Sweet Harmony Read online

The smell after rain, when all things come back to life.

  Chapter 10

  “You are in a queue. Your call is important to us . . . ”

  “Hi, my nanos are . . . I can’t smell anything.”

  “Ms Meads, as I believe has been explained to you, your current owing balance is now in excess of £800 and there is a penalty of £300 for late payment to Fullife and under these circumstances we are authorised to shut down non-essential systems for . . . ”

  “Can’t you just shut it all down? Just . . . turn off the nanos. Turn them off.”

  “We are still in contract unless you pay the termination fee. Our contract obligates us to ensure that your primary systems are in excellent working order! If you can’t work, how will you ever manage to sort this sort of thing out? Did you know that influenza killed more people in 1919 than died in all of World War One?”

  “Mummy, why is the lady ugly?” whispered the child as Harmony motioned the family round their private tour of this charming semi-detached three-bedroom property with two bathrooms, one en suite, on the side of the North Circular.

  The house shuddered and shook as the lorries roared by, the windows faintly misted over with exhaust, the once-white tiles in the kitchen stained a yellow-brown from the years of relentless smoking by the previous occupant, who’d finally cracked and was selling it all to go and live on a canal boat in Tring.

  “Shush! She’s not . . . Don’t say things like that!” whispered the mother, glancing askance at Harmony to see if she’d noticed.

  Harmony Meads, the flesh sagging beneath her chin, not yet sure how to wear the almost perfectly taut ball of her belly, hair done up in a bun as if a conflagration of pins might disguise the shedding of her locks, stares vacantly at nothing much, having perhaps seen it all before.

  “Well, thank you, yes, very interesting,” muttered the dad as they squeezed back into her tiny estate agent’s car, a postage stamp on wheels, knees to chin, Harmony’s chair pushed all the way back from the pedals so only the child can fit.

  “Mum, she’s weird,” whispered the child, and Harmony stared at the road and made no sound until the dad awkwardly asked if they could put the radio on. The child was seven years old – old enough to be running a basic nanos package and maybe a few upgrades of her own too so that she might grow up big, strong, smart and beautiful.

  After, at the estate agents, as dad and child were heading away, the mum hesitated, then turned and scurried back.

  “My daughter is . . . She’s very . . . I mean to say that she doesn’t understand the choices people make, you see?”

  Harmony stared, blank and cold, into the woman’s eyes, and the woman looked away, nodded once, licking her lips, and scurried after her family.

  That night, drunk on cheap beer, she finally called Karen.

  “Mum? I’m . . . I’m in trouble.”

  There is a great darkness that sometimes she dreams of, that she is falling into. Sometimes when she dreams, she hears herself say these words – “Help me” – and wakes up terrified, not knowing what is real. “I’m in . . . I’ve got these bills I’m in . . . It’s credit cards too. It’s credit cards and I’m behind on everything. Just – I’m in real trouble.”

  Karen Meads never let anything perturb her. The most extreme her emotional state ever reached was, “Oh dear. That doesn’t sound good.”

  This phrase was deployed now, and Harmony nearly choked with relief to hear it. In the language of anyone else, it was a nothing sound, a nowhere noise made in the hope that things will change and the moment will pass. From Karen Meads, it was the rallying cry, the charge to war, and patiently she listened as it all came out – the credit cards, the bills, the unpaid debts, the shutting down of her nanos, the acne, the weight, the baldness, the explosion of hair beneath her armpits, the hay fever, the colds, the . . .

  “Can they do this to you, dear?” asked Karen, soft voice rising a little in pitch, the nearest she came to shouting. “Can they do this?”

  “The health company say that they have a moral and contractual duty to ensure my immunisation packages are functional, but non-essential services can be disabled.”

  “This doesn’t sound like disabling.”

  “They said that after so long on the nanos my body would be . . . It wouldn’t know how to cope, that once you’ve been on nanos for this long it’s . . . There’s a thing called ‘punitive financial reclamation’ and I’ve been trying to pay the money but there’s also the gas and electric and food and travel and rent and . . . ”

  “Darling, I’m coming to visit you.”

