Darkness eats away at the lamplight. It’s the time of morning when everything should be still. St. Pancras glows orange and looks like a gateway to somewhere warmer and brighter.

I love the Eurostar. I love the way it feels to be moving at that speed on a pre-determined route. But I sleep the whole way because we were up so late packing and then we had to get a midnight bus to London.

We don’t have much stuff. I mostly spend the weekend in the same outfit–a bright skirt, a blouse, a pair of sandals, making the most of the August heat–except one time when I think it’s going to rain so I don a pair of leather riding boots and then it turns out to be the hottest most glorious day of the whole trip. That is the day we walk to the top of Montmartre and have lunch at a little restaurant whose name I forget. We order salads–with meat, boiled egg, avocado, beetroot–and a carafe of wine and though we’ve spent most of the day’s allotted budget on the meal there is a happiness that comes over us. We finish the wine slowly, watching a girl in a red dress and heels alight from a vespa scooter. I don’t remember coming down from Montmarte particularly though I do remember that as we do we pass a painting of a donkey on a wall and also the Lapin Agile, which reminds me of the high school production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile I once saw. (It turns out I misremember this because when I go through my photos I discover that the painting is actually of a horse, and there’s a man on the horse, riding bareback)

I remember sleeping on the floor of a friend’s empty apartment. The mattress is torn and dirty, like something you’d find in a streetside skip. There’s a refrigerator in the middle of the room where we put our juice and our cheese. The shower head is collapsing and the bath stained with rust and other unimaginable things and I avoid washing for the whole weekend, making do with splashing my face and scrubbing under my armpits with water from the sink. That’s a nice way to be, for a time.

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Every time I come here I see a different city.

The first time I visited New York I was twelve. It was nothing to me but the place of my mother’s birth; and therefore, though my only impressions of it were vague and fluid, like a film, I had some invisible tie to it. I had heard place names. Brooklyn place names, mostly, because that was where she had lived; in a cramped apartment on Flatbush Avenue. I knew names. But I had no capacity to envisage anything.

So it was like being shaken in a bottle and then tipped out onto a map full of foreign words. We took a red-eye from LAX, stopped over in Las Vegas. I remember the glitter of lights, a garish city that looks beautiful only when viewed from above, in the haze of half-sleep. We stayed with friends of friends somewhere in Brooklyn, but I was still young enough not to pay enough attention to things. We took subways and cabs. Towards the evening we rode all the way out to Coney Island. That was another place-name I had known. Coney Island. I hadn’t known how to picture it, but maybe, in a vague sort of way, I had compared it in my head to Balboa Island, because they were both called “island”, because I had fond memories of playing arcade games at Balboa, winning prizes.

Coney Island was dying, dead. A warm, empty wind blew through the streets (this was April, and still cold, but slowly thawing out). The light was yellowish, brownish. We stood watching ferris wheels and roller-coasters decay before our very eyes; then we had a hot dog at Nathan’s and took the train back and I fell asleep listening to my mom describe the wicker subway seats of her childhood.

Later that weekend we visited the Met; I decided it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, to live in an apartment overlooking 5th avenue, and then you could pop in and out of the museum whenever you wanted, visit each room and lavish each painting, each sculpture, with the attention it deserved. Easy. I liked the thought of luxury, then. We went and used the bathrooms in Saks Fifth Avenue; I was bowled over by the price tags on things. I remember particularly a lime-green silk woman’s suit, priced at about $700. I could wear lime-green silk suits and visit the Met; yes.

We went to the Village, to Bleecker street where I spent some time in a Tibetan shop buying prayer flags, embroidered pillowcases that smelled of incense, blue paper lanterns, and then to a shop full of wooden and knitted things; I bought a hat. At another shop, our friend tried on vintage fur coats, slipping them over her pale Burberry.

But that trip was mostly the Brooklyn Museum trip. We went on what I remember as a dewy day; bits of sunlight, droplets of water on the leaves in the botanic gardens, through which we strolled slowly and deliberately, savouring each springtime smell, feeling the hot, moist air of the greenhouses, until we arrived at the museum, and went upstairs where we looked at an exhibit of Hiroshige drawings. I remember the simplicity, the clean lines and colours. I was entranced. From the gift shop I bought a little necklace, a pink flower on a red beaded rope. I made notes in an embroidered notebook from Chinatown (I probably still have it somewhere, those notes are preserved).

