She didn't like taking the short-cut through the park but her bladder was burning inside her and her pelvic muscles were rapidly weakening. Relief was only the width of the park away.
The great oaks and elms were turning and they glowed red in the light of the low, evening sun. The path between them was darker, winding through great, grey trunks and flower beds. If it had been any later she would have tried for the hotel instead, but it was such a short walk and the steady pressure from her bladder was an imperative.
She walked swiftly. The pink and white flowers folding in against the night and the warm, sandstone and white columns of the rotunda called her to forget the lengthening shadows and linger, but her bladder would not let her listen.
She was certain she'd made the right decision until she passed the rotunda. She didn't know what made her look up. The scrape of an oversized shoe. A looming shadow. What she saw almost loosed her bladder on the spot.
A man, disguised as a clown, leant over the rotunda rails. His eyes were dark holes in white arches and his enormous, overly friendly smile conveyed nothing but an impression of teeth like crumbling yellow tombstones.
She had to fight her initial impulses. The first was to run - almost certainly an over-reaction. The second was to clamber up the rotunda stairs and slap the idiot man silly. That felt completely justified - except the child in her didn't believe the clown was a man. The child knew it was a hideous demon from the circus ring of hell.
Besides, she told herself, I don't have time for that.
She walked on quickly, fumbling for keys in her handbag. She had tempted fate. She knew that now. A ridiculous giggle behind her stood her hair on end but she didn't look back until she reached the squat, concrete toilet block in the corner of the park. The clown was still standing in the rotunda, its hair a glowing nimbus, watching her.
She entered the heavy gloom of the toilet block and shouldered a cubicle door open, lurching into the safety of the stall. She twisted the lock and stumbled to the toilet, wrenching her pants down over her hips as she went. She almost fell onto the seat. She nearly let out a groan of relief as her overtaxed bladder finally let go. She sat in an anxious sweat, straining to hear over the seemingly endless trickling beneath her. Nothing. She wiped herself quietly then stood and silently pulled up her pants. She waited, listening, until she was certain no one was there.
She unlocked the cubicle door and pushed it open slowly. She was alone. She stepped to the basin and washed her hands, then splashed her steaming face with cool water. She sighed and looked up at her reflection. Circus hell smiled at her from the mirror, showing all its teeth.
