Purple People

by Kate Bulpitt

  ‘Which shows,’ said Magnus, ‘that targeting certain demographic groups is of more concern to the government than others. If you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. So if you aren’t paying due corporation tax, don’t worry!’

  ‘Better a more forceful way of cracking down on loutish behaviour than not cracking down on anything at all,’ said Gwen.

  ‘Ed, let’s finish with you,’ said Desmond.

  ‘The lady is absolutely right with her question, but baby steps… Look, I’ve already said it this evening, but I think we should give the Purpleness a fair chance. It might be a bit bonkers, but we’re a bonkers nation, right? It’s crazy, but it’s imaginative, and at the moment it seems to be doing some good, even if as a deterrent alone, from what some of the young people in the audience have said this evening. So let’s see what happens. Viveleviolet, right?!’

  There were some laughs and repeated calls of ‘Viveleviolet!’ from the audience. Ed grinned.

  ‘And on that note,’ said Desmond, ‘thank you to everyone here in the studio, and to all those of you at home for watching. Good night.’

  ‘Incredible,’ said Helena. ‘Really astounding. Though Magnus was fantastic, Eve. Should we try and say hello?’

  Eve licked her lips, her mouth dry. ‘I’m not sure we’ll get to go backstage,’ she said. ‘We don’t have passes.’

  Helena leaned towards her, gently prodding Eve just below her collarbone.

  ‘Are you quite sure about that? Don’t you want to see Magnus?’

  ‘He probably won’t remember me.’

  ‘Eve! He obviously remembered me, so he’ll certainly remember you. Come on, let’s go.’

  Chipping in, Womble said, ‘You know you’ll regret it if you don’t.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Helena.

  Eve wanted to say, I’m glad to be something you two agree on. Instead she said, ‘Do you think there’s a bar?’

  ‘Backstage there will be!’ said Helena, linking her arm through Eve’s, and leading her towards the exit.

  Approaching an usher, Helena said, ‘We’re supposed to meet our friend Magnus, who was on the panel – how do we find him?’

  Here’s a situation assisted by the lack of PortAbles, thought Eve.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Helena gave a trustworthy smile.

  ‘Can I take your name?’

  ‘Helena Arthur.’

  The usher raised a walkie talkie. ‘I’ve got Helena here, a friend of Magnus Jones. Is it okay to send her through?‘

  The handset emitted a crackle, then, ‘Hold on.’

  This has the potential to be horrifying, thought Eve.

  Another crackle. ‘Roger that. Go ahead. Just note any CIV passes, please.’

  Having checked their passes and jotted down their names, the usher said, ‘Follow signs to the studio lounge. You’ll be met there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Helena sweetly.

  She took Eve’s hand as they followed photocopied arrows deeper into the building.

  ‘Clammy,’ said Helena. ‘You okay? I know this is a big deal.’

  ‘Actually, I could do with some air,’ said Eve, who’d noticed a fire exit at the end of a dusty corridor. ‘I won’t be long. I’ll come and find you.’

  This needs a coat of paint, Eve thought, as she ducked down the corridor, passing faded, peeling posters for long-gone committee meetings and community projects. The bar on the fire exit door was stiff and creaky, but after a good shove she managed to get it open. Then, so that she wouldn’t get locked out, she placed her bag on the floor as a makeshift door wedge. Next to her, a window was open, paint flaking from the frame. Eve peered in: an office filled with cheap furniture and stacks of files which had overloaded the shelves and were now manoeuvring across the office, piling up on one side against a wall.

  Eve sighed, leaning back against the bricks between the fire exit and the window. There was a coolness to the evening air, and she stood looking at the trees nearby, zen and still under the inky canopy of the night sky. How strange, she thought, that after all this time Magnus and I are in the same building.

