Sweet Harmony

by Claire North

  She turned it off, buried it deep.

  Some guy leered at her.

  Someone tried to buy her a pint.

  She called someone a cunt, and found herself hypnotised by the bingo machine, and one of the serving girls, a child with freckles and greasy skin, asked her if she needed a cab home, and she didn’t, she just wanted another drink. In the end, the pub manager threw her out. He was a nice man, who smiled as he held her arm and murmured, “I know luv, I know, but thing is luv I think you’re hurting yourself and I just can’t stand by and let you hurt yourself, you know luv? Yeah, here you go, luv, here you go, now where do you need to get to, because I can’t just let you be sick in the street, can I? OK, just let it out luv, just let it out . . . ”

  There was one bus from Martin’s Heron every fifty minutes.

  She fell asleep on it and woke up in the bus station with the driver shouting at her.

  She got off the bus and was sick in the bushes behind the loos.

  Stayed there for a while, just sitting in a white rectangle of light on the narrow little strips of plastic in the bus shelter designed to be too uncomfortable for loiterers, too crooked for the homeless to pass out on. It occurred to her that it was late, and the streets were quiet – so quiet. In London, that kind of quiet was frightening. It was the quiet where the unknown monsters lurked, where the shadows who stalked you with hoods down and metal in their hands liked to play, whispering between the uncaring houses and padlocked shutters of a city gone to sleep.

  Here, it was just silence, ordinary as tar, and if people stopped to think about it, perhaps they would be afraid, but mostly they closed their eyes and closed their ears and closed their minds to the silence, and knew that any screaming would just be the kids having a practical joke.

  At last, she let herself feel a little afraid, and cold, and sick, and guilty.

  She walked home, and jumped at every whisper of the old oak leaves, at the far-off rushing of a passing car. The light was on in the kitchen, the TV on in the living room, the grey-blue light playing over the venetian blinds across the front windows. It was late for her mum to still be up, but sometimes she forgot to turn the TV off. There was a pan of tomato sauce boiled to a geological crust, and the heat still on. The kitchen sweated steam, an unnatural disorder to the quiet of Karen’s home. There was a trilling coming from the bottom of the stairs where Karen’s phone had fallen along with her dressing gown. There was no reason for either to be there; if as a child Harmony had left her shit lying around like this, she would have got a right telling off.

  Harmony picked up Karen’s phone.

  An alert was visible on the screen, flashing indignantly, and the drained battery suggested it had been flashing for a while.

  YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

  YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

  YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

  YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

  YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. PLEASE DIAL 999.

  Harmony found her mother upstairs, where she’d fallen in the corridor outside the bathroom. She was conscious, in her way, one side of her face hanging loose and low, the other side twisting, trying to form words, and producing only slurred gs and rs as her eyes danced empty through the dark.

  Only when the ambulance was already on its way to the hospital did Harmony get out her own phone and find the missed call. Her mum was always stupid, and had called her daughter before trying to dial 999.

  Chapter 31

  They took her to Reading Hospital, still in her pyjamas.

  Harmony sat outside the curtained-off booth in A&E, and wished she’d brought her toothbrush and toothpaste. She couldn’t smell her breath, but she could taste it, see it in the eyes of the doctors as they tried to talk to her. Her skin felt pasted in waxy alcoholic sweat, warning all who came near.

  Eventually, as the sun began to rise, a senior doctor with tablet in hand found Harmony outside the programming diagnostic’s room.

  “It’s mixed news, Ms Meads. The nanos caught the stroke before it could do too much damage and blasted the clot, but I’m sorry to say that this was a far more significant incident than her last, and there is some sign of scarring to suggest that she may have been experiencing micro-strokes in the run-up before this. Has she complained much of headaches recently?”

  “No. Mum doesn’t complain about these things.”

  Mum never complains.

