with a bottle of belladonna and also rushes up the tower’s narrow staircase, only to be followed shortly afterwards by Marilyn, who cries ‘Mother!’, and then Vincent. Ernest – still a little lost in the cloud of sulphuric acid – asks, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Going on? Going on!’

Monsieur Tuvache, also breathless after climbing the stairs, chokes as he is joined on the platform of the tall, narrow tower by the rest of his family. The paved area is circular and covered by a conical slate roof with an exposed timber frame. In the walls, slits are open to the sky, like the arrow-slits in battlements, no doubt so that the sound of the bells could travel further in the old days, or the voice or loudspeaker belonging to some long-deceased muezzin. Here, a breeze makes a continuous wailing sound. Marilyn’s flared and pleated white dress flies up as she thrusts her arms and wrists between her thighs to hold it down. It is night-time. Red and green neon signs displaying gigantic Chinese advertisements light up the tower. Madame Tuvache picks up the bottle filled with liquid belladonna, raises it to her lips and threatens her husband as he approaches Alan:

‘If you kill him, I’ll kill myself!’

‘So will I!’ says Marilyn, buckling up the chinstrap of the helmet containing two sticks of dynamite, which Vincent gave her for her coming of age. In her hands she grips the wires of the detonators.

The eldest Tuvache child has pressed the cutting edge of a thick-bladed kitchen knife to his own throat: ‘Go on, Dad …’

Mishima blurts: ‘It’s not him I want to kill, it’s me!’

The neck of the bottle is right up against Lucrèce’s lips, and she won’t back down. ‘If you kill yourself, I’ll kill myself!’

‘Meeh oo …’ says Marilyn’s muffled voice inside the helmet with the armour-plated visor, meaning ‘Me too.’

‘Go on, Dad,’ repeats Vincent’s crazy voice as he stuffs down a pancake.

‘So will this never end?’ cuts in the gentle Ernest, suddenly beside himself with anger. ‘Marilyn, darling, you’re going to be a mother! And what about you, Father? If you do this, who’ll run the shop?’

‘There is no Suicide Shop any more!’ declares Mishima.

This puts a damper on proceedings.

‘What do you mean?’ asks Lucrèce, suddenly lowering the bottle of belladonna.

‘They’re going to destroy the shop! At best, they’ll close it tomorrow morning.’

‘Uh oo? (But who?),’ Marilyn wants to know.

‘Those we made fools of tonight.’

The wind gusts around the top of the tower, whistles over the edges of the walls. Alan steps back as his father comes forward and explains:

‘After the head of the government made his speech criticising himself, live on the televised bulletin, he took the stopper from a phial of Sandman in front of him and inhaled it. All the regional ministers and secretaries of state did the same. None of them touched the cocktail or swallowed it (that was a worthwhile precaution!). But they all burst out in an enormous attack of laughter, each one in turn describing a childhood terror while laughing uproariously. The finance minister said: “When I went on holiday to my grandmother’s house in the country, she woke me every morning by throwing live adders into my bed. Well, actually they were dead grass snakes, but boy was I scared! When I came back to the City of Forgotten Religions, I stammered with terror and peed in my pants. Uh-oh! Now it’s starting again …” And there was indeed a smell of urine in the room. The minister of defence intervened: “I was told: close your eyes and open your mouth. I thought it was to give me some sweets but I was made to swallow rabbit droppings! Argh …!” And he started rolling about on the floor, and hopping around as if he was a little rabbit. “I remember when I was eleven,” said the minister for the environment, “I was forbidden to pick flowers from the hedges. I was told they were thunder-flowers and that if I picked one, a thunderbolt would fall on me. Well, I tell you, that was back in the days when there were still flowers on the banks! Ha, ha, ha! Now that I’ve become a minister, there’s no risk of it happening again, oh, ha, ha! There aren’t any wild flowers any more!” Then he tore out his hair in handfuls, laughing: “He loves me, he loves me not!” I was dumbfounded, no doubt like all the TV viewers and I had to flick off some of the minister’s hair, which had fallen onto my sleeves. “As for me, one time …” at last declaimed the president, who was weeping with laughter, “an uncle imprisoned me in a potato sack, which he placed on the flat back of a cart and then whipped his horse to make him set off at a gallop. Thrown around in the chaos on the cart, I fell off, and found myself at the side of the road, still imprisoned in a potato sack! Aaah! They should have left me there. Oh! I wouldn’t have led my region to disaster. Oh! Oh, oh, oh!” This was a crazy televised bulletin, which the producer had to stop suddenly because the cameramen in the studio were so doubled up with laughter too. The zigzags of their 3D-integral-sensations camera were bouncing around in all directions. You couldn’t see or understand anything any more. All of this because a scoundrel … made the members of the government breathe in laughing gas! Well, Alan?’ Finally he rolls his eyes, in which Chinese advertisements are reflected.

