It took her a long time to muster the courage to go back inside that shop.

Nothing had changed.

The same pens.

The same shelves.

The same layout, with gift bags on a spinning rack by the door, artists’ supplies at the back by the coloured paper, printer cartridges on hooks behind the counter. A new generation of children worked at the till, and they were beautiful.

Youth was beautiful.

Hope was beautiful.

Even here, selling ballpoint pens and manila envelopes, in their baggy T-shirts and terrible hair, with the world faded to shades of sepia punctuated by spikes of brilliant blue, Harmony looked at her fellow humans and, for the first time in a very long while, thought that they were magnificent.

Then a voice called, “My God! Harmony?!”

And there was Karima, sixty-eight years old, still not retired, the matron of the stationery shop, rushing towards her former worker to give her a gigantic, soppy hug.

Chapter 30

This is Harmony Meads, thirty-one years old.

For a while, she thought she was a victim.

For a while, she blamed herself.

She works at the stationery shop in the centre in Bracknell, walking to work every day past the discount gold shop, the shop that sells icons of holy Jesus, the big hotel that dominates the sky and hosts conferences on pipes, window handles and the latest development in escalator refurbishment technology. She is a few stone overweight, but she no longer considers her body disgusting. Not as much as she used to, at least. She can rationalise these things now. She knows that it’s just a psychology, a social sort of thing.

When Karima retired, a boy called Tim got the supervisor job. Tim is nineteen years old and has as many upgrades as he can pay for. He can prove, with charts, that every physical upgrade he gets also boosts his IQ, and has very strong feelings about portable phone rechargers. Harmony suspects he will go far.

Harmony lives at home, and slowly pays down her debt.

At her current rate, without paying rent, she should have paid it all off by 2048, at a cost of only £117,512.

She has decided that blame is not a productive state of mind. What good is it if it is without justice?

On Sunday mornings, Karen Meads goes to church.

She’s not sure if she believes, but all her friends go to church and it seems like a nice thing to do. She wants to go to the old church, the one with the spire and the bits of stained-glass window – not all stained glass, because that’s expensive, but bits here and there. There are always nice flowers at the old church too, and the singing is all right. But if she’s honest with herself, she finds the priest a bit too “fire and retribution” and she’s not sure she needs that on a lovely Sunday morning, so she goes to the other church, in a single-storey building with a slanting grey roof and a crucifix in plywood outside the door. The music is more modern, but also more upbeat, and they have interesting food at the social nights.