Nurse looked down at my notes.
'Take a good look, go on,' I thought.
'It's all there.’
19-year-old Aoife Murray.
Millbag from a council estate,
too thick to use a condom with her eejit boyfriend.
“You've come a long way today,” she says.
The name of the play is 'Cotton Fingers.'
It's a coming-of-age story about
a 19-year-old Belfast girl
who travels to Wales for a termination
and it's a tribute to all those difficult journeys
made by Northern Irish women to the mainland
and I just thought I'd do something about women's rights
and when I was looking up what was new in the NHS
at that time, just that very week that
I was sitting down to write,
it became free for women from Northern Ireland
to get their care on the mainland by the NHS.
I know when it started going wrong.
Second week of January,
day I cleaned the popcorn machine at work.
'Last Jedi' was opening,
there was a queue down the block.
The manager was rushing to open the doors
and I was rushing to get all the unpopped kernels
out of the machine, tray in my hands,
waiting for Britney to bring the bin to me.
“Argh! These feckin' cramps!” she says.
“What feckin' cramps?”
“Yous know...'Code Red.'”
See, Britney and me had got our periods together
since we started at the Omniplex.
She was always cadgin' tampons off me.
'Cotton fingers,' she called them.
My character, Aoife, she is fantastic,
absolutely fell in love with her
from the moment I read the script
and she's, she has a lovely way of looking at the world,
you know, despite the hardships she's facing.
So, all I did, really, was read quite a few interviews
by women who'd had that experience,
Northern Irish women,
about what it was like living with those laws
and try to incorporate their voices into Aoife's character.
I closed my eyes and pretended it was Matty Ray,
eighth man for the Ulster rugby team,
holding of me instead of Cillian.
Matty Ray's strength workin' my jeans down my legs.
Matty Ray's concrete thighs pushin' my legs apart.
Aw, the sex was always deadly
whenever I pretended it was Matty Ray.
But it was Cillian!
So, it didn't last ten minutes!
It's, like, a slice of a young woman's life
that we don't get to hear about enough, you know.
Certainly, me personally, even as a performer,
I have an appetite and I'm drawn to work like this that,
that's a really wonderful, three-dimensional,
complex, female character and a character that needs
a voice, that needs a conduit to her voice.
Boy and girl and sex equals baby.
That's science. That's simple.
I think there's definitely an appetite for these stories.
I'm excited, as a performer to share this with people,
to share Aoife's story
and to be a conduit for her voice.
Well, I phoned the advice service.
The woman on the other end of the line said that
if I wanted to terminate the pregnancy,
I'd have to go to England.
“You have to go to England,” she said.
I'm quite new to theatre writing,
it's only my third, my third play.
I think of myself more as a fiction writer.
But it's just a great opportunity to maybe
take the play a bit further.
International audiences may get to see it.
But it's more like an abortion as an experience.
Can't go around experiences.
You have to go through.
It might be zooming in on a microcosm of
a Northern Irish girl, specific laws,
but women's rights are human rights.
I think a lot of people will be moved and connect with it
and connect with the character and the script.
There's always going to be someone there to judge you,
no matter what you do.
Young mother.
Single mother.
Council estate mother.
Wee girl who had an abortion.