Horrified, and dosed up to the eyeballs on painkillers, the two women together hurried back to the department store to complain. ‘It must be the dress! Look at the colour of our hands!’ they screamed, in terrible agony from their weeping flesh. The shop assistant said, ‘I’m so sorry to have to contradict you, ladies, but it simply cannot be the dress, or else all my other customers would have been back to complain too, and none of them has. So, no, I’m afraid you can’t have a refund.’

On their way out of the department store, Perdita and Dolores tripped over the log-thick legs of a street-sleeper. It was hard to tell if this person was a man or a woman. ‘Your poor hands,’ he or she intoned in a deep voice. ‘Your poor hands. Ah, but you can’t pretend you didn’t have a hand in it! Four hands, I should say.’

‘Are you a man or a woman?’ asked Dolores.

‘I’m a sage,’ said the Sage.

‘What did you mean about us having a hand in it?’ Perdita demanded to know.

The Sage startled her by pointing straight at her. ‘You gave something that you knew to be a vile thing to someone you care about. You would never have bought one for yourself, yet you bought one for Dolores here. And you …’ – she turned on Dolores – ‘… you accepted this gift, though you didn’t want it and would never have bought one for yourself. You spotted its ugliness straight away, yet you accepted it. Both of you recognised instantly the horror of the dress, yet you said and did nothing against it – quite the opposite. You colluded with it. You acted against your own judgement and your own hearts. When we do that, we allow evil to prosper. That is why you have sore hands today.’

‘Oh, come on!’ snapped Perdita. ‘That’s superstitious twaddle and demonstrably untrue. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have bought that same dress in shops all over the world. It’s a global fashion craze!’ Perdita had only just realised this, but she was quite right. She’d noticed that every woman walking past her, as she and Dolores stood on the pavement talking to the Sage, was wearing the horrible dress that barely resembled a dress.

‘Look at all these people in the dress!’ she cried. ‘Their hands look fine!’