  Magnus loomed large in Eve’s life, casting a disproportionately long shadow, given how soon things had ended (or to be more accurate, never truly started). She hadn’t actually seen or spoken to him for over a decade, since a while before she’d moved to New York, but to her he represented a spiked handful of things. Mainly regret. Not cute or timid or viewed through a Vaseline lens lamenting, this was a hulking beast of drooling, dribbling, teeth-gnashing, foot-stomping, stomach-churning, heart-breaking wretchedness. She knew, too, that it wasn’t just him, but the beacon he’d become, which made her feel woeful. A missed opportunity, the first failure in an impressive series that was her apparently doomed love life. When relations with the latest in a (short) string of unsuitable beaus bit the dust, she would quietly berate herself that it had been a slippery downward spiral since Magnus.

  She knew very well that she had inflated the importance of their minor courtship out of sensible proportion – was aware that had she met and married some other, magnificent lad, Magnus would now barely cross her mind, just as she was sure she had not crossed his in these subsequent years. But, that she had rarely met anyone she thought so remarkable, so brilliant, so easy to be around, and – the clincher – who had somehow effortlessly made her feel like the girl she secretly hoped she could be… that was still hard to reconcile herself to. As was the fact that, although it was light years ago, water under the bridge, immaterial to anyone but her, and something utterly unchangeable even if it were true, she believed with absolute certainty that he was someone who was supposed to have been significant in her life. Maybe they would only have been together for five minutes (surely he would have bored of her?), but she was convinced – exceptionally so – that there was a journey she was supposed to have taken with him, and she’d missed it. And while there was nothing to be done, Eve often wondered who she might have been if she’d quelled her fears, or simply told him how she felt. She imagined in a parallel universe there was an Eve who had shared a better part of her life with Magnus and was quite different to this one, the woman she was now. The other Eve had succeeded where this one had failed, had created a fork in her life that her twin had yet to find, and this Eve desperately wanted to know what the other one was like. Who might she have been had she got it right, however briefly, with Magnus?

  If there were gods of destiny plotting people’s lives, putting opportunities in their paths, then they had tutted and sighed as Eve trotted past their signals, repeatedly mistaking green for amber and moving on to her (seemingly still to be fully revealed) plan B. She imagined them to be playing elaborate games of chess, or dealing with an all-encompassing version of air traffic control. Were there different departments – would folk bleep off the relationship radar and onto the careers chart? Was it like playing a computer game with wilful and often stupid pawns – would the kindly controllers punish you with a less spectacular fate if you kept missing the chances they were setting up, creating more work for them, or take pity as a door swung shut, making sure there was a new one to greet you? Would they shout and cheer as targets met their goals (‘crack out the bubbly, Moira, those two have unwittingly won wedded bliss, two kids and a cottage in Wiltshire!’) or groan like football fans whose favourite team just lost a goal (‘Snakes alive! What is wrong with her? You give people a perfectly simple task… We’re gonna need more beer, Gerry’).

  Eve had certainly learned her lesson. She had liked Magnus so much. If only she’d told him so – along with the important disclaimer that she was inexperienced in love and terrified of getting hurt. But her young, silly self had misinterpreted that vulnerability and apprehension as disinterest, convincing herself that she wasn’t so sure she really liked him after all. And so, after what was sure to have been for him an awkward smooch, Eve had closed the door and never clapped eyes on him again.

  Given that histor
ically, in the time they had known one another, their lives had continually crossed, and often in unexpected ways – the gods of destiny getting to lark inventively about – Eve had convinced herself that one day her chance would come back around. But not long after she’d moved to New York she heard Magnus was married with a baby, then two, rather putting the tin lid on that notion. At which point, following Eve’s rueful wails, Helena had sent her what had been a perfect letter: ‘Where would you rather be: there, hot-footing it round the Big Apple, living the life fantastic, or here, washing Magnus’s pants?’

  Occasionally Eve had thought about contacting him – a cheery blast from the past – but really, what would be the point? He had a successful, settled, life, and what was there to say? It would seem wholly inappropriate to try to clear the air now, however much she wanted to – for him it could only be a needless interruption. Whatever words she wished she had said should have tripped off her tongue years ago, or be forever left unspoken.

