“It’s not that I’m unsympathetic,” she explained, “but I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. Rent is rent, you know.”

Harmony lay awake that night, as her armpits prickled with the strange, unfamiliar itch of wiry dark-brown hair beginning to grow, pushing up like hedgehog spikes through her flesh, and in the morning realised that the itching wasn’t detergent left in her underwear, but vaginal thrush.

Chapter 6

“Well yes, as the nanos shut down you may experience some . . . How long have you had . . . Ah yes, well, after that long there will be an adjustment period as your body comes to terms with the loss of protective services from . . . No. There’s nothing to be done. Except pay. Are you able to make a payment now?”

“But I’ve been through shutdowns before. There was a hospital . . . ”

“Yes, but you still had a lot of services running, didn’t you? Muscle, fat, digestion, skin, teeth, hair – my, there were a lot, and that’s not even counting the firewalled upgrades! Yes, well, I’m sorry to say, Ms Meads, that with so many upgrades now being withdrawn from your system, you will experience a transitional period, and please do make your payment soon as we don’t want you to go into punitive measures, do we?” A little laugh, a shared joke. “Oh my, that wouldn’t be good at all!”

A letter from a bailiff left under the door. We are authorised to take goods unless you pay. We are authorised to do this whether you let us in or not. If we have to smash down the door, you will pay for the damage. You must pay £60 immediately on receipt of this letter to cover our administration fee. This will not be deducted from the overall debt you owe – it is our administration fee for contacting you.

Upstairs, Phuong and Hailey screamed at each other through the paper floor: “Left, left, go left – there’s one high – shoot him, shoot him – Jesus!”

Downstairs, Mr Patel sung in the shower. “ . . . She taught me to yodel /

Yodel-oh-ee-dee!”

“Cut that racket out!” roared Mrs Patel, voice twisted into a mechanical thing by its journey through the pipes. “Why are you always making such a racket?”

This is Harmony Meads, eight weeks before her twenty-ninth birthday. Her carefully curated pink-peach blouses and tight-fit cream skirts are starting to bulge in all the wrong places around her gently expanding form. She tried going for a run yesterday and was tired before she left, and her whole body hurt within five minutes of a shuffle-gasp, heaving down breath, shooting pains running through her left ankle, her right calf, everything unbalanced, everything out of kilter.

Women in compression tights with patches of see-through webbing to help define the contours of their muscled legs don’t even have to try to overtake her. Men in muscle-vests, a hint of bulging pec, a lot of heaving tricep, zoom past her with a rustle of wind. There was a time when she could do that, did that to stay in with the cool crowd, the upgraders and nano-modders who did just enough exercise on a weekend that there could still be a question mark over their perfect, honed bodies – was it nano or is it natural?