The Worshipful Company of Milliners

T L Huchu

Woman wearing a pink floppy hat writing at a desk. Behind her, is a shadowy figure looking through frosted glass at her, or most likely, her hat. Image by Olen from images from Stockphoto

For as long as she could remember – one hour +/- – Kitsi had been in the factory. Before that, everything was bleak, blank, the foreboding ultra-darkness of non-existence. Like a baby gazelle, she had come to and wandered through the workshop floor aimlessly, skirting past milliners cutting felt, sewing and gluing. An arm reached out from behind her and touched her shoulder.

‘New girl, you wanna come work with me?’ said a smooth voice behind her. ‘My name’s Peshi.’

‘Kitsi,’ Kitsi replied, taking the four fingered hand offered, into her own.

‘Always confusing for a first timer but don’t worry, the fog will wear off in a bit.’

‘Where are we?’

‘Work, home, you choose what it is to you. Look around; these are all your sisters.’ Peshi swept her arm in a grand arc.

All around were thin figures in uniform black dresses, much like French maids. Their faces resembled cat-human hybrids, feline eyes and round faces. Arms moved about furiously working, and watching them for a moment as they sewed and hewed, Kitsi felt an itch in her palm. She scratched and the itch grew worse until it became an unbearable burning engulfing her whole hand, spreading its necrotic pain upwards. She rubbed her palms together. Peshi handed her a pair of scissors and the itching stopped. It became a lukewarm glow in her fingers.

‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop… you’ll get used to the itch.’ Peshi’s tail came up over her shoulder and scratched her nose. She smiled, her mouth revealing sharp white teeth.

‘Where am I?’ Kitsi asked, taking a deep breath, confused by it all.

‘Come, let’s see what Boss Lady has in store for you,’ she replied with a wink.

?

12 September 2008

I went to hunt the great white whale, and the Leviathan dragged me into the dark abyss. This is how it happens. You plunge the quill deep into your own heart. Query keyboard? Doesn’t have the same stylistic flourish.

The thrill of defeat. Tried to capture that lightning in a bottle one more time. And time is an unkind mistress. Unknowable. Made up of the universe’s flotsam, the great unwashed ocean full of plastic and elastic, bending, never breaking. But the Monster is torn out of my breast. Made out of my own rib. Grown and reared by my own hand. The same hand it bites: the same chest it pierces. From inside or out – the alien or the centurion?

A list of items left behind:

  1. Carbon and other elements (see periodic table)
  2. Debt and overdue mortgage
  3. Manuscript of sorts
  4. All my problems
  5. Et cetera

It will happen like this, as in a story. I will go into my garage. Arrange my papers where you (the reader of this diary) will find them. But before you find them, you’ll see me, a pendulum that has stopped swinging, hanging off the beam. For God’s sake, DNR!

Then again…

Real life never pans out as the intricate clockwork of stories. Beginning. Middle. End. I’ve made my bed. Now lie.

The factory on Lobengula Road was cold in the winter and hot in summer. Its zinc metal roof was buckled and creaked with the slightest wind. What windows remained unbroken were caked in grime many decades old, like frosted glass, and the sunshine came in a yellowy brown texture full of dots and dark spots.

Kitsi stood on the dusty floor, her black boots surrounded by the debris and off-cuts strewn by the milliners. A languid fellow in overalls with dreadlocks and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth walked around in a dream state with a large broom, sweeping through the rubbish, piling it at people’s feet and in the corners of the room, creating small paths and never picking up after himself.

‘We’ll share this workstation,’ said Peshi, drawing Kitsi out of her reverie. ‘Keep it neat, keep it tidy. Do not lend our stuff to anyone. Never ever, ever. No one returns things around here.’

Someone from the next table tutted.

‘Tools – scissors, needle, brush, pliers, pin pusher, spinner, corset stay, egg iron…’

‘This is all too much to take in,’ said Kitsi.

‘Consider this your crash course.’ Peshi kept on, pointing from one object to the next on their wooden worktop, gnarled and scarred from years of use.

Kitsi saw names etched out on the surface in desperate script, as though their owners didn’t want to be forgotten. She ran her hand over a T, her slender finger falling into the groove. All around came the loud noise of snipping, hammering, voices humming or singing in the far corners of the factory floor. A large round clock near the main doors chimed with every hour and a cuckoo came out, jerky in motion as though the springs were broken.

‘What if I can’t do this,’ Kitsi said.

