Tom has a look in his eye that tells her he isn’t going to settle. So she takes him in her arms – he’s getting heavy, she feels her body ‘oof’ at the effort – and holds his still-small form, dense with half-sleep, against her own. His body moulds against hers, his forehead against her cheek when she tilts her head towards him. It is not easy to hold this softness within her, for her child, when there is so much in the world that expects her to be hard.

Erica watches Vee as she walks from standing stone to standing stone, the umbrella a press of hard colour against the drab day. The older woman looks calm, meditative. And so, so ill. She seems thinner even than she was two weeks ago, when they last saw each other; greyer, too. Watching Ursula die taught Erica that death is cruellest as a fading.

The traffic is getting heavier, but at least the rain has stopped. Erica holds Tom a little closer and walks towards Vee, who has made her way back to the central sculpture, and is folding the umbrella, shaking raindrops from it. ‘I don’t think he’s going to go back to sleep,’ Erica says, and Tom confirms this with a yawn and three steady blinks before looking around. ‘What would you like to do?’ She braces for some sort of ticking-off: organisation, having a child, bringing it with her, even though the women who lived at the camps raised families here.

But Vee just smiles and indicates her bag. ‘Why don’t I take your photograph?’

10 April 2018

10 April 2018

Vee

The look on Erica’s face is priceless; surprise/shock/delight/puzzlement in a flickering slideshow. In the old days, she would have been ready, and she would have caught it on film.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’ Vee almost laughs at the surprise in Erica’s voice. ‘I am a photographer.’

‘Wow,’ Erica says, looking at Tom, licking her finger and wiping something from his face, then tucking her own hair behind her ear. ‘OK. What do you want me to do?’

‘Just do what you’re doing.’ Vee looks through the viewfinder, takes a shot just to see how Erica reacts. The protest photographs from a couple of weeks ago were nothing special, but she had enjoyed being in the darkroom again.

The sight of the camera has Erica standing as though she is in a queue for something unpleasant: unsure, anxious, straight-spined. Vee plants her feet, balances her body with her breath. ‘Tell me what you remember about Leonie.’