by Louise Kean
‘Why all the questions about my girlfriend?’
‘I’m just interested, Gavin. Other people’s relationships interest me. I just wonder what you go for, what your type is. Everybody has a type. Some men just go for baubles, decoration. The only thing more attractive to a man than a beautiful woman is an easy life. And I just wondered what your type is. Beautiful or easy?’
Gavin looks at me with an element of serious concern. I don’t think he likes this line of questioning. But he answers anyway.
‘Arabella? She is very beautiful. And not at all easy. So there’s your answer I guess.’
‘Arabella from the play? But Gavin, she’s stunning!’
‘And?’ he asks me, like a dry old maths teacher waiting for an answer from a stupid young pupil.
‘And nothing, nothing at all. That wasn’t surprise, I just meant … good for you!’
Gavin lowers his head and inspects the coffee I spat out onto his trainers, which is drying into a dirty stain that looks a bit like the birthmark on Gorbachev’s forehead.
‘We’ll see,’ he says, half out of the door now. ‘She is gorgeous. But she’s definitely not easy, and it can wear you down.’
‘Not easy is the best kind!’ I say, as he is almost gone, but I hear him mutter ‘Tell that to your boyfriend,’ just as the walkie-talkie on his belt starts spewing white noise and static, and I hear a muffled voice say,
‘Dolly’s at the back door.’
My door opens again and Gavin pokes his head back in. ‘Dolly’s arrived,’ he says, and turns to leave.
‘Should I wait here?’ I shout, a hint of panic in my voice.
‘Depends on her mood. She might throw you out, she might want to meet you straight away. You may as well stay, I suppose. I’ll try and gauge how she is before she gets down here.’
‘Should I be scared?’ I ask him.
‘I don’t know, are you scared of most things?’
‘It’s starting to feel that way.’
‘Well if you are she’ll sense it, like an attack dog, so try and keep it under control. And don’t worry, with any luck she’ll be hammered.’
Gavin shuts the door.
I unpack and inspect my brushes to see if any of them need replacing, and open up a couple of samples that a new make-up company have sent me. I check my own hair in the mirror and mess it up a little, and re-gloss. The trouble with talking is that it wears your gloss away. I think about sitting, but I don’t know where Dolly will want to sit, and I don’t want her to burst in and chuck me straight back out again for nabbing her favourite spot. I try to lean back nonchalantly, cross my arms, uncross them, strike a relaxed non-fearful pose that doesn’t just look ill at ease and terrified.
I spot a press pack sitting on the desk, and a picture of Tristan sticks out. Somebody has childishly drawn long eyelashes on him, and a pencil-thin moustache. Below the picture the text reads:
Directed by Tristan Mitra, Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore has been staged at The Majestic once before, starring Hollywood screen idol Joanna Till. The play marks Tristan’s debut in the West End, fresh from the success of his all-male adaptation of The Sound of Music at the Brixton Art House. He previously worked for the DSS for thirteen years, but was fired, which he believes intrinsic to his direction of the play.
I pick up another page and see a heavily air-brushed close-up of Dolly. You can tell it’s air-brushed because no matter how good the make-up there would still be the suggestion of lines around her eyes and lips, but her face is like a porcelain mask instead. I skim-read text. It mentions Laurence Olivier and David Niven, but then nothing of note for two decades, until recently when it seems she’s been in some TV movies, playing ‘the popular grandmother detective Mrs Mounting for the Hallmark Channel series Mrs Mounting Investigates.’ From David Niven to the Hallmark Channel then. I toss the pack back onto the counter, sit on my hands to stop them from shaking, and wait for Dolly Russell to make her grand entrance.
Scene III: History
After twenty minutes and a series of fearful moments and with still no sign or news of Dolly, I wonder if there has been some kind of problem; if she has thrown a tantrum on learning of my lack of theatre experience, or is upstairs leading a drunken conga across the stage, or has Gavin pinned to a wall somewhere, teaching him her version of living. Just then somebody begins knocking a tune on the door – tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap … pause … tap tap … I recognise it as the Tapioca song from Thoroughly Modern Millie. I love musicals. Everybody in a musical is so in love with life itself that they keep bursting into song.
