“What side effects?”

“Well . . . your spot, for example. If you continue in non-payment, the nanos will also start to shut down other non-essential systems. These can include, but are not limited to, smell, libido, allergen protection, colour sensitivity, frequency sensitivity, dental protection, taste, fat processing, cellulose processing, hair growth, hair loss . . . ”

Finally, Harmony wept.

She had thought that she was stronger than that, that the world had thrown all it could at her already and she had triumphed, that she had grown and become invincible from her sufferings.

Turns out she was wrong.

Gillian waited patiently for a little while. A lot of people cried at her down the phone. It was part of the job. She prided herself on how sensitive and motherly she was.

Then: “Is there someone you could borrow the money from?”

This was not the correct question. Harmony threw her phone into the toilet with a scream of rage, tore at her hair, clawed at her face, howled loud enough to bring Phuong and Hailey knocking on her door with a cry of, “Harmony? You OK in there?”

“Yeah, I’m . . . I’m fine, I’m . . . ”

The shame of their curiosity, the humiliation of their kindness, calmed her down a little bit, though she didn’t open the door to their polite concern. She went back to the bathroom and fished her phone out of the toilet, drying it off with tissue paper. Not that it made a difference – it never booted up again.

Chapter 2

Nearly nine years before Harmony Meads woke up to a pimple on her chin, the teenager who would be the woman lay on her back on a lumpy single bed in a hall of residence in Reading and mumbled, a little late into the proceedings but a microsecond before it was going to cease to be relevant, “Have you got a condom?”

Jarek, twenty, a third-year BA to Harmony’s first and therefore clearly skilled in the ways of life and love, froze, body drawn in a long arch above hers, poised in every way she’d always imagined, hoped for and quietly feared, then blurted, “What?”

The point of university, Harmony knew, was to lose your virginity. It was, if anything, a more important experience than getting any kind of degree – what her mum would have called “living your life” with an approving nod, even if she’d never let her imagination run to how her daughter would interpret this command. Knowing that this needed accomplishing if she was ever to be a woman – experiencing the same wild sexual delights as her schoolfriends had probably, perhaps, if you believed them – she had set about finding the perfect man for the task. Her first effort, with a Master’s student called Benji, had ended with him passed out diagonally across her bed, snoring with mighty beer-blasting stench, while she huddled in a tiny triangle of mattress left by the shape of the sprawling of his limbs, not even down to her one sexy bra, which she’d worn especially despite the fact it pinched.