The eleven-year-old child recoils. ‘But, Father, I didn’t know! I was wearing Mother’s gas mask and I didn’t notice. I took the bottle of desert breath from its usual place, but I’d forgotten we’d changed suppliers … and now it’s Laugh Out Loud who delivers to us …’

His father advances, arm stretched out and holding the hilt of his tanto, the point of its blade pricking the red silk cross on his kimono jacket. His head, dripping with sweat, gleams with sliding colours. His wife walks at his side, ready to swallow a litre and a half of belladonna. Marilyn, with the big black helmet enclosing her head, looks like a fly from a nightmare. In her ultra-sexy dress, the kind worn by a film actress, she advances blindly, gripping two detonators in her fists. As for Vincent the artist, illuminated like a ridiculous fakir, grimacing horribly and belching after a pancake, he’s savouring in advance the squirt of red paint that will shoot out of the tube in his throat.

Alan backs away in panic from the incomprehensible sight of his whole family caught up in the storm about to break and turn people into corpses, right in front of him! An advertisement for effervescent tablets sends its three-storey bubbles climbing up the entire height of the Zeus tower.

Alan rejects the inevitable and stretches out a hand. ‘No, no! Don’t do this …’ He draws back and stumbles.

He disappears backwards through one of the openings. His legs shoot into the air and drop straight down. Lucrèce, Mishima, Marilyn, Vincent, and Ernest too, abandon everything on the flagstones – the bottle of belladonna, the tanto, the knife – to rush forward and bend over the opening. Marilyn, who’s getting tangled up in the detonator wires of the integral helmet with the visor that blinds her, asks: ‘What’s happened?’

Her cemetery warden unfastens the strap and replies: ‘Alan has fallen through the window.’

‘
What?
’

‘But he’s not yet squashed on Boulevard Bérégovoy!’

Alan is there, a storey below at the edge of a small roof, suspended by his right hand from a zinc gutter whose rivets are giving way and popping out, one by one. It looks like his left shoulder was hurt in the fall so he can’t move his arm. The gutter is splitting and bending over, taking Alan with it. It is about to break completely. It’s then that a long, white ribbon descends, on its way to reach the child. Vincent is unwinding his turban! Fast as lightning and bending over the void, he unrolls the immensely long crêpe bandage from his head, and it soon reaches Alan’s right hand. He seizes it just as the gutter comes off and falls away, bouncing off the pavement down below in the depths of the darkness. His flabbergasted parents and sister turn towards Alan’s elder brother, whose clenched fists are still gripping the long bandage at the end of which Alan is dangling.

‘Quick, help me!’

Mishima, Lucrèce, Marilyn and Ernest leap to Vincent’s aid and together they pull gently on the bandage to prevent it tearing. Alan comes up, in a series of small jolts. With ten careful hands, they bring him back towards them. They are almost there. As the child, who is light, rises, they let down the crêpe bandage they’ve pulled in, in order to double or triple its thickness and safety.

‘I was so afraid,’ confesses Lucrèce.

‘It’s a good job you were here, my lad,’ sighs Mishima.

‘My head doesn’t hurt any more!’ exclaims Vincent in astonishment.

‘Our boy shall be called Alan,’ decides Marilyn, with tears in her eyes. ‘If it’s a girl, she’ll be Alanne.’

Ernest nods his agreement and the little Tuvache boy climbs, climbs. Hanging in the air, he observes the heads bent towards him, the faces of his father, his mother, sister, brother and almost brother-in-law.

Mishima laughs. ‘In any case, we wouldn’t have to worry if the regional government did close the Suicide Shop by decree! With the money we’ve earned recently by selling jokes and novelties, we’ve got enough to move to the other side of the boulevard and take over management of the François Vatel, which we’d rename Better Than the Shop Opposite. We’d turn it into –’

‘A crêperie?’ asks Vincent.

‘If you like!’ laughs Monsieur Tuvache. Since his birth, his youngest child has never seen him as joyful as he is here.

The eldest child is radiant too (which is new) as he pulls on the bandage:

‘I’ll stop doing the skulls – it’s getting a bit tiresome – to make pancakes as round as Alan’s face, with two holes for his laughing eyes and a slit for his big optimistic smile. Around the pancake, with batter drizzled from the ladle, I’ll trace golden curls and I’ll dust the cheeks with a little chocolate powder for his freckles. Even people with no appetite would want to hang that up under glass above their beds so they could believe in something nice.’

‘
Oh, oh, that would be happiness
…
!
’ sings Lucrèce. Her youngest child has never heard her sing before.

And the child rises up, holding on with one hand. He’s no more than three metres from them. Chinese ideograms slide over the back of his bright pullover and trousers. Gripping the bandage, without calling for help, and without fear or bitterness for what they have been, Alan looks at them as he rises upwards, jolt by jolt. Their collective happiness, their sudden faith in the future and those radiant smiles on their faces are his life’s work. Two metres away from him, his sister is laughing. Madame Tuvache watches him approaching as if she has suddenly seen her mother arrive in the school playground. Alan’s mission is accomplished.

He lets go.

Jean Teulé

Jean Teulé lives in the Marais with his companion, the French film actress Miou-Miou. An illustrator, filmmaker and television presenter, he is also the prizewinning author of ten books including one based on the life of Verlaine. In researching that book he discovered that a group of nineteenth-century poets had founded a review called
The
Suicide Shop
and this inspired his novel. He has also written biographies of Rimbaud and François Villon.

Sue Dyson

Sue Dyson has been writing and translating for around twenty years. She is perhaps most widely known as bestselling novelist Zoë Barnes.