When I was very little and Mum had housework to do on rainy afternoons, she used to sit me and Richard in front of BBC2 to watch the likes of Calamity Jane, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or Hello Dolly, or Thoroughly Modern Millie. She said she thought them far less harmful than violent cartoons starring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe that were showing on the other channel. Richard would be bored within minutes and sit in the corner scribbling with crayons or banging things. I’d get annoyed at the interruption, but not enough to turn off the TV. After about twenty minutes Mum would wander in with a bottle of polish in her hand and say, ‘Oh I’ll just watch this bit for five minutes’ as the seven brothers high-kicked at a barn dance, or Julie Andrews sang ‘Babyface’, then she’d settle down on the sofa. After a couple of minutes, when I was certain she was staying put, I’d get up and go and sit next to mum, curling up on the sofa beside her. She’d tuck me under her arm and stroke my hair as she hummed along to the songs and the rain poured down outside, flooding the holes in the driveway, and Richard scribbled joyously on his paper – and then the walls – in the corner.
I shout ‘Come in’ but the tapping continues, so I trip to the door and throw it open. Tristan Mitra practically falls through.
‘Tristan?’
‘Make-up!’ he exclaims with a beam. I smile back at him. ‘Why were you tapping the Tapioca song on my door?’ I ask.
‘What better song to tap?’ he asks, and because I don’t have an answer we stand in what could be an uncomfortable silence, before it is mercifully shattered by Tristan exploding with laughter, a false falsetto laugh that catches us both off-guard.
‘Are you looking for Dolly?’ I ask him, straightening my skirt, ruffling up my hair.
‘Not at all, not one bit. I was looking for you! Looking at you. You really are quite gorgeous, but then you know that. Of course you know that, what beautiful woman isn’t aware of the effect she has on the people around her, but is it a curse as well, I wonder? Does it leave you slightly bewildered, Make-up, when somebody isn’t quite as impressed with you as you think they should be? So much so that it has you reaching for the lipstick and the diet books?’
‘I’m sorry, Tristan, I don’t think I remember the question …’
He waves his hand, it isn’t important.
‘I thought you might want me to fill you in on the theatre, and Dolly herself, before the old monster descends.’
He turns his hands into claws, makes his teeth into fangs, and pretends to walk down some stairs. He looks like he is attempting the Thriller dance. I don’t know how to react and he laughs again, hard and loud like a punch in the air.
I think he must have found those uppers.
‘That would be helpful, Tristan, if you wouldn’t mind, if you have time. I really don’t know much about this theatre stuff at all, or Dolly, and I feel that I should …’
Tristan moves into the little room and suddenly it feels crowded and claustrophobic, what with the lilies and the velvet and the cards, and Tristan as well, who seems to be everywhere all at once. He is half the size of Gavin, but twice the presence. I tuck myself away in the corner by my make-up box, but he wanders over and stands in front of the brushes laid out on the table, appraising them seriously.
‘Smoke and mirrors, smoke … and … mirrors …’ He selects a cheekbone brush of fine hair and, with
closed eyes, sweeps it down the length of his nose.
Opening his eyes slowly he turns to face me.
‘So, The Majestic Theatre.’ He gestures around him with a sweeping motion of his arms. ‘Well. I always say that if you’re going to fill a gap you should fill it completely. Let’s start at the beginning.’ He taps the end of my nose with the brush delicately, and then steps back to appraise his work.
‘The Majestic Theatre on Long Acre, Covent Garden, was commissioned in 1880. Queen Victoria instructed that somebody build a “beautiful building to fill an ugly space, and quick!”’ he says, doing a fair impression of the Queen’s low, moneyed voice, while simultaneously his eyebrows tango and his chin tucks into his neck to signify an old lady’s multiple chins. ‘But it was twelve spiteful years in the making. The first of those years was spent attempting to evict the tramps and drunks and whores who lived on the intended site, a sprawling old hat factory, wrenched from the family Hobson – hat makers for three centuries – after William Hobson the ninth dabbled with opium to ease the pain from his arthritis and became joyfully addicted. Lucky bastard.’ Tristan smiles and circles the make-up brush on my cheek softly and slowly as if to aid concentration.
‘Of course, the family didn’t realise before it was too late that their profits and their business were going up in smoke – ha! So, ignored by the bank, which had more pressing concerns in India and America, Hobson’s hat factory became three floors of filth and sin. But the drunks and the tramps and the whores are the most resilient of us all, Make-up, clutching on to life, so far down that there are no rules, getting by because not getting by is the graveyard. Hobson’s hat factory was their home, and there’s no place like home. They kept coming back. And who can blame them?’
