The fourth time he waggled his phone out of the window, pointing it towards the ground this time instead of up at the sky, Jack’s phone vibrated and he almost dropped it in surprise.

He pulled his arm in and was about to tell the others when he noticed it was a Twitter notification. Which was unusual, as it would make it the second tweet he’d received that morning. He tapped the blue notification. It started loading very, very slowly. Panicking that he’d lost the connection already, he stuck his arm back out of the window, trying to point it at the ground again like last time, and then stuck his head further out so he could see the screen a little better. It was still loading very slowly.

After several slow breaths – Jack willing the page on as it buffered – it got there. He blinked fast in surprise. His tweet about being stuck in the attic in New Cross had got 257 likes. Which wasn’t really very many when you considered how many people there were in the world – or rather, how many there were on Twitter. But considering the most likes Jack had ever got before was seven (he’d pointed out an inconsistency in an old Simpsons episode), it was a lot. From the state of his mentions, it looked like he’d had a few replies too.

Some of them sounded promising.

@rockyb1999

Where in #newcross are you mate

@littlewandering

I’m on trafalgar drive – where u based #newcross #southeast #LDN

Others, he conceded, sounded less promising.

@RVQ88

This sounds like a punchline to a joke

@thegooner87

HAAAHAA!!!

And he was particularly excited about this one, which was from a woman who had lots of followers. Jack clicked on her profile. She was a columnist for a newspaper.

@SteffyWrites

South London network assemble! Anyone in the New Cross area and willing to help this bloke out?!

Jack marvelled for a second that his words were being seen by this woman, whose bio said that she had once been nominated for an award. He’d never had anyone like that interact with any of his tweets before –

And then he couldn’t see any more replies, because his phone had lost the connection again, so it was only showing him what had been downloaded before it dropped off. He refreshed the screen, holding the phone out of the window, with one eye on the top-right corner, watching for the WiFi, and considered this development.

He’d hoped for a response or two, of course – that had been the point. But he was surprised the message was doing quite so well. It had been an experiment, more than anything.