Sisteria

by Sue Margolis

  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.

  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 s
almon 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.