Sweet Harmony

by Claire North

  Ibrahim smiled without his eyes, and she knew what that smile was, knew what it meant and knew that she was without hope. “I’m sorry, Harmony. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what we can do for you.”

  Chapter 20

  This is the world drained of colour.

  Grass is a withered, muddy yellow-brown, laced with spines of grey.

  The brilliant crimson of a woman’s lips is an ochre smear on her blueish skin.

  Oranges, yellows and limes, laid out in boxes at the local greengrocer, have waxy, stubborn skins and hues of slimy faded grey, like the wet mud of the river when the tide pulls back. She runs her fingers over them, suddenly no longer trusting to the familiar shapes of the fruit, and can’t smell their sweetness, and finds they taste only of acid in her mouth.

  Tomato sauce is the colour of scrambled eggs.

  Double-decker buses, painted shades of sludge, grunt by in streets of chemically drenched autumn. Sometimes she passes a child in brilliant-blue rubber boots, or a woman with a yellow scarf around her neck, and she has to stop herself from standing still and staring, dazzled by the brightness of it, a flash of astonishing life in the sullen wasteland she moves through.

  Ibrahim keeps her on the books as long as he can, but in the end her performance isn’t enough, and head office has spotted it, and he has to put her on administrative leave.

  “When you’re better, when this is . . . better,” he said, “you can come back. There’ll always be a place for you here.”

  He’s not lying. Lying would imply an active intent to deceive. But it’s easier to make a promise of this sort – an impossible promise – when they both know she’ll never come back.

  She sells what little she owns – laptop at the pawn shop, a couple of quid for the nicer of her clothes – and goes home, back to Bracknell.

  Chapter 21

  The day before she was going to be discharged from hospital, Jiannis sat down next to Harmony’s bed and said, “Give me your phone.”

  “What?”

  “You’re coming home tomorrow, but you can’t live looking like . . . well . . . ” A gesture, taking in her sallow skin, the bruising beneath her eyes, flesh turned to putty by the ravages of medicine.

  Harmony felt her fingers tighten round the phone in her hands, while across the ward a nurse checked the prescription updating to a woman in the bed opposite, whose family had not visited, and who hadn’t woken up. “I . . . Why do you want my phone?”

  “We need to choose your updates very carefully. Selective. None of this free-for-all; we need to make sure you make only the best, carefully curated choices.”

  He wasn’t even looking at her as he spoke, but flicking through his phone, checking photos of women, updates they’d experienced, how it had affected their bodies, holding up his screen occasionally to compare the image of a model to Harmony’s sprawled out, gown-clad body in bed, as if checking a portrait against a suspected fake.

  “I’m . . . I don’t think I’m ready for this yet,” she blurted.

  “Don’t be ridiculous – give me your phone.”

  Her fingers tightened. “No.”

  “Harmony.” A slow chide of irritation, the wiser man dismissing a child’s complaint, and it reminded her of something. What was that feeling?

  (“Don’t you have upgrades?”)

  “Clearly you’ve made bad choices in the past; that’s why you’re here. We need to be better, make better choices. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and I really think . . . ” He reached out to grab her phone, and she snatched it away.

  “Don’t touch my fucking phone!”

  Her voice rang out across the ward, loud enough for the nurse to glance up from her tablet, face twitching in disapproval and surprise. Jiannis rocked back, eyes flickering around the room to see if anyone else had noticed this shameful outburst. “Babe, you’re being . . . ”

  “Don’t touch it,” she snarled. “Don’t fucking touch it!”

  A moment of astonishment. No one has talked to him like this for years. He doesn’t know what to do about it. He hasn’t had to deal with such . . .

  But it’s a hospital ward. Generally speaking, abusing patients is considered Not Cool, and will be bad for his kudos. “All right,” he hissed, soft and slow beneath his breath. Then again: “All right. You’re clearly not yet in your right state of mind. That’s fine. I’ll pick you up tomorrow and then we’ll talk about this properly when you get home, yes? Yes.” Standing up in a single movement, shoving his phone into his pocket. “Yes,” he concluded, argument settled, problem solved. “That’s what we’ll do. Fine.”