  A nuclear option. An explosion of Karen. She came up by the train to Waterloo, and then had to borrow someone else’s phone at the station because she’d forgotten to charge hers, but had written Harmony’s number down in her notebook so that was all right, and didn’t understand what the difference was between the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines but somehow made it to High Barnet with a cry of “London is a ghastly city, isn’t it?”

  They sat down in Harmony’s rented room, and for the first time went through the figures. Not the figures on which Harmony’s life had been running – not her weekly salary in, weekly money out – but the real figures. The ones that lay beneath, the ones that lasted longer than Monday to Friday and were going to gobble her life whole.

  The £7000 or so she owed across four credit cards to four separate banks had, since she first took them out, ballooned. Sometimes she made the minimum repayment, sometimes she missed it and over barely three years her initial debt had crawled up to a little over £11,000.

  “Can’t you just . . . live a little more carefully?” blurted Karen, and immediately knew she’d said something stupid, and saw only pain in her daughter’s eyes. She started fiddling with her wedding ring, oblivious to the motion, the flesh grown under and up and around the metal, and if anything spoke of a heart rushing in fear and dread, it was that little clawing at a diamond on a golden band.

  In the end, they came up with a financial rescue plan, cutting every cost to a minimum, and injecting an emergency £200 from Karen’s secret box of cash that she kept in an old make-up box above the bed, to try and tide her through the worst of the moment.

  At the end of every week, the plan left Harmony with £7.50 spare for any indulgences – “Fancy food, maybe?” suggested Karen hopefully. “Or nice soap?”

  For three weeks she made it, and though her debts did not decrease, neither did they grow. On the fourth, the office went out for drinks to celebrate Steve’s birthday, and she didn’t want to lie, didn’t want to tell them why she couldn’t go, the horrid, bitter truth of it all, so she went and had to buy a round. It was just what was expected, and it would have ruined everyone’s night if she’d said no and explained why.

  And that was the next five weeks shot, and she didn’t have anything spare and then the heel broke off her shoe and she still didn’t fit her clothes and needed something to wear, anything . . .

  “Is everything, you know, all right?” asked Ibrahim, the boss of the Enfield office. “Are you . . . you know?”

  Once upon a time, she would have looked on Ibrahim with scorn. Twenty-three years in fucking Enfield, twenty-three years of semi-detached-with-a-lovely-shed-round-back, twenty-three years of nothing but immune boosts and the odd nutritional upgrade, not even bothering to get his wrinkles done, “quirky” Ibrahim, selling houses with eccentricity and his famous boiler anecdotes. For a while, she’d hated him, and now he was sat opposite her in his office, a shrine to Tottenham Hotspur, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees, and he was being kind.

  She found the kindness harder than scorn. Scorn she could take, weave into a coat of armour around herself, a wall of anger, hostility and pain. Scorn was hot and bright, a fearsome thing. Kindness destroyed what little strength she had left, and at last, she told him everything.

  Chapter 11

  This is Harmony Meads, aged twenty-six.

  She is beautiful.

  S
he clearly has upgrades, because in the conventional sense of the thing her eyes are a little far apart and there’s nothing remarkable or honed about her face, and she is not really beautiful.

  But she is so, so beautiful. She has made choices – she has chosen to get upgrades, to celebrate who she is, to rejoice in what her body is and how she lives in it, to delight in being Harmony Meads.

  Despite working twelve hours a day, sometimes six days a week, every part of her is honed, toned to muscular grace. Never too far, never the warped, lumpen thing of true muscular fiends, but a feminine strength, a ballerina’s power, focused and enhanced with a few choice additional accessories and subtle biological tweaks such as Bright Eyes – If you start bleeding from the eyes please contact your healthcare provider – and Voice of an Angel – 96% agree that this is the perfect voice for the perfect woman! Taken from a sample of 271 respondents. For best results, don’t drink any substances colder than 12°C.

