Free Sisteria by Sue Margolis

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