  Without a word, he marched away, and Harmony changed the password on her phone the moment he was out of the room.

  Chapter 22

  It was the sound of someone playing the piano that drew Harmony’s attention.

  Visiting hours were ending, but not many families made it to 8 p.m. through the ritual of dinner – school dinner sausages and rice pudding – or the flurry of nurses checking for sores, draining a swollen cyst, shaking heads at blood pressure. Visitors liked the quiet hours, the gentle moment on the ward where nothing much was happening and they could focus on clean, cordial emissions of care without the sticky biological stuff or reality of hospital life getting in the way of their compassion.

  At first, after she regained consciousness, Harmony strictly obeyed all the nurses’ commands, stayed in bed, drank plenty of water and let someone know when she was going to the lav, reduced to a four-year-old again. Then she saw other patients sneaking out for a fag, or popping down to the shop on the ground floor to buy a naughty chocolate bar, and the nurses either didn’t notice or didn’t care, so when she got bored, she also started wandering. There was TV to entertain her, and internet for £15 a day, but it made her eyes hurt and the longer she spent on the ward, the louder it seemed to be. Beeping which had been hushed on Monday was, by Thursday, a deafening cacophony without end. The groaning of a woman whose nanos couldn’t take away the pain – “Perhaps it’s in her head?” a doctor whispered – made Harmony curl up, knees to chest, hands over her ears, begging for it to stop, for the woman to sleep, lapse into a coma, die.

  Whereas the corridors, after visiting hours, were empty, silent, cold and grey. They were rain after drought, a cool place of stillness only occasionally punctuated by someone rushing by with a gurney, the rattle of the wheels rising and falling like a motorbike on an empty country lane. So Harmony drifted, body weak and weary, stopping on benches in Oncology and Dermatology whenever she needed to rest, pausing to catch her breath at Imaging 3 and Gynaecology, the doors shut up for the day, the patients packed off to bed.

  She heard the piano while crossing a walkway over one of the hospital’s big, internal atriums, a courtyard of red brick, blue metal, potted plants in cat litter and dirty green glass. She got turned around at Sarah Ward as she tried to work her way down to it, but picked up her route again by the all-faith chapel and shuffled the walk of the gown-clad penitent towards the music.

  In the middle of the atrium, framed by bamboo and hardy stiff-limbed grasses that no one need care about too much, was a grand piano. On Wednesday and Thursday lunchtimes, a sign said, there were concerts. Everyone was welcome. Donations were appreciated.

  The woman who played was not holding a concert. She was pear-shaped, her breasts beginning to droop with age, and disguised this horrendous truth with a long black cardigan and baggy trousers, creating from her sinking shape no shape at all. She had hair fading to grey, which seemed to be passing through purple and blue on its journey, her body unsure how it wished to age, and damned if it would do so gracefully. She wore four rings, three on her left hand, one on her right, and hunched like a crow over the keys, producing runs of sound and falls of music that couldn’t be called a tune, but still managed to hold Harmony in her place.

  The woman played for one other: a creature even more ancient and decrepit than herself. This older lady was strapped into a gia
nt blue chair, closer to a sunbather on wheels than a wheelchair, padded and blue. Beneath the straps that held her were layers of woolly pink blanket, none quite big enough to cover all of her, and so a patchwork of interlaced squares spread out instead to form a fluffy cocoon. Her hair looked like a fistful of bubble bath dolloped on her scalp; her skin was grey-white, threaded with blue-black veins. Her green eyes were open, and stared at nothing much. Yellow-tinted spit rolled off her great, protruding lower lips, and if she breathed, the motion was so tiny that Harmony couldn’t see it at first.

  Yet it was clear that this was the lady for whom the music was made, and she was perhaps the mother of the woman dressed in black, caught in a moment of vacancy.

  The music finished.

  The woman looked up.

  Saw Harmony, and smiled.

