Sweet Harmony

by Claire North

  With nanos, running was easy.

  Without, she can’t imagine ever overcoming this pain, or the shame of being laughed at: pudgy girl trying to run.

  She needs to buy new clothes, bigger clothes, and doesn’t want to go to the shops, and doesn’t have the money to get anything that would make her look good.

  There is now a definite patch of blue-grey skin on the top of her scalp as her hair attempts to adjust to the failure of the nanos that have for . . . she’s not sure how long . . . years . . . helped sustain that perfect silken growth, product-free. There are still parts of her face that don’t have acne. A few patches on her cheeks, a small area between her eyebrows, but in the morning when she stands in front of the mirror, the skin on her chest and back is beginning to pucker and swell with tiny bumps of rupturing flesh. Her arms ache all the time as fat and fluid, contained for so long within a belt of muscle, begins at last to find freedom, sagging gently down, down, all of her going down.

  She tells her friends that she’s busy tonight. Busy, yeah, you know, got other commitments.

  When her mum calls, which isn’t very often, doesn’t want to be a fusser, Harmony doesn’t answer the phone.

  The day before the landlady changed the locks on the door, Graham sat her down.

  “So, Harmony. This office, it’s . . . well, it’s a very specific clientele we deal with, and our people, they’re the brand; they’re . . . There’s a wonderful opportunity just come up; I really think you’d be happier there. It’s the ideal place. You’d fit in perfectly and it’s not much of a cut in pay. The boys in Enfield are great. They’re really . . . ”

  “I don’t want to go to Enfield.” She refused to cry. Crying made her more ugly, and she’d known this conversation was coming, got her crying out of the way last night. She was strong. She had been through shit and she had survived. This would not break her. “I can turn this around. This is just a . . . I can turn this around. You know me. You know I can do it.”

  “Harmony,” he explained, as gentle as she’d ever seen him, his expression as near to kindness as he could manage through his peaked, tweaked, primed facial upgrades, maybe the George Clooney or Captain America – it was hard to tell. “Let me be very clear. Either you go to Enfield, or you go home.”

  She went to Enfield.

  A new start, that was what she needed.

  A new her.

  Chapter 7

  This is Harmony Meads, aged twenty-one.

  Does she have upgrades? Or is she just young? Is that glow the first flush of excitement, life and hope that makes all people beautiful, a joy that no amount of nanotech can mimic?

  (A mixture. She is excited for the future; she has dreams, ambitions; she has chosen the house she’s going to buy when she’s got the money; she has chosen, if not the man she’ll marry, then certainly the car he’ll drive, and the white cashmere jumper he’ll wear on casual Sundays at garden parties. She also has upgraded her sexual protection, her resistance to fatigue – Do not use this program in conjunction with caffeine. If you experience heart palpitations please contact your healthcare provider urgently – and yes, her smile. She doesn’t have to brush her teeth now, and even if No More Dentists doesn’t seem to do much more than keep her teeth white and her breath minty-fresh, the idea that it’s there makes her much more relaxed when expressing herself. She accepts that this may be a slightly costly placebo. She accepts that it’s worth it.)

  Harmony Meads went looking for a job.

  Getting a job was harder than anyone had told her it would be. The year Harmony graduated with her hard-won 2:1, the housing bubble went, which also blew some other bubble which did something to inflation or something, which basically meant . . .

  “When we hire someone as young as you, it’s an investment. We are investing in the whole person.”

  “Of course it’s minimum youth wage until you’re twenty-five, and then it’s up to £8.50 an hour . . . ”

  “How do you feel about meat-derivative products?”

  “What you need is to do internships! I know they’re unpaid, but they’re such a good opportunity for . . . ”

  She wore a shiny cream blouse and pencil skirt to interviews when she got them, which wasn’t often. She applied to temp agencies – just to fill the gap – but everyone else had applied too and she could only get shifts doing 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. sitting alone in the front of office buildings in Reading. No one came, no one called, the front door was locked and she had no idea why she was there in her vanilla pumps and brown eyeliner, pretending to herself that she’d study and mostly just doing Sudoku, too tired for anything else.

  Even that work dried up after a while, and no one told her why, or if it was something she did.

  In the end, she got a job in a stationery shop back in Bracknell. It paid by the hour, and didn’t cover health insurance. She moved back in with her mum, and when her student card expired and healthcare costs doubled, Mum came to her and said:

  “So . . . I know I’ve always paid for this, very happily of course, always want the best for you, but I was wondering if . . . well, how you’re doing financially? I’m very happy to cover it, don’t you worry, I can cope – but what do you want?”

  Karen Meads, sixty-four years old, widow at forty-seven, had worked down the local supermarket for seventeen years until her back started to give out. Then she had lived off savings, and a bit of income from the government and her dead husband’s insurance policy, and in term-time had rented out Harmony’s room to actors doing panto down the local theatre, and coped. She always coped. It was what she did.