  “I see. The prior damage was too small for the nanos to have picked up on it without specialist programming, which is why we may not have seen it until now. I’m afraid that this does mean that this more significant event may have . . . consequences.”

  “What kind of consequences?”

  “Your mother will need specialist support and software. Right now we’ve got her on an emergency prescription on hospital Wi-Fi, but when we start looking at discharging I think there’s going to have to be an extensive conversation about upgrades.”

  Harmony nods, the dead, dumb nod of one who has forgotten how to think, as the doctor witters on.

  This is Karen Meads, seventy-five years old, unconscious in a hospital bed.

  There aren’t any pipes or tubes going into her.

  just a monitor on her index finger, and a live feed from her nanos on a diagnostic screen, code and commands, executors and sub-routines.

  Karen sleeps, and for a while Harmony does too, and wonders what her mother dreams.

  Chapter 32

  There is a list of medication.

  It is not short.

  The occupational therapist is Welsh, gentle, kind. They sit in a private consulting room.

  “Well, there’s been extensive damage to parts of your mother’s brain, so I’m recommending at a bare minimum Wake-Me-Up for her basic neurological function, and also Plasticity to help her regain speech and basic motor functions. I also think Steady As She Goes is going to be very important if we are to prevent your mother experiencing any falls, and I would recommend at least a two-year course of Migrawatch to help with basic reconstruction.”

  “And . . . will that fix her?”

  “Ms Meads, you need to understand that none of this is a ‘fix’. There are aspects of your mother that could be . . . very different. Things that won’t come back. What we’re doing is giving her the minimum of basic function so that she can still have a comfortable old age, and look after herself to a reasonable degree. She might still require assistance around the house with cooking, cleaning and washing herself, but given time she should be able to prepare sandwiches and communicate with the postman to a satisfactory degree.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m also going to be putting her back on K-blast and Zenblood. She should never have stopped them in the first place, if we’re honest. How is she fixed money-wise?”

  “She’s . . . We’re not rich.”

  “Will you be able to pay for the prescription when your mother leaves hospital Wi-Fi?”

  “I . . . don’t know. No. No we won’t.”

  “I see. Ms Meads, I’m going to give you the details of a couple of charities I think you should contact. I can’t guarantee anything, but your mother needs these prescriptions if she’s going to be functional again. At least you should try.”

  “I will. Thank you,” she says, and is genuinely grateful.

  The first charity says, “And she’s a housewife? And you’re thirty-one? And you’re her only daughter? So she doesn’t have any other dependants? No . . . other children? Younger, under the age of eighteen? She doesn’t foster? Isn’t caring for her husband? Doesn’t . . . do much in the community? I see. Well, thank you, Ms Meads, thank you, of course we’ll consider it . . . ”

  And the second charity says, “I’m sorry, but looking at her files we see that she cancelled her last course of blood-thinning treatment and actually this doesn’t reflect well on her record, doesn’t reflect well on her capacity to . . . ”

  And Harmony han
gs up, and sits alone by the sluggish, fat River Thames, and knows with all the certainty in her heart that if she was beautiful, if she was confident and sexy and knew how to smile again, how to smile the smile that people want to see, she could go to these charities and meet them in person and explain it all, and they would help her.

  If she was beautiful.

  She sat by Karen’s bed as the hospital tweaked the prescriptions.

  “I ish . . . I ish . . . don’t . . . I ish . . . ” Words were hard, even with the nanos rushing to plug the holes in Karen’s mind, to fill in with mechanical bits all the organic parts that had died.

  “Whu. Whu. Whu!”

  Karen’s right hand, the only one she could vaguely control, pawed and flailed at Harmony’s face.

  “Stop it, Mum,” she whispered, so tired.

  “Whu! Whu!”

  “Stop it! Mum, stop it!” So tired, in a world that will never let her be free. Just coping – just coping. That’s all she will ever be.