‘Easiest job in the world, you’ll get the hang of it,’ Peshi replied, her voice carefree and full of gusto. ‘Cheer up. You’re not the first to join the Sisterhood. Only we’re not in London so…’

‘But what if I really can’t?’

‘Oh dear.’ Peshi stopped. Her fingers gripping a thimble like a croupier holding chips. ‘This is what you were born to do. Boss Lady runs a tight ship around here. No hangers-on allowed. It’s either in, or back to the void for you, and I certainly know which one I prefer.’

At the far corner of the table was a small forage cap in navy blue which Peshi was making. It was of the colonial style, soft sides with a firm round crown. The peak was made of black leather and bits of thread from the stitching jutted out. Peshi took it in hand and held it up.

‘You have to be careful around here.’ She leaned in closer and whispered, ‘The sisters are not averse to borrowing now and again in order to keep their quota up.’

Kitsi learned the trade with the ease of a nestling learning to fly. Imitation, desperate flaps in thin air, a view of the dense undergrowth in which lurks all manner of predators, for with the fear of oblivion behind her, she had no choice in the matter. Her fingers, she found, were thin and nimble. She could thread a needle with ease and stitched up Peshi’s work. A few times she pricked herself and drew warm red blood. She sucked her finger and went straight back to work.

Late in the morning, Peshi took a flask from a shelf under the worktop and told Kitsi it was time for a break. They both walked with a shuffling gait, each step no more than a few inches apart. From the back, they had the clockwork motion of geishas with bound feet, their tails swishing behind. Peshi stopped to introduce Kitsi to Fifi. They chatted for a moment, giggled like schoolgirls and moved on, out the creaking doors into the fresh air.

Kitsi took in the concrete pavement, cracked, with tufts of grass jutting out and litter blowing around. The fence was brown with rust and had more holes than wire.

Lorries coughed up smoke and droned along the road. The other industrial units were as dilapidated, many were worse. Roofs caved in. Machinery stolen and looted for scrap.

Near the gate sat an old security guard reading the Daily News.

‘Don’t know why they have him,’ said Peshi, lighting a cigarette. ‘The humans can’t see us anyway.’

‘How long have you been doing this?’ Kitsi asked.

‘Long enough to know enough not to care. Fancy a cuppa?’ Peshi poured a drink into the cap of her flask. ‘It used to be teaming around here, back in the day. Queues of trucks brought in bales of cotton and left with reams of cloth. Logs from Manicaland were pulped and became paper and timber. You could smell new rubber in the air from the tires and tubes manufactured around the corner. Early in the morning you had the wind chime of bottles rattling on the backs of Coca-Cola trucks, behind which came Lobels’ laden with bread. They did everything, cement, plastics, you name it. These streets were always packed with labourers going to and fro. It’s another world all together now.’

A woman carrying a dish of masawu fruit on her head and a baby on her back walked past on the desolate road. Kitsi tried to imagine this place as it had been in the past but could not. Their factory cast a sad shadow on them. She turned to see its worn bricks, the broken sign that said Mahendere Textiles with a picture of a hand, thumbs up, next to it.

Peshi finished her cigarette and crushed it with the sole of her boot.

‘Come on. Let’s get back inside,’ she said.

?

10 September 2001

Things will never be the same again. This thing, this Monster, this tyrant, has me by the throat and won’t let go.

Imagine. A man pierced in his breast by a knife. It (the knife) causes him untold pain and misery. As he lies on the ground, his arms cradle the knife, almost lovingly, gently. He knows if he tries to remove it, he’ll bleed out into the earth and surely die. In this moment, the knife is at once his tormentor and his saviour.

This sweet, beautiful idea. There can be no fault in this idea. If there is a fault, it is that it is perfect. In an imperfect universe, perfection is fault. But we are drawn to it, like mystics of old. Where there is darkness, let me be light. And light like a candle or stars consumes the object that creates the light. The giver of the gift is simultaneously destroyed by it. Does this make any sense?

Each new sentence I craft. Every time my finger presses on the keyboard, transmitting an electric signal towards the white page. I commit an atrocity. I move further and further away from that perfect idea. I am a builder with no cement or spirit level. Every new brick I lay drives me towards ruin. To counteract this, I redraft and rewrite, I lie to myself that each draft leads to more perfect sentences – as if there can ever be such a thing! But accept that premise. The question then becomes: is a book full of perfect sentences a perfect embodiment of the Idea, or is it merely solipsistic self-aggrandisement?

?

