In the end, they came up with a financial rescue plan, cutting every cost to a minimum, and injecting an emergency £200 from Karen’s secret box of cash that she kept in an old make-up box above the bed, to try and tide her through the worst of the moment.

At the end of every week, the plan left Harmony with £7.50 spare for any indulgences – “Fancy food, maybe?” suggested Karen hopefully. “Or nice soap?”

For three weeks she made it, and though her debts did not decrease, neither did they grow. On the fourth, the office went out for drinks to celebrate Steve’s birthday, and she didn’t want to lie, didn’t want to tell them why she couldn’t go, the horrid, bitter truth of it all, so she went and had to buy a round. It was just what was expected, and it would have ruined everyone’s night if she’d said no and explained why.

And that was the next five weeks shot, and she didn’t have anything spare and then the heel broke off her shoe and she still didn’t fit her clothes and needed something to wear, anything . . .

“Is everything, you know, all right?” asked Ibrahim, the boss of the Enfield office. “Are you . . . you know?”

Once upon a time, she would have looked on Ibrahim with scorn. Twenty-three years in fucking Enfield, twenty-three years of semi-detached-with-a-lovely-shed-round-back, twenty-three years of nothing but immune boosts and the odd nutritional upgrade, not even bothering to get his wrinkles done, “quirky” Ibrahim, selling houses with eccentricity and his famous boiler anecdotes. For a while, she’d hated him, and now he was sat opposite her in his office, a shrine to Tottenham Hotspur, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees, and he was being kind.

She found the kindness harder than scorn. Scorn she could take, weave into a coat of armour around herself, a wall of anger, hostility and pain. Scorn was hot and bright, a fearsome thing. Kindness destroyed what little strength she had left, and at last, she told him everything.

Chapter 11

This is Harmony Meads, aged twenty-six.

She is beautiful.

She clearly has upgrades, because in the conventional sense of the thing her eyes are a little far apart and there’s nothing remarkable or honed about her face, and she is not really beautiful.

But she is so, so beautiful. She has made choices – she has chosen to get upgrades, to celebrate who she is, to rejoice in what her body is and how she lives in it, to delight in being Harmony Meads.

Despite working twelve hours a day, sometimes six days a week, every part of her is honed, toned to muscular grace. Never too far, never the warped, lumpen thing of true muscular fiends, but a feminine strength, a ballerina’s power, focused and enhanced with a few choice additional accessories and subtle biological tweaks such as Bright Eyes – If you start bleeding from the eyes please contact your healthcare provider – and Voice of an Angel – 96% agree that this is the perfect voice for the perfect woman! Taken from a sample of 271 respondents. For best results, don’t drink any substances colder than 12°C.