  Her career has been remarkable. The estate agents in Epsom barely managed to hold on to her for eleven months before she was poached by a branch in Croydon. Croydon couldn’t keep her before Bermondsey grabbed her, shuffling her on to the River Thames with a cry of “Talent like that shouldn’t be wasted!”

  Kensington and Chelsea made bigger sales more reliably, but Bermondsey was where the youth were, the fashionable, the beautiful ones, speaking a language of technology and modern finishes, while the West Londoners were still set in their Victorian railings and quiet gardens with lovely rosebushes.

  Harmony Meads is beautiful, successful and fits in perfectly. Everyone in the Bermondsey office was upgraded in one way or another. Even Jazzy, a little older, a little wiser, sexy and more ballsy than any of the men, who could have got away with being a naturalist if she’d worked at it, had gone down the upgrade road.

  “I could go authentic,” she mused, slipping her long, black hair back into a ponytail and pushing her round, scarlet lips towards the mirror in the lady’s loo. “But there’s just not enough hours in the day to really make it work. I have chosen a certain lifestyle, and I like my life, and I’m damned if I’m going to sacrifice it for the effort needed to really commit to the naturalist’s look.”

  Harmony, hiding her awe behind the gentle daubing of a cotton pad to her flawless, poreless cheeks, nodded agreement. Only a few models and actresses could pull off the naturalist’s look these days, and even then most fashion magazines tended to agree that while it was all very impressive and that, it wasn’t the choice of the true superstar. The trend-setting idols were the ones who were getting custom nanos programmed directly by the health product designers; from the rock stars with the shimmer of scaled snakeskin translucence on their skin, through to the eagle-eyed, black-tongued bad boys of the studios, programmed to shock, surprise or just to have the perfect build for their next explosive blockbuster.

  Such things were, Jazzy felt, a little vulgar, but that didn’t stop the boys – and two girls – of the office getting pissed together on a Friday night and holding forth on what they were going to next do to their bodies, what they loved, what they despised.

  Everyone had some form of sexual upgrade, and unlike most men she’d met, the boys in the office were willing to talk about theirs, unashamed to blurt, “God, to think what my penis used to be!” It became a matter of vital scientific necessity to work out which upgrade was best by a series of drunken tests ranging from the standard examination of sexual organs down the pub through to wild and preferably recorded (for science) sexual acts.

  “We should all shag Harmony!” roared Al, who paid £39.99 a month for his perfect stubble and a further £82.99 for his Urban Prince package – The panther stalking its prey, the tiger in the shadow – the apex predator has always had the scent of power, blood and victory. Embrace the wildness inside with our latest pheromone enhancement technology, now 2-for-1 with anything from our “Sensational Allure” range. Offer must end Friday.

  “No but yeah but listen to me, if we all shag Harmony, yeah, and then she scores us on a rating of one to ten – or if we have like, a questionnaire, because it isn’t all about size . . . ”

  A roar of laughter from the crowd, and Harmony laughed too in between shrill objections, because that was what was required, because it was funny, because this was her life and these were her friends. “ . . . No but yeah, seriously, like, sexual prowess isn’t just about how big it is, yeah, so we should come up with these questions and then, like, blindfold her maybe, so it’s really scientific . . . ”

  “I’m not shagging you. I’m definitely not shagging you . . . ”

  “God, you’re so stiff, Harmony. You’re such a prude . . . ”

  “You’re just not worth it, luv,” she replied merrily, though as luck would have it she did end up shagging Marco that evening, and it was great, and he was really awkward about it the next morning and neither of them spoke about it after.

  The first time she tried cocaine, it didn’t have any effect on her.

  None.

  Zilch.

  She couldn’t understand, and when she got home, there was an alert in her nano control panel.

  You have been exposed to an illegal and dangerous toxin. It has been neutralised free of charge as part of your renal package. You may create an optional exception AT YOUR OWN RISK for an additional £14.99 a month via your control panel.