After a few weeks, Kitsi felt as though she was not actually learning from Peshi. The trade came to her like something remembered from a long time ago. It was in her blood. Peshi would show her a stitch or technique and within moments she had grasped it, her hands moving with the hesitant confidence of an old pro come out of retirement.

They had a box full of hats when one of the messenger-boys came to their table. He was short, less than three feet tall, and wore khaki shorts, a starched white shirt with brass buttons and a pith helmet that overwhelmed his head. He looked every bit the colonial servant, shiny brown shoes and a pristine moustache, and he even saluted the milliners, too.

‘Tell us where to take ‘em and we’ll do it for you and do it right, sister,’ he said.

‘Not a chance,’ Peshi replied with a laugh.

The messenger-boy stood on the balls of his feet and stretched up as high as he could, an extra inch or two.

‘Come on, sister, that’s not fair, is it?’ he said in a gruff voice.

‘Never trust them,’ Peshi said to Kitsi. ‘They mix the orders up, give hats to the wrong people and leave chaos in their wake.’

‘Reorganised the order, we have! Reliable like DHL, now.’ the messenger-boy replied.

‘That’s what you say every time and then you mess it up again. Come on, Kitsi, we’ll deliver these ourselves.’

The messenger-boy snorted, clicked his heels together and gave a salute. He turned and went to the next station to solicit someone else.

‘You’ve hurt his feelings,’ Kitsi said.

‘They have thick hides. And trust me, you don’t wanna try them. Always make sure when you work, you’re quick enough to leave a bit of time to deliver your own hats. The messengers are alright most of the time, but when they cock-up, they do it in grand fashion with fireworks, explosives and singed eyebrows.’

Kitsi carried the box of hats, while Peshi followed with an armful of brown files.

‘Wait,’ Peshi said. She reached down and picked up two runners, put one in her apron pocket and gave the other to Kitsi. ‘Take this with you. You’ll need it when the itch comes.’

They went past busy workstations, other milliners toiling at their craft. Peshi reached out with her tail to touch Kitsi’s and they walked on the floor tail in tail. She had a smile on her face and a spring in her step.

They reached a door with a fire exit sign on the lintel and walked into a long wide white corridor, brightly lit by incandescent bulbs. There was a queue of messenger-boys in front of them as they patiently waited their turn. When they were near, Peshi turned to Kitsi:

‘Make sure you’re nice to the master of the gate, otherwise he’ll send you around the planet a dozen times before you get back.’

The master of the gate was an older messenger-boy sat on a stool, with a full beard that reached past his knees and dangling feet to the floor. He wore a grand coat with epaulette on his shoulders and many medals on his chest. In his right hand he held a lever which he pulled from time to time.

‘And where are you off to this time?’ he said to Peshi.

‘Just taking the new girl out for a spin.’

‘Deliveries are best left to the professionals, you know.’

‘But if I did that, how would I ever get to come here to see your handsome face?’ Peshi replied. The master of the gate broke out into a toothless grin. She handed him a pouch of chewing tobacco.

‘Well, tell me where you want to go,’ he said, smiling still.

‘Accra, Lubumbashi, Ankara, Ljubljana, Edinburgh, Salem, Xiamen and back home again.’

‘You have to get the order right, that’s the quickest way. Lubumbashi before Accra then out to Ankara.’

‘That’s why you’re the best, but leave Edinburgh for last,’ Peshi said walking into a room the size of a small closet.

‘Demand, demand, that’s all you lot do! Mess with my poor old head. So, it’s Accra to Ljubljana and from there east until you get back.’

Kitsi took a deep breath and watched as the doors closed. It was dark inside. She held the box tight against her breast. ‘Brace yourselves,’ the master called from outside. She heard a cranking sound and then the floor below them seemed to buckle, then they were falling through a black hole, fast, faster and faster, the wind running through their hair. Kitsi closed her eyes and screamed and screamed; Peshi screamed with her, high pitched like a cat. Then they hit something hard and fell to the ground. She opened her eyes and she was on a pavement outside a grand building with Dutch style arches.

‘Welcome to Lubumbashi,’ Peshi said, getting up and dusting her dirty uniform.

The sky was bright blue and the sun above fierce. Cars drove bumper to bumper, and people walked past them without noticing. They walked into an office, up to the first floor, where they found a man at a desk, working on a spreadsheet on a computer. The fan above him spun lazily.

‘This is Katumbe Kafue,’ she said, leaning over his shoulder and peering at the figures he had on Excel. ‘How boring; give me the yellow and red kippah in the box… That’s the one.’ Peshi held it up. ‘I love your stitching by the way.’

