Skulk (5 page)

“Are you in college?” I asked, going along with his lie about his age – I don’t even know why.

“No, I’m in politics,” he shouted. “I’m one of their, y’know, Senior Policy Wonks.”

At twenty years old. You really must think I’m stupid.

“I work with the Poverty Tsar,” he declared, looking pleased with himself.

OK, that’s it, thank you and goodnight, it hasn’t been fun.

I stood up.

“I’m just going to… er…” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the bathroom.

“I’ll hold your drink,” said John the Yachting Poverty Wonk.

“No!” I clutched it protectively to my unfortunate cleavage. “I’m good! Back soon.”

I had to brush the traces of cocaine off the toilet lid as I sat down so they didn’t stain my dress, but at least it was quiet. The muted sounds of
thump thump snort thump
were practically restful by comparison with the bar.

There was some graffiti on the toilet stall door, mostly just scrawled writing, names and dates.

My purse was quite tiny, but it had room for the essentials – phone, mace, keys, Oystercard, and four fat marker pens. I untipped the black one and 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 juddering pain in my shoulder and I fell down. I landed hard on my bare elbows, pain and pavement scratching across my arms, and looked up. Two men, their faces covered, their hands grasping for my purse. I felt it tugged from my hands, almost before I could blink. The mace was in there – worse than useless, now they had it. I tried to scream, but my chest felt constricted and no breath seemed to come. One of the men kicked out at me, I ducked away and his shoe missed my face by millimetres. I was on my feet now, backing down the alley, knowing that going deeper was stupid, that I was going further from the bright lights and the crowds that could help me, but the two men were blocking my way out.

My right ankle twisted and I staggered with a yelp. The heel of my shoe had slipped into a crack in the pavement. As I tried to regain my balance there was a plastic splintering noise and it broke off. I could feel my hands and arms and knees trembling, like an earthquake was passing through me. One of the muggers grabbed for me and I couldn’t move quickly enough – as I tried to duck away his hand struck the side of my head, all the bones in my jaw ground together and flashing white dots swarmed in front of my eyes. I felt one of them grab my hair and push me back, further away from the road.

I tried to lash out, not much more than a desperate flail – but my arms twitched all over and wouldn’t move right. A giant, body-shaking shudder ran all the way down my spine and I convulsed under the man’s hands, so hard he actually let go. My legs wobbled and gave way and a juddering shock of impact ran through my whole body as my knees hit the ground. My face felt numb and tingling at once.

Was I having some kind of fit?

I can’t feel my fingers
.

One of the men made a choking noise and dropped my purse. I lunged for it with all my might, but I only managed to roll onto my front, my legs kicking out behind me. He leapt away, turned and ran, with his friend not far behind him.

My stomach churned and I tried to crawl forwards but my arms and legs just twitched and jumped. I felt something slide across my back and looked down to see the dress hanging off me – my cleavage, my arms, all of me, shrinking and changing and...

When the orange fur burst from my hands, I finally understood.

For about five seconds, panic turned my mind into a swirling pool of madness and I twisted, scratched and bit at anything I could still reach, my mouth full of Cavalli silk and my claws scraping along the pavement.

But then I breathed in, and I lay down on my side, keeping still except for the heaving of my ribs. The world rose up all around me, like time-lapse footage of mushrooms ballooning in the forest. I let out a yelp as my arms drew back into my body and my elbows clicked into their new positions. I could feel myself flattening against the concrete. My ears twitched involuntarily. I screwed my eyes tight shut and yowled, feeling my tailbone lengthening and pushing out of my back. I could feel the hairs on my tail, feel it swishing beneath the fabric of my dress.

I opened my new eyes onto a different world.

CHAPTER FOUR

I was a fox.

Everything smelled. And not just in a bad, back-alley way – although there was a patch of stink just to my left that set alarm bells ringing in my mind.
Human territory
, it said,
foul, keep away
.

But
everything
smelled – the pavement carried the scent of sand and metal and dirt and heat, a city-smell, underlying everything around me. I could faintly make out a tangy, fizzy airborne smell coming from the electric lights out on the street.

I bent to sniff my dress, intrigued. On top of the synthetic,
fabric-dye-smoke-alcohol
I could smell from the dress itself, my human scent was floating, unmistakeably animal. My instinct told me
female
, and comparing it with the foul patch to my left confirmed that as
male
, and
mature
, and something chemical – which, after a second’s puzzled thought, I realised had to be
drunk
.

