The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  This woman is an actor, well known, who refused to be paid off after being sexually harassed by a director. Even though everyone knows her story – it’s one of the ones that kicked the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements into orbits the world could no longer ignore – something akin to silence rustles over the crowd as she tells her story. The speaker is good – she has the confidence to pause, to let the crowd absorb her words. And they do. More than the noise and the shouts, this is Vee’s favourite part of any event, and it always has been. Her own first march, with Leonie, was smaller in scale than this one – she thinks again of how overwhelmed she would be, if she was Erica right now – and the world was different. But some things haven’t changed. The listening women are focused, still, and their faces show so much power and intelligence, still, and her desire to capture, to record, seems as strong again as it was fifty years ago.

  Vee steps up onto a low wall, unzips her camera bag, and takes out her beloved old Olympus OM-1. Once she started using this model – in ’75, maybe – she didn’t see that she ever needed anything fancier, better, or more sophisticated. Instead she bought another body, then another, all the same, and she went out into the world with one round her neck and a spare slung over her shoulder. This is her implement and her weapon, and they have been through enough together to work as one. Vee loops the worn, warm strap around her neck, clips off the lens cap – she loves the tension then give of the movement – then palms it into her pocket. When she does this, she isn’t seventy and dying. She’s twenty and anxious, thirty and assertive, forty and confident, fifty and at the top of her game. She’s sixty and learning herself all over again. She’s Veronica Moon: photographer, observer, force.

  She lifts the camera to her face and her left eye finds the viewfinder, relaxes into the way of seeing it invites. Her right eye closes, and the place between her eyebrows rests against the top of the camera. Vee’s left eye is, has always been, the one that wants to do the looking – a camera has never felt right to her when she tries to use her right eye – so when she takes a shot she has to move her head away to wind the film on, with the lever at the top right. She used to envy photographers who took shot after shot without needing to take the camera from their right eye, winding on as they looked, but now she realises that that second of grace and refocus gives her the chance to find something a fraction better than what she had in the last frame.

  Erica glances around, looking for her, and Vee smiles, then makes a shooing motion with her free hand; Erica does not need her, here, and she definitely does not need Erica. A photographer is a solitary thing, half-person, half-camera. Her feet are solid and her hands are steady, as serious as they have always been when they are working.

  Vee scans through and over the crowd, waits for something to snag her eye. First it’s a woman with a child of five or six on her shoulders, the woman reaching a hand up and the child reaching for it, both of them smiling, neither able to see the other’s face. She presses the shutter, winds on, settles in again, looking for another image. A better one, this time.

  She looks for Erica. It takes a couple of seconds to find her. She is shifting further into the crowd the way that people do, without ever noticing. There’s no photograph worth taking there; just the green of the coat, the straight brown of her hair, nothing much to see. She’ll take a photograph later, a record for Erica that she was here.

  Vee crouches – her vision tilts for a second, but soon finds equilibrium again – and from this angle, placards form a new skyline against the cold March blue; in the bottom of the shot, the hats of the women in the crowd make a bumping horizon. That’s more like it. Click.

  Now she’s started she can’t stop. Was she always compelled like this? Maybe she was. She ought to be cold but she doesn’t feel it. She photographs an older woman, hair dyed purple, pussy hat, blowing on her hands, and the cloud of coldness in the air makes the boldness of her stare all the greater. It’s a good photograph. In Vee’s heyday, that would have made a cover shot for a picture editor worth their salt: mauve hair, pink hat, blue sky, grey air, questioning bright eyes, demanding to know why Vee is pointing her camera in that direction. The cover line would be something like: ‘Women’s Rights: coming in from the cold’.

  Looking around the crowd, she picks out other faces, captures their expressions of outrage, unity, sadness with a series of shutter clicks. The crowd is more multi-coloured than it once would have been, more nuanced, too. As though there are more kinds of woman than there used to be.