‘But he’s not Jewish,’ Kitsi said.

‘Jewish smewish.’ Peshi placed the hat on Katumbe’s head. He paused and leaned back in his seat. He rapped his fingers on the desk. After a minute or two, he returned to his spreadsheet. Peshi smiled and said, ‘His first manuscript was rejected everywhere. Soon, he’ll make his second attempt.’

They found a cleaning closet in the building, full of smelly chemicals and stinky mops. Kitsi stomped the floor three times with her left foot and soon they were falling through space. They landed in Accra where they gave a student her first baseball cap. In Ljubljana they gave an old man a boater with bright green ribbons on it.

It was late at night when they landed in Salem. Here they found a woman, Maria Hernandez, sleeping in a single bed. Kitsi watched her curled up like a foetus, under a sheet, snoring lightly.

‘I always come to her in her sleep,’ Peshi said.

They gave Maria a multi-coloured beanie hat, and as soon as it touched her head, she sprung up, swung her feet onto the floor and marched to her desk. Maria lit her lamp, picked up a notebook and began to scribble in it. Peshi placed her hands on Maria’s shoulders, stood for a moment to watch her write, and then kissed her on both cheeks.

‘You can’t help but fall in love with them,’ Peshi said.

Soon they were travelling around the world again. It was drizzly when they wound up in Edinburgh at a small park in Stockbridge. Pine trees filled the air with their sweet scent and a man sat on a bench, staring at the falling raindrops. Kitsi felt her heart skip a beat.

He was ragged; stubble grew on his cheek a few days old. His hair needed cutting, the coat he wore was wet from the rain, but he sat with his brown eyes transfixed to a point far off in space.

‘He’s yours,’ Peshi said. She took out a file and gave it to Kitsi. His name was Jonah Mangirazi.

Kitsi felt drawn to him with the longing of a long lost lover. She curled her hands tightly around the runner, for the itch had overcome her. The tool felt nice and cool in her palms.

‘Come closer, he won’t bite,’ said Peshi, standing next to the man. ‘Isn’t he just so intense?’

Kitsi could not speak, there was a lump the size of an orange in her throat.

‘This one is a mambara. He hasn’t written a single word in four years. He’s rejected everything that’s come his way,’ said Peshi.

‘Why?’ Kitsi asked feebly.

‘Who knows? I want you to study his skull, how broad and fierce it is. Our craft is half phrenology. You must study the head to make the right hat.’

Kitsi took out a tape measure from her apron pocket. She approached Jonah and measured the size of his skull. She noted peculiarities, the prominent occiput, thinning hair, everything about him fascinated her.

‘It’s up to you to make him a hat that fits,’ said Peshi.

There was nothing but utter joy and warmth in Kitsi’s heart as she set out to make a hat for Jonah in the workshop. She chose the finest materials and worked day and night, every thought, her entire will, bent to making him the best hat she could. She put everything she knew into it and created a fine herringbone trilby, grey trimmings, with a black ribbon around the crown. Kitsi felt it had mystery and allure to it, something a hero in a noir movie would wear.

?

6 September 1998

I was walking along the river. Like an eclipse, it came to me. Covering everything. Eureka!

This is how it happened. I was walking, one foot after the other – like I always do and it came to me.

Like the annunciation. It felt divine. Dear Diary, I know I sound crazy. But that’s how it happened.

I was walking along the river. Boom. A flash of white light. Maybe a soft whisper from over my shoulder.

The truth is. If I am to tell it straight. It doesn’t feel like it came from me at all.

In the corner of my eye. It was there all along, like that itch that comes just before you sneeze.

I was walking along the river. In that moment, all I wanted was to get back to my office in my little garage.

?

The entire factory floor, except for the loom in the middle, went quiet when the Boss Lady’s door swung open, banging against the wall. Her office was up on the first floor. It had large windows looking down on the floor; a series of metal steps led to up it. Boss Lady’s shoes clanked as she descended the stairs to the bottom, where a messenger with a large laundry bag was stood at attention, waiting for her.

Like the milliners, she was feline, but bigger, curvier, more buxom like a bobtail. Her tail swished this way and that as she walked, as if to purposefully take up more space. She wore an elegant green kaba of handmade aso-oke fabric, interlaced with fake emeralds that reflected light against the swirling patterns. It had puffy sleeves which made her look grand, and on her head she wore a stylish gele, of similarly exuberant green, looking like a ring of concentric halos flowing outwards. Though she’d tied it herself, it had the gravity defying wizardry of a Segun Gele original.

