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?”