Sisteria (6 page)

Whereas Melvin's world view was shaped by the intellectual might of Marx and Engels, Rebecca's was shaped by the capitalist might of Marks and Spencer. As a result, when they weren't handcuffing each other to Melvin's rickety iron bed frame, they were having blazing rows about whether or not the Co-op represented the apotheosis of benevolent capitalism.

In the middle of one particularly vicious post-coital bust-up which Melvin knew he'd lost the moment he suggested that the working class actually preferred margarine to butter, and Rebecca almost made herself sick with laughter, he got out of bed, pulled on his dressing gown, declared he couldn't be bothered to argue with somebody so politically retarded and disappeared downstairs into the greasy black hole that passed for a kitchen.

Ten minutes later, still smarting from defeat, Melvin walked back into the room, chewing. He was consoling himself with a bagel which was oozing cream cheese and smoked salmon.

‘Militant, you fucking hypocrite,' Rebecca shouted teasingly, clocking the smoked salmon. She leapt out of bed, her large, firm breasts bouncing as she went. In a second she had snatched the bagel out of his hand, opened it and removed the cream-cheesy mass of pink gossamer slices.

‘Very ideologically sound, I'm sure,' she said, waving the salmon under his nose. ‘You're all the same, you middle-class lefties. You spend three or four years at university living in shit holes and pretending to identify with the proletariat, while conveniently skirting round the fact that you've got stereos in your rooms which would set a worker at the Plessey factory back two weeks' wages, and fridges full of smoked fucking salmon.'

‘Look,' he said, getting defensive, ‘my Jewish mother, who is convinced I am starving to death just because I live north of the Scratchwood service area, turned up armed with the contents of an entire kosher deli when she came to visit yesterday. What should I have done - thrown it away?'

As he spoke he made repeated grabs for the salmon, but Rebecca kept dodging him.

‘No,' she laughed, deciding to let him off the hook, ‘but you could at least have offered me some.'

‘I was angry. Sorry.'

‘Militant,' she said, reassembling the bagel and taking a closer look at it, ‘why's this bap got a hole in the middle? I know Jews are meant to have sex through a hole in the sheet - Christ, they're not meant to eat through one as well, are they?'

Melvin laughed, took off his dressing gown and pulled her back into bed with him. While they sat cuddling and Rebecca ate the bagel which Melvin said she might as well finish, he set her straight about the anti-Semitic myth of the hole in the sheet and explained what bagels were.

‘You can buy them anywhere there's a Jewish population - Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds.' He paused and thought for a moment.

‘I tell you, Becca,' he said, some tiny forgotten strand of entrepreneurial Jewish DNA poking its molecular head above the parapet and forcing his lefty principles to beat a brief, temporary retreat, ‘if you're looking for a business idea, why don't you start trying to flog bagels outside Jewish areas? I mean, they're a bit chewy, but basically they taste brilliant. With the right kind of advertising you could have fishermen in Polperro ditching their pasties for smoked salmon bagels in no time. I reckon there could be millions to be made from these.'

She started to laugh.

‘Oh yeah, I can see it all now,' she began dismissively. ‘Rebecca Fludd...
shikseh
bagel queen.'

‘What's wrong with that?' he said.

‘I've just told you - I'm not Jewish.'

He shrugged.

‘So what, you're not Jewish?'

She paused for a moment to let the idea wash over her. Then she laid her head on Melvin's chest and began pulling gently at his hairs.

‘You really think it wouldn't matter?'

‘I've told you... you think Marks and Spencer were both Jewish? You could be the new Spencer. Just as long as I don't have to be Marks.'

‘God, Melvin,' she said excitedly, suddenly kneeling up on the bed and pulling the off-white sheet round her. ‘Do you know, I think this could just work. It's exactly the kind of idea I've been looking for. But you'd have to come in with me. I couldn't possibly do it on my own. You know everything about Jewish food, I know nothing. With your knowledge and my business degree, we could make a mint. Just think.'

In an instant Melvin came to and pulled himself back from his capitalist reverie. How on earth he had let down his Marxist guard, he had no idea.