  And now, here he was. Successful, charming, a family man. And Eve? Professionally: fluffily indeterminate. Romantically: a failure, apparently set to be perennially single.

  In the wake of the Magnus affair (or rather, lack thereof), Eve had promised herself to never again see things she should have said or done illuminated in the rear view mirror. This seemed to have had the effect of sometimes sending her too far to the other extreme. However much she tried to keep her expectations low, apparently her manifest terror at again messing up and missing out meant that she now did too much, attempting, albeit breezily, to leave little unsaid or undone. But as she threw one last verbal or written hand grenade at any limping fling, she’d comfort herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t going to look back and wonder, what if? There would be no more mistakes of Magnus proportions. And yet, as another dalliance quietly imploded, she’d think, here I go again… I’ve been getting it wrong since Magnus.

  Not long ago she’d found herself contacting another ex of sorts, in a short, inoffensive message asking after some Say Fantastique! story-related information she thought he might have. It was an unnecessary enquiry – she could easily have found the details elsewhere – and she’d flinched as the Portal’s mail service had chimed, accepting its delivery from her screen to his. A swift and amiable response included the news that he had recently got married to an amazing woman, and Eve had cried, those letters clouding in her vision (she did wonder why he’d worded it so – the twist of a knife). Not because she had wanted to marry him – really, she rarely thought of him – but it seemed all the men she’d felt most ardently about had now eagerly settled down, and none of them with her. She wanted to be someone’s amazing woman, but instead felt like the also-ran, the girl who no one wanted.

  And yet again, she had thought back to being on the doorstep with Magnus, and told herself: you are a failure.

  *

  Eve blinked, distracted, as beside her a light came on in the office with the open window. She heard footsteps, then a door shoved firmly shut.

  A female voice huffed, ‘It’s Watt. I got the message. What does he mean, he might have lost it? Before or after a Turning?’

  Eve’s mouth gaped; what was this?

  ‘As he’ll be well aware, that is completely unacceptable. The kind of error that could jeopardise the entire scheme. Tell him he needs to find it – no ifs or buts – and report to me first thing tomorrow morning. Plus he’s suspended from duty – effective immediately.’

  Eve heard a phone receiver slam down, followed by more footsteps, and a heavy clunk as the door closed. She peeked through the handbag-enabled gap in the fire exit and at the end of the corridor saw a police officer stride past. Was this Watt?

  Hands pressed against the cool wall, Eve waited for her heart rate to slow from quickstep to waltz. What on earth was all that about – what had been lost, and who had lost it? She took her notebook from her bag, writing the conversation down, wanting to be able to make sense of it. This felt significant, though akin to finding one blurry piece of a jigsaw with no other parts of the puzzle to help her see the bigger picture.

  You won’t find any more pieces by standing out here, she told herself, the fire door slamming behind her as she headed back inside.

  Chapter Eight

  A man in wellington boots smiled down at Eve, trowel in hand. He had white hair, a bushy moustache, and a lot of vegetables. ‘Dig for Britain!’ the poster merrily advised. ‘Get an Allotment’. Eve had taken a right turn at the top of the hallway, following in Watt’s footsteps, and now found herself in a strange crescent-shaped corridor which looked out onto a courtyard. She glanced around, but couldn’t see anyone. The doors to the nearby row of offices were all closed. Eve stood quietly, listening. Nothing.

  ‘Eve!’

  She turned to see Helena rushing towards her.

  ‘There you are! I came to find you. Are you okay? Did you get lost?’

  ‘Did you see a police officer? Woman? Shortish?’ Eve asked.

  ‘No,’ said Helena. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just…’ What did Eve think she would do if she found Watt? Say, hello, senior-sounding police officer. I just surreptitiously overheard your conversation, and wondered if you’d be so kind as to let slip the very much classified way in which you’re turning people Purple. But if she could at least see her, try and work out who she was…

  ‘I thought she might be able to help with something,’ said Eve.

