“You are in a queue. Your call is important to us . . . ”
“Hi, my nanos are . . . I can’t smell anything.”
“Ms Meads, as I believe has been explained to you, your current owing balance is now in excess of £800 and there is a penalty of £300 for late payment to Fullife and under these circumstances we are authorised to shut down non-essential systems for . . . ”
“Can’t you just shut it all down? Just . . . turn off the nanos. Turn them off.”
“We are still in contract unless you pay the termination fee. Our contract obligates us to ensure that your primary systems are in excellent working order! If you can’t work, how will you ever manage to sort this sort of thing out? Did you know that influenza killed more people in 1919 than died in all of World War One?”
“Mummy, why is the lady ugly?” whispered the child as Harmony motioned the family round their private tour of this charming semi-detached three-bedroom property with two bathrooms, one en suite, on the side of the North Circular.
The house shuddered and shook as the lorries roared by, the windows faintly misted over with exhaust, the once-white tiles in the kitchen stained a yellow-brown from the years of relentless smoking by the previous occupant, who’d finally cracked and was selling it all to go and live on a canal boat in Tring.
“Shush! She’s not . . . Don’t say things like that!” whispered the mother, glancing askance at Harmony to see if she’d noticed.
Harmony Meads, the flesh sagging beneath her chin, not yet sure how to wear the almost perfectly taut ball of her belly, hair done up in a bun as if a conflagration of pins might disguise the shedding of her locks, stares vacantly at nothing much, having perhaps seen it all before.
“Well, thank you, yes, very interesting,” muttered the dad as they squeezed back into her tiny estate agent’s car, a postage stamp on wheels, knees to chin, Harmony’s chair pushed all the way back from the pedals so only the child can fit.
“Mum, she’s weird,” whispered the child, and Harmony stared at the road and made no sound until the dad awkwardly asked if they could put the radio on. The child was seven years old – old enough to be running a basic nanos package and maybe a few upgrades of her own too so that she might grow up big, strong, smart and beautiful.
After, at the estate agents, as dad and child were heading away, the mum hesitated, then turned and scurried back.
“My daughter is . . . She’s very . . . I mean to say that she doesn’t understand the choices people make, you see?”
Harmony stared, blank and cold, into the woman’s eyes, and the woman looked away, nodded once, licking her lips, and scurried after her family.
That night, drunk on cheap beer, she finally called Karen.
“Mum? I’m . . . I’m in trouble.”
There is a great darkness that sometimes she dreams of, that she is falling into. Sometimes when she dreams, she hears herself say these words – “Help me” – and wakes up terrified, not knowing what is real. “I’m in . . . I’ve got these bills I’m in . . . It’s credit cards too. It’s credit cards and I’m behind on everything. Just – I’m in real trouble.”
Karen Meads never let anything perturb her. The most extreme her emotional state ever reached was, “Oh dear. That doesn’t sound good.”
This phrase was deployed now, and Harmony nearly choked with relief to hear it. In the language of anyone else, it was a nothing sound, a nowhere noise made in the hope that things will change and the moment will pass. From Karen Meads, it was the rallying cry, the charge to war, and patiently she listened as it all came out – the credit cards, the bills, the unpaid debts, the shutting down of her nanos, the acne, the weight, the baldness, the explosion of hair beneath her armpits, the hay fever, the colds, the . . .
“Can they do this to you, dear?” asked Karen, soft voice rising a little in pitch, the nearest she came to shouting. “Can they do this?”
“The health company say that they have a moral and contractual duty to ensure my immunisation packages are functional, but non-essential services can be disabled.”
“This doesn’t sound like disabling.”
“They said that after so long on the nanos my body would be . . . It wouldn’t know how to cope, that once you’ve been on nanos for this long it’s . . . There’s a thing called ‘punitive financial reclamation’ and I’ve been trying to pay the money but there’s also the gas and electric and food and travel and rent and . . . ”
“Darling, I’m coming to visit you.”
A nuclear option. An explosion of Karen. She came up by the train to Waterloo, and then had to borrow someone else’s phone at the station because she’d forgotten to charge hers, but had written Harmony’s number down in her notebook so that was all right, and didn’t understand what the difference was between the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines but somehow made it to High Barnet with a cry of “London is a ghastly city, isn’t it?”
They sat down in Harmony’s rented room, and for the first time went through the figures. Not the figures on which Harmony’s life had been running – not her weekly salary in, weekly money out – but the real figures. The ones that lay beneath, the ones that lasted longer than Monday to Friday and were going to gobble her life whole.
The £7000 or so she owed across four credit cards to four separate banks had, since she first took them out, ballooned. Sometimes she made the minimum repayment, sometimes she missed it and over barely three years her initial debt had crawled up to a little over £11,000.
“Can’t you just . . . live a little more carefully?” blurted Karen, and immediately knew she’d said something stupid, and saw only pain in her daughter’s eyes. She started fiddling with her wedding ring, oblivious to the motion, the flesh grown under and up and around the metal, and if anything spoke of a heart rushing in fear and dread, it was that little clawing at a diamond on a golden band.
In the end, they came up with a financial rescue plan, cutting every cost to a minimum, and injecting an emergency £200 from Karen’s secret box of cash that she kept in an old make-up box above the bed, to try and tide her through the worst of the moment.
At the end of every week, the plan left Harmony with £7.50 spare for any indulgences – “Fancy food, maybe?” suggested Karen hopefully. “Or nice soap?”
For three weeks she made it, and though her debts did not decrease, neither did they grow. On the fourth, the office went out for drinks to celebrate Steve’s birthday, and she didn’t want to lie, didn’t want to tell them why she couldn’t go, the horrid, bitter truth of it all, so she went and had to buy a round. It was just what was expected, and it would have ruined everyone’s night if she’d said no and explained why.
And that was the next five weeks shot, and she didn’t have anything spare and then the heel broke off her shoe and she still didn’t fit her clothes and needed something to wear, anything . . .
“Is everything, you know, all right?” asked Ibrahim, the boss of the Enfield office. “Are you . . . you know?”
Once upon a time, she would have looked on Ibrahim with scorn. Twenty-three years in fucking Enfield, twenty-three years of semi-detached-with-a-lovely-shed-round-back, twenty-three years of nothing but immune boosts and the odd nutritional upgrade, not even bothering to get his wrinkles done, “quirky” Ibrahim, selling houses with eccentricity and his famous boiler anecdotes. For a while, she’d hated him, and now he was sat opposite her in his office, a shrine to Tottenham Hotspur, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees, and he was being kind.
She found the kindness harder than scorn. Scorn she could take, weave into a coat of armour around herself, a wall of anger, hostility and pain. Scorn was hot and bright, a fearsome thing. Kindness destroyed what little strength she had left, and at last, she told him everything.