September 10th

It was the kind of heat that clung to you and made your lungs feel heavy. I’d tried to eat the pastabake before me, but it seemed made of the same stuff as the heat and I was gagging on it. The place had no air con, just a few ceiling fans that whirled around dragging the damp air with it, and the temperature seemed to rise and rise. Finally I could stand it no longer and got up and made my way out swaying like somebody drunk. I didn’t hear the man serving behind the counter call after me, but my husband did, and he turned back and saw that the man was pointing out I had left my jacket behind on my chair. I can’t think why I had a jacket that day.

There was no respite out on the street. With the U2 lyrics in my head… summers get hot, well into the hundreds/ You can’t walk around the block without a change of clothing/ Hot as a hairdryer in your face/ Hot as a handbag and a can of mace… I staggered along thinking that at any moment I was probably going to come foul of some Guilliani by-law by throwing up on the pavement, and so get myself arrested. We were in some back street, and feeling weak I came to sit down on the concrete steps of a deserted office building. I sipped at a bottle of warm water and stared vaguely across the shimmering empty road at some dumpsters. If nothing else, I thought, I am seeing a little bit of New York that most tourists don’t see.

I don’t think my husband was so appreciative of where we found ourselves. Working for a bank and having regular contact with various financial institutions in Manhattan, he had wanted to spend some time in the financial district. In particular he wanted to visit the World Trade Centre, which was where we were supposed to be heading. Feeling the way I was feeling however, I didn’t think that I was going to make it. I wasn’t overly bothered. The Empire State building was the one I had wanted to clamber up inside of, and we had already done that. We had done a lot of touristy things, took the Statten Island ferry, gone to the Guggenheim museum, dozed in Central Park, shopped in Bloomingdale’s, stared at the smart people in snappy black suits down Wall Street. A place never visited before, but so familiar, New York felt a bit like one great big film set. The one jarring element had been the cars. I was expecting long, lean flat cars on the cities grid system, like the ones in Cagney and Lacey or Hill Street Blues. But the cars were disorientatingly European in appearance.

The Husband was getting impatient. He didn’t think we were far from the WTC and he wanted to go and find them. I got up, said goodbye to my private little bit of New York and followed him up the street.

He had been right. We weren’t very far from the WTC. In fact we had been practically under their shadows. The trouble with trying to find tall buildings in a city of tall buildings is that the closer you get, the harder they are to see. The Twin Towers had been visible from practically everywhere in Manhattan, but had been invisible just yards away. We stood at their feet now. 110 stories of shiny crystal jutting up into the sky in defiant grandeur. The square base of the things were frightening. Their sheer height inconceivable even as you ran your eyes up their enduring lengths. The images of other buildings around them were captured in their mirrored facades until they could no longer compete, and then only the sky was caught in their reflection.

We sat for a few more moments on the plaza outside by the fountain. Some areas were cordoned off as men with hosepipes cleaned the cracks between the paving slabs with obsessive attention to detail. I watched the men thinking that they weren’t so much cleaners as guardians of the temples above us. Everywhere the place gleamed; polished to perfection. Not a stone out of place.

We were surrounded by the gay colours of other tourists with their backpacks and shorts, mingling with the black suits of the workers catching lunch on the go. Dwarfed between the two towers there was a professional stage set up for some kind of dance performances, and someone was testing the microphone. I decided not to take a photo of the plaza because I was seriously running out of film. I would catch it on the way out if I had any left. Or I’d get a picture next time we came to New York.

We went in. The vast lobby seemed made of diamond and steel and yet at the same time was business like. The tourists had their own lifts, leaving the workers easier access to their offices. We filed in with the queue and noticed something odd. Every tourist, before being allowed near the lift area, was required to have their photo taken. Ostensibly it was a fun idea to allow tourists the chance to later buy a photo of themselves with a WTC back-drop from the shop on the top floor of the tower. I remarked to my husband that it was probably actually a security measure, the system plugged into some FBI system that would pick up on the faces of any known terrorists. I knew the place had been the venue of an attempted bombing in 1993 and I felt safer knowing that terrorists wouldn’t be able to get inside the building and try to blow it up whilst I was inside.

The lifts were the size of cattle trucks. I think we changed lifts about halfway up. Probably not that safe to have a lift shaft following all 110 floors. Whilst we rode upwards pleasant staff told us various things about the building we were currently riding up in. It took some time to make it to the top. I worked on the 14th floor of an 18th story building and when we were evacuated in a fire drill, I knew that it could take as much as fifteen minutes to get down the stairs and out of the building. I was wondering how long it would take to get out of this place in a fire drill. I squeezed my husband’s hand the whole way up.

