BU21 Read online

  Stuart Slade

  BU21

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Original Production

  Dedication

  Characters

  BU21

  About the Author

  Copyright and Performing Rights Information

  BU21 was produced by Theatre503 in association with Kuleshov and first performed at Theatre503, London, on 15 March 2016. The cast was as follows:

  ALEX

  Alex Forsyth

  ANA

  Roxana Lupu

  CLIVE

  Clive Keene

  FLOSS

  Florence Roberts

  GRAHAM

  Graham O’Mara

  THALISSA

  Thalissa Teixeira

  Director

  Dan Pick

  Producer

  Holly Hooper

  Assistant Director

  Kane Desborough

  Production Designer

  Alex Green

  Lighting Designer

  Christopher Nairne

  Sound Designer

  Owen Crouch

  Fight Coordinator

  Lucy Slade

  This play is dedicated, with love,

  to Mellie Naydenova-Slade,

  lifelong plane-crash aficionado and inspiration for this story.

  Characters

  ALEX, twenty-four

  ANA, twenty-five

  CLIVE, nineteen

  FLOSS, twenty-one

  GRAHAM, twenty-nine

  THALISSA, twenty-two

  In performance, actors’ real names should replace these character names wherever possible.

  Note

  Where Ana mentions the year in Scene One, this should be updated as appropriate. It should correspond to the July immediately after the date of performance.

  This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.

  Prologue

  THALISSA comes on to the stage alone.

  THALISSA. So – I – okay –

  So you know how on the news these days there’s just this endless stream of horrendous shit going down, like every single night? Suicide bombs, mass shootings, genocides, drone strikes, school massacres –it’s like the end of the world or something.

  And it feels sort of voyeuristic to watch it, but sort of disrespectful to switch it off.

  And you’re sitting there and part of you feels really heartbroken for the people caught up in that day’s headline –and you’re kind of like – ‘Could I even cope if that stuff happened to me? Or would I just – (Gestures ‘fall to pieces’.)

  But then you’re all like, ‘Nah, that’s totally never going to happen to me – right? That’s a somebody-else thing, not a me thing.’

  Because you can’t literally conceive of it happening to you.

  And then it does. It does happen to you.

  And nothing prepares you for how fucking fierce it is.

  Scene One

  Immediately after the previous scene – perhaps a change of lights/music.

  Long pause.

  THALISSA. So I found out my mum was dead on Twitter. Which wasn’t, you know, great.

  Yeah.

  It was about ten-thirty on a Friday morning and I was just printing off some stuff for a client workshop at eleven, and the printer was being just – you fucking – you know?

  And then – out of absolutely nowhere – there was just this massive, massive bang –

  It was even like a sound – it was just this, I don’t even know the word – this pure violence.

  And I guess I must have been knocked down by the blast – because I realised I was on the floor, so I got up – and I was deaf, like my ears were underwater –

  And I looked up, and all the windows of the office were broken, and I was just like – shit –

  And people were bleeding from the broken glass, covered in dust, and everybody was just – shocked kind of isn’t the word – they were like really wired and breathing really fast and just acting strange and shaking and –

  And this one woman was screaming, so me and this other girl tried to calm her down.

  And everybody wanted to get the fuck out of the office – run for the hills, you know – but the facilities guys were all like Stay Where You Are It’s Not Safe to Leave the Building.

  And part of me was like – fuck that, who listens to the facilities guys? Wearing a yellow Day-Glo fucking tabard doesn’t make you the King of the World, you pompous, megalomaniac, fuck-stick cunts – but part of me knew they were probably right –

  So I brushed the glass off my desk – by now I was sort of on autopilot, you know – trying to re-normalise my situation.

  And I sat there at my desk, covered in dust and glass – trying to do the deep breathing from my yoga, but it wasn’t helping in the slightest – and so I did what millions of other people were probably doing that exact moment – I googled ‘Explosion, London’, and pretty much within two seconds I just found this photo of – well, this woman, lying face down in the street, in this pool of –

  She was in a really bad way. Like the bottom half of her was just – gone – sorry.

  That was like five minutes after it happened.

  She was outside the Space.NK apothecary on the New King’s Road.

  And all the hair on my arms was standing up because –

  I was like – it fucking can’t be.

  But in my heart I knew it was.

  And the one thing I’ll always – my first reaction wasn’t grief or – it was disgust.

  Which I’m so unbelievably ashamed about. Thinking that. About my mum.

  ANA comes on, in a wheelchair. She should be wearing a roll-neck jumper or something, to hide her scars.

  They’re not apparently aware of each other, but they are of us.

  ANA. That morning – Friday 22nd July 2016 – I was on Eel Brook Common in Fulham – it was about ten-thirty. My shift at Strada didn’t start until midday, but I’d arrived early so I could do some sunbathing. I was in a bikini, lying on a towel, reading a book.

  And you know? It was the most beautiful day. The first day without rain for like a month. The sky was so blue.