Furious with himself, he proceeded to deliver an indignant snotty lecture, the gist of which was that he had no desire to become another slave-owning cog in the plutocratic machine, and that his allegiance remained with the urban proletariat and their struggle against the greedy capitalist might of Callaghan and his henchmen.

***

In the weeks that followed, she asked him again and again to give up the Oxfam aid worker idea and become her business partner once they'd both graduated. Each time she mentioned it, he got furious and presented her with another left-wing diatribe. After a while, she stopped asking. In the end she said that as their political differences kept coming between them and making them both miserable, she thought it best they stopped seeing one another. Although she turned him on like no other woman he had met, his commitment to Rebecca couldn't compete with his commitment to the class struggle.

While Melvin sat alone in his room night after night mourning the passing of their relationship, particularly the passing of the sex part, Rebecca, he discovered from mutual friends, was, alongside studying for her finals, plotting and planning her way towards becoming the world's first bagel mogul, Jewish partner or no.

It wasn't long before she had convinced Emma, her sweet but thick elocution teacher, to lend her five hundred quid and her Mini. A couple of weeks later she was making a regular Saturday-morning foray to the Redbridge Lane Bagel Bakery in Ilford, which Melvin had told her about, and which, being run by Israelis, didn't bother with such religious niceties as closing for the Sabbath. She would leave campus at four in the morning, get to the bakery just as it opened, load up the Mini with ten dozen ready-made smoked salmon bagels and then dash back up the Ml in order to reach the entrance to the Nottingham Forest ground - where she'd convinced the club to let her set up a stall - well before kick-off. If she could sell bagels to rain-soaked, beer-filled Midlands football fans, and she did, right from the start - she reckoned she could sell them anywhere.

Melvin meanwhile decided that the only way for him to get over Rebecca was to immerse himself even further in political activity. Uninterested though he was in anything remotely Jewish, he had begun to get quite disturbed by the trend towards old-fashioned anti-Semitism which was sweeping the left in the guise of anti-Israel sentiment. It was due to this phenomenon that he developed a new, if qualified, support for his kinfolk - and met and fell in love with Beverley Gold.

It happened one lunchtime in the students' union bar. Melvin, along with fifty or so other Jewish students, had turned up to disrupt an anti-Israel meeting organised by the Young Liberals. The speaker, an overweight, sweaty boy in a Harris tweed sports jacket with leather arm patches, was less than five minutes into his address, at the bit where he was suggesting that the six million Holocaust victims were a Hollywood myth sponsored by Jewish capital, when the Jews began hurling abuse and chanting, ‘Nazis out.'

Beverley was standing in front of Melvin, yelling and waving her arms in fury. At some stage during her passionate display of ethnic solidarity, her fist ended up making contact with his nose, causing it to discharge a thick stream of blood which coursed down his chin and neck and ended up defacing his brand new Stuff the Jubilee T-shirt. So great did Melvin's blood loss appear that the Jews, convinced that he was experiencing some rare form of brain haemorrhage, immediately began shouting to the bar staff to dial 999. After a minute or so, a Jewish medical student in his white coat pushed his way through the hysterical crowd, which was by now completely oblivious to the speaker's calls for a boycott of Zionist capital. He took a look at Melvin's nose. ‘I don't want to be a scaremonger,' he said after a few moments, with a face that was scaremongery personified, ‘but are there any haemophiliacs in your family?'

Shouting through a huge wad of blood-soaked handkerchiefs and bits of old tissue, as well as against the still-ranting anti-Semite and the chanting Jews, Melvin replied, ‘Not that I know of. Most of my family are Polacks.'

Finally the bleeding stopped, the meeting fizzled out, and Beverley insisted on buying Melvin a drink to apologise for almost causing him to bleed to death. By the time the drink ended four hours later, he knew he was in love. He could barely believe it was happening. He had never been attracted to Semitic-looking women, and yet Beverley, with her flawless olive skin, long chestnut hair and huge brown-black eyes which sparkled like jet, was definitely giving him the horn - and a very hard horn at that.

