Free Material Girl by Louise Kean Page B

forest but Henry didn’t care. She had large pendulous breasts that sat heavily on her chest, ravaged by little stretch marks where the pendulums began to swing. This was Henry’s favorite spot – he would lay his head on those tears after six or seven minutes of furious drunken lovemaking that inevitably ended shamefully limp. He would weep quietly as she tickled his cheek with strands of her long, black, infested hair.’
    ‘Yuk,’ I whisper, grimacing.
    ‘Close your eyes and have some humanity,’ he says to me, as he sweeps a brush across my eyelids. ‘All of the money from The Majestic’s commission was quickly slipping away, spent on cheap sloe gin and night after night with Vanessa, who had got wise to the drunken architect’s feelings and upped her prices. But that’s women for you. And poor Henry was in love, helpless in the face of her inflation. When his pockets were finally empty he began stalking her late into the night, jumping clumsily out from the shadows, tripping over his drunken size twelve feet only to blow her a kiss and run away. Vanessa carried on whoring, Henry carried on behaving erratically, and The Majestic’s construction faltered as more plans were thrown on the fire. Finally, the foreman, frustrated by Henry’s absence from the site for five straight days, called his brother, Charles Lee, to report Henry missing. Henry was found three days later on the floor of an old boarding house in Hoxton, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a gun in the other, and the original set of plans laying face up on his chest, dusted with blood. A single gunshot to his head had finished him off, or maybe it was Vanessa, or maybe it was The Majestic.’
    ‘Oh no, how terrible!’ I say, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand.
    Tristan removes it and places it on my lap.
    ‘Wait, it gets worse. Charles Lee wiped the blood from the plans, accepted the commission to finish The Majestic for five times the fee that had already been paid to his dead brother, and reworked them. A strangely sober three-tier theatre was completed on Long Acre in 1892. It still had the curved lines of Henry’s original plan, shaped like a sympathetic woman, but the softer edges had been hardened, to ensure it stayed up when horses trotted past.
    ‘Unfortunately for the theatre’s investors the shows that had been scheduled to appear at The Majestic had long since found alternate sites, some of them enjoying splendid runs that had already come to an end! The theatre, although completed, stood empty for fifteen months. Then in 1893 Dickie Black and Leonard White of the Black and White Circus enquired whether the large, vacant, sad and lonely building on Long Acre with a flaking painted sign hanging over its curved entrance still had its entertainment licence, and whether it was for sale. The investors had just that week taken the expensive decision to have it demolished and the land sold on, but instead took a very reasonable price, and had none of the trouble of getting rid of the sad old girl.
    ‘Black and White immediately posted a huge red and gold sign below The Majestic that read, “ Coming Soon! Black & White’s Freaks Circus of Passion, Politics, Fairytale and Violence .” Six weeks later they replaced the ‘ Coming Soon! ’ with a ‘ Now Open! ’. It became an instant hit with local workers, soldiers in from the docks, drunks and whores and commoners and thieves. Bearded ladies and midgets galloped around the stage nightly, drinking their way through every show, spraying their audience with whiskey and ignoring the fights and the flatulence, laughing and shouting and swearing at the audience and each other. The performances became more and more debauched, full nudity was de rigueur by thetime the police moved in one sticky summer night in 1899, closing the act and the theatre down for breaching public decency laws and open acts of pornography.
    ‘Black and White hotfooted it to Venice rather than face the