Sisteria (5 page)

Instead of standing up to Naomi, Beverley immediately burst into tears.

‘I may not have a career,' she sobbed, ‘but at least I've got a husband and children to love and who love me back. Who do you have to hug when life gets rough?'

‘Easy. My Alfa Spider,' Naomi snapped, standing up to go.

At that moment, Melvin walked in. He had come home early because the game had been rained off and had been standing in the hall listening to the last minute or so of the sisters' exchange. Melvin traditionally mishandled disagreements. While he would smile inanely at being grievously insulted, he couldn't even take a dud transistor radio back to Dixons without getting so worked up that he frequently ended up threatening to punch out the lights of some blameless seventeen-year-old shop assistant. On this occasion, however, for once in his life, Melvin got it right. He simply walked over to Beverley, put his arm round her and in a very quiet, calm voice suggested that Naomi leave, carry on enjoying her life as a weather girl or whatever she was, and never show her face in his home again.

‘My pleasure,' she hissed. ‘And for your information, I'm a senior news reporter.'

‘Yeah, right, famous throughout Luton,' sneered Melvin. A few seconds later the door slammed and she was gone.

Beverley was more proud of Melvin at that moment than she had ever been.

***

Today, five years on, Beverley could only think about all the time she and Naomi had wasted. ‘Pair of idiots. Somebody should have bashed our heads together ages ago,' she said, taking a couple of crispbreads out of the packet and spreading them with cottage cheese. The warmth she was feeling towards her sister was suddenly overtaken by the animosity she was feeling towards her lunch. Why did going on a diet always involve eating sheets of stuff which tasted like they should come in a flat pack with an Allen key and cheese which looked like it had already been digested once? As she took a bite and grimaced, it occurred to her that Benny had eaten nothing all day. Her son had refused to go to school that morning, claiming he had silicosis.

‘Silicosis,' she repeated with more than a hint of ridicule.

‘Yeah. I've been up all night coughing,' he said weakly, falling back on his pillow, like some Victorian heroine in a swoon. ‘Plus I feel tired and my legs have gone all weak.' He illustrated his point with a few seconds of highly theatrical hacking and wheezing.

‘Benny, this is Finchley, not a twenties Nottinghamshire pit village. You do not have silicosis.'

She felt his forehead. Neither did he have a temperature.

‘I promise you, there's nothing the matter with you other than you've been reading too much D.H. Lawrence. Come on, Benny, I'm not daft. I suspect the only reason you don't want to go to school is because you have a piece of course work due in today which you haven't finished. Well, you're going to have to face the music. You're not ill. Get up and go to school.'

‘I can't, Mum. Honest, I feel dead ill. I want a second opinion.'

‘OK. I'll tell you again. You're fine.'

‘God,' he said indignantly, ‘why won't you ever believe me? If I say I'm ill, I'm ill.' There was more melodramatic coughing.

She looked down him. Despite the bleached head, and the hairy arms sticking out of his Cradle of Filth T-shirt, to her he still looked about three. What was more, he had changed emotional tack and was now looking up at her with huge pleading eyes.

Even though she had no doubt he was swinging the lead because he hadn't done his homework, she knew she would give in eventually - on the strict understanding that Benny spent the day catching up.

***

While Beverley threw the second crispbread into the swing bin and began making a plate of Benny's favourite peanut butter, chocolate spread and jam sandwiches, her son lay in bed and continued to gaze at the Year Eleven school photograph.

Sixth row back, third from the left, there she sat. Lettice Allard, the love of Benny's life, his wanking muse and the reason he had refused to go to school. He had been desperate to stay at home not because he had got behind with a school assignment, but because he was exhausted, having spent the entire night trying to work out whether he stood even a remote chance of pulling this exquisite blue-eyed goddess.

Yesterday during lunch break, when a gang of them got together to smoke some weed at Lettice's house, which was just over the road from the school, he'd felt pretty sure she'd given him reason to hope. But he couldn't be certain. On the other hand there had been that long, sexy look she'd given him, not to mention the hair flick. Correction. Two hair flicks. These had to be sure signs of her unspoken desire. On the other hand, maybe he'd misread the signs and her desire was only unspoken because she didn't desire him.

Somehow, the conversation got round to circumcision. As usual, Lettice had been riding on her PC high horse. (She'd inherited her overbearing manner and politics from her mother, a Marxist aristo who had married beneath her.) She began by saying that in her opinion circumcision was the institutionalised mutilation of infants who couldn't give their permission. A lad called Neil then accused her of being the knob police. She lost her temper. He then accused her of being ratty because she was menstruating. She gave a high-pitched screech of fury.

‘For your information, Neil,' she said, ‘women don't menstruate, they
fem
struate.' She took a deep breath and returned to the subject under discussion.