  Leonie once wrote that feminism would only succeed when it was made up of more than white women and dykes. Well, here you are, Leonie, Vee thinks: here is your crowd, my friend. Black, brown, white, gay, straight, bi, cis, trans. Vee takes shot after shot. She would photograph every woman here, if she could. If there was any film left over she’d photograph the men, too.

  Oh, this is a good feeling. If Vee aches, she doesn’t know it. Her old self is back. She might be missing a part of her brain, but with her camera in her hands she is very nearly whole.

  She is months from death and yet she is happier than she has been in a long time.

  Being here, in the noise and the fury and the overwhelming goodwill from sister to sister, is something like being young, and very likely to be the last time she experiences this. Oh, what they could have done, in the 1970s, with mobile phones and a media shaped and called out by any woman with a hashtag and a sense of outraged self: Leonie would have loved it. (Once she had vented her outrage at media still owned, governed and run by men.) The sisterhood of the 1970s would have won, properly, thoroughly, if they had only had what women today have, and think nothing of. Surely.

  Leonie would have loved to see Erica here, too. (There’s something about Erica’s name that bugs Vee, at the edges of what she has forgotten.) And been horrified that it was her first demo. Although, of course, if Leonie was here Erica would have been to plenty of protests, whether Ursula liked it or not. Vee lets the camera search for Erica again, finds her further forward now, her small green back standing out. She’s talking to the woman next to her, pointing at the stage, earnest. The sight of her makes Vee lower her camera and close her eyes, let the pain be in her head, instead of outside it, joined to and drowned by this noisy, fierce crowd, whooping their support for the actor who is calling for more action, for persistence and resistance and never giving up. Erica looks around, in the lull, looking for Vee, who raises a hand. Erica looks brighter than Vee has yet seen her. ‘Thank you’, she mouths, and then she is pushing a fist into the air with everyone else, as the actor leaves the stage, her own fist raised.

  Vee doesn’t recognise the next speaker, but from the shape of her, the poise, she must be an athlete.

  The athlete is holding up a medal, letting the crowd praise her – how strange it is to see a woman taking credit, still – and when the noise dies down she starts to tell a story. It’s about abuse and fear, about so many men in authority taking what they shouldn’t, and that quiet sneaks over them all again, as they listen. Vee hears enough to be horrified – so many of these stories, and yet instead of becoming inured to them, hearing each makes all the others sharper, more bitter and more sad. But at the same time she is watching, capturing a face with tears running down it here, two women with their arms around each other there, a woman who has put her placard down and is leaning against it a little way behind her. It says, in haphazard capitals, ‘PROTESTING THIS SHIT SINCE THE 1960s’. Vee takes a photograph which includes the placard, the slump of the woman’s spine as she rests, the concentrated look on her face as she looks towards the stage. They might have known each other, back then.

  Even though she’s only watching, at a fraction of a distance, not bellowing and showing her fury like the women she sees in front of her, still she is part of this purpose, less conscious of her body, mind full of now. She assumes that she has a headache, still, but she really cannot tell. As speaker after speaker takes the stage, she focuses, winds on, watches, waits, and
feels outrage and sorrow and strength seep into her. Her own preoccupations seem like nothing, here. The chants are getting more ragged edged and sustained, the noise level creeping up and up. The police horses seem more restless, one in the corner of Vee’s field of vision stepping from foot to foot, stretching its neck and raising its head as though trying, also, to get free. Vee turns the camera to see if she can find a shot. There is tension starting to string its way through the air now, binding everyone in the space. This is how it goes, sometimes. The protesters are primed, ready for action: that’s how it needs to be. But it is best if they go home primed, and start to take that energy out into the world, making changes. Leonie called it ‘delayed amplification’ and she was the queen of it. When she used to speak at meetings, in the early days, she could send their sisters home bursting with purpose and intention. They would come to the next meetings full of reports of what they had done: bosses challenged, legs unshaven, MPs questioned, dinner dishes left, unapologetically, for someone else to wash.

