People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry Read Free Book Online

Chimneys, and the Black Boy. Marco suffered from severe colds and spent long hours recovering from them in bed. During evenings out with Lucie, he frequently vanished for short stretches with one friend or another. “It just didn’t click what was really going on,” said Sophie. “It was so stupid and naïve of us.”
    Her friends found him vain and standoffish, but Lucie was becoming more and more serious about Marco. One weekend, he dropped her off at Heathrow and drove away in her car, with the promise that he would pick her up on her return the next day. But when she landed, Marco wasn’t there. “He didn’t pick her up, he didn’t turn up at all, and Lucie was in a bit of a state,” said Sophie. “She couldn’t get hold of him. She didn’t know where her car was, she didn’t know where he was, she didn’t know anything. Eventually, she rang a member of his family, his cousin or something. The cousin said, ‘I was hoping this wouldn’t happen again. This is what Marco does, you see. What exactly has he told you?’ It turned out that he was a complete lying bastard.”
    Marco, it transpired, had never been a model. Moreover, he was a heavy user of cocaine. The disappearances in the pub, the susceptibility to “colds,” and the long hours of recovery—suddenly, they made sense. In a rage, Sophie went to Marco’s flat. He was in bed, stupefied after an extended binge of drugs and booze. The keys of Lucie’s Renault Clio were on the table beside him. Sophie picked them up, gave Marco a valedictory punch, and stormed out to retrieve the car. Its door and back panel were scraped and dented by a collision.
    Lucie was as caring and protective of her car as she was of her hair and fingernails: that was the end of her and Marco. Her unhappiness was intense but short-lived. Then, a few months later, came jolting news. Marco had committed suicide—or, according to another version of the story, had died of an accidental overdose of drugs. Whatever the truth, Lucie’s handsome ex-boyfriend was dead.

 
    3. LONG HAUL
    It was becoming obvious that the life of an air stewardess wasn’t for Lucie. By early 2000, it felt like a trap that she must urgently escape. To her colleagues, this was difficult to understand, for she had recently achieved the ambition of every British Airways cabin crew member: promotion from the short-haul jets that flew from Heathrow to the intercontinental flights out of Gatwick. The long-haul destinations were more exotic, more glamorous and, above all, better paid. As a junior flight attendant, Lucie’s basic salary was paltry—an annual £8,336 * before the deduction of tax. The same amount again came from the “allowances” that were added to her pay depending on the destinations, and the nature of the flights on which she worked. Flights that were very early, or long, overnight flights, and flights that required an unusually fast turnaround—all of these earned a bonus. There were allowances for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, based on the cost in local currency of a three-course meal in a five-star hotel. It was assumed as a matter of course that most employees would settle for a much cheaper meal and pocket the difference. So the least desirable flights were short hops within the United Kingdom; the most rewarding were the expensive cities of Asia and the Americas: Miami, São Paulo, and the most lucrative of all, Tokyo.
    Having moved to long haul, Lucie could expect to earn about £1,300 a month after tax. But however much she worried about money, she continued to edge deeper and deeper into debt. Lucie’s scribbled accounts of expenditure and income for the end of 1998 listed a monthly payment of £764.87, more than half her income, on her Diners Club credit card account alone. Then there was the £200 monthly payment for her Renault Clio, a £47 payment for a bank loan, £89.96 for her Visa card, £10 for a Marks & Spencer credit card, as well as £70 in rent to Jane, a £32