Yes, it had been all business with her consultant this morning. She’d reported the viciousness of the headaches, the nausea building and her vocabulary and memories being nibbled away at. Maybe. It’s not like it was after the surgery in 2007, when Vee was aware of great craters of darkness where her memories and her knowledge used to be, and known that nothing would return them to her. If she hadn’t fallen out of love with photography after Leonie died, she would have done it in the aftermath of surgery. She had spent night after night, looking at photographs, sitting with colleagues and old friends from the movement, asking them to tell her the truth that the images swore to. And knowing that, at the moments she pressed the shutter, then wound the film on, she was choosing what to see.

What’s happening to her now is of a different order. This is the imperceptible alteration in the twilight that means your first shot might be OK, but the last on the film will be grainy and barely usable. Vee had asked the questions she had brought. They might have been the ones she asked last time.

The straightness of the answers had been comforting, in the way that a clean wound is comforting when you thought it was going to be a ragged cut.

Expect to become more tired, and for your memory to be affected. Know that your judgement is impaired. As for your sight – we can scan you again, but really, you’re the best judge.

I don’t think it will be more than two months.

*

Erica is teetering on those boots again. Well, if this is what gets her through the day, so be it. She looks terrible, pale and tired. But when she sees Vee her eyes brighten; instead of waiting she comes out onto the pavement. They look at the poster together, and with Erica next to her, Vee can suddenly see what she sees.

She may, finally, have arrived at wherever she set out to, on that sunny day in Dagenham in June 1968. Some people never get an exhibition. Some people are truly forgotten. And that would be worse, even if there have been times when she thought it would be better.

Erica looks down at her hands. ‘Do you want to come in?’ she asks. ‘I mean – I know you do, that’s why you’re here. I’m – I’m just nervous.’

Vee nods. ‘Lead the way,’ she says.

Erica puts her hand to the wall as the movement of the lift begins; she wobbles, a little, and Vee puts out an arm. How good, to steady someone else. ‘Are you OK?’

Erica gives a smile-not-smile. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh.’ Vee knows that she is supposed to be congratulatory, but brain tumour or no, she can see from Erica’s face that it’s not that simple. ‘Well.’