by Sue Margolis
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.
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.
By 1990, the Ilford bagel was sweeping across the US. There was hardly a strip or mall in the country which didn’t boast a Tower of Bagel. Tower of Bagel trucks plied the interstates day and night, the corporate logo of a toppling pile of cartoon bagels becoming as familiar as Walmart’s. Soon, reports began to appear on the British financial pages of bankrupt, desperate American bagel bakers committing suicide because of the competition. First the owner of New York’s famous Bagel Schmegel drowned himself in a hundred-gallon vat of dough. Then the Boogy Woogy Bagel Boys in San Francisco ended it all by taking sleeping pills crushed in Kahlua.
The Clintons adored Rebecca and Brad, as did Tony and Cherie. Both first ladies always insisted that their garden parties be catered by Tower of Bagel. The only dissenting voices on the planet came from Saddam Hussein, for obvious reasons, and from the Reverend Ian Paisley. Having discovered that the Pope had started to enjoy a couple of chopped herring bagels for breakfast, he declared them to be the Devil’s Doughnuts and refused to cross the threshold of the newly opened five-lane drive-thru Tower of Bagel in Belfast.
The night Mme Yeltsin was shown on the nine o’clock news opening the first Tower of Bagel in Moscow, Melvin stood in front of the screen weeping tears of fury. For Christ’s sake, it had been his fucking, bastard idea. He could have been a multi-millionaire by now, instead of a serial failure in a rusty VW. If only he hadn’t been such an arrogant arsehole when Rebecca had asked him to become her partner. If only he’d seen the utter balls-aching uselessness of Marxism sooner. If only he hadn’t been such a fool... If only he hadn’t let her go.
***
As he pulled slowly on to the drive, his mind was engulfed by that final thought, by what might have been, by what he might have been had he stayed with Rebecca. Moreover, no matter how hard he tried, he had never forgotten or stopped aching for the molten passion he had felt for her. He had lost count of the times he had lain awake in bed next to Beverley, guilt surging through him as he remembered the night he and Rebecca had made love eleven times on the trot, and how the next day his balls ached so much he had to see the doctor at the university health centre. And how the pain had caused him to have to mosey, John Wayne style, into the surgery. And how he had never felt so happy in his life, before or since.
Chapter 5
The Morgue was filling up fast. By now the body count had risen to well over a hundred. Taut, harassed-looking attendants, unused to accommodating such large numbers, careered round the harshly lit tiled room in their long green surgical gowns, thick rubber gloves and white Wellington boots. A couple of them swabbed down recently vacated marble slabs. Some wheeled hospital trolleys. Others, laden with large porcelain kidney dishes, charged in and out of the plastic swing doors at the back.
Despite the attendants’ best efforts at emergency stops, two trolleys, one with a pile of kidney dishes on board, had collided a few moments ago. The dishes had fallen to the floor and smashed, adding to the chaos and din. A large area of previously spotless white tiles was consequently now covered in kangaroo tail with garlic polenta, and green shell mussels with mooli, hijiki, chilli and rocket.
The Grim Reaper, who was stationed by the front door, greeted new arrivals.
‘Hi, my name’s Phil,’ he boomed from the far reaches of his black hood while at the same time extending his scythe in welcome, ‘and I’ll be your Angel of Death this lunchtime. Would you prefer post-mortem or non-postmortem?’
***
When the Grim Reaper asked Beverley, who by now had begun to feel decidedly queasy, whether she had a reservation, she’d been tempted to say, ‘Yes, at least a dozen,’ and then make a dash for it before somebody in a surgical gown tried to whip out her spleen and weigh it. But instead of being rude, she simply gave him Naomi’s name.
Having been told by the Grim Reaper that her sister had phoned to say she was stuck in traffic and would be a few minutes late, Beverley was shown to a marble slab in the window by an Aussie Morgue attendant called Lance. Their route took them past slabs full of intimidatingly trendy men and women, all of whom seemed to be wearing narrow oblong spectacles with thin black frames. It was only as she sat down that Beverley noticed the large badge pinned to Lance’s Surgical gown advertising the restaurant’s Valet of the Shadow of Death parking service.
‘Can I offer you a stiff drink while you’re waiting?’ Lance had asked chirpily as he handed her the black-edged menu. ‘We do some absolutely harrowing cocktails. What about a Hemlock Wallbanger? That’s similar to a Harvey Wallbanger except we add a couple of drops of squid ink. Then there’s our special Black Death Die-quiri? That’s Guinness garnished with floating oozing boils made from advocaat and grenadine. Or what about a Gravesend Surprise, that’s...’
