BU21 Read online

  – and then she just went spastic – fucking hysterical, like I was a serial killer or something –and then I had to spend an hour pretending to her I made it all up, and that I didn’t really have a girlfriend, and that she wasn’t dead, which actually made me feel better, even though I knew it was a lie – and then I just fell asleep –

  I literally didn’t know what I was doing that night – I was totally in shock.

  Autopilot.

  But then if I hadn’t have done – I’d have been on the streets that night – I had nowhere else to go – and in a crisis, you do what you have to do, you know.

  FLOSS. And I was just staring at the chair guy, like this –(Eyes wide open.) and I remember my mind did this double-take and I thought for a second that it was, in some insane way, Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, and I was like – I didn’t know he flew now, or made random house calls – go, disability!

  Anyway – he looked up at me, and he caught my eye for a moment, and then he just died. The light just went out – quietly, and softly – And the thing is, he looked so kind.

  Pause.

  And we had to move out of the house for a week, and when we came back chair guy was gone, and they’d tidied everything up as best they could, jet-washed everything, you know – fucked up the whole garden, actually – but there was still this gash in the grass, and on the wall behind there was this black stain – which was like corpse juice or something.

  Charming.

  And for six months me and my dad ignored the black stain on the wall with this sort of studied indifference – I love him for that – we made no mention of it at all – stiff upper lip, all that shit – but neither of us went out into the garden either.

  And then one day I came back home, and the wall had been painted white, and there was this trellis and like roses or something planted against the wall, and the gash had this chiminea over it.

  And I missed the black stain on the wall, actually. Weirdly.

  And when I went to the inquest to give my little spiel – it’ll go on for like four years or something, so it’s awesome that I’ve done mine already – and Chairy – The Man Who Fell to Earth – his name was actually Sunny Mir – SunnyMir – which is such an awesome name – and he was forty-seven, and he was a doctor from High Barnet.

  I didn’t say anything, in the inquest, about him still being alive. His family were there and I didn’t want them to – so I totally bossed the inquest – smashed it –

  I kept that between me and Sunny.

  Our little secret.

  CLIVE. The thing is my family was actually, like, relentlessly secular – my dad’s a cardiologist and basically this hard-line Richard Dworkin-worshipping atheist guy – you know, science has absolutely all the answers, religion is – (Gestures idiot face.)

  In my house, religion, and especially Islam, was sort of patronisingly looked down on like it was for those less fortunate in life – like believing in God was downmarket – sort of like bingo or ITV or car-boot sales or something –

  And because my grandparents are all dead, and my parents are almost neurotically well integrated – you know, all the fervour of the young first-generation immigrant, desperate to be more English than the English – I’m talking tweed, man, the works – I was in the weird position of not quite fitting into the culture where I lived, but also being a total stranger to the culture where the racists thought I should eff-off back to.

  And I’m not like my dad. I love my dad but – I’ve always been quite a spiritual person, you know? I was sort of turned off by the coldness of his scientific outlook – it excludes a space for love, and kindness, and human fallibility, and wonder, and gratitude – basically everything that makes life worth living.

  I think.

  So when I was a teenager I kind of rebelled against my dad’s emotionless sort of truth, and I started going to the mosque, you know?

  I needed it. I really needed it, man –

  Both to discover where I’d come from, and to work out where I was going to.

  ALEX. So I was totally back to work the next day. Totally fucking RoboCopped it. Didn’t tell fucking anyone. Bosh.

  It’s a fucking dog-eat-twat world, mate, especially at work – chink in the fucking armour is all it takes to get the – you know – that medieval war thing – spikey – halberd or something – in.

  And then when all the sick jokes started coming – internet memes, comedy clubs, all that – practically the very next day –

  And it turns out that if the plane had crashed in like a poor area of London it’d have been entirely tragic – but in a posh area, people find it a tiny bit secretly hilarious.