  Stood up; went to her mother, daubed spit away from her mouth casually, a habitual act, then looked up again quickly, as if only just remembering how a stranger might feel about this, unused to such things; smiled, an apology, a shrug with the lips – you know how it is.

  Harmony tried to smile back. The muscles were weak, ached, it was hard to remember how to move her face to show these feelings.

  Maybe that’s why the woman spoke. Maybe she just needed to speak.

  “Mum’s ninety-seven,” she explained, staring at nothing much, wiping her fingers on a crumpled tissue with a coffee shop’s name half-lost in the stained old folds. “She’s had cancer, heart failure, diabetes . . . only she hasn’t. She hasn’t. She has excellent health insurance. Dad saw to that before he . . . It’s so good that these things only get a few seconds head start, a clot in the aorta and boom! Dealt with. Trouble with glucose? No worries. The nanos are keeping her alive, in good nick actually . . . They’re doing all right.”

  She hesitated, glancing again at Harmony, trying to read the other woman’s expression. Harmony opened her mouth to say something, to explain that she wasn’t frowning, or dumb, that there was simply something wrong with her face. But the moment the words rose to her lips, she closed them. How fucking stupid did it sound?

  The woman nodded, fears confirmed and, putting the tissue back in her pocket straightened up to grasp the back of her mother’s giant, stretched out chair.

  “Her mind’s mostly gone, of course. Mostly gone. They tried an experimental process on her, nanos for the brain, something to fill in the broken neurons, but it didn’t work. She could talk and feed herself again, but it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her. It was just . . . some algorithm. It made her behave funny, do funny things; in the end we had to shut it down. Felt like shutting her down, but I thought . . . she wouldn’t want to be this. Now she’s just waiting to die. Does that sound terrible?”

  Harmony shook her head. She could do that much.

  “I play piano for her. I think she likes it. She probably doesn’t. But it makes me feel like I’m doing something. She’s been like this for five years now. They say with nanos she could live to be a hundred and twenty-five.” A little intake of breath, a thought not uttered.

  The woman perhaps wants to say, “That’s my life. That’s my whole life. That’s the next twenty-eight years gone, waiting.”

  But she doesn’t.

  That wouldn’t be kind, or proper.

  So instead she smiles again, apologising, and pushes her mother away.

  Harmony didn’t see them again, and thought perhaps she’d been dreaming a digital dream.

  Chapter 23

  The ride back from hospital to Blackfriars was silent. Two people stared out of opposite windows. The fare was £7.20, and Jiannis looked for a moment at Harmony as if she might pay, dressed in the same clothes she’d been admitted in eight days ago, the day the world ended.

  She didn’t look at him, and he put it on his credit card.

  Upstairs, in the apartment, she went straight to bed and lay on her side, facing the wall.

  After a while, he lay down next to her.

  “You know I love you,” he said at last. “You know you’re special to me.”

  She didn’t answer.

  He tried holding her for a while, but it didn’t last. Eventually he got up, went round to her side of the bed, picked up her mobile phone from the bedside table. Tried to open it. “Babe, what’s the password?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Seriously?” he hissed. “Seriously?”

  Threw the phone down on the bed beside her, marched away.

  The estate agents sent her a “get well soon” card.

  A day later, Graham called, asked when she’d be back. “There’s a lot to do, you see, a very exciting time in the market.”

  Jiannis went out feasting, dining, golfing, drinking, drugging with his friends, and came home sober, calm, perfect, with shit that stank of vodka and piri-piri chicken.

  Karen called. “Darling, you know you can come home any time . . . ”

  “I’m fine, Mum.”

  “Of course you are, dear. It’s just a mother’s prerogative to worry. But I know you’re fine. I know you’ll cope.”

  It occurred to Harmony that she should look up “dopamine withdrawal”, but it seemed hard – really hard – to do it. She could itemise the tasks involved one at a time, even imagine herself achieving them, but whenever she went to move her arm towards her phone it seemed futile, wearisome. So she lay, facing the wall, and time rolled by.

  “I’m going to – no, I’m going to – I’m not going until I’ve . . . ”

  Voices raised from the door. Jiannis actually starting to shout; it’s been a while since he’s shouted, or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s talking at his ordinary level and she just hasn’t heard him speak for a while; these things are hard to measure.