‘Anyway, all I know is that when I finally decide to renounce my celibate state, there's no way I'm doing it with a bloke who doesn't own a foreskin. It's just so unnatural.'

She then turned to Benny, smiled and performed the first hair flick.

‘By the way, Benny, you might be interested to know that while I was on the Web looking for stuff on female circumcision the other night, I found this group of circumcised men who are totally vexed about it, and call themselves circumcision survivors. They've even worked out ways to reclaim their foreskins.'

She went over to the leather-topped desk standing in the bay window and picked up half a dozen print-outs. She handed them to Benny.

‘I thought being Jewish and all that you might find it useful... I mean, you must be pretty angry with your parents for having you chopped without your permission.'

Benny, hugely embarrassed by this public discussion of his penis, yet simultaneously flattered by the idea of Lettice having spent even a few seconds considering its existence, let alone its well-being, coloured up and said he'd never really thought about it.

‘Well, maybe it's time you did. I mean...' she said, throwing him an unmistakably sexy look.

She smiled at him for what must have been a full five seconds. This was followed by the second hair flick. Blushing, Benny folded up the papers and slipped them into his jacket pocket. Was she giving him the come-on? He just couldn't be sure. But as he lay in his bed, he knew he had to do everything he could to make her his. And what was more, he had no doubt about the first step.

Benjamin Moshe Littlestone was about to renege on the covenant Abraham had made with God five thousand years ago, not to mention trample on the generosity of his ultra-orthodox Uncle Shmuley, who had flown all the way from Montreal for Benny's bar mitzvah bringing with him a set of the finest kosher phylacteries from Israel.

Benny was to set about reclaiming his foreskin.

Chapter 4

Melvin pulled up at the traffic lights in his rusty 1982 VW Passat. Immediately, his mobile started to ring. He stabbed the send button and straight away wished he hadn't.

‘Och, Mr Littlestone. I'm glad to have caught you. McGillicuddy here... from the bank.'

The words ‘McGillicuddy' and ‘bank' in the same sentence were usually enough to have Melvin hyperventilating into a paper bag. The man may have just agreed to extend his overdraft, but historically Mr McGillicuddy was rarely the bearer of glad tidings where Melvin was concerned.

‘Ah, how are you, Mr McGillicuddy?' he said, a touch too jovially, failing to conceal the anxiety in his voice. ‘How are you getting on with the hairpiece?'

The lights turned green, but Melvin didn't notice.

‘Well', Mr McGillicuddy said uneasily, ‘truth to tell, that's the reason I'm ringing. Of course I could be worrying about nothing. I mean, mine could be a one-off experience, but I thought I ought to inform you...'

Melvin wasn't about to shit a brick. He was about to relieve himself of an entire garden wall.

By now the cars behind him were starting to hoot. A Lada pulled out and spluttered past him on his outside, the driver enjoying the rare treat of mouthing ‘Wanker' as he went.

‘Up yours,' Melvin yelled back, but by now the Lada had disappeared.

‘I'm sorry, Mr Littlestone, I didn't quite...'

‘Oh, goodness heavens, no,' Melvin spluttered. ‘I didn't mean you, Mr McGillicuddy - some moron just cut me up, that's all.'

Melvin shoved the Passat into first. As usual, the car moved off with all the grace of an oversized mechanical rabbit with the farts.

‘I see,' Mr McGillicuddy said, sounding a trifle uncertain, ‘now then, where was I? Ah, yes. First of all I would like to say that being somewhat follically challenged, as they say these days, the gift of a hairpiece was most appreciated...'

If the old duffer didn't spit it out, Melvin was going to drive over to the bank and ram a haggis up his Scottish backside.

‘And for the first couple of weeks,' McGillicuddy continued, ‘everything went swimmingly. Then, last night in bed, to my horror, I discovered great clumps of hair all over the duvet and pillows. Morag got into a reet stoochie, I can tell you. She didn't thank me for making her get out her crevice tool at eleven o'clock at night. The reason I'm phoning, Mr Littlestone, is not to complain, but to drop you a word to the wise. I strongly suspect that all the hairpieces could be faulty and that you should take the matter up with your wholesaler. I do hope you haven't purchased too many of the things, because if mine is anything to go by, they really aren't of merchantable quality.'

‘Heavens, no,' Melvin said, thinking of the ten gross he had in the stock-room. ‘I just bought a dozen to, er, test the market, that's all. I'm sure my supplier will refund the money on any faulty ones. And let me say how sorry I am that this has happened, and I promise I'll get another hairpiece to you as soon as I can.'

‘Och, don't worry yourself about me. It's you I'm more concerned about. You see, it did occur to me that you may have invested heavily in the things and been - er, diddled, shall we say? Naturally it further occurred to me that this could mean you would have insufficient monies to clear your overdraft as we agreed.'