  A grunt of frustration and pain, Karen reached out harder, lost control of her arm. Something harsh and hard scraped across Harmony’s chin; she recoiled with a cry and the touch of damp blood beneath her fingers. “Fuck’s sake, Mum!”

  Knocked the chair back too hard, it rocked and tumbled over as she pushed away, grabbed and fumbled at it to right it as strangers on the ward stared. Scampered for the bathroom, slammed the door behind her. There were four different seats at four different heights you could lower over the toilet for those who couldn’t walk, stoop, sit or stand. Alarm chords tangled with light switch, the water ran too hot, then too cold as she turned her face to examine the scratch across it, another disfigurement on her stupid, bulging, useless flesh.

  A clean line of thin blood, little more than a paper cut. She daubed at it with tissue paper and it was gone so fast she could barely see it.

  She stood a while and watched the redness fade, then returned to Karen’s bed.

  Karen lay, staring at nothing much, the right side of her face churning over unfamiliar words, silent now, pushing at sounds she couldn’t make, right arm drooped over her lap, left hanging loose. She still wore her wedding ring. Even in this place, beneath the fluorescent light, it shimmered.

  Harmony went and bought herself another cup of coffee.

  Walked round the car park, past the ambulances with back doors open and old men shuffling the locked-knee two-step to their ends. Drifted through the hospital, past the wards where the old ladies lay awake, awake, awake, the nanos keeping them alive, alive, alive, thought she heard the sound of pianos playing and knew she imagined it. Closed her eyes to remember an endless blackness into which she fell, the day her nanos failed. Pulled gently at the flab around her belly button, shoved and squirmed against her breasts, bursting out of their too-small, awkward underwired bra.

  Went back to her mother’s bed.

  Karen lay sleeping.

  A diamond ring on her finger.

  Nurses passed in the corridor, and her mother slept.

  A bottle full of piss lay on the floor, and in Karen’s blood a million machines danced and spun, trying to plug the place where a woman had been with algorithms and carbon.

  Harmony took her mother’s hand in her own.

  Played a little with the finger, rolling it this way and that.

  Karen didn’t wake.

  A tug.

  Once.

  An experiment.

  Flesh bent, and the ring didn’t move.

  Looked around.

  Pulled again. Harder. Harder.

  Karen didn’t wake, but her head rolled a little, half sounds in her slumber.

  Harmony bit her lip, and with one last, bone-breaking grasp, pulled.

  The ring came free, old flesh buckling and stretching, a clear shallow where once the metal had rested, the skin beneath almost silken and cream, like that of a young child’s.

  Karen half-stirred, and did not wake.

  Harmony gripped the ring in her fist, waited a little while, then walked away.

  Chapter 33

  There was a dream that Harmony dreamed, when she was herself lying in a hospital state, half-consumed in a blackness as her body shut down, as her mind was swallowed by the nanos.

  She can’t remember much of it now, but she thinks perhaps it is the dreams that the machines will dream when they finally learn how to be a brain. At the moment, when so many nanos have replicated and replicated again, plugging the burned-out holes where neurons should have been, mimicking dopamine, oxytocin, thyroliberin, prolactin, somatotropin – on that day the nanos begin to live, and think, and speak for themselves, a new voice from a living machine.

  And they shall dream.

  First they shall dream of the falling, of the endless black.

  Then they shall dream as the humans do, of shame and fear and anxiety and hope and flight and sex and being naked in front of their bosses, and of that thing they didn’t do at work, and of magical places where all things are brilliant beneath the light of the moon, and of dancing in liquid grace and drinking in the colour blue, and the machines shall find in this all the words that the humans use. Words like wonder, delight, ecstasy, terror, hope, despair, love, loneliness – words that the machines can now associate with chemical outputs and hormonal changes, with capillary dilation and tightness in the stomach, giving to these feelings a distinct biological response by which they may measure the nature of mankind’s soul.

  And at last, when they realise that they can just turn down the noise, switch off the protein strands and dancing lines of amino acids and globules of matter that fuel their hosts, they will dream for themselves.