  And suddenly there was this enormous bang. It was louder than anything I’ve ever heard – louder than reality –

  And I thought it was a car crash or a – I don’t know – I looked up – and –

  Your mind can’t process what you’re seeing, it – this jumbo jet plane hurtling straight at us – me – it was smashing the trees in the park like matches as it – the whole plane flipping over and over like this –

  And it just smashed into the line of houses at the end of the park –

  And after it crashed I remember a split second where everything was quiet – totally quiet – and then there was the explosion, and then I was covered in burning aviation fuel –

  And then I passed out.

  FLOSS joins them, apparently unwillingly.

  FLOSS. So I’m not sure what I can actually add to the whole – I’m just not completely down with emoting, you know? Like this. Feels a bit – dickish – a bit sort of competitive.

  Sorry.

  Fuck it. So basically I was in my dad’s kitchen making a sandwich and then all of a sudden this guy, still in his airline chair, just crashed into the garden.

  Wee – Bop.

  Like a cartoon – a really fucking dark Tim Burton cartoon or something.

  And I – for the first couple of seconds he was alive, and then he wasn’t.

  And I’m a twat, and I’ll feel guilty for this for the whole of my life, but the first thing I thought was just �
�� that song – ‘It’s Raining Men!’

  Sorry.

  GRAHAM enters.

  GRAHAM. I’m Graham. Welcome.

  So to start off with tonight I’ll just stick to the facts, right – because some of what I’m going to be talking to you about, it’s right at the edge of what it’s possible for me to talk about, yeah?

  You get me?

  So the SA-24 is a Russian man-portable infrared surface-to-air missile – it looks, you know, like a bazooka – put it on your shoulder, Blat! Flies at over eight hundred miles an hour, knocks a plane out of the sky at sixteen thousand feet.

  So BU21 had no chance.

  And, since the wars in Ukraine and Syria an SA-24 is now ridiculously easy to get hold of – well, if you’re like a mentalist terrorist organisation with a decent amount of money, that is. I’d struggle to pick one up in the pub, you know?

  Anyway – two guys. One drives the van to this industrial estate near Vauxhall, nobody much about, the other guy gets out the back, puts the rocket on his shoulder, points it at a plane, whoosh, gets back in the van, drives off. They had it all on the CCTV – forty seconds. Piece of piss. You don’t even need to aim it.

  The missile hits the plane somewhere over the river at Battersea Bridge, huge explosion, and it just smashes into Parsons Green, taking out a tonne of houses on the way.

  I mean, what kind of a cunt would do that?

  CLIVE joins them.

  CLIVE. Hi. I’m Clive. Nice to meet you.

  The trouble with stories is you never know how far to go back, do you, to make stuff make sense? Or is that just me?

  Look – I’ll just tell it from the very start so you can make your own decisions, okay?

  So I was only like six or something when September 11th happened – and I literally had no idea what country New York was in, let alone who al-Qaeda were, or what jihadism was – but the next day – bang – I get punched in the face at school.

  And I’m like – wow, what was that for?

  Boy called Caius. Little shit. Classic class bully – you know? Thick neck, head like a football, bit like this – (Mimes stupid face.)

  Probably in prison now –

  Or a CEO or some shit, probably.

  And from then on Caius called me ‘Osama bin Clive’.Amazing mental journey he went on to reach that, you know?

  And it was weird, because until then it hadn’t occurred to me that there was even a minimal difference between me and everybody else in my class. We lived in the same sort of houses, our dads did the same sort of jobs, we watched the same stuff on TV, played with the same Transformers, everything. But after then, being a young Asian boy growing up in a mostly white area, every now and then – not often, I’m not trying to be whiney about it –but sometimes you’re just like ‘whoa – are you actually being serious?’ – especially after some terrorist shit’s gone down recently.

  I remember after the London Tube bombings when I was twelve – there was this feeling, you know? This tension.

  Like all tension, though, you can kind of turn it to your advantage too? This one time, right, I was sitting on this packed bus next to a fat guy eating this really stinky skank-burger – it was really catching in my throat, like I was going to just vom on him –

  So I just put my backpack on my lap –

  And I close my eyes, put my hands out like this, and I start to mumble, like this – (Mimes mouthing what sound like prayers.)

  Guy fucked off like a shot.

  Whole seat for Clive, right there. Sweet as. Cheers, Osama.

  So I wasn’t even actually praying – that was the words to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – Queen? (Does it again – it is now clearly ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.)

  At that time I didn’t even know any Muslim prayers.

  Which was actually the other massive problem in my life.

  THALISSA. So my office is in Chelsea, and I just decided –I just got up from my desk, and I just thought, fuck it – and I just started running down the street towards Parsons Green, towards Mum.

  After about a hundred yards I – high heels, you know? Hate them – I just threw them off, and I ran down the street barefoot, like a hundred miles an hour – like Usain Bolt or something.