I went back other times after that. I visited college campuses in a snowstorm (my enduring memory of that trip is drinking a hot chai latté from a funny little bar near NYU called the White Rabbit). I went for a spectacular run through Central Park. I sipped Sierra Nevada in a grotty Midtown hotel room with a few college friends. I spent a week on the Upper West Side, taking the subway, reading Don Delilo.

Each trip was made of impressions, of highlights between exhausted nights. Each trip was to a different New York; and I’m still trying to find the general New York, the essence of it, the thing that connects those highlights and impressions.

In the meantime, we’ve had a breathless, beautiful time here.

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Late lunch followed by a walk in the park. Not just any park. An elevated park. We’re up amongst the buildings–not above them, not looking up at them from the street, but weaving through them, like we’re hovering, like it’s magic. The sun sets behind us as we walk (through? over?) the meatpacking district. We can see into art galleries and meeting spaces, meet the eyes of billboard models. A strange yellow light descends upon the city, then melts away, into the night. We stand watching the long straight lines of the streets, the headlights, the glitter of windows. When we come down, our feet feel heavy. We’ve been floating.

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And the parade of the poorly dressed.  One man has seen fit to slit his trousers from waistband to hem, so that from behind we catch the sight of his naked bottom, the crack between cheeks.  At night the girls flock to nightclubs and wear getups that even Fellini could not have imagined.  And always in pairs.  One girl in a zebra-print skintight dress that doesn’t quite cover the twin bulbs of her rear, the other wearing rubber tights and something resembling a top.  Disappearing into the pulsating intestines of a place called Raw or Moles.  Hens in chefs hats meet stags in kilts on street corners, lose themselves in a cloud of smoke, emerge with outfits askew and cigarettes burned to the filter.  The air is heavy with shouting.  I think it’s happy shouting; but how to tell, when the calls of the drunk before he (or she, in ripped denim skirt, sequin blouse) slips finally into the realm of not-remembering are so close to calls of anguish?  Perhaps it’s the sound of the self letting go, leaving the conscience behind, two aspects parted by a sip too many.  Will the zebra girl wake with ears still numbed by techno, breath still seeped in rum and the empty taste of a late-night kebab-shop feast, and have a regret?  Even a single one, a small one: those shoes, she might think, they’re too high, my knees are sore from dancing now.  The naked-bottomed man might sit, later, upon a cold park-bench, might feel the metallic chill in new places, places he didn’t know could feel things.  Perhaps in this way the senses seem suddenly to expand.

But you see them together and you think that some sort of game is being played, surely.  That the girls fumbling with purses on the street corners are deliberately emulating the hookers of bigger cities; that the blokes, staggering in zig-zag patterns, letting their English voices loose upon the town, are deliberately ignoring every siren call until the last, choosing not to look up a zebra-patterned skirt or at the way a pair of rubber legs is crossed.  Each human his (or her) own, complete, exhibit.  And each exhibiting for an invisible audience.  Not for the disdainful eyes of you or me, or of the girl in jeans holding her boyfriend’s hand.  No, not for us do they strut and pose.

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I like watching people watching each other.  The two girls on the bus, their eyes following the roller-skating ginger-bearded man on the pavement.  The girls in front of me turning their heads at a trio of boys carrying champagne.  “He was fit,” they say, drawing out the “i” in fit. Earlier, where they are sitting, was a man with a magnificent yellow Mohawk, having ice cream with his friend.  They seemed to be having a sensitive discussion about relationships, life journeys, one of them was talking very seriously about skate parks, saying he just felt he needed to be in a city where they were prevalent.  Every so often their heads, too, would incline towards the glass, they would let slip a smile or a snigger.

People watching is almost invariably more pleasurable when the weather is good.  This is not just because there are, inevitably, more people out, and dressed a little more brightly, but also because of the way the sunlight affects them, and makes them look, and the way that a woman standing with a dog next to a spring green tree sprouting small leaves is suddenly poetic in a way she wouldn’t be if there was a drizzle over the city or a monochrome grey in the sky.  Shadows do more interesting things like this.

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