She looks across at the younger woman – what does it matter if she’s madeup to the nines? It’s her fine brain that matters. And she feels panic, panic because she has never spoken publicly, because she cannot trust her brain, because Erica has spent months applying herself to the words all around them tonight. The faces turned towards her are full of surprise, expectation, waiting. It would make a great photograph. But she cannot talk. She never could. If she had been able to, she might have saved her name, long ago.

Erica leans forward, and says quietly, ‘Tell us what you remember.’

Yes. She can do that.

‘This is what I remember,’ she begins. Her voice feels thin in her throat and she has a sense of the room leaning in to her. That won’t do. She straightens, tightens her hold, begins again.

‘This is what I remember. I remember that, in 1968, I was a young woman from Essex who knew what a camera could do, but not a lot else. I had a feeling, though, that I was worth more than the world was telling me I was worth. I could—’ Her mouth has too much saliva, from the drugs, and a tang of metal. ‘I could taste it. So I went to see what some women at Dagenham were doing to change the world. And, thanks to Leonie Barratt, I joined in.

‘This is what I remember about the women’s movement. It was a fierce, furious beast, and it was sure that it would win. It didn’t compromise and it didn’t care. It invited the world to smell its hairy armpits and to mock its dungarees and it didn’t matter because women knew we were right.’

‘Hell yeah!’ shouts one of the sisters, Kiki maybe, or Fen, from the back, and although Vee appreciates it, she can’t acknowledge it, can’t do anything but keep her eyes on the top of the podium. There’s the soft steadiness of Erica’s presence to her left. She doesn’t look at her; feeling her there is enough.