‘You’re going to take photographs?’ Erica must have misheard. Vee doesn’t photograph. In an early email about the exhibition, she’d written: ‘I haven’t taken a photograph in more than twenty years, and I won’t again. You may not quote me on that, as you may not quote me – directly – on anything.’ She’d read the email out to Marcus. ‘You’ve a heart like a lion to be doing this,’ he’d said.

‘Yes. I am a photographer.’

‘I thought you didn’t photograph anymore.’ There’s a thrum of excitement in Erica, where grief was a few minutes ago.

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

*

It would be more accurate to say that her mind has changed. More accurate yet to say that disease has changed it. There is no reason for her to be doing this. But as she sorted through her equipment yesterday she had thought, why not? She won’t get the chance again. No one is going to notice her, or care about her, at a march. They’ll have bigger, better things to care about than what Veronica Moon is doing. And press photographers now won’t recognise her. They might have heard of her, studied her, but she looks like just another old woman. So, she’s going to take some photographs today. If the tumour is making her do it, squashing her memories and blocking her fear, well, she’s going to let it.

The trouble with having a tumour chewing through your brain, Vee thinks – putting aside impending death, for a moment, and worse, the threat of blindness – is that you know you cannot trust anything you think. At home, as Erica talked, Vee had seen, so clearly, so simply, that she was lonely, she was afraid, she needed someone the way Vee had once needed Leonie. And so coming to the march seemed more important than anything else. She’d had an odd thought, floating in from nowhere, that perhaps she owed Leonie this.

But then, in the cab, she’d become certain that the rattle and swerve of motion was doing sudden, terrible damage to her ailing brain. She holds on, hard fists and closed eyes, until the taxi driver drops them on Great George Street.

As soon as her feet hit solid ground again, and she begins to walk, her camera bag bouncing on her hip, she knows she can do this. They cut across to Parliament Street, walking with it just as it is changing form, turning from a flowing, street-bound river to a sprawling, square-edged pool of women.

The patches of song, the laughter and the chants taken up, shifting and swelling and quelling, work like a balm as she and Erica make their way towards them. There is nothing in the world like the sound of women protesting.