  “Get out of my flat. Get out of my fucking . . . ”

  Jazzy burst into the bedroom, perfume, mascara, crimson lips, sex in a little black dress, fire and light and perfection in high heels, took one look at Harmony and exclaimed, “Fuck’s sake, what have you fucking done?”

  Jiannis couldn’t get rid of Jazzy without physically hurting her.

  Touch me, she said, and I’ll call the police.

  “It’s OK,” mumbled Harmony from where she lay. “It’s OK.”

  “I’m going out,” snarled Jiannis, snatching his coat from the back of the white leather chair by the unused, untouched make-up table. “Don’t stay up!”

  The door slammed hard enough to rock the monochrome art photos on the wall, all architect’s lines, hard light and unknown torsos of beautiful women. They’d come with the flat; they were part of the cohesive aesthetic that was so . . . was so . . .

  Harmony couldn’t remember what it was. Wasn’t sure if she cared.

  Jazzy kneeled down by the side of the bed and stared at Harmony for a long while. There was a thing in the older woman’s face that might have almost been sympathy, or perhaps more likely pity. Pity for the broken woman. Pity for a little, lesser thing.

  Then Jazzy said, “Your boyfriend is such an arsehole,” and it turned out it was sympathy after all.

  Chapter 24

  Harmony moved out of the Blackfriars flat two days later.

  Jazzy didn’t help her move boxes – “Darling, that’s not my style!” – but phoned her seven times to make sure she was doing it, to exclaim, “Don’t stop for the wanking cock-shite!” and “Forget that fucker!” and other odes to encouragement.

  Jiannis screamed at her. “Stay there! STAY THERE! STAY RIGHT THERE! YOU WILL DO AS YOU’RE FUCKING TOLD!”

  And when that didn’t work, and the man with a van – little more than a kid, eighteen years old with sticking up, gel-slick hair – found the entire thing objectionable enough to overcome his universal apathy and plant himself squarely between Jiannis and Harmony, he seemed to crack.

  “Babe, I love you,” he exclaimed. “I love you. I’ve only ever wanted to look after you, you know that. I’ve only ever wanted the best for you. We’re going to get married; we’re going to get ma
rried; it’s going to be – you know I’ve only ever wanted to . . . ”

  She wanted to tell him that she knew he was wrong. That he had programmed her to be happy. He had drugged her not to care. But she thought that if she said it, she’d run out of energy, any energy at all, she’d never make it into the lift, and besides, the boy with the van would judge her, would marvel that she’d let things get this far, and right now it mattered so much to her – so much – that this stranger didn’t think she was stupid.

  So she said nothing at all.

  In the end, Jiannis threw himself in front of her, kneeling, pressing his head against the burgundy luxury Saxony heavyweight carpet that lined the corridor by the gorgeous Bontoft-brand polished black titanium elevators, and when the lift came she stepped past him, and the boy carrying the last of her boxes made a tut-hiss sound between his puckered lips and shook his head as if to say, “Mate, like . . . mate!’ – which was, in its way, the ultimate condemnation a man might give.

  Harmony moved into a bedsit in Lambeth, Phuong and Hailey above, Mr and Mrs Patel below.

  “I can laugh when things ain’t funny, hey, hey, hey, hey!” trilled Mr Patel in the shower.

  “I can’t!” hollered Mrs Patel from the room next door. “I don’t think anyone else can either!”

  Jazzy joined her that first night, and brought a bottle of champagne.

  For the first time in a very, very long while, Harmony got drunk.

  A real drunk.

  You appear to be above your recommended alcohol limit. Would you like to browse our range of products?

  “Fuck men,” exclaimed Jazzy, stretching out her long, curved legs in silk stockings. “Fuck them. Never liked Jiannis. Pompous prat.”

  “I know you’re saying that to make me feel better, but please don’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because it makes me feel stupid. It makes me feel like . . . like it was so obvious like . . . why did I even stay with him?”