‘Many more returns this month compared to last month,’ Boss Lady shouted in a shrill voice. ‘Production is down 0.5%.’

A collective groan went out across the factory floor.

‘At this rate, we’ll have to lay off a few souls. Why can’t we be more daring, like computer games?’ she said.

There were many anxious faces around the workstations as she weaved round them, stopping here to give a return, and there to issue stern admonishment. She was firm and business-like in every movement, not a gesture was wasted. She complained about the cost of materials, untidy stations, the state of the floor, missing equipment, nothing escaped her keen eye.

Kitsi and Peshi tensed up as she reached their station.

‘And this one is yours?’ Boss Lady said to Kitsi, fishing the trilby out of the laundry bag. Kitsi nodded.

‘She’s new,’ said Peshi.

‘No one is talking to you, little Miss Bigmouth,’ Boss Lady replied. From this close, Kitsi saw the freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. ‘Kitsi, I want you to look at the wrinkles in this felt. You didn’t stretch it enough over the hat block. Make sure you steam it well. Look at this brim, ghastly. Does that look even to you? Learn to eyeball when you cut, if you can’t then measure and mark.’

Tears welled up in Kitsi’s eyes. She shook with emotion. To see her work returned like this caused her so much pain.

Boss Lady lowered her voice. It became gentle, maternal even: ‘You do know you only have two chances left. We’d hate to lose you.’

Boss Lady passed by, the messenger-boy in tow.

Kitsi felt Peshi’s tail on her shoulder. She brushed it off and buried her face in her hands.

‘It’s going to be okay. No one ever gets it right the first time,’ Peshi said.

‘I did,’ a voice said from behind them. It was Fafi, Peshi’s arch-rival. She walked tall and confident. ‘Look newbie, maybe you ought to think about finding a new master.’

‘Be careful,’ Peshi said, almost a growl.

‘She hasn’t told you, has she?’ Fafi ignored her. ‘All her little apprentices this year have failed and gone back to the void. That never happens at my table. Think about that and come join me if you want. I’m right in the corner, table number 23.’

Fafi turned and left, her tail erect, high up above her head.

‘Poacher,’ Peshi said.

In the middle of the factory floor stood an old loom. Beside it sat the most beautiful woman in the room, fully human in her form. She had smooth black skin, dark as polished gabbro. Sweat glistened on her face like diamonds caught in sunlight. She wore a loose silk dress and jewelled choker around her neck and sat with her back straight. A basket of Panama straw lay at her feet, waiting to be woven.

She was the last remaining muse in the factory. No one knew her name. Once she worked here with her sisters, but they had all gone away, moved into television or video games. Alone, she seldom paid attention to the milliners, but now she looked up from her work, saw Kitsi crying and frowned.

Kitsi ran away to the off-cuts room. She locked herself inside and ignored Peshi pounding on the door. There were three sets of doors at the front wall of the factory, near the foot of Boss Lady’s stairs. The other two led to the materials room and the canteen.

The power went off as Kitsi sat on the cold floor of the room, surrounded by scraps of fabric whose glorious colours she’d seen in the blur of her tears. She felt the unbearable shame of failure loping through her stomach like a swarm of cockroaches. Boss Lady’s voice was in her head, prodding every tiny error in her work.

She lay down on the floor and her head touched something hard. She picked it up, her hands tracing it, and its dimensions felt like those of an old book. Clutching it to her chest, she closed her eyes and dreamt of a new hat.

When Kitsi finally woke up, she was ready to create something new, something really special this time. She had to if she wanted to survive.

?

3 August 1998

As you brush against bodies your left hand weighed down by Gap shopping bags full of useless things you feel nothing in your right pause and in that instant you turn behind you and ask where is he where is he he was here just a moment ago and now there’s nothing just heads and bodies in designer clothing going into and out of designer shops not noticing the hen franticly searching in the undergrowth for her chick where moments ago she saw the shadow of an eagle flying high above and cried out which is you in that mall where is he where is he he was here just a moment ago in and out of shops you go searching for him in changing rooms under shelves calling out his name again and again not caring that you look mad up the escalators and down again into Next Debenhams Hollister Waterstones running your high heels cluttering on the hard granite floor lit up by florescent lights it all seems so large and big and insane a labyrinth you should never have come here never have let go of a security guard stops to ask if he can help where is he where is he

?

