She looks for Erica. It takes a couple of seconds to find her. She is shifting further into the crowd the way that people do, without ever noticing. There’s no photograph worth taking there; just the green of the coat, the straight brown of her hair, nothing much to see. She’ll take a photograph later, a record for Erica that she was here.

Vee crouches – her vision tilts for a second, but soon finds equilibrium again – and from this angle, placards form a new skyline against the cold March blue; in the bottom of the shot, the hats of the women in the crowd make a bumping horizon. That’s more like it. Click.

Now she’s started she can’t stop. Was she always compelled like this? Maybe she was. She ought to be cold but she doesn’t feel it. She photographs an older woman, hair dyed purple, pussy hat, blowing on her hands, and the cloud of coldness in the air makes the boldness of her stare all the greater. It’s a good photograph. In Vee’s heyday, that would have made a cover shot for a picture editor worth their salt: mauve hair, pink hat, blue sky, grey air, questioning bright eyes, demanding to know why Vee is pointing her camera in that direction. The cover line would be something like: ‘Women’s Rights: coming in from the cold’.

Looking around the crowd, she picks out other faces, captures their expressions of outrage, unity, sadness with a series of shutter clicks. The crowd is more multi-coloured than it once would have been, more nuanced, too. As though there are more kinds of woman than there used to be.

Leonie once wrote that feminism would only succeed when it was made up of more than white women and dykes. Well, here you are, Leonie, Vee thinks: here is your crowd, my friend. Black, brown, white, gay, straight, bi, cis, trans. Vee takes shot after shot. She would photograph every woman here, if she could. If there was any film left over she’d photograph the men, too.

Oh, this is a good feeling. If Vee aches, she doesn’t know it. Her old self is back. She might be missing a part of her brain, but with her camera in her hands she is very nearly whole.

She is months from death and yet she is happier than she has been in a long time.