  But you know what? I actually sort of found it massively cathartic, you know, all the rancid internet jokes and class hatred.

  If you can fucking laugh at it, you can beat it, you know.

  Is that true?

  Fuck it – it’s called a poignard. Long dagger thing that you stick between armour. That’s what it’s called.Not a fucking halberd.

  Charlie’s dad has a wall of them in his house. Great Hall. Totally castled up, Charlie’s dad.

  He’s totally buried in the family chapel, Charlie.

  Skills.

  How’s this going so far? Digging it? Getting off?

  Good for you.

  GRAHAM. I always fucking hated it around Fulham. Pretentious cunts, Hooray Henrys, women who call themselves Yummy Mummies, whereas in reality they’re furious skeletons in gym kit, one missed meal away from the grave – cunts called Geoffrey driving Range Rovers. Abysmal people.

  I suppose at least they’re always getting their houses done – I drive for a building delivery firm, so I suppose middle-class vanity is what keeps it afloat – lofts and cellars and extended kitchens and shit –

  But nobody wanted to see that shit happen. Not even in Fulham.

  I was one of the first TV interviews, right?But you probably know that already?

  It’s kind of iconic, if I say so myself.

  Half an hour after. Still in, you know, shock:

  GRAHAM is now ‘on TV’, just after the crash – or he behaves as if he is.

  The plane – it came down right here – right over there, you understand? I wasn’t more than a hundred yards away.

  Pause.

  I tried to save as many as I could. I think I got to five or six. I don’t know. I wish it could have been more –

  Pause.

  And you know something? Whoever did this, I’ve got a message for you, pal – we won’t ever be beaten. Not by you, not by anyone – because we’re Londoners, and we’re shoulder to shoulder, forever. You get me?

  (Normal voice.) And when you agree to do one, they ask you to do another, and another – and it just sort of snowballs with a momentum of its own that you’re not really in control of –

  Until you’re like a fucking celebrity and sweet old biddies come up to you in Tesco and thank you for what you said, with tears streaming down their faces. Seriously, I’ve been hugged by more weeping old ladies than Tom Jones, you know?

  Weird as.

  FLOSS. So the passengers from BU21 fell from four thousand five hundred feet. It’s totally unsurvivable, unless you fall into deep snow or something, and you’re like miraculously, freakishly, lucky.

  I looked it up on the internet – one guy in the Second World War fell out of a bomber from thirty thousand feet, fell into a pine tree and then into snow, survived, stood up, lit a fag, scratched his head and wandered off.

  Probably to a bar to get totally bongoed, I’d imagine.

  But mostly you’ve got no chance. So there was nothing I could have done, even if I was like a doctor or an ambulance guy – rather than just a gormless idiot holding a cheese sandwich –

  You know something? According to the medical guy in the inquest, about seventy per cent of the passengers were alive and conscious as they fell four thousand five hundred feet through the air.

  Dat’s a real bastar
d of a statistic to drop on us, doc.

  I looked that up on the internet – how long a fall from four thousand five hundred feet takes.

  Twenty-two seconds.

  (Counts.) One,

  Two,

  Three,

  Four,

  Five,

  Six,

  Seven,

  Eight,

  Nine,

  Ten,

  Eleven,

  Twelve,

  Thirteen,

  Fourteen,

  Fifteen,

  Sixteen,

  Seventeen,

  Eighteen,

  Nineteen,

  Twenty,

  Twenty-one,

  Twenty-two.

  …BANG.

  And I keep wondering what was going through Sunny’s mind on the way down –

  I keep timing myself twenty-two seconds – like five times a day, obsessively – and I try to reconcile myself with, like, death, in twenty-two seconds.

  On the stopwatch on my iPhone.

  And it turns out I run out of things to say after twelve seconds.

  (Takes out iPhone, sets timer.)

  Thank you for the gift of life, thank you for my friends and my family, for all the amazing things I’ve done, and places I’ve seen, I hope nobody grieves for me too much and I hope to fuck this doesn’t hurt too much.

