There was something that Vee needed to say to Erica, to give her; she can’t remember what. There’s a mushrooming of noise in the gallery, laughter, the gradual raising of voices over other voices so that soon everyone will be shouting over everyone without realising they are doing it. Each notch in volume is a notch of pain.

She needs to remember the thing for Erica. And then she can go home and be done with all of this.

‘They love the contact sheets,’ Erica continues, with the chattering brightness of a woman at a deathbed: anything but silence. ‘I suppose a lot of people don’t know what they are. And it’s a reminder of old times, for the rest.’

That’s what she’s been trying to remember. ‘In my bag,’ Vee says. She cannot open her eyes, now; she hurts, skull and spine, at the very thought of light.

There’s the sound of the zip of Vee’s bag pulling back. ‘What do you need? Do you have more painkillers in here?’

‘There’s an envelope for you,’ Vee says.

It’s A4, board-backed, and Vee checked more than once that she had put the right things in it, and that she had put it into her bag. She found an empty mug in the fridge this morning, and has left her key in the front door more than once over the last week. She hears Erica tear at the paper flap; a chair scrapes as she sits. ‘What are these?’

‘Look,’ Vee says. Erica has the power over the images now.

There is a rustling sound. Erica is taking out the two contact sheets. If Vee can’t speak of this – and she doesn’t dare, in case she is wrong – then the images can.

The first contact sheet is the film of Leonie and Erica on the day Leonie died. Vee hadn’t looked at these photographs for years. They had been a shock when she developed them, in her own darkroom, sometime during her recovery from surgery. Her world had lurched and pitched as she watched the images bloom through the liquid in the chemical bath. She saw love, affection, a bond. She saw a mother and daughter. Or, she thought she did. In the photographs, the roundness of Leonie’s body made it look as though she was curving herself in, around Erica, an animal with her young. In one image, Erica looked simply, joyously happy; about to laugh, not yet moving, so caught in uncoerced delight. The expression on Leonie’s face matches it.