Jiannis stopped trying to contact her three months after the Enfield move. No one at the office knew any of Jiannis’s friends, so they hadn’t seen the photos, didn’t know every detail of her body.

Not that they would have believed it was her, not that sexy, lithe, writhing athlete in the pictures. Not their chubby, spotty Harmony Meads with her flaking skin and thinning hair. Not that goddess.

“When you’re better, when this is . . . better,” Ibrahim said, “you can come back. There’ll always be a place for you here.”

This is Harmony Meads, thirty years old, going back to Bracknell.

Her mum meets her at the station, and they get a cab.

The semi-detached she grew up in always stank of Karen, of old woman’s flaking skin, of forgetting to flush the toilet and cheap bright-green washing-up liquid. For a moment, Harmony thinks she can smell it, and wonders if her nose is back, if sense is returning – but it’s just imagination, her brain filling in a gap where feelings should be, plugging her senses with what should be, what could be, anything except the reality of what is.

She doesn’t hear from her London friends. One or two drop her an email occasionally, but mostly they forget. Their lives are busy, bright, hectic, and Bracknell is a long way out of town. Even if you don’t miss the train, there’s half an hour of walking to do on the other end, along pavements strewn with rotting leaves and cracked conkers, fallen from ancient trees pressed against the walls of the old people’s care homes and public swirls of green, a reminder of the great forest that once ruled this dimple in the earth.

Harmony doesn’t leave her room for three days. Karen goes power walking, 8 a.m. on the dot on Wednesdays and Fridays, the chatter and trill of “Oh Carrrooolll! Whoo-hooo!” bursting into the flat from tracksuited women with pale dyed perms like a foghorn in a cloister. Even though Karen has a walking stick, she still goes out with them, using two mountaineering poles to help her keep up the pace, and swinging along merrily at the back with a cry of “Don’t worry about me, ladies!”

On the third day, Karen gets Jenni, the old schoolfriend, to come and visit. Harmony hasn’t seen Jenni for years, hasn’t kept in touch, but Karen doesn’t know much about Harmony’s London life and so reaches out to the only contact she remembers, and who is still in Bracknell.

Jenni studied economics at Warwick University, was going to be an academic, did most of a PhD, but in the end came back to Bracknell to get married, have kids, raise a family. For a while, as she witters on about the nursery and day care and trying to find non-gendered shoes for her baby daughter, so as not to bias her into thinking she has to be a princess, Harmony despises this perky, ordinary woman sat on her mum’s settee. She barely has any upgrades – just a couple to keep her going when the kids leave her knackered, and to help her body make the most of sleep – and slouches with a mug of coffee in her hand and a baby dribbling in her lap, snot and spit and little puckered lips. She is in a single second of revelation everything that Harmony hates about this place, about this humiliation. She snaps, “Well, good to see you. I’m sure you must be going,” and marches into the kitchen to do the washing-up: anything, anything at all to look like she’s busy.