  “What do you want?” she asked, standing in the kitchen door in the bright pink onesie in which she went on power walks with the over-sixties group, her only concession to luxury the diamond wedding ring she’d worn since the day they’d said their vows, and which she’d wear until the day she died and joined her man in heaven. Harmony’s dad had spent most of his savings on this ring, Karen whispered, and when she found out she’d been so angry at the stupid man. But even now, scrimping by, coping, she’d never been tempted to sell it. Not once. Not ever.

  Gently curling hair the colour of imminent autumn rain, the same green eyes as her daughter, Karen was beginning to shrink, but not to stoop. At night she slept in a hairnet, and before she pissed in the morning she put on mascara and checked her hormone levels and blood pressure on the computer. She didn’t like syncing her nanos to her mobile phone; what if someone pinched it while she was out? What then?

  “You know I’m very happy for you to be here,” added Karen as Harmony paused to digest the layers within her question. “It’s so nice having the time with you; you’re always welcome. It’s nice for a mother to help out.”

  “I can pay for it, Mum,” Harmony sighed. “I’ll be fine.”

  Harmony Meads was also a coper.

  When her sexual health package came up for renewal, Harmony thought for a long time about going back to the basics. If she paid for only the minimum of immunities – colds, flus, the nasty stuff like pneumonia and measles – and saved carefully, she could look at renting her own place away from the endless semi-detached backstreets of Bracknell, away from the yellow-brick houses and white porches, trimmed hedges and winding flagstone alleys where direction lost all meaning.

  If she rented, of course, she’d never have the money for a deposit on a place of her own, so in the end, she chose to keep the full package, including Take Control, and stay with her mum. Besides, she liked having a say over when her periods happened, if they happened, and being able to disable the worst of the cramps.

  “I can pay some rent, Mum!” she exclaimed in the high voice of the truly hopeful, truly pained, and curled inside with relief when Karen replied:

  “Oh no, of course not, I won’t hear of it! I mean, we’re not living like queens are we, dear, but we’re fine, and it’s very nice having someone else in the house. Now, what would you like when you come back for supper? Macaroni cheese or carbon
ara?”

  Her mum was a feeder, and to make matters worse, a good cook, as long as what she cooked involved pasta or cheese.

  Slowly, a little squelchy fold of flesh at a time, Harmony began to put on weight. She realised it was happening, would raise her knees to her chin and see flesh rippled across her belly, pinch at her sides and bum in disgust. She joined a local jogging group but was horrified to discover it was also mostly women over the age of sixty, some of whom had more stamina than she did. She quit, and went to the local leisure centre instead, but it was hard, after ten hours at work, to get home, change clothes and go out again for her £7.50 spin class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and even though her mum bought her three months’ membership for Christmas, she was often too tired to do much, in mind if not in body, and nothing seemed to make much of a difference anyway.

  She kept applying for jobs, but less now. Applying was tiring, hard, and more than half never even bothered to get back to her. Sometimes she got an interview, but that never seemed to go anywhere, and twelve months passed, and nothing changed.

  Chapter 8

  It took Shelly getting the promotion to the big stationery shop in Virginia Water to change Harmony’s life.

  They both went for it, even though it wasn’t much of a step up. There would be more flexibility in hours, a slight pay rise and besides, everyone knew that the Virginia Water store stocked more deluxe stationery products – leather-bound notebooks and artist’s drawing sets for the discerning client – and was the place to be.

  Shelly had worked at the shop for seven months and was, at the kindest, useless.

  “I just, you know, like, don’t really care about this stuff,” she explained to Harmony as they tagged reams of A4 paper. “I’m, like, only doing it until my modelling career can, you know.”

  Shelly was irrefutably beautiful. Her brilliant autumn-blonde hair flowed and curled around her face like frozen candlelight; her skin glowed like tungsten; and though she was stuck wearing the staff T-shirt, her short shorts revealed legs and buttocks hewn from Michelangelo’s marble. Her beauty was such that all the boys assumed she was a tart, that there was no other reason to be that sensational save for the benefit of men, but she replied stiffly that she was saving herself, and that this was all cos of who she wanted to be, and to fuck right off or my dad will fucking do you, get me?

  “Why do you want the job in Virginia Water?” asked Harmony. “I mean, if you’re going to be a model . . . ”

  “Oh. I dunno. It’s just, you know . . . like, you gotta . . . you know!”

  It was of course possible that in the job interview Shelly rose to the occasion with a prepared speech about her love of ballpoint pens, or how she really appreciated the difference between 2B or 4B pencils, but it didn’t seem likely. They organised a farewell party for her, and Shelly cried and said she’d be back to see them all soon, as if Virginia Water was more than fifteen minutes away by train or she didn’t still live in Wokingham with her bloke and his sister and her husband, and Harmony sat at the back and realised that she was never going to do anything with her life, and was stuck in fucking Bracknell, and it was all fucking pointless.

  “Sweetie, don’t worry about it,” whispered Karima, fifty-eight years old, a chubby, curly-haired matron with skin the colour of city sunset, who’d started working at the shop after her shit of a husband jilted her thirty-three years into the marriage, leaving a mortgage and a labradoodle called Peaky. “You’ve got so much more than that little Shelly has! You’ve got brains; you’ve got real commitment, a real soul. All she’s got is nanos and upgrades, and everyone’s got those these days. She’s pretty enough, but with her looks she needs to be beautiful and natural if she’s going to get into the papers, and she doesn’t have enough to pull off a naturalist, or enough sense to spend smart on her upgrades. And besides, you can’t program for personality, can you?”

