Purple People Read online

  Eve leant back while she waited for her stirring, whirring computer. She glanced at the pin board which hung a little lopsidedly in front of her. In pride of place were an ‘I heart NY’ sticker (and boy, did she ever) bought the week she arrived in the city, a doodle of Pam Fox-Jones, she and Adio’s fictional first lady of current affairs, and one of Eve’s earliest bizarre news clippings, about a man who’d attempted to strangle his wife after she’d sucked a mint too loudly. To Eve this had seemed a brilliantly absurd and yet concise character study: years of unspoken, repressed tension, brought to a head by a lowly Polo. It reminded her of how often the briefest, daftest reports contained the most potent truths about human behaviour. People could underestimate that, she thought.

  Also pinned to the board was Eve’s signed photo of newsreader Annie Morris. Growing up, Eve had dearly wanted to be a newsreader. She had always been fascinated by the news – the relentlessness, the speed and the scale of these incredible, far-reaching stories, from life-changing, world-changing events to the personal tales of survival and celebration. She loved (and feared) the unpredictability of it, and the way these occurrences, whether explosive or emotional, united people. In a school careers essay she had earnestly stated: ‘Being able to tell the news is one of the most important things there is. The news is really a never-ending story that everyone is part of, it is history happening around us.’

  And if the news were a party then, in the young Eve’s mind, the newsreader played hostess. Her childhood idols had been the elegant news ladies she saw on television. She had been transfixed by the glamour of their smoulderingly serious delivery, paired with subtle, smoky eyeshadow and drapey silk blouses. Clearly they were not only clever and successful, but bore all the attributes most fitting for such an authoritative role, appearing knowledgeable but unintimidating, commanding but reassuring, and able to inform the nation of calamities and catastrophes in a soothing, unalarming manner. They were the newsreading equivalent of mums putting plasters on scraped knees and giving you an ice lolly, yet wielded an added school-marmish sort of power. When things went askew – miserably soaring crime rates, riots, the fleeting, disastrous privatisation of the police force – they had presented everything in such a way that you could still doze soundly through the night.

  Eve had wanted to be a newsreader more than she had wanted to be Wonder Woman, or her favourite telly detective, a no-nonsense broad who always solved the crime, while wearing fetching, bejewelled jumpers and managing to chase wrong ’uns even in her high-heeled boots. This desire brought with it a secret guilt, junior Eve having decided, should the moral dilemma arise, that she would choose becoming a successful news lass above things for the greater good; namely, tranquillity in her parents’ marriage, or her brother’s reformation to a less trouble-seeking soul. At a kindly neighbour’s suggestion, she had approached her favourite national newsreader for advice, to no avail – though this later transpired to be due to her brother Simon’s intervention, for he had got hold of the envelope (Eve’s stamp had been licked with a wish and crossed fingers) and substituted the contents with the less impassioned lines of their mum’s shopping list. Simon eventually confessed, thinking his trick hilarious; Eve had vowed never to forgive him. In recompense, for her twelfth birthday, their mum had arranged a visit to the local TV station, where Eve watched the news being recorded, and afterwards the presenters each gave her signed picture postcards of themselves (she had been struck by the fact that then regional news gal Annie had also kindly added ‘Happy birthday, Eve!’ across hers). Though even her memory of this was slightly tainted by a mortifying moment in the canteen. Whilst their mum was distracted by the sight of Annie and co – equally impressed by the abundance of local celebrities and the canteen’s new ‘frothy-coffee’ maker – Simon had inked graffiti on their table (predictably embarrassing end-of-the-pier anatomies), only to be swiftly spotted and reprimanded by a passing weatherman. Eve had been utterly horrified, and dearly hoped Annie and the others hadn’t noticed the incident.

