Carnival

Lucy was 15 when she ran away to join the carnival.  A handsome boy on the waltzers, leaping from car to car as he took the money, alighted on the back of the car Lucy and her girlfriends sat giggling and screaming in.  Standing behind Lucy as she gripped the bar in front of her, the wind whipping her hair around her face, he gazed over her shoulder and into her cleavage as he waved away her money.  Looking up into his tanned face, she beamed radiantly.   Later, as she lay in the back of his van on an old mattress, dizzy with cheap cider, he pinned her wrists above her head while she struggled, her eyes wide with panic, her ripped knickers stuffed in her mouth, muffling her screams as he stabbed his cock into her virgin cunt, grunting, “Take it, you little cockteaser!”

 

In the cold grey morning, the tears still wet on her cheeks, Lucy shivered as the van started, the vibrations from its clapped out engine thrumming through her naked body as the carnival convoy pulled away, bouncing over the rutted field.

 

The fearful excitement of that first journey – her nose pressed against the filthy windows of the van, peering out to try to guess where they were going, her heart racing as they jolted across rough ground and shuddered to a halt – all that was long submerged beneath a numbing routine.

 

While the men erected rides and pitched tents, the women of the carnival were sent out into the town in their costumes to hand out fliers and drum up trade.  Lucy no longer flushed pink with shame as she stood on some windswept high street or shopping precinct in her skin-tight outfit of flesh coloured net dotted with sequins that barely covered her pussy and her nipples.  She held her head high, the feathers in her head dress fluttering, her eyes blank beneath drooping lids, heavy with false eyelashes, her face painted like a doll.  By sun down, the women returned, entering the carnival ground through the scenery flat painted with hell’s mouth.

 

Her first job of the evening was always the same.  Near the entrance to the carnival, in a gauzy white dress she sat pertly on one end of a beam, balanced above a tank of water.  At the other end of the beam was a target where, with three darts for a pound, men were invited to aim for the bullseye.  Lucy’s job was to smile and smile, even as the beam dropped away beneath her, plunging her into the icy water.  And then, still smiling, she clambered out, hauling herself back onto the beam, her dress transparent now and clinging to every curve of her body.  The game was fixed of course.  The fat Romany who ran it, his face unshaven and his belly hanging out of his vest, never spoke a word to Lucy that she understood.  But some nights he seemed uninterested in her and left her sitting on the beam for game after game, with only a token ducking when the punters got restless.  Other nights, he took perverse delight in dunking her on almost every game, grinning cruelly at her as she surged up out of the water, coughing and spluttering and began the awkward struggle back up onto the beam.

 

Her job done, the carnival pulsing with punters, Lucy’s next job varied with the night and the whim of the owner.  On the nights she was the mermaid, Lucy dressed herself in a glittering, silver-scaled tail, her hair spread out across her shoulders and a necklace of sea shells dangling between her naked breasts.  Her job was to sit on the artificial rock in a huge glass tank, combing her hair with a razor shell comb, as the punters were gathered into the tent.  Then the showman would begin, telling them the tale in his broken Eastern European English of how his whole family were fishermen and one day, out in rough seas with his father, his grandfather and all his brothers and cousins, they had almost been dashed upon the rocks when they heard ghostly singing that led them away from certain danger.  And how, as they pulled up their fishing nets, they had found the mermaid, struggling and weeping for her lost home in the sea. 

 

As he spoke, water began slowly to fill the tank, first lifting the fronds of seaweed and anemone around the rock, then fluttering the fins of Lucy’s tail.  Soon it was deep enough for Lucy to begin to swim back and forth while outside in the tent the tale continued, of touring the palaces and great houses of Eastern Europe, exhibiting the mermaid for princes, dukes and bishops.  Of the men who had lost their heart to the mermaid and the women who had drowned themselves in doomed, romantic gestures of imitation.  Meanwhile, the water was deep enough now to swirl Lucy’s hair around her face, floating and coiling as the water neared the glass ceiling of the tank.

 

And now the story changed, to one of jealous passion, a man driven mad by his desire to possess the mermaid, outcast from society and forced to tour with the carnival, exhibiting the object of his lust to strangers, “So that only I can possess her, even if to do so will mean her death.”  The tent would grow still, countless pairs of eyes in the dark peering into the murky green waters of the tank as Lucy held her face above the water in the few inches of air left, gulping it down before diving underwater and swimming again, pressing her frightened face to the glass, bubbles escaping her mouth and nose as her lungs burned and her tits heaved.  Then she thrust above the water again, gasping and banging frantically on the glass ceiling, the water closing over her face.  Only when the tiniest sliver of air remained did the lights on the tank dim and the show ended.  Each night it seemed to Lucy that she struggled for longer and he waited longer before freeing her.  Some nights, after the tent had emptied, he stood alone before the tank, watching her thrashing in the water and banging desperately, his fingers wrapped around his stiff cock.

