But she hadn’t called. She’d gone home and got into bed. She wasn’t tired but she was cold with shock and grief, over-exposed to the world. She needed the dark. She’d dropped into a doze, a terrible half-sleep in which her brain reran the morning: Ursula crying, Erica being ushered away to her room, the sight of Leonie, quiet and clammy. Waking after an hour that felt like seven, she went downstairs and poured herself a glass of rum, and then another. Annabel had been to collect the films that were waiting to go to the lab, and drop off contact sheets for Vee to look at. And Vee was definitely planning to call the lab. She had another drink; she started to get the calls from their friends, as the news started to bleed out into their world, their friends, the women Leonie knew. She didn’t call the lab. She couldn’t, really, feel any sense of urgency about it. The thought of the world continuing to turn seemed ridiculous to her. And every time she formed the intention to make the call, explain what needed to be done with the film, either the phone rang again, or the thought of having to sound businesslike, make a request as though this was any other film on any other day, felt too impossible. There was no Leonie any more. And there had always been Leonie. This was a new world, harsh, lonely, and impossible to navigate, and Vee found she had no will to try.

The next day, she’d gone to work, because she didn’t know what else to do. She’d been photographing a girl band, with permed hair, ripped jeans and tanned stomachs. She caught their excitement, their exhausting happy exuberance, and she wished that she had the words to tell them all the ways they were betraying themselves and all that the generation before them had worked for. This was not what she had hoped for, the night she had photographed tearful beauty queens outside the Café de Paris, the night Leonie hurled flour bombs at Bob Hope. It was a tiring shoot, noisy and shambolic, with the band’s manager interrupting and the girls always needing something more, coffee or extra lipgloss. And maybe Vee forgot to make the phone call to the lab, or maybe it wasn’t even anything that deliberate, that active. She had just lost the intention to do it, among all the other things she lost with Leonie. Nothing had mattered, in those days. Just groping through to another sleepless night.