‘Thank you so much for your concern, Mr McGillicuddy,' Melvin said, feeling he was going to throw up at any moment. ‘But let me assure you, the bank's monies are in safe hands. Everything's under control at this end. Absolutely fine, in fact. Couldn't be better. Peachy. Perfectly peachy.'

***

Peachy? Perfectly fucking peachy? Who was he kidding? He was finished. Washed up. Ruined. The toupees had been his final chance of a reprieve from bankruptcy, and the cunting things had let him down before he'd even got round to selling them.

‘Vladimir,' Melvin growled, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white, ‘I don't believe it. I do not fucking believe it. He knew they were faulty. He must have known. He conned me. The Russia bastard conned me.'

The toupees were the most recent in a long line of gimmicks which had been supplied to Melvin courtesy of his former school penfriend Vladimir Chernyenko, formerly of Novosibirsk, lately, of Friern Barnet.

Once a leading light in Siberian communism, Vladimir had been one of the first Russians to foresee the dawn of capitalism in the early eighties, and as if symbolically to stake his claim in the new Russia he believed was imminent, had managed somehow to import through relatives in Brooklyn an elderly - but not nearly elderly enough to be interesting - Chevvy Impala. The Chevrolet was beyond question the flashiest car in western Siberia, and when, a few months into the new Russia, Vladimir decided his future lay after all in the West, the Impala travelled with him on the boat to Harwich.

One of the first people he contacted after landing was his old British penfriend. Melvin, still hanging on to the vestiges of his left-wing student past, was instinctively drawn to Vladimir, even though with his droopy seventies moustache and big tinted specs - not to mention the ridiculous car with its long-out-of-date New York licence plates - the Russian was about as manqué as it was possible for a communist to be without actually wearing morning dress and a monocle and claiming to be one of the long-lost Romanovs. Melvin helped Vladimir set up a small flyblown import-export business over a minicab office in Hendon. The Chevvy, still untaxed and uninsured, became Vladimir's trademark. It was not surprising that within a very few months, across a considerable stretch of north-west London, Vladimir Chernyenko became known as Vlad the Impala.

Some of Vladimir's pharmaceutical import lines, like the industrial-thickness ‘Big Lady' sanitary towels from Poland, and the Aussie condoms which came in Large, Jumbo and ‘Brace Yourself Joyleen', had proved remarkably successful for Melvin. Others most definitely had not. Most infamous of these were the DIY ear-syringing kits from the old USSR.

Melvin paid £100 a gross for the yellowing boxes, which were wonkily stamped ‘Plodexport Moskva'; he reckoned he could sell them for £4.99 each. In six months he sold four kits. What's more, he'd been forced to give refunds on three. The kit's tiny plastic bottle which was meant to hold twenty millilitres of finest Armenian olive oil to soften the wax before syringing in fact contained the Russian equivalent of WD 40.

Whenever Melvin complained about faulty merchandise, Vladimir was always full of apologies and had never hesitated to refund his money. Until now, that had never amounted to more than a couple of hundred quid. This, however, was five thousand. Even if Vlad hadn't suddenly gone bent and scarpered to the Costa del Crime with Melvin's money, there was a strong possibility that he simply didn't have it any more. In which case Melvin was bankrupt. In a matter of weeks the Littlestones would be living off Pop Tarts on some Rottweiler-strewn council estate in Park Royal.

As he became more and more convinced that he could kiss goodbye to the five thousand, Melvin started to think about topping himself. The problem was, he couldn't decide on the best way to do it. Pills were slow to take effect and there was always the dread possibility he might be brought back from the brink. As for putting a gun (even if he had the remotest idea of where to get hold of one) in his mouth, a GP mate of his had once told him that such suicides often succeed, if that was the word, only in blowing away their face and the frontal lobes of the brain without killing themselves. Such self-performed frontal lobotomies, his friend assured him, cure depression all right, and the person lives happily if uglily ever after - which wasn't quite the effect Melvin was considering.

Anyway, even if he did manage to commit suicide, his most drastic plan for a financial turnaround, the life insurance company would be bound to find some way of worming out of paying, leaving Beverley to inherit nothing but debts, which, since they had remortgaged the house last year, were now nudging a hundred grand. He simply couldn't condemn Beverley - endlessly patient, tolerant Beverley, who had stood by him for twenty years while he lurched from one financial disaster to the next - to lonely poverty. His gratitude to his wife, not to mention his pride, meant he also had to protect her from finding out about the toupee debacle. He resolved there and then to remain alive, do everything in his power to get his money back from Vladimir and find some other way to rescue them from their pecuniary nuclear winter.

