“Okay.” Lola shrugs, and bends down to pick up her fallen pencil. “Nothing on Instagram.”

“How’s the design going?” asks Simi, coming close enough to peer over Lola’s shoulder.

“Not bad,” says Lola, flipping the page over to one that is fresh and blank. “I’ll show you when I’ve done more.”

Simi sighs, and goes back to her desk, her head tumbling with thoughts about Marybelle and Fred, and seeing them both in London. She is excited, but afraid to be excited at the same time. She cannot believe that they will actually be in her city. The feeling is the same as when she thinks about her trip to Zimbabwe – she is buzzing that she went, but in London feels so far removed that at times, she doubts she ever did. Her hand is the only tangible proof, and now, the memory of the morning’s call which seems as fragile and disconnected as her own state of mind.

That trip. That cyclone. Made me rethink everything. Life. What is it? What matters? What doesn’t matter? Does this matter? This shop. Ten years of my life. All this fabric. All my clients.

She looks around the shop from kaftan to kaftan, corner to corner.

“You okay?” Lola asks. “You look a bit … a bit … somewhere else.”

“Just thinking. I thought I had all the answers. That the Kaftan Shop was important. But are we good for people? I mean, maybe we’ve been selling the wrong way round. You know all this ‘you must look beautiful. Buy this. Buy that.’”

“Isn’t that how shops work.”

“But, is it good for us? That place, Zimbabwe … nothing was perfect. Sometimes stuff wasn’t even there. I mean the basics – shops like we know them, roads like we know them. The lodge was great, but the in between stuff. But nobody complained. They just got on with it. They’re survivors. I went to bits. So that’s what I want to find – what I want to sell. How to live. How to stay really alive. I want to wrap whatever it is into each kaftan. That being alive. Being part of something.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I think I’m talking about what you’re talking about. Stories. I want every kaftan to have a story. Have a soul. Where it’s from. The cloth. The community. So the buyer loves it. Looks after it. Passes it on.”

“Okay … ,” says Lola.

“And people can bring us their cloth. Old fabric. New fabric. Tell us their stories. Then we make the kaftans. Make them beautiful. Make them alive.”

“Okaaay … ” says Lola, chewing the end of her pencil, as she considers her boss in the grip of this strange new excitement.

“This is going to be the Kaftan Community Shop. Your new kaftan, your design for those children, is going to be at our new opening. So are Marybelle and Fred.”

 “But you don’t even know when they’re coming …”

“They will …”

“And what are we going to do with all this fabric we’ve already got?”

“Find out where each roll came from.”

“Really?” Lola’s eyes pop with dread.

“I’ll do it,” says Simi. “You design. We’ll …” Simi feels her mobile buzz again.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023