'My plane turned back to London'

"You may have noticed we've turned the plane around." The pilot's voice comes through the loudspeaker. There's been a crash in New York. The World Trade Center. American airspace is shut, he says, and I know: you don't close all American airspace for an accident. Thirty-five thousand feet up over the Atlantic I sit, trapped. I think: I'll never see New York again, there will be a war, we'll fly until we run out of fuel like in one of those 1950s doomsday movies; I'll never get home.

I've been in London for the weekend to visit a sick friend, take an extra day, fly out on the morning of 11 September. The plane turns back.

For years I've divided my time between New York and London.

It's been an easy pattern, the cities similar enough so there's no culture shock. I love London, but New York is where I was born and grew up; it's who I am. Not just New York, but downtown Manhattan. It's my village. Both my parents have been dead for years; New York is somehow my real connection with them. I don't so much feel American as I do a New Yorker. I remember wandering around the foundations of the World Trade Center when it was going up with my first boyfriend.

I'm not sure how to feel now; it seems improper to say you're hurting when there are people who died, people whose husbands and wives and kids are dead. But I feel as if someone has kicked me. This must be the way people feel when war breaks out and they're stranded in a foreign country, watching it on TV. Surreal. Stomach turning. Not being there is unbearable. Every night I dream I'm at home and wake up and look out and see the sunny London garden outside my window. Every few hours I call the airline. When can I go? When can I go home? I watch TV all day and night.

It takes me six days to get a flight home. Then, coming in from JFK, there's the skyline and all I see is the empty space, the raw gums, buildings torn from the flesh. There's nothing to say; it's all been said.

In front of my building on Greene Street in SoHo, my neighbour Lois is waiting. Everyone's OK here, she yells before I get out of the cab. The air is thick with smoke. A black cloud hangs over lower Manhattan.

Upstairs, in my loft, I look out of the south-facing windows and there's nothing there. Before I left, the towers filled the windows; now they're gone.

When the twin towers were built, we laughed at them, the ugly boxy structures; the crates the Empire State and Chrysler buildings came in, we called them. In New York, where change is the only stable thing, familiarity breeds affection and the towers had become part of life.

"Are you OK?" There are dozens of messages on the machine: one friend, trapped in the subway beneath the Trade Center that morning, survived; another went to work late, thank God; news of a guy who didn't make it. A friend from the BBC calls to say she's in town. "You have to go there so you know it's real. I'll come with you." We walk towards Wall Street.

No traffic; only dust. Ash, paper. You can taste it. Everywhere are workers with shovels, Red Cross people, volunteers. Can I help?

The disaster tourists have already arrived with their cameras.

"I told you already, no pictures," says a beefy cop. "Show some respect. You know what that dust is? That's people."

St Paul's Chapel has become a refuge and a memorial. Teddy bears, rosary beads, flyers with missing people on them, portraits of firemen as angels line the railings. Later the kitsch merchants will come with the twin towers in snow globes and GI Joe dolls playing God Bless America.

What I remember most about it, though, was the silence. No noise, no traffic coming north from the "Zone", the area closest to Ground Zero, where there is no traffic. And no planes fly over the city. I'd go to bed at nights, with the silence so thick, so dense - no background buzz - you could lean against it.

Almost as soon as I get back, I call everyone I know. Are you OK? You? I make the rounds of the neighbourhood, looking for firm ground. I go to Balthazar, the brasserie on Spring Street, my regular hang-out. "Thank God you're OK. Welcome back, have a drink," says one of the waiters. "We just wait for regulars to show up. So many people are gone."

Some of the shops in SoHo where I live are shutting down, others empty. In the wild, free-spending Nineties, uptown shops - Vuitton, Chanel - replaced art galleries in the once funky neighbourhood. In the wake of 9/11, no one's shopping, the economy's lousy, the stock market's in free-fall. Some friends lose their jobs,

the rest of us worry as the goodtimes patterns of a decade are trashed.

TriBeCa to the south is hit hard; after weeks, it's still in the "Zone", still without traffic. Restaurants like Chanterelle and Nobu where you couldn't get a table before - there's only before and after now - - are offering deals. Others are closing. A lot of people won't come downtown, don't want to see it, smell it.

SO we go. Kids play ball in the street. Soldiers patrol, a very few brave tourists come, astonished - given the popular myth about New York's rude denizens - at these friendly locals who say "Hi" and "Thanks". Suddenly we're the focus of the nation's sympathy, like a black-sheep relative fallen on bad times. The weather is mockingly beautiful, hot, sunny days, balmy evenings, except for the cloud hanging in the Indian-summer air, black by day, eerily illuminated at night by the lights used by the rescue crews digging around the clock.