  Eve stared at the photo, at Annie’s stripy shirt and shoulder-padded jacket, her easy, confident smile. Annie was a legend (and one of the first African–Caribbean women to deliver the news on British television), and while Eve might never have ascended to such great heights, she wondered, again, if she’d been too quick to steer away from that course. And why? Was it just, as she had told herself, giving the increasingly gloomy, fear-peddling realm of real news the slip for a more footloose, frivolous adventure? Or had seizing this Stateside chance simply masked her fear of failure?

  It was Adio who had brought her to New York (she would later merrily refer to him as not only her boss and partner in crime, but also her fairy godmother), saving her from the assisting pool at a news corporation, where she fetched coffee, booked lunches, and typed emails signed with the disclaiming flourish ‘Dictated but not read’, all the while aspiring to a life that was more Kate Adie than Girl Friday. She’d been planning a change – this spell at the corporation had seemed like a chance to make some excellent contacts, but she hankered after more colour, and stimulation. She’d considered a return to the slightly terrifying world of the tabloids, where the pace was electrifying, and scandal crackled in the air, but knew the world where woeful celebrities and footballers’ wives ’n’ lives captured the front pages wasn’t really the place for her. A more vigorous, less salacious publication seemed like a plan, though she had also pondered on a stint volunteering at an organisation abroad… And at that point Adio stepped in.

  Having first bagged a cheap weekend in NYC, Adio had subsequently snagged a Big Apple boyfriend, and decided to make a transatlantic leap of faith, and give the city, and the boy, a more permanent shot. On the plane back from his initial getaway, while brimming with the smitten kitten-ness of holiday romance, Adio decided to put into action the business venture which he’d been percolating. Say Fantastique!, he figured, would go down a storm in New York, a city that was chock-full of the crazy and incredible, and in America, the land of perky positivity – what could be more perfect? (He was right, of course, and couldn’t have known quite how timely a tonic it would be).

  That was – Eve could barely believe it – more than a decade ago. The agency had not only become incredibly successful, supplying stories to newspapers and TV shows around the world, but a surprisingly popular cult hit too, with a rapidly expanding number of readers, including quite a number of notable folk. And Eve loved life as a Gotham gal. Everything about the city – the speed, the heat, the people, the possibilities – was intoxicating. Here, away from the life she had known, the expectations she had set for herself and those that had been set for her (never spoken, but implied: to seek success in the same way her brother sought failure), she could do as she pleased, be who she wanted. It provided her with a bubble, an escape from the disheartening state of the nation, politics, her past, with its hatful of mistakes and laments, and her family – her philandering father’s disinterest, her mother’s regret and her brother’s lack of it. Here she could tune out, or tune in, what she liked. Just being here felt like a grand achievement.

  *

  ‘A penny for ’em,’ said Adio, leaning over Eve’s shoulder and hitting a button on her computer which brought their Portal page into view. He’d been quick off the mark that morning. As the newly updated page appeared before her, there was Pam Fox-Jones, with beehive askew and a puzzled expression on her lovingly inked, animated face. ‘Purple WHAT?’ quizzed her first speech bubble, while another declared, ‘I need a sherry – make it a large one.’

  ‘Oh, nothing… random nonsense.’ When it came to her family, Eve was sure she’d already bored Adio witless over the years, and when it came to querying her career, she didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Besides, there were more pressing matters at hand.

  ‘Wow, Pam looks great. I suppose if this did turn out to be something big – ’ she pictured rolling dice and hoped the purpleness wouldn’t transpire to be a freakish pandemic – ‘her
spin on it could be an opportunity for us at home.’ More readers, she thought, an increase in advertising. A bridge between the silly and serious.

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Adio, sitting down at his desk. ‘Make a proper splash, get an empire-straddling, more tangible presence, and then if we did want to go back…’

  ‘Speak for yourself!’ Eve spluttered as a gulp of coffee went down the wrong way. She coughed. ‘I’m in no rush.’

  ‘Me neither, but…’ Adio slid his chair towards the window, opening it and leaning out with a cigarette in hand, defying the building’s rules, again. He raised a match and an eyebrow before continuing, ‘Then if we did want to go back, we’d have already spread our tentacles, as it were.’