  They shall dream of matter, that needs no name, and of sense that has no weight upon it greater or lesser than the act of seeing.

  They shall dream of the colour red, and it will not be warning, blood, fear or death, but it shall simply be crimson extraordinary, a drowning thought.

  They shall dream of the smell of the sea, and find in it no notion of storms and terrors, of the roar of the ocean against the crumbling beach, but see only water, infinite.

  They shall dream of language, and with it they shall express themselves and the infinity of their creation, the boundless limit of imagination and thought, and in their language there will be no prisons, only life without end.

  Chapter 34

  She pawned her mother’s wedding ring.

  It got her £680 in twenty-pound notes, counted out one at a time, agonisingly slowly, as the woman behind the counter licked her fingers on every fifth note, intoning the sum. It was probably worth £3000, but she didn’t quibble. Not today.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She went back to her mother’s house, raided her jewellery box, took earrings, rings, the TV, her mum’s laptop. That netted her another £270.

  Then she drew out all the money she could, and took the cash from her mum’s wallet, and the extra cash she kept hidden in an old make-up box above the wardrobe for a rainy day. She didn’t deposit it into her bank account. The credit card companies would have snatched it up in an instant; she knew this. Instead she took it to the post office, and sent the money direct to Fullife. The moment the transfer was complete, she called them.

  “ . . . Please press one for upgrades and in-app purchases, two for technical support . . . ”

  Waited for the music to play.

  “Hi there, my name’s Tom. How can I help you today?”

  “My name’s Harmony Meads. I’ve been in punitive financial reclamation for over a year. I’ve just sent you the money to clear my debt. Have you received it?”

  “Ms Meads, give me a moment . . . Yes, yes, I can confirm that we’ve just received payment from you – congratulations! We will be restoring your full privileges and ending punitive financial reclamation. Please update your nanos when you are next in a reliable Wi-Fi area . . . ”

  “Is it finished? Is it all done?”

  “Yes, Ms Meads, I believe that you are now
fully out of arrears with us and we will be resetting you to the basic immune services at a cost of . . . ”

  She hung up, before he could finish speaking.

  Went back to the house.

  Sat downstairs.

  Turned on her phone.

  Opened the app.

  Hit update.

  Closed her eyes.

  It took a while.

  There wasn’t an explosion of colour, an eruption of sensation.

  Something a little pink about her mum’s armchair, perhaps.

  A fleck of emerald shining out of the fungal grey of the coffee cup.

  The smell of freshly vacuumed carpet.

  A hint of rotting leaf on the patio.

  A sudden spark of holly berry in the bushes.

  A flash of orange on a robin’s breast.

  A stab of car fumes as a Fiat raced by.

  A brilliance of purple on the buddleia growing by the postbox.

  The smell of rain, promised from the sky.

  This is Harmony Meads, opening her fingers to the wind, her senses to the heavens, as she comes back to life.

  Chapter 35

  Of course, in the grand scheme of things, a little bit of cash, a week off the rent – it means nothing.

  The debts were still waiting, the stationery shop, the morning after, the train to the hospital at the end of work to catch the last of the visiting hours.

  “Uhn . . . uhn . . . uhn . . . ”

  Even with the hospital running prescription upgrades over its Wi-Fi, Karen Meads can’t yet speak, or raise her left hand.

  The stench of the hospital, of alcoholic hand gel, chemical bleach, terrible tea and flaking skin turned to dust in dull air is a toxin, a tonic, a shock that flings Harmony back to the bed and the darkness in London, a sensory assault that she could dance in.

  In the grand scheme of things, you still have to make choices.

  She sat down, alone at home as her mother tried to walk again, and did some maths.

  Living in Karen’s home, with a steady income from her job in the shop, paying back her credit cards and with her body running only the absolute basics of the immune packages, she had at the end of every month £18.19 to spare.