Most days I just stare out of the window. I'm desperate to do something, not from altruism, but to keep busy. The volunteer jobs are all taken. Like everyone else I wander around, anxious, dislocated, bringing money and cookies to firehouses draped in purple.

The city is divided: those who lost someone close and those who didn't; uptown and downtown. For many, uptown seems almost as before; down here everything has changed. I rarely go uptown now; I want to be close to home. Normally, I'd go to at least a couple of movies a week; I don't go at all. Nothing is normal.

Then the Anthrax scare. I get some Cipro, the antibiotic used to treat anthrax. Embarrassed, I hide it but the neighbours ask if they can have some. I'm reluctant to get the mail out of the mailbox. One envelope looks suspect. I take it back to the post office; they think I'm nuts. I go to bed thinking about smallpox. Nukes. Maybe I've written too many thrillers. Everyone's nervous about flying.

But there's also the "to hell with it" factor. Friends I haven't seen in years call. Love affairs begin. Stories of lots of sex and booze. Food, too.

"What flavour of Ha?gen-Dazs is best?" asks a woman who hasn't touched ice cream in 10 years. Entenmanns cakes and Krispy Kreme doughnuts fly off the shelves. Cosmetic surgery booms; if the end is coming, we're going looking good. There are no jokes, though. In the HQ of bad jokes, there are none.

From abroad come the anti-American stories. As if we don't get it, as if we somehow fail to connect. We know there are other wars, we know more people died in Srebrenica or Rwanda. It doesn't make us mindless, flag-waving idiots. Almost 3,000 of us are dead. Thousands of kids have lost a parent.

Then one morning around the corner from my place, I see a guy hangingphotographs in an empty store window. It's an exhibition they call "Here Is New York".

"Do you need any help?" "Sure," he says. "What can you do?"

"Nothing," I say. "I'm a writer." "Me, too," he says introducing himself as Michael Shulan. "OK, you're in sales."

Thus in late September, I become a volunteer. Michael and some of his friends have hung photographs, hundreds of them, anonymous, random, like laundry in the Naples streets. All day, as crowds pack what we call the "gallery", we sell digital copies of the pictures for 25 bucks for the kids who've suffered from 9/11.

Some weekends I go in before 10am to open up and stay until six or seven. My feet are killing me but I love it. There's the sense of community, the New York where I grew up, a small-town city of neighbourhoods and villages. There are the volunteers-Mary, the real estate agent, Brenda, the computer whizz, Chris and Jay, Maggie, Lara, Clete, Sam. There are drinks every evening after closing. Friendships are made.

The photos are by amateurs, professionals, children. Here is a tea set covered in ash like an artefact from Pompeii. A young woman weeping and holding her wedding photo up, hoping someone will tell her that her husband is still alive. A fireman with a shovel walks across a girder in the blazing rubble. Half-hidden behind a pillar, because we're not sure if it should be up, is the stark picture of the Trade Center with what looks like birds. They're not birds. These are people jumping.

The exhibition becomes a phenomenon. News crews come. People wait four hours to get in. They come from London, Japan, Alaska. Bill Clinton shows up with Kevin Spacey. Elton John comes by, though the shop has to be cleared for Sir Elton.

Eventually the show will travel to Germany, France, London, Washington-DC. I end up working on a film about it for the BBC. And I meet some of the people in the pictures: JoJo Capestro, an Italian woman from Brooklyn, who walked down 87 floors from tower one in her stockinged feet, fainted, saw a priest, thought she had died; Erik Tischler, an Orthodox Jew, who took her picture. Lucille Blair, an Englishwoman, was photographed running home over the Brooklyn Bridge to reach her little boy. Billy Green, a firefighter, went in with his crew, came out alone. He saw piles of dead people but remembers them as cows. I wonder, suddenly, if he'd seen TV coverage of the footand-mouth crisis in Britain and it had stuck in his mind.

In this last year, New Yorkers' lives have crisscrossed in a way they rarely do in this most tribal of cities. I've got to know a couple of firemen; I'll try to keep in touch. Attention was paid. People listened.

For those who lost family, friends, people who lost jobs or witnessed the traumatic events, life in the city has changed for ever. I know people who can't go into tall buildings. Some friends are leaving New York for good. For others, life has snapped back to normal. More or less. For me, the changes are in the emotional terrain. I'm not taking any bets on the future right now. New York is, again, full of bravado, we posture and swagger and shop. But the future seems less secure. All the talk is of making war on Iraq. A sense of unease when a plane flies too low. Stubborn remnants of missing posters. And, at my place, the empty windows.

We feel fragile. We feel tender and protective towards our now vulnerable little island, this snip of cement, this scrap of land with two million people jammed on it in the middle of the archipelago that makes up New York. Put your arms around it in case any more bastards come after us.