7

IN THE NEXT few weeks of Michaelmas term, I stopped going to the library. I quit all the college teams I had joined in a last desperate bid for acceptance. I phoned my father less often, and I no longer went back to London to see my grandmother. I stopped working, and I attended my supervisions for the express purpose of not getting thrown out. Francis introduced me to the system called essay rotation, devised and run by Lisa. She had a bank of essays written by first-class students of previous years, who had sold her their notes at graduation. She kept a spreadsheet indicating which faculty members had marked which work. For a small subscription fee, which Francis paid for me, she guaranteed a weekly essay of at least mid 2:1 standard on nearly any topic I could conjure up, distributing the work with gruff efficiency. She only failed me once, when my medieval supervisor set a particularly obscure exercise on Christian mysticism, and that week I simply didn’t turn up to class, telling him I had flu and was vomiting into a plastic bucket. Michael told me, in strictest confidence, that she was making over five hundred pounds a week.

Whilst the demands of academic work were reduced almost to nothing, my financial situation was vastly improved. We were not technically allowed to have jobs during termtime, but I had applied for the late shift working the bar at Po Na Na, a club in the city centre, to supplement my allowance (my sixty-year-old supervisor did not seem the type suddenly to drop in for a spot of commercial hip hop or hard house, so I was not afraid of detection). In the event I didn’t have to do anything. Francis gathered me under the broad wings of his allowance. He was better than anyone I have met, before or since, at giving gifts of money. Cash usually brings with it an entourage of troublesome associations that drive a rift between even the closest friends. Because it has no sentimental value and infinite practical value it is a tough thing both to give and to receive in the right spirit. Francis had a knack of purging any condescension or imposition from his gifts of money, because he presented himself as a mere conduit for wealth rather than a source, a hole in his father’s pocket down which the coins tumbled without ever stopping long enough to acquire a new owner. Taking it from him gave me the same feeling as finding a bundle of twenties in the street, having a cursory look around for the owner and then pocketing it. Far from feeling embarrassed, he encouraged me to congratulate myself on my own good fortune at having made friends with him, just as he was fortunate to be his father’s son.