The top floor was like a small shopping mall. It had room for a restaurant, a cinema, a gift shop, a pub. Looking through the glass walls to the outside, the view gave a similar feeling from that experienced whilst looking at the ground from a flying aeroplane. You could see for miles.

We walked the parameter and took our clues of what we were looking at from the written guides placed around the sides. We put a dime in a machine and it flattened the coin out and printed “I Love NY” on it. We went to the cinema and strapped ourselves into our seats as requested. It was supposed to be a simulation of a helicopter flight around the towers. The chairs we sat in actually moved whilst the grainy video showed the towers from the outside. Everyone stiffled laughs. I don’t think it really captured the true experience. On the way-out the projectionists said goodbye in approximately twenty different languages, and then asked at the end, “did I miss anybody?” I went to the Rest Room. We had a drink. We bought gifts for family; some mugs and a box of chocolates with the logo On Top Of The World on them. My husband had a pleasant chat with the women serving at the Gift Shop till. He remembers that conversation to this day.

There was seating that allowed people to get right up to the windows and look down to the ground. As safe as it was, it was impossible to look directly down the side of the building and not feel sure that you were just about to tumble to your death. It was disquieting and I clung to the rail behind me in case some freak accident meant I slipped and smashed through the pane of glass into the void outside.

We found the stairs that led up to the roof. Oddly, it felt safer up there than it did looking out of the windows below. It wasn’t very windy, and the area was wide and solid. Walking around amongst the scatter of other tourists, I heard every language but English.

Looking across diagonally to the other top of the other tower it felt almost as if you could jump across to it. Or hop on a cloud and be carried over.

Manhattan was bathed in sunshine. You could see directly up the length of it fitted in between two gleaming rivers; the Chrysler building, the Empire State, Central park, Brooklyn Bridge. On the other side, looking out towards the Atlantic, I looked out across to the Statue of Liberty and I don’t think I cried, but I think I felt like it. It was a dream fulfilled. For so many years I had seen New York on TV and film, and I had wanted to come since I had been little. We’d never been able to afford it until now. life was sweet. On Fortune’s Cap we sat the very button.

Stood holding my husband’s hand, we suddenly spotted a storm blowing in from the east. Behind us there was perfect late summer sun, but now before us a vast sheet of dark cloud and rain was heading straight for us. It obliterated everything it covered. We watched it coming for a long time. The wind was whipping up and it was getting dark. The world looked different now. Behind us, most of our fellow tourists had gone back down. I took the last of my photos and we too left.

When the storm hit, the windows inside the tower fogged up and the rain and clouds covered the view. The stairs to the roof were closed. The rain lasted all night.

The place had put us both in a good mood. It was the perfect end to the perfect holiday. Everything was perfect. We were still holding hands as we descended in the cattle-truck-lifts, and I think we might have kissed and whispered things to each other about what we should do when we got back to our hotel room. I was feeling much better going down the building than I had felt when I was going up.

We went beneath the towers to where there lay a stunning underground cavern of shops and transport links. As my husband bought us a coffee, I watched a woman in a suit lay out some advertising posters on the floor that I think were bound for the walls of the shopping mall. We went to the subway and stood on a dusty, hot platform waiting for our train. There was a poster advertising Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new film Collateral Damage. As part of the background of the poster there was a fake newspaper article recalling the details of the attempted bombing of the towers in 1993. It mentioned something about how Arnold’s character, a New York Firefighter, had lost his wife and child in the blast. I remember thinking what an insult that was to the people who had really lost loved ones in that blast. And how in bad taste it was to put a poster here, directly beneath the Twin Towers.

It seemed an eternity waiting for our train. When it came, inside it, the stifling heat was replaced by the cooling ventilation of an air con system. I liked New York’s subway I decided. I preferred it to London’s Underground which felt claustrophobic and dangerous. We easily got a seat. Resting my head on my husband’s shoulder, things seemed dreamlike. What we had just experienced didn’t seem real somehow. That mere humans could dream up, plan, engineer, build, service and operate a place like that seemed impossible. Surely it couldn’t be by human hands alone that things like this could be achieved? There was something otherworldly about buildings that scraped the sky, something divine about the ability to construct them, something spiritual about the desire to see them built. The capabilities of humankind seemed captured in the existence of these staggering global icons. I felt changed for having experienced them.

An announcement came over the tannoy; the driver was not moving from the station platform, he said, until the person in carriage x had taken their feet off the seats. He sounded so bored in his New York drawl, so bad-tempered, so near the edge of reason, that everyone in the carriage looked around at each other and laughed.

I love New York, I thought, I love New Yorkers. I was sorry to be leaving. But tomorrow afternoon my husband and I were going back home, flying to Britain in that other testimony to human vision and achievement - the aeroplane.