  After thinking it through, and doing a little research online, she didn’t pay for a toxin exemption. Instead she went back to the parties and took the cocaine, and revelled at how she was still in control, part of this world and ruling it, rocking it. And one night she found herself dancing with the boys and Jazzy, and she smelled Jazzy’s sweat, felt the heat of her body, the brush of thigh against thigh and, without knowing why, found herself pushing against the other woman’s flesh, belly to belly, groin to groin, writhing, snaking across Jazzy’s body, pushing her lips into her neck, against her lips, fingers around her backside until with a roaring laugh and a “Piss off, Harmony!” Jazzy shoved her away and buckled over with laughter, and the others laughed too and Harmony wasn’t sure what had happened, but laughed because it was that or be an idiot, the only one not in on the joke, and scurried to the bar and ordered vodka, which the nanos processed into a warm tingling in her forehead and belly that was nothing nearly enough like being drunk.

  At the office, Jazzy said nothing, and smirked at Harmony from the corner of her mouth, and the boys chuckled at a private joke, and when Harmony got home that evening she tore through the online store, ripping through data until at 3.40 a.m. she found the upgrade.

  Elevation – the ultimate pack for the sexual woman. Enhance your libido, bring your hormones into perfect balance and unleash the real woman inside! Use at your own risk.

  It was the most expensive upgrade she’d ever bought.

  She thought a long time before buying, but her overdraft had been automatically extended by the credit card company, and she knew it was the right thing to do the moment the payment went through.

  Chapter 12

  When she met Jiannis, she could immediately identify and cost the programs running in his body, and liked the choices he’d made. Too many men went for the boxer’s build, but he’d chosen a marathon-runner’s physique, with the toned arms of a tennis player and a dash of enhancement to his genitals that made him a magnificent lover without entering into the realm of the ridiculous as too many men were often tempted to do.

  Jiannis worked in finance, did something with data, and she met him while selling him the luxury character-filled new-build apartment on Blackfriars Bridge complete with private off-road parking, twenty-four-hour concierge, private gym and film club. He made an offer immediately, on the condition she had a drink with him, and they christened the deal with their bodies at the secondary inspection once offer was accepted, then again on the confirmation of purchase and, of course, on the day keys changed hands.

  She knew he was the one for her when they did a line of coke to
gether down the club off Cannon Street, and she realised that he too was doing it just for show, just to be with the lads, and had left his anti-toxin protocols active, just like her. He liked to be in control. He liked to control his job, his body, his world. Nothing he did was unconsidered, even when it seemed wild, delightful, spontaneous. He understood the value of appearance, and knew how to appear relaxed when tense, at ease when on guard. She admired him instinctively, and liked that he admired her too, and when he asked her to move in with him when her lease came up for renewal, she decided it was probable she’d end up loving him.

  “He seems like a very . . . respectable . . . young man,” was Karen’s assessment the day they had lunch together in Richmond, a halfway point between her life and her mum’s, straight up the railway from Bracknell. “He seems . . . yes, well, I hope he does right by you.”

  If Karen had called him a scion of the Hun, a reprobate and a dangerous fool, she would not have done so in stronger language, and Harmony knew this, and chose just this once to hear the words spoken rather than their meaning, and smiled her perfect smile, a smile to illuminate the world, and said, “Really glad you like him, Mum.”

  Six months of bliss followed.

  She knew they were blissful, because she had decided that they almost certainly would be, and though she was a sensible woman, a woman who knew how to respect herself, there was no denying that Jiannis was one of the smartest, sexiest, most on-it people she’d ever met. If being with him meant that she was also all of these things, then she’d take it. She would rejoice in this identity.

  He chose the best restaurants, and even though the bill was sometimes a bit . . . but it was OK, because her credit card kept on extending the overdraft and she was still making minimum payments, and besides, he’d take her out a lot anyway, pay for her drinks down the club, though she’d always insist she was her own woman and could pay for herself.