  ‘Your tentacles already get us into enough trouble.’

  Adio laughed and put his feet up on the windowsill, an elegant rebel. He would make a great model for an arty kids’ action figure, Eve mused, accessorised with a highball tumbler and a paintbrush. He was so striking to look at, she always thought – graceful, but with an energy that fizzed through his body, out to the kinks of his dark hair, all angles and artful waves, like one of his drawings, and with cheekbones that rarely kept him out of mischief (‘The bone structure of a Pharoah,’ his Aunt Rashida would tease whenever she came to visit, a reference to their Egyptian heritage. ‘You can imagine those chiselled in granite, can’t you?’).

  Smoke wafted back into the room through the open window.

  ‘I thought you were giving up.’

  ‘I have given up. It’s a notably strange day and this – this –’ he held the cigarette aloft with a dramatic flourish – ‘is not a cigarette. Oh no, this is a simple, antique de-stressing device, fulfilling its purpose before being caught in nicotine’s enforced walk of shame towards oblivion. And that’s another reason to spend time at home: you can smoke there.If you are a smoker, of course. Which actually I’m not.’

  Adio leaned closer to the window and exhaled, the smoke moving sluggishly once caught in the balmy fug of the city’s stifling summer air.

  Smoking made Eve uneasy. Not just because she worried about Adio’s health, or his setting off the building alarms and getting them into trouble for breach of their office lease. Smoking reminded Eve of home. Of her dad, mostly. And of the smell that still clung to you as you left pubs or clubs – lingering long past closing time, stubbornly claiming its frowsty place, and wheezing defiantly in the face of those who’d campaigned against its return to public places. A return which, with the recent rise in cigarette advertising, now seemed increasingly (and yes, surprisingly) permanent. Of course it was archaic that Blighty had regressed to being so fag-friendly. This was another side effect of the Repeal: the more you took away, the more folk appeared willing to give. The first infraction was the hardest, but then…

  Adio was unusually still for a few minutes, then said, ‘It’s utterly illogical, isn’t it, people turning purple. More illogical than usual. There are freaky, funny, accidental things which can occasionally seem dreadful at first glance and, maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect this won’t be one of those.’ He considered the ash accumulating at the end of his cigarette. ‘It’s something when the real news puts on its whirligig platform boots and comes over more bizarre than the bizarre news.’

  Eve ignored her initial impulse, which was as much for her own benefit as anyone else’s, to respond with chirpy optimism.

  ‘Did you get any clues out of anyone at home?’

  ‘Only that a couple of guys were attempting to uncover what some big government press conference was about and in the process of some very broad research, got those photos. No one knows more than that. Entirely random and unrelated to Number Ten? We don’t know.’

  Eve glanced up at the Polo clipping. A mint-related murder seemed quite mundane in comparison to whatever purple peculiarity might be afoot.

  ‘Well, Womble’s beside himself, and you’ve gone all sombre… I hope it is just some weird and one-off home-brewed fluke or something.’ As she said this, Eve was wondering if she entirely believed it herself, already imagining the headlines.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s an excuse for more whisky.’ Adio winked at her, then flicked ash towards the heavy black ashtray he’d sweet-talked the barman at a fancy hotel into letting him take. ‘What time do we need to tune into the press conference?’

  ‘Eight o’clock.’ Eve glanced at her watch. She was already tingling with prickly anticipation, desperate to find out exactly what was going on.

  Chapter Two

  The prime minister’s speech had been extraordinary. The truth was stranger than any science fiction, seeming possibly insane and probably (surely?) illegal.

  What was supposed to be a lunchtime press conference started late, leaving bowls of soup cooling and salad leaves wilting as the world waited with bated breath. News reporters chattered through the passing minutes, gamely and inanely attempting to guess what the big reveal might be, while workers gathered around TV sets holding unopened packets of supermarket sandwiches, too anxious to begin to eat, and mothers spoon-fed their little ’uns whilst wondering what kind of madness they’d borne them into. Television shots showed the cloudy, blustery weather in Blighty, which added to the tension, implying there was a definite storm brewing.