  Here, though, there’s too much energy, anger, connection for everyone to simply go home. It might be that today really is just one march too many, for people like Vee who have been doing it since the 1970s and for those who first took to the streets when Trump came to power, thinking it was a question of months, not years, until the world changed for the better. It might be that there needs to be a moment like the one Vee can feel coming: the women running amok, for once, tearing down shop signs instead of Instagramming their fury. Vee stretches her shoulders, deliberately feeling the blades pull apart. She might be getting ready to run. Or to throw something. The thought of it makes her smile. How long is it since she has felt that Leonie would be proud of her?

  Erica is making her way towards her; except this is a spotlit Erica, lighter, brighter. She starts talking when she’s three metres away, even though Vee has no hope of hearing her. ‘. . . Amazing! I had no idea that it would be like this!’ she is saying as she comes to stand next to Vee.

  ‘Good.’ Vee sees herself at the Miss World protest, when she first fully understood that she was not alone in feeling that, for all of her ambition and her work, the world was holding her back, pushing her down.

  ‘I’m done with sitting back,’ Erica says, ‘I’m going to do more. I need to see this stuff. I haven’t always seen it.’ She looks at her shoes, then up at Vee, shading her eyes from a sudden spear of low sun. ‘I haven’t always looked. I’m going to see it and I’m going to challenge it.’ The light in Erica’s eyes, the way she is tense and excited, suggest that she would be the first to throw a brick, given half the chance.

  ‘Good,’ Vee says again, stepping down from the wall, ‘I’m glad.’ And then she does something she would never normally do. She reaches out an arm to Erica, high and wide, and Erica, without hesitation, steps in, embraces her and says, ‘Thank you.’ Her hair feels exactly the same as Leonie’s against Vee’s face. Vee cannot remember the last time she was held, or wanted to be. Maybe it’s the tumour. She is supposed to be aware that there may be ‘behavioural changes’ as her disease progresses. But is the desire to be close to someone as she gets closer to death really an oddity? Is the fact that there are things she cannot remember about Leonie, about Erica, so unusual for a woman of her years?

  ‘How’s your head? Do you need to go?’ Erica asks.

  Vee probably does. There will be consequences from this day, for sure, pain and exhaustion, and maybe another section of her brain dying from the sheer effort of being here. But right now – and what does it matter if it is the tumour talking? – the thought of her flat is as appealing as the thought of her grave.

  Before she can say anything, though, it begins.

  There’s a sharp spike of sound; a cry, a shout. She swings her body around, bringing the camera to her eye, an ingrained habit. There’s some sort of argument between a woman holding a placard and a police officer. Vee takes a photograph, another, moving closer and closer.

  The police officer sees them and walks over. ‘Were you taking photographs of me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vee says. She reaches into her pocket for the lens cap and pushes it back into place.

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘I don’t believe there’s any reason why I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Are you a journalist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She used to be,’ Erica says, ‘and a bloody good one.’

  ‘Could you show me, please?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Vee says, ‘it’s a film camera.’

  ‘And why should she?’ Erica chips in. ‘She’s within her rights to take photographs.’

  Vee smiles at Erica; it’s good to see fire in her, to know it’s there.

  And Erica takes the smile and uses it as fuel, as some sort of encouragement. ‘Fucking police,’ she says to Vee, as though the officer can’t hear them. ‘Fucking typical entitled men who think they can harass women. Bastards.’ Vee has never heard her swear. She’s never seen her spoiling for a fight, either.

  On the other side of Trafalgar Square there’s the sound of something breaking, a different kind of fury in the shouts; the chants have got ragged, moved to outraged yelling. It’s as though the air has got sharper and dropped five degrees in the space of two breaths. A collective tensing of muscles runs through the crowd, police and protestors both.

  Vee knows what this means.