  You see? Twelve fucking seconds.

  What do I do for the other ten?

  Do I just go WEEE and enjoy the ride?

  CLIVE. When I was growing up I was against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not because I was a Muslim – but because I wasn’t a massive psychotic warmongering fuckwit with mad eyes like Tony Blair.

  Because I was a decent human being.

  And I’ve got this natural British desire to root for the underdog, the little guy – but in Afghanistan and Iraq we were the big guy, the marauding bully, the over-dog, the Caius –

  And me and my dad would argue – fucking hell would we argue – about the war, about everything –

  And when you’re a teenager, the more somebody opposes you, the further to the other end of the spectrum you go.

  So I kind of became really quite devout. Just to piss off my dad, really. In retrospect.

  I started going to the mosque every day – grew a shitty bum-fluff beard.

  And because all my parents wanted for me was for me to get on, do well, play the game – be a lawyer, suburban-respectability shit –

  I thought, fuck that, too. I was going to do something greater and purer and more noble with my life.

  Something with a proper spiritual purpose.

  I was going to change the world.

  Scene Two

  We’re in a support group. Semicircle of chairs. ALEX, THALISSA, FLOSS, GRAHAM, ANA.

  ALEX. So work suggested – well, they fucking basically insisted – or they said they’d fucking fire me – that I go to like a support group – I mean, for fuck’s sake, right? – because I was smashing so much coke and booze that some days I wasn’t turning up until like eleven in the morning, and when I did I was gibbering about being raped by dinosaurs and shit –

  So –

  In the meeting I was totally Leonides, utterly fucking Sparta – I was like ‘I fucking dare you to fire me when my house’s just burnt down and my girlfriend’s just been incinerated by a falling plane. It’d be a PR fucking holocaust for you. You can’t fucking touch me, basically.’

  And there were like six of them, and they just stared at me –you know, like this –

  And in the end there’s no point in calling their bluff on it. These HR cunts are fucking cold. Fucking – bankers, you know?

  And it turns out a survivors’ group is literally the best place in the universe to pull.

  You give it all this ‘I’ve been hurt real bad, baby’ shit, and then you look down all like this – (Morose and wounded.)

  And then look up all hopeful – and then you’re like,

  ‘I’ve never met anybody who understands me’ – pregnant pause –‘and what I’m going through, like you,’

  And then you try to force out some actual tears through your actual eyes – squeezing one of your balls with your fingernails through your trouser pockets works – and in like ten minutes they’re noshing you off, pretty much guaranteed.

  Target-rich environment, man, the seriously traumatised.

  Mental.

  THALISSA. So about a month after the crash I went back to work – but it turned out to be a massively shit decision because I was getting all these flashbacks and –

  Well, everybody was being so amazingly,like emphatically kind and patient – but in my mind it was – because they were treating me like I was some sort of ticking time bomb – people would just talk to me. Really. Slowly. And. Concerned – like I was retarded or foreign or something –

  And in the end I was in this client chemistry meeting and I stood up– in front of the senior client and everything – and I was just like – ‘fuck’s sake, can everybody please just stop being so fucking kind to me?’

  And the account director just looks at me open-mouthed, and I ran out and just hid.

  So here I am. And I’ve got to say, it’s been totally fucking brilliant.

  I mean, of course it’s a bit cringe, but I’m a very people-person, and I’m very happy to be open and inclusive and – it’s a cliché, but a problem shared really is a problem halved.

  Some of the people are great.

  There’s this guy, Alex, a banker, at the group. To start with he was all like, you know, macho alpha-male dickhead – but underneath, I could just feel that he was as vulnerable as me.

  I’ve just got this radar for people, you know.

  And then one night we went for a drink together, and he just opened up to me. It was actually really beautiful.

  He said that he’d never met anybody like me, anybody who understands him like I do – and I was like – me too, Alex. Me too.