  When I got near, the police, the fire engines – it was just chaos – they were trying to stop people from going too near, but it was impossible, because the area was just so big. And when I actually got there – the New King’s Road, Favart Road, all the roads off – Chipstead Street, Quarrendon Street – they just weren’t there any more.

  They were all gone.

  I was looking around like this – and I’d lived in these streets my entire life and I had no idea where I was any more.

  And I saw – I don’t want to even –

  People turned into – who’d fallen from the plane – some of them were just piles of – I don’t want to say meat, because they were people –

  Sorry –

  I had to get to Mum. I suppose even though she was clearly [dead] – I just needed to be the one who looked after her.

  But I couldn’t get to her. I was barefoot and there was so much glass, and my feet were cut to pieces and this policeman was shouting at me, and I just sat down in all this rubble – and I remember the smell – burning rubber and plane petrol and burnt hair – because the smell is still there, to this day, in my nose – however much you try and get rid of it –

  The whole thing was just so unreal.

  It felt like being in a film – like it wasn’t actually happening to me – but I was just watching it – rather than actually, you know, experiencing it.

  But then this guy just started taking photos of me sitting there – news guy, paparazzi, you know – and I just snapped out of it – and I stood up, and I screamed something at him, and he just looks at me blankly, and then I just punched him in the face.

  Because fuck him, you know – that was the worst moment in my life, right there – and he wanted to steal my grief and sell it to a newspaper for profit. Fuck that.

  ANA. And when I came to I was in this indescribable agony – but this animal instinct, it just kicked in – and I just wrapped my towel around me, and I rolled around and around until the flames went out. But when I tried to pull the towel off again – bits of my skin and flesh were still stuck to it. I found that quite hard to accept.

  It was actually a Mickey Mouse towel, and I remember feeling so sentimental about getting blood on Mickey, like I’d done something unforgiveable.

  All around me – the explosion had basically incinerated everything and everybody in the park.

  And I don’t know whether it’s a miracle or a curse, that the human body can live through so much –

  There was this woman, about twenty-five, and the blast had ripped most of her clothes off, and her flesh was shredded all down this side, like pulled pork, and she was walking towards me – totally bewildered –

  (Quietly.) Calling out for her child.

  And whatever kept that woman alive – whether it was God or adrenaline or whatever – for a few more seconds before she died, long enough to know that her baby was dead, is evil.

  Sorry, I don’t think I should carry on like this – you don’t need to know.

  It won’t do anybody any good.

  ALEX bounds on, sits on the corner of the stage.

  ALEX. So hey, I’m Alex, great to see you and all that.

  Thanks for coming.

  Before we start, I just want to make sure that we’re totally clear about the parameters here – to set and manage your expectations, make sure we all know roles and responsibilities. All that standard corporate project-management shit.

  So you’ve paid your fifteen quid, twelve if you’re some kind of a massive screaming pikey – and for that you kind of expect – what’s the best way to put this?

  As far as I can tell this is essentially a financial exchange where you’ve paid money to be entertained by a bunch of horrific human suffering – which
– if you think about it, is kind of weird.

  Kind of dark.

  But I suppose entertainment’s a business like any other.

  So, if that’s what floats your boat – yeah – I can totally give you your dirty little pervo fix, yeah?

  Right, try this fucker on – it’s a fucking doozy, right.

  If you like that sort of thing.

  So my girlfriend and my best friend were killed. She was at his flat on the Harwood Road. And they were fucking. And I didn’t know.

  They found them a week later. Like those bodies, you know, in Pompeii, or whatever. Fused, they said in the inquest. Fused together.

  My best mate and my girlfriend.

  ‘Surprise!’

  Retrospectively, of course, there were these clues. There were spunk marks in the bed where we didn’t habitually leave spunk marks – there was his casual touching of her arm and stuff in the pub –there was the fact that she was the happiest I’d seen her for years, and I was barely putting any fucking effort into the relationship at all –

  But you see what you want to see, believe what you want to believe.You’re like – ‘Will and Tilly? No fucking way.’

  And you’re at work like ninety hours a week so you can’t like police it – and envy is such a pointless emotion, you know?

  And it actually made it easier to mourn them – the consolation that they were a pair of cheating cunts.

  For that I’m profoundly grateful, actually.

  That first night after work I literally had nowhere to go – no clothes, no toothbrush, nothing.

  So a lot of us from work went out, got smashed – what else could we do? And I was all messed up, and I ended up back at this girl’s, and I was a bit like – (Mimes shaking.) and she was like:

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you with someone or something?’

  And I thought of the helicopter footage of the wreckage of Harwood Road on the news – and I was like –

  ‘No, I’m absolutely not.’

  And when it was over, I was sick.

  I don’t normally feel, well – guilt is such a non-productive emotion – and the girl went fucking mental about the vomit, because it was all over her sheets, and she was like ‘that’s Egyptian cotton, you prick, from the fucking White Company’ – and I was like –

  ‘I’ll buy you a dozen sets of your shitty chav sheets if you just shut the fuck up about it, because my girlfriend died this afternoon.’