  To her left, the camera crews are paying attention again, focusing on the confrontations that are breaking out here and there. They will soon expand, she knows: the riot police will move in, and the protesters will get angrier, and there will be no chance of going home quietly.

  The officer looks Erica up and down. ‘Could I search your bag, please, madam?’

  ‘Why do you want to search my bag?’ She sticks out her chin, her lip. Vee can see what is about to happen. She removes the lens cap from her camera, raises it to her eye.

  8 March 2018

  Hampton, four hours later

  ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Marcus says, getting to his feet, fast, when Erica walks through the door. In his arms, Tom shifts but doesn’t wake. Erica has always envied her husband’s ability to keep Tom sleeping. Her slightest move always seems to rouse him to restlessness. ‘Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? I was worried about you. I left you messages.’

  ‘My phone battery died.’ Erica hangs up her coat, then takes off her shoes and leaves them on the floor next to the shoe rack. She’s too tired to bend down to put them in place. Marcus will no doubt mention it when he notices, because she always points out when he doesn’t put his shoes away.

  Every part of her is worn out: feet, voice, back, eyes, ears, throat. And at the same time there’s an adrenaline fizz at the solar plexus that tells her she’s a long way from sleep. She’s hungry; thirsty; thrilled; horny. ‘Wait till I tell you what I’ve been doing.’

  There’s no wine in the fridge. No clean glasses, either. They had friends over last night, and of course, because Marcus has been Doing Childcare, he won’t have unloaded the dishwasher. She pours white wine from the rack into a melamine tumbler with a lion on the side of it, plonks in the last ice cube from the tray in the freezer, and goes to kiss Tom’s fluffy, warm clean-smelling head. Marcus turns his face away when she tries to kiss him, too.

  ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘You should be glad I’m home, then.’ She sits down next to him, puts her head against his shoulder, ignoring the way his body stiffens at her touch.

  ‘Of course I am. I thought you would be back hours ago. You said five at the latest.’

  ‘Well, events overtook.’ Logic, good sense, everything she knows about Marcus tells her to say nothing more, to go and take a bath and curl her body into his when he comes to bed, put a hand on his chest and let him know that despite everything she is not too tired for him. But there is nothing circumspect in the remains of the adrenaline. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

  He sighs, and smiles,
and frees an arm to put around her shoulders. ‘Stage dive? Tattoo? Joined the Foreign Legion?’

  ‘I got arrested!’ she blurts. Then, ‘Well, detained. By the police.’

  ‘You did what?’ Tom shifts and murmurs against the sudden tension in his father’s body.

  ‘A policeman tried to search my bag and I told him to fuck off. He’d been bothering Veronica about taking photographs. I didn’t think that was right. Next thing I knew I was in a police van.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’ Marcus turns to face her; Tom barely moves.

  ‘Yes! I had to wait ages at the station. They took my stuff away and searched me and I got my fingerprints taken.’ Erica holds her fingers towards him, making wriggling stars of her hands, as though they are proof, although it was done on a screen, not with ink, so there’s no trace. ‘And my DNA. I asked if that was standard and they said it was. Then I rang a solicitor they gave me the number for, and she said she didn’t need to come in and the police wouldn’t do anything. Then I sat in an interview room for a bit.’

  ‘Wow.’ It’s not an admiring ‘wow’, but she pretends not to notice. She smiles. He doesn’t smile. His face is a sky of hurt with a brow of coming thunder.

  ‘Erica, I was worried before you came back. I’m even more worried now.’

  And the bravado rushes out of her as suddenly as it rushed in. ‘I was scared.’ And she was, just for a few minutes, scared that being in the police station would stop being an adventure, a misunderstanding, a case of pissing off someone who didn’t, in that moment, need to be pissed off, and had the power to show it. She’d thought about miscarriages of justice, and whether she had to declare this on job applications. Wondered about the women who didn’t have the luxury of all the things that protected her, however much she didn’t want to believe that they did: money, skin colour, education.