The next two months were, I think, the worst of my life. My terraced house seemed mean and depressing after New Court, and the knowledge that the comparison was unfair did nothing to lessen its effect. A few days after my return Dad told me that he could not afford to pay my allowance out of termtime. I strongly suspected that the real motivations behind his cutting me off were not financial, and that he was acting out of some sense of parental obligation to teach me about the value of money. Given that I was sitting on a stolen million the lesson seemed a little late, but even without my promise not to touch it there would have been no way of integrating the cash into my life without arousing his suspicions. He encouraged me to get a job.

I took the late shift at Movie Time Video, which started at six and finished at one in the morning, and paid £5.30 an hour. I found myself treating the work as a penance: the video store was my own personal neon-pink purgatory, but no matter how many hours I did, no matter how many times I took the insults of manager and customers, I still had no relief from the crushing weight of the money sitting in its offshore haven. I had begun to imagine it as a physical entity, a block of notes bobbing like a swollen body off a pebble beach, waiting to wash ashore and be discovered. The drip drip of what I had done kept my conscience awake at night. What I had undertaken as a gesture of freedom had begun to look like recklessness. It was not the theft itself that troubled me, though Francis’s logic of innocence was beginning to crumble without the maintenance of his rhetoric. Rather it was imagining what my father would think of me if I was discovered. The idea that I had put myself in a position where I could cause him so much shame and pain made me nauseous with guilt, until I felt panic rising in my gorge and thought I would have to blurt it out. Later such worries would give way to more prosaic fears, such as a terror of prison, but for me fear was no match for guilt. These sporadic attacks were like the waves of fever brought on by a tropical malaise, and when they were at their peak I would have to take long walks on Wandsworth Common, or lie in my room with my door shut, desperate to avoid any kind of human contact. Movie Time Video allowed me to take home two videos a night (excluding new releases) for free, and after I had finished my shift I would watch old films until the city began to glow with a muggy dawn, breaking like a sheen of sweat over the Common. I started to take out pornography too, and when I had exhausted the store’s meagre collection of soft core I made morning jaunts into Soho on the tube in search of something harder. I would lie towels along the crack under the door and keep the sound turned down low, for fear the grunts and cries might wake my father. That summer, London was afflicted with a superfluous heatwave, and with no clean air or open water to bring relief the slightest task was horrible. My guilt was compounded by a physical dirtiness. Within moments of a shower, my hair was matted, my eyes and throat stung with fumes and my shirt was stuck to my back.