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started to draw a fox on the back of the door.
    It evolved, as these things usually do, unfolding in front of me as I drew. I’d say that the drawing started to come alive, except that metaphors like that are tricky once you’ve actually seen a fox turn into a person. The fox on the door didn’t come alive – my strokes just got wilder and more confident, until he was sitting up on his haunches, his ears alert and his eyes a scribble of bright red among the black muzzle lines. He seemed to be watching me, maybe waiting for something.
    I signed the drawing with THATCH scrawled in the top right hand corner, as usual.
    Back in the bar, Ameera and Jewel had gone. I should’ve seen it coming, but I still felt a stab of icy panic when I couldn’t see them anywhere. I walked around for a while, trying to look purposeful. My friends are just on the other side of this barstool... I know exactly where I’m going, they’re just over there... ’scuse me, I’m very busy and purposeful and my friends are waiting for me, just outside...
    They’d gone. I stood outside the bar and caught my breath, while the unlicensed minicabs crawled along the pavement and the bouncers refused entry to people with the wrong colour Gucci sandals on. The panic crumbled into a heavy layer of weary bitterness. It lined the bottom of my stomach like the sticky blue stuff in my cocktail that tasted like cough syrup.
    I tapped out a text to them both.
    Can’t find you. Gone home. Have a good night J M
    I probably should’ve hailed a taxi, but the club was about a ten minute walk from a bus stop that would drop me right at the end of my road, and I’d rather keep the cash. If Mum thought it was a good idea to press drinking money into my hands, she didn’t get a say whether I spent it on cocktails or spray paint.
    I set off walking, my short heels clicking heavily on the pavement. I cringed slightly away from open bar doors, which spilled desperate smokers and thudding music out onto the pavement. A blinding flash lit the air, and I realised I’d been caught in the corner of a paparazzi photo of someone leaving a club. I couldn’t clear the afterimage quick enough see who it was.
    I was nearly at the bus stop when I stumbled to a halt with a click-clack , gazing into an alley between two glass-fronted bars. There was a piece of graffiti on the wall, large enough and close enough to the road that I could see it clearly in the pulsating blue-purple-yellow light that filtered out through the frosted glass.
    A labyrinthine maze of hot pink arrows curled around each other, forming the shape of a giant brain. Bright blue-white sparks flashed between the arrow tails. Strange shapes seemed to flicker in and out of sight, like the way you can see faces in tree bark or creatures in the shadows. I could see animal shapes, and building shapes, and things that could’ve been hands reaching out – but I couldn’t tell what was really there, and what I was putting there.
    Right in the middle of the brain there was a four-pointed star in bright, sunshine-yellow.
    It was an E3. I would’ve known his style anywhere, even if it hadn’t been for his tag: two mirrored swirls of white in the centre of the star.
    I looked around at the other people staggering down the street, wondering if any of them had seen it. Even though I was in the middle of bitterly stalking off home alone, part of me wanted to share this.
    One of a group of women glanced down the alley as they passed me and saw the amazing painting, but she didn’t pause, didn’t even smile.
    I whipped my phone out and strode into the alley to get a photo. I got up close and took one of E3’s signature that filled the whole screen, then backed away to get the whole painting into the shot, my eyes on the floor so I didn’t trip on the uneven paving. I backed up against the wall and raised my phone up almost to my eyes to get as wide a shot as I could.
    Something knocked the phone from my hands, I felt a