Sugar skull woman portrait on a forearm

The fair pulled onto Harrowgate Common on Tuesday and I have been sat in the wagon ever since with the lamp turned low, because Mr Sayer has put me on the painted skull booth and I cannot get the white out from under my nails. He wants a calavera for every punter who pays a shilling, a sugar face with black hollows and gold scrollwork down the cheek, the way he saw them in a magazine from Mexico City. I told him the ink for the eyes runs in the damp. He said the damp is the point, it makes them look like they have been crying.

Last night a girl sat for me on the upturned crate, and I drew a crescent moon above her brow with my finest brush while the wind worked at the canvas flap. She did not flinch once. When I had finished she asked whether the smoke curling behind her was from the fire-eater's torch, and I said no, it was from the chip van, which made her laugh so hard she had to hold onto the tent pole.

Thursday the rain came in sideways and the generator quit at nine. In the dark the painted faces looked far less like paint and far more like a row of lanterns somebody had left out for the dead to find their way home. Mr Sayer stood in the mud with a candle counting the takings twice, swearing softly, while the girl from the crate came back through the flap with her shilling and asked for another.

I did her eyes again, slower this time, and gave her the scrollwork. She said her grandmother used to paint the same faces on the kitchen wall in a village I have never heard of. I nearly told her I had never been further than Lincoln. Instead I said the candle would hold, and it did.