I feel stunned and slightly angry. Are they serious? I haven’t got anything like £6.5 million. I’ve only got about . . . 4 million left. Or was it 5? I stare at the page, feeling cheated. Lottery winners are supposed to be able to buy anything they want—but already I’m feeling poor and inadequate.

I shove the paper aside and reach for a freebie brochure full of gorgeous white duvet covers at £100 each. That’s more like it. When I’ve won the lottery I’ll only ever have crisp white duvet covers, I decide. And I’ll have a white cast-iron bed and painted wooden shutters and a fluffy white dressing gown . . .

“So, how’s the world of finance?” Mum’s voice interrupts me and I look up. She’s bustling into the kitchen, still holding her Past Times catalogue. “Have you made the coffee? Chop chop, darling!”

“I was going to,” I say, and make a half move from my chair. But, as always, Mum’s there before me. She reaches for a ceramic storage jar I’ve never seen before and spoons coffee into a new gold cafétière.

Mum’s terrible. She’s always buying new stuff for the kitchen—and she just gives the old stuff to charity shops. New kettles, new toasters . . . We’ve already had three new rubbish bins this year—dark green, then chrome, and now yellow translucent plastic. I mean, what a waste of money.

“That’s a nice skirt!” she says, looking at me as though for the first time. “Where’s that from?”

“DKNY,” I mumble back.

“Very pretty,” she says. “Was it expensive?”

“Not really,” I say. “About fifty quid.”

This is not strictly true. It was nearer 150. But there’s no point telling Mum how much things really cost, because she’d have a coronary. Or, in fact, she’d tell my dad first—and then they’d both have coronaries, and I’d be an orphan.

So what I do is work in two systems simultaneously. Real prices and Mum prices. It’s a bit like when everything in the shop is 20 percent off, and you walk around mentally reducing everything. After a while, you get quite practiced.

The only difference is, I operate a sliding-scale system, a bit like income tax. It starts off at 20 percent (if it really cost £20, I say it cost £16) and rises up to . . . well, to 90 percent if necessary. I once bought a pair of boots that cost £200, and I told Mum they were £20 in the sale. And she believed me.

“So, are you looking for a flat?” she says, glancing over my shoulder at the property pages.

“No,” I say sulkily, and flick over a page of my brochure. My parents are always on at me to buy a flat. Do they know how much flats cost?

“Apparently, Thomas has bought a very nice little starter home in Reigate,” she says, nodding toward our next-door neighbors. “He commutes.” She says this with an air of satisfaction, as though she’s telling me he’s won the Nobel Peace Prize.