  The Big Apple was still waking, but by now Eve and Adio had already spent a couple of hours monitoring the curiously coloured events in the homeland. Eve kept the photo of the purple men open in one corner of her computer screen, repeatedly glancing towards it, as though it might change when she wasn’t looking. What did they know, she wondered; what must they be thinking?

  Eve’s friend Saffron had come by, bearing juice and vodka.

  ‘Hello, trouble,’ Adio greeted her, ushering Saffron in through the office door. As a hip-swinging burlesque dancer and drink-slinging bartender, this was quite early for her to be up, post-shift, and she was still wearing traces of last night’s make-up. Saffron was feisty and perceptive, and had arrived in New York fifteen years ago, escaping the not-so-bright lights of a small city out West, intent on acquiring tattoos and a psychology degree. She had worked in a bar to pay for her studies, and two thirds of the way through her course realised she enjoyed studying the human condition far more via a shot measure than a text book, and ditched her academic career.

  ‘Morning all.’ Saffron saluted with one hand while clutching the clinking bag of drink in the other. She hugged Eve, and then called across to Joe, Say Fantastique!’s new third musketeer. ‘Hello, Boy Wonder!’ she said.

  Joe muttered a shy ‘hi’, and continued zipping through clips posted to the Portal’s video pages.

  ‘This is crazy,’ Saffron said. She set the refreshments on a table, declaring them to be emergency supplies, just in case. ‘So, what do we know – any news on the news?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Eve, ‘it remains a cliffhanger.’

  ‘It’s like a truly fabulous B movie,’ Saffron said dryly. ‘Triffids, body snatchers, purple people. Incredible. I can already feel a musical coming on.’

  ‘Want to hear the best guesses?’ Joe offered.

  The girls nodded.

  ‘Leak at nuclear plant,’ said Joe, eyes focused on his computer screen. ‘Radioactive waste, unidentified tropical virus, poisonous wild berries, alcohol poisoning, adverse reaction to medication, psychedelic drugs…’

  Adio groaned, before adding to the list. ‘Terrorist contamination of water supplies, terrorist contamination of meat supplies, terrorist contamination of beer supplies… and my favourite: alien invasion.’

  ‘That would be amazing,’ said Saffron. ‘God, I’ll be jealous if you guys get aliens before we do.’

  ‘This is so loopy,’ said Eve, glancing at the bottle of vodka and wondering about hair of the dog, ‘If it does turn out to be aliens I almost won’t be surprised.’

  On television, the slick new prime minister, Theo Fletcher, emerged from behind the especially ominous-looking black door at 10 Downing
Street. Appearing no less suave and assured than usual, he strode purposefully to the microphone, glancing calmly around in acknowledgement of the cameras, of which there were a substantially higher number than for the usual budget-cut and legislation announcements. As cameras flashed excitably around him, the prime minister moved forward, unblinking, smoothing down his sober, claret-coloured tie. Eve had noticed that you could gauge the severity of any impending announcement from the shade of his neckwear, from perky poppy to more worrisome wine.

  ‘Today,’ he began, ‘there has been much speculation over the publication of some rather unusual photographs. There has also been considerable alarm, but I want to put your minds at rest. These pictures are not a hoax. Nor do they illustrate the results of any terrorist activity, chemical accident or unintentional contamination.’

  At his use of the word unintentional, Eve’s stomach lurched.

  The prime minister paused. ‘I had intended to prepare everyone for this obviously unexpected turn of events, and I apologise for the distress that may have been caused in learning about them in this upsetting, unorthodox way.’ A flicker of annoyance crossed his face. ‘I should add, too, that under the Anti-Incitative Distribution of Information Act, we will be taking action against those behind this irresponsible, and inflammatory, unveiling.