 

On the nights Lucy was the Egyptian princess, she dressed herself in a floor length, pleated muslin dress that cupped her breasts, her nipples clearly outlined through the translucent fabric.  She festooned her arms with gold bangles shaped like snakes and outlined her eyes with black, smudgy kohl.  On a sand-strewn stage, before a painted backdrop of the pyramids, Lucy danced a sinuous, enticing dance to the wailing note of a flute, gradually letting her dress drop to the floor and gracefully bending to remove the lid of a large basket.  To gasps from the crowd, she lifted two snakes, one in each hand, and held them aloft as they coiled around her arms and waist, their tongues flickering and hissing out their anger at being disturbed, their tails rattling out a warning.   

 
 

Lifting one high in the air, Lucy would let it coil itself around her neck, slowly slithering down between her breasts and across her belly.  She would part her legs and throw her head back as its tongue fluttered against her clit.  Lifting the other snake with both hands, she would rub her cheek against it, sometimes licking its smooth dry skin, feeling the crowd drawing nearer, straining to see as the head of the first snake bumped against the lips of her pussy.  Lowering one hand, she would spread her pussy, gasping as its head wriggled inside her, its muscular contractions making her legs tremble as juice from her cunt dripped down its skin.

 

Then she would sling the other snake over her shoulder, turning her back to the crowd as it slithered down her spine, bending forwards slightly as it slid between her buttocks, guiding it with her hand and dropping to her knees, groaning and clawing the floor as it writhed its way deep into her bowels.  With nine, ten, twelve inches of snake thrashing inside her cunt and arse, their tongues flickering maddeningly, Lucy would roll on the floor, whimpering and moaning, the body of one snake tightening around her neck, the incessantly rattling tail of another pressed to the tip of her clit until, screaming and jerking, her eyes wide and crazed with lust, Lucy would cum, sobbing with shame as she lay coiled about the snakes, sweat dripping from her skin, reaching out to wrap her fingers tightly around the few meagre coins the crowd would throw in appreciation of her degradation.    

 
 

Some nights were slow and there was no money to be made from romance and passion and lust.  On these nights, Lucy would crawl back into the van with the filthy mattress and wait for closing time and the inevitable queue of drunks at £20 each.  Fat, ugly, old, stinking, Lucy greeted each one with her most coquettish smile and her lips parted to suck and lick and slurp up their cocks.  Some were so fat they had to lift their bellies while Lucy crouched on all fours, balancing their blubber on her arse as they fucked her.  Some were so drunk they couldn’t get it up and used to amuse themselves instead by sticking their fingers into her, frigging her cunt and arse and sometimes sticking a whole fist inside her, covering her mouth with their other hand to muffle her screams.

 

But even the fat and the drunk were better than the fit and the young – gangs of pissed up young men who clambered into the van together, pinning her down and ramming their cocks into her cunt, her arse, her throat, three at a time, raping her and spraying her with their spunk, then instantly replaced by another three.  They yelled and slapped and choked her, pouring beer over her and ramming the empty bottles into her.  At one unfortunate stop, next to an army barracks, the whole regiment visited her, flinging the doors of the van open and fucking her, one after another, bent over its tail.  Then they dragged her out of the van altogether, spread eagled her in the muddy field and took their turns with her, circling her and setting up a howling, terrifying chant of “Fuck her!  Fuck her!  Fuck her!”  She was found the next morning, unconscious and face down in a ditch and when she was brought round with a bucket of cold water in the face, she vomited pints of spunk.

 

Lucy’s handsome boy grew drunken and bitter and money was short until finally he couldn’t afford the rent for his pitch in the carnival.  He came back in a sour mood one day and began angrily stuffing Lucy’s few possessions into a bag.  “What is it?  What’s happened?”

 

“I’ve paid the rent.”

 

“What with?”

 

“You.”

 

And so Lucy trudged across to the owner’s caravan, clutching her bag with both arms wrapped around it for protection, her mouth dry and her legs trembling as she tapped on the door.  It seemed as though every girl went to the owner’s caravan sooner or later but Lucy had never seen any of them come back. 

 

Everyone tells a different story about what happened to Lucy.  Some swear they’ve seen her face, streaked with mascara and distorted into a scream in grainy, underground movies – the sort where girls get trussed up with tightly knotted ropes and fucked by snarling, salivating dogs.  Others talk more prosaically of a shallow grave and a hasty departure.  There’s even a story that she settled down and lives quietly in London, studying history with a boyfriend who’s a doctor.  And there are some people who say that if you know where to look, in the farthest corner of an Egyptian souk, there’s a pale-skinned princess in a floor length pleated muslin dress who will show you the snakes she keeps in her basket, lifting them up to the light and kissing them.