Deborah St James came at Sanctuary Buildings by way of Parliament Square on one of the hottest days of what had so far been a blazingly hot summer. She’d been asked to meet with one of the undersecretaries at the Department for Education as well as the head of the NHS.
‘We’d like to talk you about a project,’ she’d been told. ‘Are you available to take something on?’
She was. She’d been casting round for a project since the publication of London Voices four months earlier, an undertaking that she’d spent the last several years putting together. So she was happy to attend a meeting that might turn into a new project although she couldn’t imagine what sort of photography the Department for Education in conjunction with the NHS might have in mind.
She approached a guard at the door with her identification in hand. However, he wasn’t so much interested in that as was he interested in the contents of her capacious bag. He told her that her mobile phone was fine but she was going to have to prove that her digital camera actually was a camera. Deborah obliged by taking his picture. She showed it to him. He waved her towards the door.
He said, just as she was about to enter, ‘Delete that, though. I look like crap.’
At the reception desk, she asked for Dominique Shaw. Deborah St James here to speak with the undersecretary for the school system,
she added. After a discreetly murmured phone call, she was handed a lanyard with VISITOR printed on the card that hung from it. Meeting Room 4, she was told. Floor 2. Turn to the right if she chose the lift. Turn to the left if she chose the stairs. She went for the stairs.
When she arrived at Meeting Room 4, though, she assumed she’d been given the wrong number. Five people sat round a polished conference table, not the two she’d been led to believe wished to meet her. Three floor fans were trying heroically to mitigate the temperature in the room. They were only creating something of a scirocco. A woman rose from the end of the table and came towards her, hand extended. She was smartly dressed in a manner that shouted ‘government official’, and she was decorated with overlarge rimless spectacles and gold earrings the size of golf balls. She was Dominique Shaw, she said, Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for the School System. She introduced the others so quickly that for the most part,
Deborah only caught their positions: the head of the NHS, a representative from Barnardo’s, the founder of something called Orchid House, and a woman with the name Narissa whose surname Deborah didn’t catch. They were a diverse group: one was Black, one looked Korean, Dominique Shaw was white, and the woman called Narissa appeared to be mixed race…
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