The train to London wasn’t for twenty minutes, which was bloody typical, and gave her mum time to talk the man behind the glass into letting her on to the platform, hobbling up behind Harmony to whimper, the horror and pain written on every part of her wrinkled, shrivelled, fungus of a face, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it, darling, I’m so sorry, I’m just . . . ”

In the end, after ten minutes, and with Karen on the verge of tears, Harmony relented, and they went over the road to the pub and had a really crap Sunday lunch, with tepid gravy and wet veg, and didn’t really talk, except a little bit about the telly.

Chapter 17

She doesn’t ask Jiannis what he’s done to his penis, but she knows he’s done something, because after it hurts.

“Babe, you’re really stiff these days, you’re really – just not yourself. Is it work?”

Her eyes laugh with the merriment of Aphrodite, her body a sculpture in bronze, and her voice is dull, cold. “No. It’s not work.”

“You’re not like yourself. You should really try to lighten up.”

When he sends her a link to Beta Uplift, she barely bothers to read it before activating the package.

For depressive treatment blah blah blah helping to restore balance to the brain blah blah blah dopamine release over a slow blah blah in the event of stroke please blah blah blah.

It doesn’t make her feel better, but she doesn’t feel as bad as much. The world becomes a little duller, a little grey. Summer days are merely bright rather than radiant. The sound of rain is just a tapping on metal rather than a dance, majestic from an endless sky. The River Thames, rolling beneath Blackfriars Bridge, is a body of muddy water she has to cross to get to the next party. Credit card debt is a problem, but these things don’t matter much. Nothing much matters much. It’s all just OK.

He takes her places again, and she hangs out with his friends, and they all smile, and the men are really very strong and fit and beautiful, and the women have magnificent breasts and delightful laughter, and so does she, and that’s fine too. That’s fine. That’s the world that Harmony Meads wanted. That’s what she reads about in the magazines.

She does all right at work. Not as well as she used to, but no one seems to care. She is still projecting the right brand aesthetic, and a lot of the customers seem to like the way she’s not pushing the hard sell, letting them have space, even though she’s clearly desperate. She’s useful for a certain niche, Graham informs her. A certain, puppy-dog niche.

She thinks that these words should shock her, and wonders whether she should think about that revelation a bit more later, and doesn’t, because it doesn’t matter.

And when Jiannis says, “You shouldn’t hang out with those guys any more. They’re no good for you,” she doesn’t argue.