The athlete is holding up a medal, letting the crowd praise her – how strange it is to see a woman taking credit, still – and when the noise dies down she starts to tell a story. It’s about abuse and fear, about so many men in authority taking what they shouldn’t, and that quiet sneaks over them all again, as they listen. Vee hears enough to be horrified – so many of these stories, and yet instead of becoming inured to them, hearing each makes all the others sharper, more bitter and more sad. But at the same time she is watching, capturing a face with tears running down it here, two women with their arms around each other there, a woman who has put her placard down and is leaning against it a little way behind her. It says, in haphazard capitals, ‘PROTESTING THIS SHIT SINCE THE 1960s’. Vee takes a photograph which includes the placard, the slump of the woman’s spine as she rests, the concentrated look on her face as she looks towards the stage. They might have known each other, back then.

Even though she’s only watching, at a fraction of a distance, not bellowing and showing her fury like the women she sees in front of her, still she is part of this purpose, less conscious of her body, mind full of now. She assumes that she has a headache, still, but she really cannot tell. As speaker after speaker takes the stage, she focuses, winds on, watches, waits, and feels outrage and sorrow and strength seep into her. Her own preoccupations seem like nothing, here. The chants are getting more ragged edged and sustained, the noise level creeping up and up. The police horses seem more restless, one in the corner of Vee’s field of vision stepping from foot to foot, stretching its neck and raising its head as though trying, also, to get free. Vee turns the camera to see if she can find a shot. There is tension starting to string its way through the air now, binding everyone in the space. This is how it goes, sometimes. The protesters are primed, ready for action: that’s how it needs to be. But it is best if they go home primed, and start to take that energy out into the world, making changes. Leonie called it ‘delayed amplification’ and she was the queen of it. When she used to speak at meetings, in the early days, she could send their sisters home bursting with purpose and intention. They would come to the next meetings full of reports of what they had done: bosses challenged, legs unshaven, MPs questioned, dinner dishes left, unapologetically, for someone else to wash.