Karen Meads never let anything perturb her. The most extreme her emotional state ever reached was, “Oh dear. That doesn’t sound good.”

This phrase was deployed now, and Harmony nearly choked with relief to hear it. In the language of anyone else, it was a nothing sound, a nowhere noise made in the hope that things will change and the moment will pass. From Karen Meads, it was the rallying cry, the charge to war, and patiently she listened as it all came out – the credit cards, the bills, the unpaid debts, the shutting down of her nanos, the acne, the weight, the baldness, the explosion of hair beneath her armpits, the hay fever, the colds, the . . .

“Can they do this to you, dear?” asked Karen, soft voice rising a little in pitch, the nearest she came to shouting. “Can they do this?”

“The health company say that they have a moral and contractual duty to ensure my immunisation packages are functional, but non-essential services can be disabled.”

“This doesn’t sound like disabling.”

“They said that after so long on the nanos my body would be . . . It wouldn’t know how to cope, that once you’ve been on nanos for this long it’s . . . There’s a thing called ‘punitive financial reclamation’ and I’ve been trying to pay the money but there’s also the gas and electric and food and travel and rent and . . . ”

“Darling, I’m coming to visit you.”

A nuclear option. An explosion of Karen. She came up by the train to Waterloo, and then had to borrow someone else’s phone at the station because she’d forgotten to charge hers, but had written Harmony’s number down in her notebook so that was all right, and didn’t understand what the difference was between the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines but somehow made it to High Barnet with a cry of “London is a ghastly city, isn’t it?”

They sat down in Harmony’s rented room, and for the first time went through the figures. Not the figures on which Harmony’s life had been running – not her weekly salary in, weekly money out – but the real figures. The ones that lay beneath, the ones that lasted longer than Monday to Friday and were going to gobble her life whole.

The £7000 or so she owed across four credit cards to four separate banks had, since she first took them out, ballooned. Sometimes she made the minimum repayment, sometimes she missed it and over barely three years her initial debt had crawled up to a little over £11,000.

“Can’t you just . . . live a little more carefully?” blurted Karen, and immediately knew she’d said something stupid, and saw only pain in her daughter’s eyes. She started fiddling with her wedding ring, oblivious to the motion, the flesh grown under and up and around the metal, and if anything spoke of a heart rushing in fear and dread, it was that little clawing at a diamond on a golden band.