Ghosts: Priceless

New York, January 2026

I land at Newark and the fire alarm is going off. I walk into the women’s toilet and behind me is someone who proceeds to vomit profusely in the neighbouring stall. I wash my hands while she gags, and gags. I go through security to the blaring sound of the fire alarm. Having read Sense and Sensibility on my phone on the flight over, my eyes are bloodshot. The border officer asks me my biggest modelling career highlight. I hope the state-sanctioned nostalgia might conjure a tear, but it doesn’t.

You can’t know the price of anything in New York. The tax is different depending on the item, so you can’t know until you’re at the register, it is explained to me. The woman stacking shelves goes on singing as I turn away. In Banana Republic there are tags on everything, but prices only on some, with seemingly little logic. Shoes are priceless. This coat is priceless. This jumper too, pale blue - which would suit me.

In New York, I should be rich - something I have never felt before. Here, I should be an heiress, or at least married to an historic banker. Here, my parents should have conspicuously fled South Africa when I was born. I would have been manageably exotic, and probably less Leftwing: perfect. Someone is doing Duolingo on this bus. I’m going to the Met, though I can scarcely afford it. I’m on the awful drag approaching the museum, where I feel tiny and poor, and worst of all like I should be neither. I put my hair up into a chignon and pull out my pearls from inside my turtleneck.

Inside, I look at everything, and cry when I can’t get a silk scarf back into it’s packaging after considering buying it for my mother. I eat an excellent hotdog by the frozen lake in Central Park, and feel like Ignatius J. Reilly. On the bus back to Chinatown a girl full-send sings-along to ‘We Are The People’ by Empire of the Sun playing, presumably, in her headphones. “Are you gonna leave me now?”

Where do people here buy food?

You’re not allowed to know the price of anything in America and you should be ashamed to ask.

Apparently, there are seven million trees in New York which is crazy because I can’t see any. Apparently, they are mostly London plane trees which explains why I do not recognise them. They are so small, so spindly. Branches like the veins on the backs of my thighs: bit ugly in January, unlike the huge, towering women in London Fields. Plane trees like mothers and grandmothers, lumpy and mottled and perfect. Even better without leaves. New York Plane trees are just too young.

The last time I was in New York I was turning 23, and I can’t remember too much about it. I remember getting engaged on the roof of the apartment I was living in. I do remember pining, pining, pining to be allowed back to London. We just moved one of my own rings onto the relevant finger.

In a shop that sells $100 vases a girl wistfully remarks on her “long head”. The other girl also standing in the mirror asks what she has. What head does she have?

I sit down at the bar too early in the evening, exhausted from jet-lag, next to the only other occupied table. “So, how many guitarists are signed with you?” she asks him. “I actually shoot digital as well as film,” she tells him. Now I’m nearly thirty and here to shoot Playboy. I do Pilates in my hotel room, and notice that I feel more aware that I might be gunned down than last time.

Behind the bar is a huge, funkily hand-drawn poster of choking protocol. Bit of a vibe-kill. I wonder how many people have choked in this bar.