My column of wishing stones. Somehow I thought that if it fell, my world would fall too.

That morning, I’d found four stones when you appeared beside me. I knew your face, but not well. A year older than me, and we’d never talked. Is this any good? you had said shyly, opening your palm. I’d pretended that it was and let it fall into my pocket with the others.

You came at the right time. A door opening, a rulerful of light.

The column never fell. It was taken down, after I died. Since then I have had only one wish for all the stones I could ever pile high. For you to hear me.

All this time, no one has heard me. Least of all you.

Now though, I think someone can.

Keats Madeline

The internet would write one of my essays for me. If the wifi ever worked.

Coleridge Christabel Madeline compare

You just had to rewrite everything to avoid the plagiarism software. Piece of piss.

Christabel Madeline virginity

Come on, ancient wifi of death.

‘Their behaviour even disrupts gender roles’ could just become ‘the actions of both characters challenge gender stereotypes of the period,’ blablabla. Online thesaurus to fill the gaps, sorted. Copy and paste was for dickheads.

Some seriously dark videos here, once you got past the stuff about Keats – but the word ‘virginity’ would do that. Nothing I hadn’t seen before.

Sherlock Watson gay sex. Yeah. Bit more fluffy, though the wifi was spluttering its final requests. I might as well write to the porn mafia and ask them to make a whole new badly lit movie with BBC lookalikes than wait any longer.

The rest of the day was a mushy haze of eating and sleeping and wifi resuscitation attempts. Doors banged a few times and Tyger barged around. I picked my remaining nails off and had a bath, freaking out when the water ran brown. Outside, the rain gave everything the look of an old home video.

God, what was I going to do here? I wasn’t a fucking Girl Guide. I was going to get paler – my legs would be the colour and texture of budget frozen chicken by the time the month was through. Maybe it was time to get heavily into writing epic Romantic poetry, stalking the hills in worsted skirts, Byron and Wordsworth trying to keep up with my dramatic strides and flourishes of penmanship. I wondered if there was any opium lying about. Maybe I should have stayed down south, faced the music.

I looked at my watch. Still hours until I was meant to meet Fraser. Time for some more porn.

There was a tap at the door and a man’s voice. Adam was leaning against the wall in the hallway. All he ever seemed to do was lean.

He looked past Lottie to me. ‘Evening, kiddo.’

It was stupid not having a car up here. You couldn’t get anywhere on foot unless you had legs of steel. Lottie had said that she wanted to live simply, but it wasn’t as if she was wandering around in sackcloth planting seeds, and Luddites definitely didn’t have a specially developed remote control thumb or need help from their daughter in working out the finer points of tweeting to their fifty-two followers.