  And then we – well – she shoots, she scores!

  That night was the first night that I’d felt happy in a long, long time.

  FLOSS. So I was getting kind of teary at weird points, like at dinner and stuff – like there was something spontaneously tragic about carrots – which isn’t me at all – and my dad totally can’t deal with that kind of nonsense, and so he was like – (Ultra-posh voice.)

  ‘Um, you know, uh – I asked Cecily’ – his secretary – ‘to, see if there was anything that could be done about your’ and he gestured forward in the air, in this vague way, bless him – ‘and she’s booked you into this, I’m sure it’s a waste of time – ’and handed me a leaflet like this, like it had shit on it.

  Which was so sweet of him I almost cried – but I didn’t, obviously –

  And I turned up the next week –

  And the first thing I thought was that it was a little bit like a sort of maimed version of Friends,you know?

  (Sings.) I’ll be there for you,

  Though we’re torn limb from limb.

  Sorry.

  It was kind of worse than I was letting on. I justcouldn’t stop seeing Sunny. Everywhere.

  Like literally I’d be walking down the street and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I’d catch sight of Sunny in the crowd, or in reflections in shop windows – or like he’d go past on a fucking bus when I was riding my bike.

  It was fucking terrifying. The PTSD guy – Derek – of course he’s called Derek – told me not to be scared of it – that it was perfectly normal for somebody who’d gone through what I’d gone through – but fuck’s sake –

  I mean what was I supposed to do, go:

  ‘Oh, hi, weird corpse flashback. How you doing?’

  ‘Yeah fine, dead and stuff. You?’

  ‘Yeah fine, just having this massive psychotic episode – you know, seeing you and stuff – ’

  And then the lights would change and the bus would drive off.

  I mean – I stopped lo
oking in mirrors in case I saw him over my shoulder –

  It was like a horror film – a really low-budget, shit, British horror film, that just kept going on and on and –

  And I was kind of trying to get a handle on it – it mostly happened in busy, you know, restaurants and on Tubes so – so I just spent a lot of time chilling at the crib, word?

  Didn’t go out. At all.

  And I was like – fuck, Floss, you’re turning into a crazy psycho cat woman, you know? With all bats in your hair and shit? Postmen going like this – (Shocked face.)

  When I answered the door?

  I’d be like, come on, get up, you haven’t worn outside clothes for a week now.

  But then I’d be like – fuck me, is that Countdown?And I’d just sit down again, because I was so scared.

  It was mental. And I mean actually mental.

  This place is fucking jokes, man – seriously, the average conversation is like:

  THALISSA. So, you still seeing a dead Pakistani guy on public transport, hun?

  FLOSS. And I’m like:

  (Modestly.) ‘Yeah, hun.’

  THALISSA. Yeah, so I pretty much constantly see the naked corpses of mutilated babies hanging from trees.

  FLOSS (to her). I been there, sister.

  (To us.) It’s always great to meet people with similar interests to yourself, I suppose.

  GRAHAM. So my main problem after 22/7 was rage. I had a lot of rage. I mean a LOT. Some of it was directed towards the numpties in MI5 and the police and the retards at the Channel Tunnel who missed a van with a five-and-a-half foot long missile in the back – I mean, it’s not like a pair of fucking nail scissors in your hand luggage, is it? It’s a cunting missile, you cunts.

  But most of it was just like outrage – how dare these dirty fucking fuckers do this to us, to London?

  Because these Muslim fuckers needed to be taught a lesson, you know? Death and violence is the only thing these people understand, and thank fuck the government did what they did – ignore the Twitter-hashtagging Guardian-reading fucksacks, the scruffy student candlelit peace vigils with their ‘Not in My Name’ shit – and they properly stepped up to the plate and – smashed it –

  Globally trending hashtag ‘We’re All Londoners’ – fuck off.

  (Wanker gesture.)