Nevertheless, after they made love for the first time, in Beverley's flat on Gregory Boulevard, Melvin was forced to admit that he had found himself pining for Rebecca. It wasn't that his feelings had changed towards Beverley. They hadn't. She was beautiful, intelligent, sexy. She laughed at all his jokes. What was more, because they shared a religion and a culture, he didn't have to explain himself twice an hour as he had to Rebecca, be it about holes in sheets or his profound aversion to the very idea of tripe. Beverley even came from the same part of London as him. Yet despite all that, there was something Rebecca possessed that Beverley didn't. Gentile genes. When he licked Rebecca out he was tasting forbidden fruit. It was wicked and dirty. It was a sin. Sleeping with her was the sexual equivalent of eating roast pork on Yom Kippur - only a hundred times more exciting. She nurtured the rebel, the heretic in Melvin, in a way that neither Beverley nor any other Jewish woman ever could.

Melvin and Beverley were married in the September after they graduated. Because Beverley's parents had no money, Sam Littlestone paid for the wedding, a modest affair at the Walthamstow Assembly Rooms.

Four weeks later, barely recovered from their honeymoon tour of European Cruise missile bases and the two nights they had spent locked in a German police station cell (during which Melvin had addressed the exceedingly polite and kind policeman as ‘Oi, you, Goering, yer fat Nazi cunt'), they had to bury Melvin's father.

***

It also fell to Melvin and Beverley to sell Sam's business. After three months, however, there was not even a sniff of an offer, and Melvin realized he had no option but to take over the pharmacy, if only temporarily.

But he was unemployed and Beverley was still a student, training to be a teacher in London, so temporary swiftly became permanent. The knowledge that his father had finally got his own way filled Melvin with rage and frustration. He dealt with this by running the shop in a way he knew would have his father performing Olga Korbut acrobatics in his grave. Melvin Littlestone became Buckhurst Hill's first and only PC - pharmaceutically correct - chemist. For a start, he refused to hand out any medicines which in his opinion were likely to produce side effects. This included aspirin and paracetamol and anything containing even minute quantities of hydrocortisone. He banned all products containing food colourings. He also outlawed baby milk on the grounds that breast was best, refused to stock disposable nappies because they contained bleached fibres, and wouldn't have tampons in the shop because they caused toxic shock syndrome.

When Melvin's stock of little more than Vick, Anusol and a few dusty bottles of syrup of figs failed to draw customers, the gimmicks began.

***

In order to stave off bankruptcy and keep going, Melvin had descended into a cycle of paying off one credit card with another and was permanently exhausted from fending off calls from the ladies at Barclaycard.

But by the mid eighties, while he was driving from Finchley to Buckhurst Hill every day to run what he still regarded with distaste as his father's chemist shop, Rebecca had made it big in the bagel business. Very big. During one period, he was haunted on a nightly basis by snatches of
Hole in One
, a BBC1 documentary series entirely on Rebecca. The programmes seemed to Melvin to do little more than show her hopping from helicopter to limo - from one of her company boardrooms to another.

Constantly beaming a perfectly capped Hollywood-type smile, she told the story of how, a few weeks after she'd begun selling bagels at the Nottingham Forest ground, Brian Clough had driven past in his Mercedes, wound down his window and said, ‘I've heard about these, young lady. Let me try one.'

So smitten was he with what he insisted on calling beagles that soon she was supplying the pre-match lunch for the squad, ground staff and stewards. The day Forest won the European Cup, Brian Clough gave a press conference and announced that his team's success was due to himself, hard work by the players, and beagles - in that order.

‘Bagels Play their Roll in Forest's Fire' was the headline in
The Guardian
the next morning, and Rebecca, the ‘Brainy Bagel Babe', was even featured beaming through bagel spectacles in
The Sun
.

A year later, thanks to the publicity, orders for bagels were pouring in from nearly every football team in the country, and Rebecca, with the help of the Israeli baker she'd poached from the shop in Redbridge Lane, opened her first bagel bakery in the new Covent Garden market. She called it Tower of Bagel.

As the London bagel craze took off, lunchtime queues outside the shop stretched from the Piazza to Long Acre. Soon there were six shops in London and dozens more planned for the provinces.

American tourists who came into the London shops declared Tower of Bagel bagels far superior to any they could get back home. One of them, a young Jewish Harvard Business School graduate named Brad Weintraub, whose father owned half the Hamptons, became her business partner and later married her.