Penny Does a Runner: Part XI

It was in something of a daze that Penny was led back to the circus tent. Before she knew quite what was happening she stood backstage amongst half a dozen young women dressed in blue leotards just like hers.

“Ah, you must be the stand-in for Josephine!” a brunette girl said to her. “What luck – I had thought we would be one down this evening.”

“Thirty seconds!” a man said.

“B-but... I’m not...” Penny said to nobody in particular, turning on the spot in bewilderment as the girls chatted and fussed distractedly. “I shouldn’t really be...”

Just then the vast red curtains behind her parted and the noise from the ring beyond came flooding in like a cacophony: the roar of the crowd; the deafening music; the amplified baritone of the ringmaster.

“They will dazzle and amaze you!” he cried. “Thrill and astound you! The most fearless females this side of the Amazon, each and every one of them ready to risk DEATH as they fly through the air!”

Penny’s stomach did a death-defying somersault as she was taken by the hands and led by a pair of skipping girls through the curtains and into the ring.

If her senses weren’t quite overwhelmed already, they were when a pair of blinding spotlights were turned onto her and the rest of the acrobat troupe. Blinking in the glare, Penny wondered – not for the first time that day – quite how she had got herself into such a spot.

As her sight returned she realised that the view from the sawdust-covered floor of the ring was quite different to the one she had enjoyed not half an hour earlier from the safety of the stands: all around her was colour and motion, jugglers tossing clubs with dizzying speed and skill; exotically tattooed fire-breathers sending bursts of flame skyward; the ringmaster under a spotlight of his own, resplendent and fantastical. And, all around, up to the roof of the tent itself it seemed, hundreds upon hundreds of faces keenly trained on the acrobats about to perform.

Two girls set off on gymnastic floor routines, extravagantly toppling and somersaulting around the ring, while two more began their ascent to the pair of tiny trapeze platforms high above. Penny watched with as much wonder as any child in the towering circus tent as the pair climbed the narrow ladders with disarming insouciance. In no time at all they had reached the top of them and, without so much as a pause, took hold of a trapeze and leapt.

The audience oohed and ahhed as the girls swung and flew and flipped with breathtaking grace, and gasped in unison when they swapped trapezes mid-air. Far below, unnoticed by all, young Penny Hasler gasped for quite a different reason, as she was shepherded to the foot of a ladder.