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I've exhausted all the pencils in the world. I've used up all the pens, markers, biros, highlighters. Once, when I was still living in London, I broke into a museum and twocked a rusty old typewriter I found there but it only lasted me a couple of years while I banged out these notes to myself. (Whoever else is going to read them?) I've outlived hard drives, soft drives, flash drives, tweets, flippits, thinxes and all the other fiddly-fancy ways to store text. I've gone back to the beginning, I have.

I write with charcoal on walls. There's no shortage of walls hereabouts, and when I run out of charcoal I just burn something.

The sun gets bigger every day. I used to think it only seems to get bigger cus it's coming closer, and that. No. It's really growing bigger, I'm sure. And redder.

The nights are fewer and shorter now, and when night comes I don't recognize the stars. I was never good at their names: I only know Charles's Wain and Orion. A few thousand years after I lost my death, the stars in Orion scarpered off in different directions. Now the stars are all strange, except for the sun overhead. Too right I know that one.

I remember my father. When I think of him all I see is a mouth shouting at me and two hard square fists. I remember his voice telling me I was just a whore and a slapper and yelling at me that I'd never amount to nowt. He got that last bit wrong though: only I'm the most important person in the world, now.

Cus I'm the only one left.

I can't remember my mam. I've forgotten the faces and the voices of everyone I ever loved. The only people I can still recall are the bastards I'll hate till the day I die. Which likely means I'll hate them forever. Most of all, I hate my dad and the filthy perv who stole my death.

I was out in the street when I turned fifteen, and I was on the game and sixteen when I met him. One of those clever lads from the Uni, he was, reading science. While I was pulling him off in the alley, he kept nattering to me about something he was working on. Nanotech, that was the word. And summat called the Hayflick limit, which meant bugger-all to me at the time, only I sussed it out later. Said he hadn't kept track of his own experiment, and wasn't sure he could ever repeat the results. I wanted him to stop jawing so I could just concentrate on getting him off and then get on to my next punter, but he kept blagging about little tiny robots and such. I was wearing a skimpy miniskirt and a halter. He saw the tracks all in the veins in my arms and my legs and he knew I was on the stuff. Then he jabbed a needle into my arm, injected something. It felt like fire in my blood, ooh I wanted it I wanted it.

I'd already got his money, so he just did up his flies and he left. I pulled a few more punters, then I went back to the bedsit I was sharing with two other girls on the game. I was on the blob that night, so I pulled the used tampon out of my fadge and chucked it away, but I couldn't find a clean one to put in. I found my last clean pair of knickers, and put those on. I felt like all my blood was on fire, and for a while I couldn't sleep. Then I passed out, like.

When I woke up, there was a hole in my new knickers ... just there, across the fadge. There was also a hole in the mattress, underneath.

I wasn't hungry, but that's normal when you're doing ecstasy. Thing is, I wasn't hungry for a high, either. For the first time in all I could remember, I wasn't hungry or thirsty for owt. I put on a skirt, then I looked for my make-up. When you're on the game, you age fast, and you want a bit of slap to cover the wrinkles and that.

Then I noticed that the tracks in my arms had gone. And the ones in my legs were fading.

I got my make-up and went to the mirror. While I was putting on my slap and my lippy, I saw that the lines in my face were gone. All this time, I'd been sixteen going on forty. Now I looked more a proper age sixteen again.

I remembered that fellow from Uni, and I figured whatever was in that drug he'd needled me with, I wanted more of