Here, though, there’s too much energy, anger, connection for everyone to simply go home. It might be that today really is just one march too many, for people like Vee who have been doing it since the 1970s and for those who first took to the streets when Trump came to power, thinking it was a question of months, not years, until the world changed for the better. It might be that there needs to be a moment like the one Vee can feel coming: the women running amok, for once, tearing down shop signs instead of Instagramming their fury. Vee stretches her shoulders, deliberately feeling the blades pull apart. She might be getting ready to run. Or to throw something. The thought of it makes her smile. How long is it since she has felt that Leonie would be proud of her?

Erica is making her way towards her; except this is a spotlit Erica, lighter, brighter. She starts talking when she’s three metres away, even though Vee has no hope of hearing her. ‘. . . Amazing! I had no idea that it would be like this!’ she is saying as she comes to stand next to Vee.

‘Good.’ Vee sees herself at the Miss World protest, when she first fully understood that she was not alone in feeling that, for all of her ambition and her work, the world was holding her back, pushing her down.

‘I’m done with sitting back,’ Erica says, ‘I’m going to do more. I need to see this stuff. I haven’t always seen it.’ She looks at her shoes, then up at Vee, shading her eyes from a sudden spear of low sun. ‘I haven’t always looked. I’m going to see it and I’m going to challenge it.’ The light in Erica’s eyes, the way she is tense and excited, suggest that she would be the first to throw a brick, given half the chance.

‘Good,’ Vee says again, stepping down from the wall, ‘I’m glad.’ And then she does something she would never normally do. She reaches out an arm to Erica, high and wide, and Erica, without hesitation, steps in, embraces her and says, ‘Thank you.’ Her hair feels exactly the same as Leonie’s against Vee’s face. Vee cannot remember the last time she was held, or wanted to be. Maybe it’s the tumour. She is supposed to be aware that there may be ‘behavioural changes’ as her disease progresses. But is the desire to be close to someone as she gets closer to death really an oddity? Is the fact that there are things she cannot remember about Leonie, about Erica, so unusual for a woman of her years?

‘How’s your head? Do you need to go?’ Erica asks.