The second failure made Kitsi feel like she was drowning in a vat of sticky molasses, every pore glued shut, unable to breathe and to move. Fafi took to passing by her workstation and winking at her two, sometimes three, times a day. The urge to defect to save herself was there, but Kitsi chose to be loyal even if it meant her own life. When she walked, the sisters averted their gaze, as though she was the host of an incurable ailment.

Peshi decided to take Kitsi away from the factory to clear her head. The place ran 24/7 and the milliners never had time off – at least not officially. They walked tail in tail and entered the master’s porthole and wound up on George Street in Edinburgh.

They bought cups of coffee from a café on the street. Well, they didn’t exactly buy them – when you’re invisible, you can just take stuff. All they had to do was wait for the barista to make the right order, turn his back for a moment and one touch, it vanished; then when it left their hands, it reappeared as trash in exactly the same spot it was ‘borrowed’ from.

They walked west to Charlotte Square where white tents were erected for the Festival.

Kitsi noticed a lot of people milling about in fine hats, some of which she immediately realised had been made by the Worshipful Company of Milliners in their little factory in Harare. It was easy to differentiate their hats from the normal human hats. For a start, their clients seldom wore clothes to match the hat for they were unaware they had it in the first place, and there was a certain aura which marked their handiwork.

‘If only you’d been here last year. I would have taken you to Abekouta in Nigeria for the Ake Festival. My, you should have seen what hats they wore!’ said Peshi excited in the warm summer air. ‘Their geles put Boss Lady to shame.’

‘How long have you been doing this?’ Kitsi asked. She was melancholic.

‘Since 1969. My first writer was David Maillu from Kenya. I still make his hats,’ Peshi replied wistfully.

The iron railings outside the square were papered with posters advertising shows. Crowds went through the gates, past the reception with shelves of free guides and rows of ticket stalls to the left. They walked into the gardens, on an open grassy square where many chairs had been placed. People sat in the sun, drank alcohol and read books. Kitsi and Peshi ensconced themselves on some deck chairs.

‘If anyone tries to sit on you, poke them up the arse with your finger,’ Peshi said. She reached into her apron pocket and took out her runner, for the itch had come upon her.

‘Do you ever wish you were free like them?’ Kitsi asked, watching at the humans wandering around.

‘What makes you think they are free?’

‘Their lives are not tied to some grimy factory like ours.’

‘You have much to learn. They have their own petty issues and struggles, just like we do. Every day is a battle for them, as it is for us. The writers especially are slaves to their craft. No one is absolutely free. We all are what we are and how we make the best of it is what defines who we are.’

They were close to the bookstore but couldn’t see within because there was a long queue of people, winding round, waiting to see the author of an extremely popular fantasy series. Peshi pointed out a writer wearing Somi’s wide brimmed cavalier hat, which had a red ribbon and blue ostrich plume tucked in.

More writers walked in and out of the green room. Kitsi liked a purple stovepipe hat worn by an austere-looking woman, which Peshi said was made by Anami. Behind her was a tall man in a sombre black suit who wore a frivolous yellow cocktail hat on the right side of his head, complete with a veil. Peshi sniggered.

‘That’s why I told you not to trust the messenger-boys,’ she said. ‘He’s Neville Sutton, a writer of very serious literary fiction. Now, someone gave him a romance hat, his new novel is, I swear, Mills and Boon to the core, yet critics fall over themselves, raving about how profound it is. “An acute expression of the human condition”.’

‘I think he looks lovely in that hat.’

‘Oh, look, here’s one of mine,’ Peshi pointed at a woman in jeans and a t-shirt who wore a leopard skin headband with many feathers. ‘She writes gritty feminist novels and I gave her a Zulu impi’s headgear. You gauge your writer – are they a peacock or a mole or something in between? – and then you make the hat to fit. It doesn’t matter what sex they are, so long as it’s the right one for them.’

That afternoon they lounged and drank pot loads of coffee, watching their sisters’ creations: cloches, kufi caps, ten-gallon hats, garbos, hennin, Pende beaded crowns, shakos, turbans, Himba ekoris, all manner of creations in wild colours and styles, some of which they couldn’t even name. It was one thing for Kitsi to see them in the factory, but out here in the real world, it was dizzying and dazzling. For the milliners, writers at a festival were models on a catwalk. And every now and again, she saw a writer whose head was far too large for their hat.

