Reading the first email from Erica about the exhibition had set off a series of explosions in Vee’s body, from mines that had been buried deep. A shock of memory behind her eyes, showing Leonie at her shining, smiling best. A thud of pain low in her pelvis, grief making her heavy and slow. And in the space between her sternum and her heart, a fizzing burst of loss, relived as though it was yesterday that she took the final photograph of her friend. She could be overwhelmed again, if she allowed it to happen.

She takes a deep breath and focuses on the media wall. A bare breast fills the space, then the image is broken up as individual screens are replaced with text. They look to be quotes about identity. Vee closes her eyes. It’s hard to believe that this still needs to be debated. Or that women are still wearing heels and having nose jobs.

‘And an artefact is anything that isn’t a print or an object, basically,’ Erica continues. If she noticed how Vee was almost overcome, she doesn’t show it. ‘You said you thought you might have some other things? Cameras? Images from your own archive?’

‘Did I? I remember you asked.’

Erica looks at her hands for a moment. Vee sees that she paints her nails, but it doesn’t look as though she takes very good care of them – the polish is chipped, and the cuticles are red, rubbed or worried at. Hands, eyes, teeth, feet – they are the tools you need most in your life, and they need to be cared for the way Vee’s father used to care for his carpentry tools, clean and sharp always. Erica will learn.

‘Shall we go up?’ Erica hands Vee a pass, and they take the lift to the second floor.

The current exhibit is a collection of photographs about cross-dressing. It must be years since she’s been to an exhibition that she hasn’t been expressly invited to. And even then, if she’s honest, she would only show up so that she could feel her own sense of injustice, rub the wound raw again at misogyny in action. She wonders who will come to one about her.

Erica says, ‘I know a lot of curators frown on a purely chronological approach, but I think it makes sense for your work. We will trace your growing confidence as a photographer as we trace the growth of the women’s movement.’

Vee takes a breath and looks around. The space is long and narrow, divided into sections and rooms. The light here is good: not natural, but neutral, plentiful, well directed.