Earth Porn pics of the day was good, if not exactly the crotch-diversion I’d been looking for. The lace-and-log-fire version of landscape photography – lurid trees over an obscenely blue lake that cascaded off an arcing shelf. I wondered if this place would ever make it on to that site. If you got the light right, or took a super-close-up of some grungy moss. Maybe it wasn’t quite showy enough, hallucinatory enough. It was a bit subtler here, muted, like looking through the lenses they use to film Scandinavian crime dramas. The pale mustard and blasted green of the hills surrounding Jim’s place. The bland sky.

Who had I been kidding? Jim wasn’t my friend, or anything else. He was a stupid monolith with no social skills, and he didn’t want me around. Which was fair enough. Why would you want me around?

I turned off the laptop. Turned off my phone. Lay on my bed feeling the chill of the duvet on my arms. The pillow that I normally stowed underneath a second, plumper one was feather-stuffed. I slammed my head down on it, rubbed my face in, feeling for the prickles and stabs. Sometimes I thought that my bones couldn’t be dense and fibrous. That instead they were full of air, pea-shooters. Empty space where nothing sounded. The spines of feathers.

After an evening spent blowing bubbles into my warm white wine with a straw – Lottie drinking decaf coffee and reading a book on colour theory in her dressing gown – I went outside for a wander, my head frothy.

Twilights lasted twice as long here, as if refusing to give darkness its proper run. Tonight was another achingly slow osmosis, things just beginning to lose their edges.

This corner of the garden faced inland, where the distant end of the loch narrowed to a point. There was the dull grey gleam of two silver birches in front of me and a collapsed washing line next to them. Not a breath of wind, though cold enough for the bare skin of my arms to pebble.

It finally got dark. I’d never seen a night sky like this one. Like someone had flung up a sackful of cheap gold stud earrings. And the longer I looked, the more layers appeared. Stars and stars and stars. I tipped my chin up and stuck out my tongue. Maybe I’d catch one, the most insane acid tab you would ever have. It would taste like sherbet and champagne and those violet-coloured popping sweets and my head would explode. I waited for one to fall.

There was a noise that made my head snap back down. A wild, percussive sound, right in front of me.

The plastic covering over the washing line. I could just see it eddying from side to side in the wind. It went again, an abrasive slap of tarpaulin on pole, like enthusiastic hands on a wet arse. How could I be so freaked out by the dark? It was just the dark. Just—