Kitsi shut herself in the off-cuts room. There were tall shelves full of little bits of material of different forms and sizes in transparent tubs. Under a pile of cloth, she retrieved the album and began to look at the pictures within. The dust from the book clung to her hands. In it she saw hats of such exuberance and dare, she could not believe they could have been made here, or anywhere for that matter.

She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice the door open and a tall figure loom, watching her. A voice startled her:

‘I was wondering where that went.’

Kitsi was startled and dropped the album. It was the muse, leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded. Her long afro brushed against the top of the frame. She hid one hand behind her back and smiled at Kitsi.

‘You should have seen this place when my sisters worked here. In those days we made such marvels as you cannot imagine, child. We hatted poets in the Arab lands, Russian novelists whose work is without equal, French satirists, started Anglo Sci-Fi, whispered to West African myth makers, gave dreams to Shona storytellers, we did them all.’

‘Why did you stop?’ Kitsi asked, closing the album.

‘My kind is fickle. Film came in, then television, then video games; my sisters all moved to America or Japan. Why else do you think those forms exploded while your art withers?’ the muse sighed. ‘I stayed on but couldn’t do it myself. Luckily, or not, the universe abhors a vacuum. I was alone in this place when the first of your kind popped up and took her place at a station. Soon you’d infested the place like rats and we had post-modern grotesques all over the place. The beginning of the end if you ask me. Thank God my sisters left material and some basic designs, otherwise who knows what other travesties you lot would have wrought upon the world.’

Kitsi stood up, walked over to the muse, and offered the book back. Unable to meet her eye to eye, she looked down at the muse’s feet which were in simple rubber soled sandals with rekeni straps.

‘You keep it, child. The milliner’s existence is fragile, she pops into being as she is needed, and out of it when she’s no longer useful.’ the muse said and not without some sadness. ‘Yet from the moment you arrive you are fully formed with speech and knowledge, almost as though you’re recycled, no reincarnated. I pity your lot. Take this.’ From behind her back, she brought out the most elegant woven Panama straw, painted with varying shades of yellow and orange.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Kitsi said, afraid to touch it.

‘Take it. It’s yours, child, and good luck to you.’

The muse left her in the room and within a minute Peshi rushed in, begging to be told what had happened. This was the first time any of them had seen the muse get up to walk, let alone speak with one of them. Kitsi went back to work and made the best hat she could.

?

22 June 1998

I knock my head against the wall. I take drugs. I take long meandering walks. Imagine the plumber who can’t come into work on Monday because he has plumber’s block!

Where do our ideas come from? No, that makes it sound too hocus-pocussy. As if they’re drawn from the ether. It’s not that I don’t have ideas, it’s just everything I think of is too pedestrian. Not daring enough. Been done before, by someone else, better.

What if I lack the genius required? Nonsense. Writing is carpentry, there’s no magic in that. Instead of wood we use words. Allusion to St. Joseph. Father. Protector. Cuckold. Loose connections.

I try to think, to conjure it up, but nothing comes to me. Maybe I try too hard. Hit the library. Hit the gym. Hit myself. Give it time, it will come. And if I’m just not good enough? Shame! Fuck it.

?

When power went off during the day, the factory was dim, but the sisters went on with their work regardless. Pigeons fluttered their wings and cooed as they roosted on the metallic roof struts above. Kitsi no longer had to work now, though she helped Peshi from time to time. All she could do was wait for the verdict on her last hat. Her neck was stretched out on the guillotine, waiting for the blade to swing down. She stood near the left wall and read the names inscribed, one to a brick, in crayon. These were the novices that didn’t make it, some of their names too faded to be legible, then as she got further up the wall, no more names, just Xs. They’d done that because space was running out. Kitsi realised that if she returned to the void, all that would be left would be an X and nothing more. The other sisters averted their eyes as she wandered between the worktops, checking out new designs. Nanomi was creating her trademark seed hats, each the size of an acorn, which sprouted and grew into awesome creations once they touched the writer’s scalp. But none of these wonders did anything for Kitsi’s humour. She decided to go out and take a walk, hand in hand with her fear, along the Mukuvisi River, for her fate was now irredeemably out of her hands.

?

7 April 1998

Every Tuesday and Thursday, without respite, I commit an act of fraud. Let’s define some terms via the Oxford Dictionary:

Fiction: (late middle English (in the sense ‘invented statement’): via Old French from Latin fictio(n-), from fingere ‘form, contrive’. Compare with feign and figment.) Something that is invented or untrue.

