Sun, flames and mandala on a thigh

The lift is out again, so I have been hauling paint tins up the stairs like a sherpa, and I am writing this on the landing because the flat still smells of turpentine. Mr Okafor on the fourth floor has finally let me at the stairwell wall. You'll remember the sun I wanted to paint there after you left, the one with flames pouring off its rays. He agreed on one condition: that I put a lotus in the bottom corner, because his late wife grew them in a washing-up bowl on the balcony and never once got one to flower.

So I have been working on it at dawn, before the buses start. The sun is ochre fading to rust, then to a red that looks almost wet. The flames were the hard part. Every ray has to lick upward the same way or the whole thing looks like a child's drawing of a bad day. I kept getting it wrong until I stopped trying to draw fire and drew the gaps between the lines instead, which is apparently how you do fire.

Yesterday the lotus opened. I mean the one I'd painted, but also a real bloom on his balcony, pushed up through a crack in the concrete where nobody had planted anything. He came down in his slippers to look and said nothing for a long time. Then he asked if I could make the petals a bit darker, the way she liked them, and I said yes before I had thought about it.

Write back soon. Tell me the new job suits you, and that you are eating vegetables.

Love, Maddy