I DON’T KNOW what it’s like on the Dart in Dublin, but on the London Underground, we don’t talk to each other. It’s a deal we make on moving to the capital, along with the agreement to never get around to doing a weekly food shop, and to pay more rent for a room in Peckham than you would for a house anywhere else in the UK. Not a particularly sweet deal, but it’s all just part of living in a place where too many other people live.
This contract was re-written for me and the other passengers in my carriage on 7/7/2005, when we were on a tube that was attacked by terrorists. We were in the front carriage – incredibly lucky to be alive – and in the chaos of the moment we began to talk, obviously; we needed to understand what the hell was happening.
I made a bad joke (inappropriate I know, but it’s the way my brain works). Someone pointed out an errant toothbrush wedged between seats. We brushed soot from each other’s faces, held hands and all breathed through a French woman’s scarf to filter out smoke.
It’s this human reaction to tragedy and chaos that I’m exploring in my show Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You as part of Absolut Fringe in Dublin. The show is a coming-of-age story, exploring my life up until that point, the event itself and then everything that happened next. It’s about how we put things together after they’ve been blown apart. You hear about people who’ve had near death experiences and then subsequently changed their lives for the better after such a blast of perspective. The difference was, I had a ‘near being killed experience’, which isn’t as catchy and is perhaps more complex to process.
In the months after the attack I became fascinated by the idea of the bomber on my train, who I discovered was the same age as me. In the show I imagine walking up a mountain with him, and the idea of talking him out of it in the pub. Because he was a human, like me. He couldn’t answer any of my questions and that did my head in a bit. But we’re talking about massive, scary questions that can’t be answered simply and are about shifts in society that need addressing from the root. It was too late for him. But like any event, once it’s happened the important thing is how you deal with it afterwards.
This isn’t a political story in that I’m not suggesting how to address these issues in a wider sense. It’s a personal story about making better decisions, reevaluating relationships and getting better, in every sense. But obviously politics is personal, in that it’s about people and how we interact; so maybe it is a good place to start.
People often ask who the ‘You’ in the title is. I think they’re hoping for some scurrilous gossip, or a complex back-story… It’s simpler than that. It’s ‘You’, as in them, the people I shared the experience with, but it’s also you. Because it could have been you. I’m glad it wasn’t though, you seem lovely. But we live in the kind of world now in which it could have been, in which it wasn’t that surprising. Unexpected and tragic, yes, but maybe not massively surprising. And because we apparently live in this sort of world now, we have to stick together. We have to connect. That might sound trite… I don’t care. In the darkness of the carriage, we have to start talking in order to create some light.
Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You by Molly Naylor is at 8.15pm from Monday September 12 until Saturday September 17, at The New Theatre on East Essex Street, Dublin, as part of Absolut Fringe 2011.
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