It’s a close-run thing. The expressway out of Manhattan to Kennedy is clogged think, barely moving: our driver takes us zigzagging through the rainy streets of Brooklyn and Queens, neighbourhoods and names recognisable only from novels. We slip in just under the wire to check our bags, and quickly load up on duty free cigarettes well past the deadline for our flight. Shoes and coats off for security, we tag onto the queue to board just before its tail disappears. For nearly an hour the plane edges slowly forward towards take-off on the tarmac in the rain, in a U-shaped queue of planes of all shapes and sizes, like depressed commuters. When we finally leave the ground, New York is instantly invisible in its shroud of cloud.
I have to switch seats temporarily to man the emergency exit aisle, and I sit next to a talkative woman called Shannon, a storyteller and wine/chocolate tasting organizer with homes in London and Manhattan, who curiously embodies all the reasons I feel I could never live and work in New York. She’s intelligent, well-educated and even kind (she brings chocolate for the cabin crew, cheerful young English women with lives and loves scattered around Virgin’s spider-map of the globe), and yet self-obsessed and utterly devoid of a sense of humour.
Flying against the day, dawn comes before sleep. Ireland appears, then Wales, and finally England. It’s a strange kind of relief to be back in the EU citizens’ passport queue, and when we get to the tube I kiss the underground sign: a symbolic gesture of return rather than passion. Eventually I get to Camberwell, where there is a bed to sleep in, and a much-missed fried to say hello to. In the next week I will find myself on the steps again, in the Albion, watching football, being interviewed for a job, moving Steff’s stuff out of the flat we used to share, and somehow unable to encapsulate in words the totality of the experience of the last four months. It’s two full days before I buy a newspaper or turn on a television.
