‘Is that a political statement?’ a drama girl asked when she confessed her ambition.

‘Yeah,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s against capitalism.’

In truth, she just wanted the stuff. She put it in another compartment in her brain. She felt when she had shoplifted all the major brands, her true project would be complete.

‘Brave,’ the drama girl said, snapping the strings of her leotard.

She attended all the lectures and seminars, read the correct books starring shifty Irish male heroes, saw films with shifty French male heroes, squinted at the subtitles, shoplifted the plainest cardigans. ‘Can you read that?’ she asked loudly in the viewing room as the subtitles tumbled across the screen. ‘I can’t read that.’ She was performing expertly, she was adorable except once, in a seminar, when she shouted, ‘Jesus Christ, let me out of here.’

‘Who said that, Lucy?’ her tutor asked.

‘Beckett.’

She couldn’t risk a slip-up like that again so she began stuffing her ears with cotton wool, making it easier to agree with people by not listening to them. Her parents’ money couldn’t keep pace with her lifestyle. The styles of the cardigans kept changing, wool spooling and unspooling itself across the sky. She slammed her digits into cold machinery. There was nothing that could be done. She didn’t speak to her parents anymore; she couldn’t even remember their number. Her only memory was them eating plain sandwiches off their laps, and she wasn’t even sure that was a real memory or some idea of poverty planted by the college.

‘Where does your money come from?’ she asked a drama girl.

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said, one leg resting on the wooden bar. ‘It just arrives.’

She started sending pictures to men online, her finger in her mouth, her breasts on show, her legs wide open. It was fine. Her accounts filled up. She had one customer called the professor who was particularly fond of her. He claimed that when he looked at her photos, he felt like he was in love, that it had to be love.

‘Okay,’ Lucy replied and emailed him a list of brands.

‘I haven’t heard of half of these.’

She drew him a map to the luxury department store.

*

At the start of her second year, Lucy started seeing her first boyfriend, an amateur ventriloquist, majoring in business, who held her hand under tables and called her three times a day to be reassured he was good enough for her. At the weekends, she went out to his family home on the train, speeding past huge houses, glimpsing them sideways. The journey itself felt like an achievement. She bought an apron in the luxury department store to wear around the house. She bought it. His parents loved her like an orphan.The apron was a plastic material; every stain wiped right off.

His bedroom was the first place, within those four walls, lying on the soft carpet, she felt safe and her entire ugly history seemed to recede. She was becoming a new person. She fell asleep on top of a pile of stolen cardigans. She read novels and underlined passages that felt special to her in big streaks of red pen. These novels were about civilised women who holidayed in Europe, women whose lives weren’t rotten or shameful. Someday, she thought, someday. She would burn her own face off to become one of these women. She still had dreams at night, her boyfriend’s arm draped over her; gloomy houses with no exits.