Pisstory Pt. 01: Small Town Carnival

She returned the gusset to her face, licked it, and inhaled its odour in a single deep breath before passing the knickers to me, smiling.

"Present" she said "For later. I told you I liked those stories."

I sniffed at the pants myself. My erection, which had been gradually disappearing, gave a sudden kick at the thick, dark scent of her.

"For later, I said. Put them in your pocket. I need something else from you."

I realised that, apart from my diminishing cock hanging out of the front of my jeans, I was still fully dressed, albeit my own T-shirt was lightly stained with her piss and the knees of my denims soaked in it. Before I had a chance to feel ridiculous Emma knelt down in front of me.

"Your turn to wee on me. First in my mouth, then over my tits."

She closed her lips over the end of my prick, her tongue running itself over and under the glans, tip probing the peehole for the last undrunk traces of cum. I looked around me in the twilight, at the frosted window in the back of Emma's old shop where she'd read porn and fucked herself on the lavatory, at the crumpled heap of her discarded clothes, the incongruous and obsolete brick coal bunker, finally returning to the naked back and buttocks and sweat-damp hair of the energetic and wildly imaginative girl kneeling before me, sucking my cock. From a distance I heard applause from the market square, an ambulance siren from the ring road. We were in another world, a parallel reality inhabited solely by ourselves, whose only rules were what we chose to do with and to each other. This ring of medieval buildings, already good as demolished forever, was its own phantom universe, Emma and I its unique and absolute rulers.

Slowly, the pressure of all that drink on my bladder overcame my residual erection, and I began to piss in her mouth.

She swallowed steadily at first, then began to gulp, then, as I lost control of my own torrent, pulled back, piss streaming down over her lower lip, rocking herself back and exposing her tits and stomach to the downpour.

"That's wonderful!" she breathed. "Now in my cunt!"

She rocked herself back onto her buttocks, spreading her thighs and exposing her vulva to the still-thundering stream. Again she opened herself up with her fingers, and I tried to aim in the rapidly fading light at her clitoris. I must have had some success, because as I finally began to run out of pressure and began splashing her thighs her eyes rolled and she gave a cry somewhere between a heavy sigh and a cat's mew.

Exhausted, we held each other. As we kissed I licked what was left of my piss and spunk out of her hot, sweet mouth. She dried her cunt again, this time on the bottom of my T-shirt, thus adding to its array of stains and odours.

"How did you know?" I said. "I mean, that I liked... that?"

"Oh, easy. It was 'Macbeth'. You knew that quote. Plus you kept looking at my crotch as though you were thinking of what all that cider would provoke."

"You've got me there" I said, surprised and pleased not to feel the slightest embarrassment.

Another siren sounded far away.

"We stink" Emma smiled, nuzzling my ear with that picturesque nose of hers.

We did, though as we walked arm in conspiratorial arm around the edge of the market square it was hard to imagine that anyone else could detect it above the fumes of burger vans, the haze of cheap aftershave and perfume, the tobacco smoke and sour beer smell that pervaded the now-packed square. There were three police cars parked in the closed-off road, and a small knot of officers, truncheons drawn, were wrestling a gang of flailing drunks into a black van. There wasn't much chance that any teenager would be arrested now for carrying a bottle of cider, or for doing the stuff that kids in that condition do to each other given the chance in the absence of parents, teachers, or other authority figures.

Years later, when I was researching my book on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, relating some of his scenes to the grotesqueries of the French writer Francois Rabelais, I came across the essays on Carnival by a Russian philosopher and literary critic called Mikhail Bakhtin. The annual medieval festival of Carnival, according to Bakhtin, was an articulation of the independence and resistance of the working classes -- the serfs, the peasants, the day-labourers, and, yes, women -- against the Church and aristocracy that sought to keep them in their place for the rest of the time. It was something that expressed itself through excess, blasphemy, sexual incontinence, subversive language and satire. When the early modern period succeeded medievalism, the authorities sought to contain Carnival and control its proponents by reducing it to an officially-sanctioned series of parades and feasts designed to replace the grassroots original and turn it into method of control.

But, according to Bakhtin, the principle of Carnival survived its bastardisation and taming, re-emerging in the arts and literature, refusing to accept the centralised, standardised mockery it had become. Looking back on that June night in the mid-1970s I instantly thought of Emma and me, scruffily carnivalising the official mock-Carnival of our small-minded home town by our unrestrained, culturally unacceptable activities in the astonishingly appropriate arena of a space between condemned medieval buildings. Our refusal of shame in the spontaneous use of our bodies with each other was a classic Bakhtinian trope of resistance, even though -- or perhaps especially because -- we had no idea we were doing it. It was an act -- or a series of acts -- of acknowledgment and acceptance of each other, as both self and stranger.

I'm an art critic of some forty years' standing. If that sounds like pretentious bollocks, so be it. That's my stock in trade. It doesn't make it any less true. And in any case, a lifetime spent second guessing the intentions of dead artists, and trying to see past the evasions of living ones, has made me realise -- as Bakhtin also said -- that there is no final Truth. It's all stories, meaningful to us who participate with or without eyewitnesses or documentary evidence. Emma almost certainly remembers that night differently to me, whether more accurately or not is anyone's guess. From the moment she told it, at the point of our mutual orgasm, I didn't know how much of that story she whispered in my ear about sucking off the lecherous newsagent she had imagined. It doesn't matter. We had our time, we came together, and it was good.

"I never did get to lick you out" I said quietly into her ear.

She turned her head and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

"Not much to lick out there at the moment. Anyway, there's always something else left to try."

In the light of a shop window display I looked down at her bright little body. She was well named. She'd put her top back on inside out to hide the cum stains, but I knew they were there, stretched over now-soft nipples in the warm evening air.

The stage in front of the 16th-century clock tower was now host to a a hairy blues-rock band. A press of young men, interspersed by the occasional girl, was crammed around, nodding their heads seriously in time with the laboured riffs and clattering drums, trying to sound like something between The Groundhogs and early Jethro Tull and failing miserably at both.

"Guess what music I'm going to put on when I get home" I said.

"'Back Street Luv' by Curved Air?"

"Eno. 'Here Come the Warm Jets'."

She giggled. Kissed me on the ear.

I took her hand and squeezed it, holding on as we crossed the road and were swallowed up by the concrete bus station.