Melvin reached forward and switched on the manky old car radio. Underneath the loud crackling noises, a woman was speaking in what sounded like Serbo-Croatian. He fiddled irritably with the tuner for a few seconds in an effort to find the six o'clock news on Radio 4. All he got was more crackling, followed by silence. Then, from nowhere - as if to taunt him - there came an interview with some lottery winner who was saying that despite his seven-point-eight-million-pound win he wasn't planning to give up his window-cleaning round.

‘Tosser,' Melvin muttered, thumping the radio's front panel, whereupon it died. ‘Catch me running the shop if I won eight million quid... fat chance of me winning eight pence.'

At this point Melvin did what he always did, which was to start thinking that his life had only turned out the way it had because he was cursed by bad luck. He was, he thought, the kind of bloke who would save up for a trip to the Himalayas only to get there and find them closed and covered in scaffolding.

Although he gained a certain amount of perverted pleasure from blaming fate for his financial downfall, he could only indulge the fantasy for so long. He knew full well that bad luck had nothing to do with his predicament. He had only himself to blame. His entire adult life had been a catalogue of self-made fuck-ups, brought on by an unlikely combination of arrogance and weakness, not to mention sheer stupidity.

For a start, he should have stuck to his guns and never have taken over the business from Sam, his elderly widower father, after he died in 1980. Melvin had always made it clear that he had no intention of getting involved in the chemist's shop, which was small and decrepit and on precisely the wrong side of the tracks out in Buckhurst Hill, Essex.

Sam, however, had made it equally clear that Melvin would inherit the shop one day and that he expected him to carry on running it. So determined was he that he insisted on Melvin taking science A levels and reading pharmacology at university, rather than sociology, which Melvin begged him to let him take.

From the time of the miners' strike, when he was sixteen, left-wing politics had been Melvin's passion. He was a cause and demo junkie. Hardly a weekend went by when he wasn't at an anti-apartheid rally, or noisily demanding justice for some allegedly virtuous jailbirds named by the left after some locale, be it the Streatham Six, the Forest Gate Four, or even the Torquay Two. Melvin had set his heart on backpacking round India before university, and after graduating, getting a job as an aid worker with Oxfam. Sam could see the idealism and desire burning in his son's eyes, but because he was the kind of pompous, arrogant man who strutted even when he was sitting down, he refused to acknowledge it as anything more than adolescent nonsense.

He announced that he would not pay the parental contribution to Melvin's grant unless he acquiesced. Realising he was fighting a losing battle, but not wanting to forfeit the chance to go to university, Melvin ended up studying pharmacology at Nottingham. He hated his course and scraped a third, not because he lacked ability, but because he did no work. Instead he spent most of his time standing outside the student union building dressed in his faux-lefty uniform of donkey jacket and Lenin-style blue denim cap, flogging copies of
Militant
to sociology wonks and African students who were shivering away their time in Britain sustained by dreams of starting their own socialist-dictatorship as soon as they got home. So committed was he to the cause that he became known as Melvin Militant.

Although he was short and had a beaky Jewish face, women, particularly non-Jewish ones, found Melvin extremely attractive. It seemed to be of no interest to them that at parties he danced like a dyspraxic baboon, or that he found it impossible to walk down the street and hold a conversation without tripping over his feet or treading on theirs. They were desperate to play Diane Keaton to his Woody Allen and couldn't keep their hands off him.

As a result, Melvin was never short of a leg-over, and spent his first couple of years at Nottingham satisfying his substantial appetite for tall, blonde
shikseh
goddesses.

Of all his goddesses, Rebecca Fludd, with her Faye Dunaway looks, not to mention her firm buttocks which were always tantalisingly outlined and divided by the back seam of her Levis, was the most divine. What was more, for a lass of twenty, her shagging abilities were extraordinarily advanced.

Once, just after they'd started going out, she turned up at his room brandishing a pair of handcuffs. ‘Wotcha, Militant,' was all she said, plunging her tongue into his mouth. A few seconds later she had forced him on to the bed, unzipped his fly and was going down on him with all the skill of a seasoned hooker.

Their backgrounds couldn't have been less similar. Like many middle-class students, Melvin nurtured romantic notions of poverty and was gagging to identify with the class struggle. Rebecca, on the other hand, who had been brought up in a terraced house in south Leeds, felt she had lived her own class struggle long enough and couldn't wait to end it. While Melvin played at jettisoning his privileged past by selling
Militant
, nicking textbooks from the university branch of Dillons and living in a fetid little house in Dunkirk with an outside bog and intermittent hot water, Rebecca was putting her heart and soul into her business studies degree, had blagged free elocution lessons from a rich Sloaney girl on her course and was nurturing dreams of one day becoming what her parents called ‘a tycoon'. Her only problem was that she hadn't the foggiest what she might become a tycoon in.