Bored with the cheekbone brush, Tristan replaces it on the side and addresses the counter as he searches for a new and exciting tool.
‘Each night they were herded up and horded out with horns and whistles and truncheons and punches, to allow the necessary preparations for the following night’s demolition. But by midday they were grubbily sneaking past the hired security, or getting them drunk on cheap vodka, or laid, or high! Wonderful, wonderful, ingenious! And so the process would begin again that night, with whistles and bells and punches, a mini war, before the place could be blown. But by the following midday they were back again …’
‘Tristan?’ I interrupt, as he flicks the back of his hand with an eyebrow brush, ‘how do you know all of this?’
‘Research, Make-up.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It must have taken you ages!’
‘Not really. I could tell you the same about most of the theatres. I have to know the history of a theatre before I work there. It would be like you applying a new eyeshadow, say, to a client, and not knowing where it came from or what was in it …’ he says with a smile.
‘Oh. Right. Exactly,’ I say, desperately trying to remember any of the eye shadow science I learnt at college. Nope, mostly forgotten.
‘Where was I?’ he asks.
‘Drunks and whores who wouldn’t leave,’ I say.
‘Right. Well. One black January London night when the construction unit had taken all that they could, soaked in swearing and spitting and the vomit and faeces being thrown at them in buckets, and the urine being sprayed on them from third-floor windows like vile spurts from peculiar water pistols, they took action. Forty-seven drunks and tramps and whores vanished the night they blew up the old hat factory, at one a.m.’
Tristan widens his eyes.
‘Hell!’ I say, appalled.
‘The explosion woke the bits of the city that were sleeping, but nobody cared. And by nine a.m. all the rubble had been cleared.’
‘My God, they just blew up all those people?’ I ask, confused.
Tristan nods his head theatrically.
‘Yes, Make-up, they did. Business is business, and they had plans in place, people were already on the payroll. The architect of The Majestic, Henry Lee, was the brother of the renowned architect Charles Lee, who had just remodelled Her Majesty’s Theatre into an Opera House to gushing critical acclaim. The Times said, “Charles Lee uses line with a conventional splendour.” Henry was twelve years younger than Charles, but two inches taller and with size twelve feet. Their mother had been startled by the pregnancy that was Henry, believing that at thirty-four she was well past childbearing age. Henry had always felt like a mistake, poor bastard. His mother looked bemused when she saw him. His father, the civil servant Charles Lee Senior, met Henry’s adoring stares with a mixture of irritation and anger. When Henry’s mother died of a blood disease at forty-four, Charles Lee Senior took a ten-year-old Henry to one side at her burial and whispered, “It was you. You were too much for her.”’ Tristan says it in a thick, comical Irish accent.
‘Tristan, are you making this up?’ I ask, irritated that he has taken me for a fool.
‘No! Absolutely not! Make-up, what would make you say such a thing?’
‘Well, you didn’t say they were Irish for a start.’
‘That was just for colour, Make-up – do you want this to be interesting or not?’
‘Can’t you just tell me about Dolly now?’ I ask, fidgeting.
‘Soon, Make-up. Patience is a virtue. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and patience is the hobby of angels.’
I sigh. He gives me a reproachful look and carries on.
‘The Majestic was Henry’s first commission, and a fateful one. He dreamt of six tiers to seat two thousand people, but was plagued by doubts and insecurities, violently ripping up new plans, sometimes throwing them on the fire and beginning again. Then there would be nine tiers, then twelve, then twenty! At the age of thirty-three he had been drinking heavily for eight years, to soften London’s hard edges, even though he knew that softening hard edges was not necessarily an advantage for an architect. Henry had recently fallen savagely and obsessively in love with a Spanish prostitute named Vanessa who had long, thick dark hair like a mare’s, and which had never been cut. It was overrun with lice like wood mice in a 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 c
ompleted 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 the time 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 pornography rap, plus a second and more sinister charge of attempting to breed freaks by mating them. The Majestic stood cold and lonely again through two punishing winters.’
‘No, Tristan,’ I put my hand up. ‘Stop it now. You are making it up. Nobody breeds freaks,’ I say, shaking my finger at him reproachfully.
