And Jenni doesn’t seem to mind or care and trails along behind her with a merry, “Oh no, we’re not picking Jo-Jo up until two and I went to the shops this morning especially so I could have time to see you, didn’t we, Si-Si? Yes, we did, yes, we did!”

Karen has deliberately “gone to the post office” that morning, though what could be that urgent or take that long, Harmony cannot imagine. When she comes home, plastic bag full of pasta, cheese, mince and tinned tomatoes, she very politely doesn’t ask how seeing Jenni was, or how Harmony is doing, but simply exclaims, “Lasagne tonight! I know you like the crispy bits!”

That’s the night that Harmony checks her phone and sees that K-blast and Zenblood have both reached the end of their contract.

Do you want to renew?

Chapter 29

One day, Harmony started going for walks by herself.

Nothing provoked this. There was no bolt of lightning from the sky.

She walked because where before she had not wanted to, now she did.

Got out of that room because it was time.

She lived on benefits, which didn’t pay her way, and her debt did not decrease, even though the credit card companies gobbled up her meagre income before she could even buy food with it, and she didn’t pay rent, and slowly her body learned to adjust to life without upgrades.

The hair loss slowed, and her mum got her mate Christina round to do her hair, and when she first suggested it Harmony snarled, “That bitch isn’t touching my head!”

And then she thought about it, and realised that she hadn’t had a haircut for years, and remembered Christina as quiet and gentle, and not to be blamed for her mother’s oppressive, offensive, irredeemable kindness, crushing Harmony like a ton of feathers.

So she said, “Actually. Yeah. I think Christina could be . . . Yeah.”

Christina was in her early seventies, but still had the moves with the scissors. She set Harmony up in the kitchen, washed her hair with something that she couldn’t smell and set to on the muddy, drained lengths.

She went short, a pixie-cut that made her ears stick out. Her neck felt unnatural, exposed, light, a huge weight of shorn locks, a foot or more of it, tumbling to the ground like spiderweb spinning in the breeze.

“It’s good for the hair to be given a chance to grow,” mused Christina, running her fingers through the tufty, shorn-down top of her scalp. “It’s good sometimes to start again.”

Karen watched and said nothing, and Harmony remembered then that she probably did love her mother after all, and had never been given any reason to be anything other than grateful.

Her skin settled a little. She still had pores, great gaping pores, bubbles of black and hollows of pink all across her face but this was, her mother calmly informed her, normal. Just what normal was.

Her weight gain stabilised. When she bent over, the fat in her belly buckled like the crushed hull of the Titanic; her thighs and backside spread wide across the rough striped seat of the bus to the shops. The suitcase of clothes she’d worn when she was beautiful, of straps and strings, of exposed flesh and curving seams, remained unopened under the childhood bed. She bought clothes from the discount store at the shopping centre, next to the stationery shop where once she’d worked.