Beauty and the Beast

Beauty:

The roar of the Rose Casino is one of my earliest memories. Card tables, roulette wheels and one-armed bandits were the furniture of my childhood. The first act of my life featured a cast of drunks and desperate men. The careless rich, the care crushed poor and plenty of folk who were on their way to becoming one or the other. I’m not telling you this to justify myself or to defend what happened. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, not really. I just want you to know where I have come from. I want you to understand that for a girl who grew up running around gambling machines with her giggling sisters, hiding from bloated security guards, stealing bar snacks and watching show boating high flyers with awe there was nothing strange about the way this began. There was nothing strange about being lost on the turn of a card.

The Beast:

Her father was a fool. I think that’s something everyone should be able to agree on. Whatever else you might think about our story I don’t want you to put all the blame on me and paint that drunken bum as some kind of tortured innocent. Drunken is perhaps unfair. Alcohol wasn’t his poison. He wasn’t even greedy in the conventional sense. It was never about my money. I’ll give him that. He lived for the thrill of winning and for the pleasure of risking everything on the spin of a wheel or the turn of a card.

Beauty:

It’s a weird twist that it was Pa’s gambling that brought me and my sweetheart together. The habit that was always going to ruin us, and kind of did a couple of times, brought me all the comforts of my new lifestyle. Things got bad for a while just after I finished school. Money was really tight and my two older sisters both got mixed up in some things that they are well out of now. It’s strange to think that the gamble that broke Pa’s heart was the one that finally made his daughters’ fortunes. It could have made his if he hadn’t been so stubborn.

The Beast:

He was losing that night, losing badly. He often did. I sometimes thought he preferred it that way and until that night I’d avoided playing with him. I mostly play for fun and for stakes that I won’t regret in the morning. I prefer to play with men who can honestly laugh off their losses. The smell of real desperation makes my indigestion play up. He was starting to sweat. I would have walked away if Beauty hadn’t come up to him and whispered something in his ear. For a brief moment he went up in my estimation. He might be a loser and an addict but a woman of breathtaking beauty was whispering sweet nothings to him. I made a joke about his floozy looking at my cards and passing on the info. When he snapped back that she was his daughter I heard only that she wasn’t spoken for. A few hands later when he was all out of money it seemed natural to give him a chance to win it all back by gambling the only really precious thing that he possessed.

Beauty:

I had to stay with the Beast for six months. I had to go and live with him in his mansion on the outskirts of town. If he went out to a party or a première or just to a friend’s house I had to go along. If anyone asked I was his girlfriend and I was crazy about him. We would have separate bedrooms and I was under no obligation to, well what’s a delicate why of putting it? There was to be no obligation to act like his girlfriend in private. The arrangement was childish and sinister and made no sense. He was well past the prime of life and he was unusual looking but he was also fabulously rich and pleasant enough to talk to. Plenty of pretty girls would have been happy to date him.

The Beast:

I didn’t want to buy her. That could never work in the long term and I want her by my side for whatever time I have left. Winning her bought me a chance to show her my world. I wanted her to be dazzled by the life that these withered claws have built and to be truly won by the fact that I was wrapping it all up and giving it to her.

Beauty:

Pa got really upset when he found out that the Beast owned the Rose Casino. I’d been living at the mansion for a few months by then and I was starting to enjoy it. I was entertaining a few friends that night. It was a great mix. A few Hollywood stars I can’t name. One or two up and coming models, a director who said I could be big, a famous artist who said he could tell I was creative. The drink was flowing and the party was going well but then Pa burst into the room and started demanding that the Beast had to give me back. He accused him of cheating. Shouted that if he’d known he was playing the casino owner he wouldn’t have been such a fool. I don’t know about that. He’d been losing to the casino all my life.

The Beast:

Her Pa had become an embarrassment and a potential obstacle. Apart from anything else a man in my line of work doesn’t like to be accused of rigging games. It’s bad for business and an insult to our profession. That little incident left poor Beauty in tears. She was very upset about her party. That night I comforted her in her room and our love became real.

Beauty:

Pa got sick soon after that. I felt really bad about arguing with him at my party. In his own silly way he was just trying to protect me. He couldn’t understand that it was starting to look like losing me to the Beast was the best thing he had ever done for me. I begged him to move into the mansion or at least a fancier hospital. The Beast had offered to pay for everything despite Pa’s rudeness. My sweetheart is so caring and such an old-fashioned gentleman. It’s so sad that he’s had to wait so long to find someone who can see past his appearance.

The Beast:

Her father got sick soon after the party incident. I was enjoying Beauty too much to let him ruin things. It seemed easier to get him out of the way. She was very upset when he died but that passed with time. Being there for her when she was grieving helped to bring us closer together so it really did work out for the best.

Beauty:

That night in the casino, the party and even Pa’s death all seem like such a long time ago. I’m so much happier now. I’m so glad that we’re getting married in the morning. The wedding is going to be the biggest of the decade. Everyone is coming and the Beast is spending millions. We’re having swan at the banquet, a twenty two tier cake, fireworks, trained doves and a river of champagne. It’s all so romantic. I’m glad I met my sweetheart even if it was in a strange way. The only real sad point is that poor Pa won’t be there.

The other slight stain on our happy ending is that the media keep sneering at our love. They make mean comments about the age gap and the Beast’s unusual looks. They even dragged up some of those awful rumours. I love him and I don’t want him to ever change. Why can’t a shallow world understand that I can see what’s in his heart? I suppose the moral of our story is that real beauty is on the inside and sadly people can’t always see it.

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Alan Green lives in Whitton, in the south western corner of London. He works in a library by day and scribbles short stories in the evening. His wife wrote a much funnier version of this biography but he’s decided not to use it because he hasn’t really been a Ghostbuster.

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