‘Don’t tell me... one shot of embalming fluid, two shots of Formalin, a swizzle stick and a black umbrella.’
Lance gave her a hurt look.
‘No thanks,’ she shouted firmly over the general hubbub. ‘A glass of Perrier will be fine.’
‘C’mon, how’s about a Lethal Injection? People say it has an instant calming effect.’
‘I’m sure it has, but I’d prefer fizzy water - unless of course you have a problem with that. Perhaps all the bubbles have gone flat on account of them being in mourning.’
‘No, we can do fizzy water. Regular, or with lemon and lime coffins?’
Beverley took a deep calming breath.
‘Regular.’
‘In an urn or a glass?’
‘Honestly,’ she said, doing her best to hold on to her patience. ‘All I want is a glass of water - no squid ink, no black grapes, no hearse-shaped ice cubes... just water.’
Lance finally seemed to get the message. He nodded, smiled and headed off towards the bar.
‘One Watery Grave,’ she heard him shout to the bartender. ‘Hold the Klamati olive crucifix.’
***
Beverley knew precisely why Naomi had phoned her and insisted they had lunch at the Morgue. Having discovered that lower-middle-class suburbanites like Beverley and Melvin were now going to the Ivy, she would have been desperate to find somewhere even more fashionable. And she most certainly had. The Morgue wasn’t just another tacky themed restaurant designed to attract tourists and the occasional cast member from Brookside or Emmerdale. The Morgue was stellar. According to B.B. Finn’s restaurant report in last week’s Sunday Tribune, not only was its post-Pacific Rim cooking ‘so pulsating and animated that it defies description’, but the place also had a ‘momentous’ mission statement. New Zealander Terry McSweeny, the Morgue’s creator, whom gossip columnists always described as ‘flamboyant’ (and whom the Standard diary recently referred to waspishly as ‘London’s favourite Kiwi fruit’), was quoted as saying: ‘Death is just so out there right now. It’s Linda. It’s Gianni and Diana. Inside the Morgue, taboos surrounding death disappear. I like to think we greet death here in a fun way and make it our friend, an intimate - a playmate, if you will.’
For some reason, the chattering classes had reacted to Terry McSweeny’s mission statement as if it were a Socratic treatise. In the two weeks following the Tribune article, cabals and cliques of London’s leading pseuds, poseurs and prats had flocked to the Morgue to discuss mortality over plates of gently sautéed lamb’s brains. Hot on their silly heels came the girl bands and footballers.
***
Beverley buttered another piece of sweet, nutty bread and began looking at the menu, praying it wasn’t all scallops and pork bellies and that she would find something whi
ch once had scales or a cloven foot, or chewed the cud, and was therefore kosher. From time to time she looked out of the window to see if there was any sign of Naomi. There wasn’t. According to Beverley’s watch she was now fifteen minutes late. For an uncharitable moment she couldn’t help thinking that this had less to do with the traffic and more to do with her sister playing the kind of egotistical power games favoured by divas and Hollywood starlets. She immediately felt guilty for thinking it, but she couldn’t help it. She blamed Melvin. Somehow, she was allowing his refusal to accept that there was even the remotest possibility Naomi could have changed to rub off on her. The moment she’d told him about the letter and their phone call he said, ‘Believe me, Bev, women like Naomi don’t change. Ever. For as long as I can remember, she’s always put you down about something. What about when we were at your cousin Rita’s wedding a few months after Benny was born? First she swans round the place like Lady Muck, looking like she wants to spray breath freshener in everybody’s mouth. Then she comes up to you and what was it she said? Some remark about your hair.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Mel. It was a long time ago.’
‘No, come on, you remember. Women never forget stuff like that. What was it?’
‘OK,’ she said reluctantly. ‘It was, “I love what you’ve done with your hair, Bev. You should wash it more often.”’ca
‘See? She’s evil, Bev. Let her back into your life and I’m telling you it’ll end in tears.’
If he’d said this once over the last few days, he’d said it a hundred times. In fact he’d trailed her round the house saying it.
‘Melvin,’ she’d said in exasperation when he finally followed her upstairs and into the bathroom, ‘I think you’ve made your point. Now, I’d quite like to wax my pubes in private if that’s all right with you.’