Fraud: (middle English: from Old French fraude, from Latin fraus, fraud- ‘deceit, injury’.)

A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.

Notice how the two words are near synonymous. And that’s what I do standing in front of my students every Tuesday and Thursday, without respite. I peddle empty words and they lap them up like sponges. When I was a child I liked stories – every child likes stories. I’d sit on my grandma’s lap and order her to tell me ngano. As soon as she was finished, I would order her to tell it again. I could listen to the same story a thousand and one times and, each time, enjoy it just as much as I did during the first telling.

?

Kitsi decided if she was going down, she’d do it style. From the muses’ album she’d seen the hats of the masters; Dostoevsky’s grey and black cloches with small intricate labyrinths, like brain gyri and sulci, and Tolstoy’s large multi-coloured sombreros, packed with figurines of people, animals, machines of war, grand in scope and ambition.

She had the muse’s elegant straw and set about doing her work. Peshi was not allowed to help her, she was on her own, those were the rules. Each breath Kitsi took smelt of the glue used by the pot load in the factory.

She wet the straw thoroughly and was glad to see the paintwork didn’t run or ruin. The straw was light and soft to the touch and bendy. She placed it on a hat block and gently stretched it out. Nothing she’d used before felt so malleable; as though her thoughts transmitted themselves perfectly into the shallow crown she created to fit off-centre, on the left side of the head.

The brim Kitsi made was a large disk, exuberant like the rings of Saturn. She could feel the sisters’ eyes watching her work with this beautiful material as she trimmed the border and sewed black ribbon there.

She made a red rose, stuck it on the side of the crown, and, within, inserted embracing figurines, male and female. Then she glued tiny straw poles with stars on either end. Inside the hat she inserted soft white cotton lining, marked out with the graffiti from the Roman alphabet.

The muse passed by her table and gave her a little wink.

Kitsi found Jonah pensively walking along the Water of Leith with his two dogs. As she placed the hat on him, it blocked the sun over his head, leaving him in the grip of its shadow. He froze: a sybaritic look of horror stencilled on his face.

?

3 March 1998

Subjective assertion: I am a sick man.

Everything’s fucked! End of the world type calamity – mass extinction event, cancel Christmas, hope you bought insurance. On mornings like this I fear I’ll be revealed as the fraud that I am. Fantastic new review from Michelle Koda of the Times. The book is two years old and they’re reviewing it again! What the fuck?

Sold 15000 copies – 14446 to be exact.

Hardly going to shake the world is it? It’s cold and bleak in adulthood and no one gives a crawling fuck. The signs are there in the stars; you just need a kaleidoscope. Last week I did a festival in Glasgow and was shocked people even bothered to turn up to my event. The fucking moderator hadn’t even read my work. Regurgitated the same list of clichés.

The novel is dead/dying. So it goes.

?

The messenger-boy came with news of the manuscript, a full decade after Kitsi had made her hat. No milliner had ever had to wait that long for ascension.

Kitsi gave a tired smile, but it turned into a grimace when the messenger-boy told her of Jonah’s end.

‘It’s my fault,’ she said to Peshi.

‘Don’t blame yourself, they do that sometimes,’ Peshi replied. ‘All that matters is that you made it.’

‘An evil trade, my life for his.’

‘The universe is built on trade-offs.’

The sisters gathered around Kitsi, even Fafi gave a half-hearted word of congratulations. Boss Lady descended from her office. She made a speech about the labour of creation, the part the milliners played in preserving a dying art, and she inducted the newest milliner into the Worshipful Company.

Like all before her, Kitsi received a pair of white gloves and copper scissors to the applause of the Sisterhood.

She curtsied and turned to her workstation. The factory was filled with ululation and song, the noise echoed off the zinc metal roofing. Kitsi didn’t feel joy; instead she had the full awareness of the terrors that lay ahead, the hats to be made.

T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in ‘Lightspeed’, ‘Interzone’, ‘Analog Science Fiction & Fact’, ‘The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021’, ‘Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’, ‘Mystery Weekly’, ‘The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016’, and elsewhere.

He is the winner of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2023), Alex Award (2022), the Children’s Africana Book Award (2021), a Nommo Award for African SFF (2022, 2017), and has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize (2014) and the Grand prix de l’Imaginaire (2019).

Tendai also guest edited Shoreline of Infinity 18, the BAME special issue.

The Edinburgh Nights series is now on its third instalment.

Find him @TendaiHuchu

The Worshipful Company of Milliners was first published in Interzone 257, 2015.