Read Online Sisteria by Sue Margolis - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜No,’ she laughed, deciding to let him off the hook, ‘but you could at least have offered me some.’
    â€˜I was angry. Sorry.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You can buy them anywhere there’s a Jewish population - Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds.’ He paused and thought for a moment.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Oh yeah, I can see it all now,’ she began dismissively. ‘Rebecca Fludd... shikseh bagel queen.’
    â€˜What’s wrong with that?’ he said.
    â€˜I’ve just told you - I’m not Jewish.’
    He shrugged.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You really think it wouldn’t matter?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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