  These words, intended to comfort, fell numb on Harmony’s soul.

  For a little while.

  Getting her first credit card was astonishingly easy.

  A couple of pay slips, and that was it.

  Her overdraft was £2000.

  She only got it because the first three months of Powerful Poise had to be paid upfront, and she didn’t have the cash to hand. She knew that, with a bit of careful judgement, she could easily keep up on minimum card payments, even with the APR being so high. The trick was not to let it get out of control.

  She chose her first sports enhancement package from the thousands of contenders, very carefully and after a great deal of research.

  Combining flexibility with strength, grace with control, Powerful Poise is the package for any aspiring dancer or yogi. Muscular definition combined with feminine sensuality, show the world your inner strength! Powerful Poise cannot alter muscle development beyond the constraints of current skeletal structure. If you experience jaundice or liver failure, please contact your healthcare provider.

  The decision was not unlike buying new, expensive clothes. She read articles, checked comparative websites, went on forums to ask other women how they felt about their packages. Yes, Goddess of War might give you fantastic muscles, but did it not perhaps make you seem a little masculine? How about Spin Cycle – the perfect complementary nano upgrade for the dedicated gym-goer? Yes, it gave you a far more robust cardiac boost than Powerful Poise for roughly the same price, but for all it might be more therapeutic long-term, it also led to extremely muscular thighs and calves, which Harmony didn’t feel sent the right signals.

  And she knew what the signals were. She waited four weeks as the nanos worked, and this time, knowing they were doing their thing, she also exercised, adding her own efforts to the money – the sizable money – she had invested, and felt, for the first time in months, great. There were actors and actresses, models and singers who ostensibly went for the naturalists’ approach, who were genetically beautiful from birth and didn’t need to worry about what they ate – if you believed the magazines. Harmony didn’t, but even if it was true, she knew that the natural look could never send such a message, such a decisive message about choice, about choosing an identity, as a few carefully judged upgrades could.

  “Have you done something to your hair?” asked Karen one evening as she returned from gym, smell of sweat and pride mingling across her skin.

  She knew what the real question was and felt the judgement beneath it. Even when her back had started hurting, Karen had forked out for the bare minimum of upgrades, a spinal package that dented the pain without ever letting her imagine it wasn’t real, that she wasn’t getting old. She wasn’t a naturalist, but then again: “You have to learn to cope, don’t you? Otherwise you’re just living in cloud-cuckoo-land!”

  “No, Mum,” she snapped, and saw her mum draw herself up a little straighter in response to the lash in her voice. “I’m just looking after myself right.”

  When she was at 51kg of perfect, honed muscle – nothing too flashy, but defined enough to declare that here was a woman who valued her body, herself, comfortable in her skin and her identity – Harmony started applying for jobs again, including full body pictures of herself in a smart, sleeveless, figure-hugging dress suit, revealing the tone in her arms and strength in her shoulders.

  The interviews started coming in almost immediately.

  “Of course, with your sales experience you understand that . . . ”

  “Our employees embody our brand.”

  “Really respect your positive attitude.”

  She took the job at the estate agent in Epsom for its go-get-’em vibe, its promise of excellent returns, and superb health insurance package.

  Chapter 9

  Twenty-nine years old, Harmony Meads finally hit 82kg three months after the move to the Enfield estate agents. She weighed herself in the morning; she weighed herself in the afternoon. She shifted her weight forward; she shifted her weight back. Nothing could change the relentless conclusion of the bathroom scales. Nothing could keep h
er from the truth that she was fat.

  One week later, her debt to Fullife for unpaid medical services hit £1000, and to encourage swift repayment while still supporting essential medical services, they cut off her sense of smell.

  These are the smells that Harmony Meads cannot experience as she roams through London with her head turned down towards the grey, glistening pavement.

  Fish and chips. Greasy chicken at 3 a.m. as your stomach rumbles. Boiling pasta in the pan when you come home from work. Blue cheese on a wooden plate; cheddar cheese in the sandwich as you peel back the foil. Too much chilli in the soup, an assault that burns on the way in, burns on the way out. Hot lamb shredded by the man on the market stall, meat and heat, curry powder, mango chutney, coriander and cumin, fresh coffee at 8 a.m., tea at 1 p.m., that first whiff of wine when the cork comes off, tomato soup when you feel low, roses in bloom, lavender, a friend’s perfume, a stranger’s scent as they lean in close.

  The gas, when you forget you’ve left it on in the kitchen.

  Toast, as it burns.

  Microwave meals turning to stone.

  Carbonised smoke pouring out of the oven.

  Mould in the bathroom.

  Mint toothpaste.

  Your own skin, freshly washed in lemon gel, just a slime you rub between your fingers, meaningless and ugly without its scent.

  Sheets, unchanged on the bed.

  The state of your own toilet.

  The cat shit you step in as you come home, treading it all over the carpet.

  The weather before it changes.