‘Red? And these tights are green, aren’t they? Yikes, I must look like one of Santa’s elves.’

‘They’re purple.’

‘I never wear purple!’ She looks down at her legs. ‘I’m wearing purple? Shit!’

I start to laugh. ‘What colours do you normally like?’

She looks at me through her huge dark pupils. ‘Strong colours. Bright colours. But most colours look like mud now and yellow looks like white, so it’s hard to tell.’ Our conversation is interrupted by a cheery greeting.

‘Hi, Fern!’

‘Oh! Hi, Gigi!’ Her pink hair is tied up. She’s wearing a leopard print shirtdress and leopard print shoes. She’s holding David’s steel flask and she fake-hits him on the head with it.

‘Look what you forgot! He’s normally so sensible,’ she says, glancing back at me. ‘Aren’t you sensible, David?’

‘Very,’ he says impassively, but then he smiles.

I turn back to my customer, who’s holding on to the black dresses. She asks to try them on, so I pin up the curtain while Gigi looks gleeful and gives me a double thumbs-up.

The woman comes out and nods. ‘Yes, I’ll take them.’

But I’m intrigued. ‘So you like bright colours but you have to wear black for work?’ I ask, knowing from personal experience what that feels like.

‘No, I don’t have to wear black, it’s not the dress code, but I thought it might be the answer to my colour problem. I’ll know where I am then. I can’t go wrong with black, can I?’

‘True. But you don’t generally wear it,’ I say.

‘No, I love colour.’ She moves the strap of her bag further up her shoulder. ‘I haven’t always had this problem with my sight – it came on gradually. My night vision went first. My boyfriend kept asking me why I was driving so slowly and why I was hunched over the steering wheel as if another six inches of vision was going to make any difference. I went to the opticians and he asked if I’d ever noticed that my pupils are always quite large.’ She laughs. ‘I always thought that was one of my good points.’

I like her, not just because of her honesty, but also by just getting on with her life she’s given me some perspective on my own problems. She’s still holding the four dresses and I’m thrilled at the idea of making a sale this big, a sale that will put me into profit, but she’s so bubbly and open that I really want to help her.

In my peripheral vision I can see Gigi taking a keen interest.

‘If it’s just the problem of colour, you don’t really need a new black work wardrobe, you just need to know what goes with what of the clothes you’ve already got, don’t you?’