Money. Money. Money.

“What are you going to do about paying your rent?” Amy enquired, sounding genuinely concerned.

“What do you mean? I’ve paid my rent.” I informed her.

“No, not the part of your rent that the student loans pay, the part of it you have to pay,” she elaborated.

Although the student loans paid the majority of my rent, I had to pay two hundred pounds of it myself every term. So did Amy.

Already, at the age of nineteen, understanding that rent was at the top of the pay list for bills, pay it was the very first thing I did on the day I received the part of student loan that I got to cover general living expenses.

“I’ve paid it. Why? Haven’t you?” I put down my unopened sandwich, my second sandwich, having only just finished my first, and the one that had sparked our conversation about how we were both down to the last of our first terms student loan.

“I’m still hungry,” I had complained but I was acting twitchy, so still stressed was probably more accurate.

“Might as well go out living life large,” Amy had joked, but there had been no humour in her voice, more of an agitated tone.

My twitchiness was annoying her.

“Why haven’t you paid it?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

We sat there in silence, alone, other than the staff, in the cat hill campus cafe.

“What are you going to do about paying it?” I wondered, finally picking up my sandwich again.

“That’s why I was asking you?” She admitted. “I was going to try to copy whatever your solution was, but I suppose I’ll have to ask my parents. What are you going to do about money for the next couple of weeks? How are you going to pay for your train ticket home at Christmas?”

“I’ve got my tickets already. And Middlesex still haven’t given me my bursary yet.”

“Thats because you’re not getting the bursary.”

“Yes I am. They’ve already told me I am. Plus, I haven’t touched my overdraft at all, I have all five hundred pound of my student overdraft left.”

“Oh,” was all she said in response. I suppose now she understood that when I said I only had twenty pound of my student loan left, and she had replied I only have fifty, I literally meant I only had twenty pound of my student loan left, and not that I pissed every penny that I had access to up the wall on nights out and designer clothes.