My muzzle stung, and I remembered the mugger’s blow to the side of my head. My tongue flickered out, and on my chin I could feel hair matted with a trickle of blood. My jaw ached when I moved it.

I suppose that made sense – after all, the fox-man had obviously been hurt as a fox, and he’d died as a human.

I sat back on my haunches and looked around. I could see the edges of close things with a sort of razor-sharp clarity, although the colours were muted. It was the scents that guided me along the alley, toward the main road, and the scents and sounds that blinded me when I drew closer. Delicious food-smells, terrifying chemical car-smells, the sounds of feet pounding on the pavement and buses screaming past. I could hear the human chatter, and weirdly, I could still understand it – but there was much too much to make out any one thread. My ears flattened and I cringed back into the shadow of the alley, away from the racket.

Did you and her brother my boss in the bar I don’t think hey loved it great time no by the police in the way doctor most exciting coffee Greek place...

I backed away. I couldn’t go out there. My head was already spinning. I padded back down the alley to my dress, and sat for a second.

There was another sense, much more important than just sight. Not exactly a sixth sense – more like the same sense of perspective that I’d always had, but magnified a thousand times. I glanced up at a council dustbin, towering far above my head. My whiskers twitched, and my tail – my brush – swished against the ground.

I can make that jump.

I took a run up and sprang. I flew through the air, my front legs extending, as naturally as breathing. Except suddenly, as my claws clutched at the plastic lid, it was as though my body remembered it was supposed to be a girl, with short nails, and no fur, and ears that didn’t move independently – and I couldn’t make the jump, because that was absurd.

I missed hard, the edge of the lid smacking into my ribs. Pain and panic filled my head and I scrabbled with all four feet, my front claws leaving jagged grooves in the plastic, and my brush waving madly out behind me... and then I was up, on top of the bin, panting but safe. I’d made it.

I looked down at my dress, my shoes, my purse. They looked so small, like pieces of coloured paper that could blow away in a strong gust of wind. My whole life was down there – my friends, my mother, my house, my graffiti.

Can I change back
?

What if I tried to change back, but found that I couldn’t? What if I changed back, but then couldn’t be a fox again? Wasn’t it better to seize the moment? Whatever the next few hours might bring, right now, I was a fox, and I was
free
.

I looked up at the orange-black city sky. There was a fire escape I was pretty sure I could reach from here and climb all the way up to the roof of the building.

I glanced down again at the dress, and back up at the window ledge. My legs twitched with the desire to jump. Almost without my input, I felt myself crouching back on my haunches, ready to spring.

Could I ever change back?

In that moment, I didn’t care. I leapt.

The night air was much cooler up on the roof. There was a stiff breeze that hadn’t made it down between the buildings. It ruffled my fur and made the hair on my brush ripple like water. I sat and curled my brush around me to watch it, entranced by the way I could feel and not feel every strand moving at once.

The whole sensation was bigger than just the flow and pull of the fur. The wind brought scents from far away – tarry smog mixed with more of the gritty dirt and a hint of something juicy and delicious.

A restaurant?
I sniffed.
Meat... salt, and fat
. Maybe it was a fast food restaurant. It smelt divine.

And underneath that, even more layers of smell drifted past and around me. I thought I could taste far-off rain.

Although I couldn’t make out fine details, the view from the rooftop was just as incredible as the feeling of the wind in my fur. The twinkling lights in the distance, the tiny hurrying forms of clubbers down below... The whole human world felt so far away to me now.

I could do anything I wanted.

I could raid the bins outside that fast food place for some of those sweet, juicy, greasy bones. I could run and run through the streets and over the rooftops. I could see things humans never saw. I could run away forever and live my whole life as a fox. I could take a running leap off the top of this building and end my life in a splatter of red fur, blood and bone on the street below, and nobody would ever know what had happened to me.

I sat back on my haunches, my brush curled around my paws. I wasn’t going to jump. I didn’t
want
to jump. I could just feel... something. The pull of the edge, the urge to leap out into the air and fly.

No – I had to enjoy this. I had no idea how long this would stay fun. What if I’d traded my new skin for the one thing that’d made any sense of my life so far? Could a fox handle a stencil and paint?