When a homemade bomb partially detonated at Parsons Green underground station in west London last September, Rory Rigney – a passenger on the packed tube train – instinctively threw himself out on to the platform and covered up.
Besides having difficulty sleeping for the next few nights, he has hardly been troubled by the incident in the past six months. When a balloon burst in his office a few days ago, however, just for a second he was back on the platform at Parsons Green.
“It was just: ‘You’re in trouble here’. The moment just brought me back for a second,” he says. “Oh shit,” he adds – demonstrating how he sought to protect himself by ducking his head slightly and raising his hands about his ears.
“It could have been anything, I suppose. That noise could have been a balloon or it could have been anything else.
“I suppose you take things for granted, you think you’re in a safe place. But you’re not really ever in a safe place – there could be a gas leak – you don’t really know. For a second there, because I didn’t know what it was, I thought: ‘Just cover yourself because something’s coming’. But it never came. I was prepared and thinking: ‘You’re going to be in it here’.
He was speaking on the day that the 18-year-old Ahmed Hassan was convicted of attempted murder over the bombing on 15 September 2017. Rigney escaped physical harm that day – he even went in to work later that afternoon. But 30 other people were injured on the rush hour London underground train. Hassan faces sentencing next Friday.
The balloon incident was a reminder of a trauma Rigney felt he had largely dealt with – and still believes he has under control.
He first spoke to the Guardian immediately after the bombing during a joint interview with this newspaper and the Times. At that time he appeared to be trying to process what had just happened to him.
As that interview ended, Channel 4 News arrived at his door and he went over the whole thing again. “That night I was completely drained. I went for dinner, but emotionally, I was drained. I think I had a few bad nights’ sleep, where I dreamed about it. But after that I kind of just got on with stuff,” he says.
“All during the day [of the bombing], people were asking, so I was explaining. It was one of these things that you’re reliving over and over again every time you talk to someone.”
That evening he felt “cloudy headed”, adding that he “wasn’t really there” at dinner with his partner. “Maybe it was a delayed reaction to what happened and reliving it over and over again.”
Each of the distressing dreams was the same. But while reminders do still crop up from time to time he is keen to stress that he was not severely affected emotionally and has largely been able to get on with his life.
He says a point came when he had just had enough of talking about it and had to cut himself off from the constant requests to relive it. He has not followed news reports of Hassan’s trial closely, he adds.
He declined the counselling he was offered by the police. “I think I’ve got on with things ... It’s one of those things, I suppose. If you dwell on these things, they could consume you.”
Rigney acknowledges that he has thought about what might have happened to him if the bomb had detonated as Hassan intended it to. But he likens it to looking back at crossing the road and realising you could have died.
“It’s just the way I am. I’ve never really looked back too much. And I suppose in a city like London I don’t think people are that sympathetic; you have to just get on with stuff.”
However, the incident brought other problems. In the aftermath of the bombing conspiracy theorists began putting about false stories that he was a “crisis actor” hired to stage a terror attack – or a police officer doing the same.
One video online focussed on his work for a London digital media firm, citing it as evidence that he was part of a plot to use terror attacks to censor online communications. Another person contacted him insisting he was a police officer. He says, only partially joking, that this appeared to be based on the fact that he and a police officer who had responded to the Parsons Green attack both have beards.
The false allegations didn’t hurt him psychologically, he says, but they did irritate him and leave him concerned that potential employers might be put off.
His phlegmatic attitude extends to his feelings towards the man who tried to murder him. Overall, he says, he feels sorry for him.
