Erica glances towards the silent pushchair. It seems as though she’s going to say something, challenge what Vee has said, but she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. To her, Vee is a dying woman, to be coddled and humoured. Probably slightly more trouble than a child.

18 October 1981

18 October 1981

Leonie

It was good to get it all said. And the pain of that night had long since washed away, anyway, in the river of blood and time that being a woman entails. Leonie takes out her notebook and the pen she bummed from Vee. Even Vee’s pens are expensive these days. ‘River of blood and time: how motherhood washes women’s lives away.’ It won’t help this article but it could work in the book. That would put the cat among the sisters.

Vee has got leaner since they last saw each other, more muscular, and the cropped hair suits her. A few times during the drive Leonie had wanted to put her hand on Vee’s head, rub her palm along the grain of the stubble then against it. Her friend has always had the body of a skinny pre-pubescent boy, and the non-threatening presence to go with it. Maybe that’s why she’s gone so far, slipping through the gaps in the status quo with her flat chest and straight hips, hiding in plain sight, an acceptable woman-man for success within the patriarchy. She carries that camera bag as though it’s nothing, whereas Leonie knows it isn’t – she moved it off the front seat of the car this morning, and it weighed a ton. (Vee had said she thought Leonie would be ‘more comfortable in the back’. A euphemism for ‘too fat for the front’, so Leonie sat in the front just to show her. The car is ridiculously small, though, her thighs shoved by the door on one side and the gear stick on the other.)

Vee has seen that Leonie is watching her, and she grins, the way she used to when they were first friends, and Vee had saved up all her stories of the male chauvinist pigs she’d met and couldn’t wait to talk to Leonie about. Leonie smiles back – it’s good that Vee is here, that she wanted to come, that she invited her. It’s good to be in the thick of it, to be reporting from the front line for a change. Leonie knows the movement needs her; it needs people who strategise, and look at the big picture rather than reacting. But living in her head can be lonely, especially when the world won’t read her words.

The sunshine is feeble but it’s here, halfway to warm. She turns away from Vee and looks at the sprawl of tents, the banners flapping and snapping in the breeze, and the people everywhere, purposeful and vivid. Tanya, a friend from the old days, is coming towards her. ‘Leonie?’