  ‘Is this a diversion from seeing Magnus?’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘No, not yet. The backstage usher started being very particular about checking our CIV passes on some database.’

  ‘I guess there are government ministers there, so they’re going to be extra careful.’

  ‘They’d already checked them!’ said Helena, irked. ‘Anyway, I thought with all that we should probably go in together, so wanted to find you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Eve, linking arms with her as they retraced their steps, returning to the trail of arrows.

  ‘You alright?’

  Eve nodded. ‘You? I’ve not seen you two like this before.’

  ‘I’m so angry.’

  ‘A lot of people agree with it.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it right.’

  ‘I know, and – sorry, that wasn’t what I meant, that it does, it’s just… there seem to be a lot of usually intelligent, sensible people who think maybe it can work.’

  ‘But it’s so wrong. Judging people by a colour.’ Helena threw up her hands. ‘Frankly I’m astonished that anyone could support that. That my own husband could believe in something that’s so fundamentally awful. And damaging.’

  ‘Just to be devil’s advocate though… what if it works?’

  ‘It’s still wrong.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s wrong. If they carry on doing this, it’s saying, it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to judge someone by their colour. Hell, it’s encouraging it. We’re colour-coding people so you can just look at them and make a snap decision. There has to be another way.’

  ‘Maybe Womble’s just thinking of it from a different angle, after being with the kids at school, wanting them to be discouraged from getting into trouble.’

  ‘Of course he’s seeing it differently. He’s never going to be judged at face value, just walking in the door somewhere, before he’s even opened his mouth.’

  Eve wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘You agree with it?’ Helena asked.

  ‘No. I don’t know. I don’t – but then I think of people not being able to get away with things, like the guy who hit my dad, and I wonder if maybe it could work.’

  ‘Because you’ll be able to look at someone and know whether they’re dangerous or not, whether you should trust them or not.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘How can that be right? How?’

  ‘It’s not right, it’s—’

  ‘It’s Theo Fletcher with some insane, offensive clap
trap that he’s dressing up as two wrongs making a right.’

  ‘I know. I do know that, but then I’ll think, if it makes people change their behaviour…’ Eve’s justification trailed off. ‘I can see how frustrating it is for you, but Womble’s got good intentions. He’d never mean to upset you.’

  ‘I know, but siding with this scheme seems ignorant. Having the luxury of being able to look at it and be oblivious. I’m really trying not to let this whole insanity get to me, but – it feels impossible.’

  ‘There’s an Anti-Purple Scheme rally on Saturday. Do you want to go?’

  ‘I’d love to, I really would. I think that might make me feel quite a bit better, actually. But I’m working and I can’t get out of that now.’

  ‘Can’t Rory cover for you? You could ask him.’

  ‘He’s in too. If I didn’t have surgeries booked I’d try and take the day off.’

  ‘Speaking of Rory,’ said Eve, ‘I don’t want to be mean, but what’s with the time delay thing? Surely that’s tricky when he’s giving a diagnosis… Mrs Smith, I’m afraid to tell you that your dog…’ Eve held her breath, pursed her lips.

  Helena tried not to laugh. ‘I think it’s just a nervous tic.’

  Eve continued to say nothing.

  ‘You’re terrible!’ said Helena.

  When they re-encountered Womble and Rory, the boys were deep in conversation with a backstage usher.

  ‘Everything alright?’ asked Helena.

  ‘Yep, just chatting,’ said Womble, looking a little guilty.

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  ‘Just so you know,’ said Womble, ‘apparently Magnus has left.’

  ‘Bugger,’ said Helena.

  ‘And so has Ed Fitzpatrick,’ Womble added, disappointed.

  ‘Is Gwen Thomas still there?’ asked Eve.

  ‘No, she’s gone,’ said the usher.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Eve. ‘Does it get that awkward afterwards?’

  ‘The wine delivery didn’t arrive,’ said the usher, ‘which may have something to do with their departures.’