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

gym membership, and a £140 mobile phone bill. By the time she had bought the makeup and shampoo and clothes that she needed for work, Lucie was spending a few hundred pounds more than she earned every month, and the interest on all her debts was making them harder to repay by the day.
    She was tired and ill. The long overnight flights were bound to be draining, but they were not even fun. British Airways had fourteen thousand crew members; most of the time, Lucie stepped on to a flight with people she had never met before and would not see again. The occasional pleasure of working alongside a friend did not compensate for the monotony of repeatedly pouring tomato juice into plastic cups and offering the choice of chicken or beef. “One hotel room is much the same as another in any country,” said Sophie. “She might be in Paris in the morning, Edinburgh in the afternoon, and she might be in Zimbabwe the following day. But she’d be stuck in the hotel, constantly jet-lagged and really not able to go out and enjoy the life and culture and food because she was knackered. Towards the end, she was quite unhappy—tired, miserable, she never saw the same people twice.”
    There was something almost sinister about the depth of Lucie’s exhaustion. “She’d sleep for fifteen hours on end,” Sophie remembered. “She felt awful, began to be really unwell.” It was beginning to resemble that alarming period eight years earlier, when she had been laid low for so many months by the postviral malaise. It was in this atmosphere of anxiety and exhaustion that Lucie began to talk about going to Japan.
    The idea first came up late in 1999 or early in 2000; nobody remembered quite when or how. But it was clear that it had originated with Louise Phillips.
    Louise was the closest of all Lucie’s friends. The two had known one another since they were thirteen. Physically, they were a contrast: Louise was slim, small, dark haired, with a sheen of that fashionable prettiness that Lucie lacked. She, too, was a girl without a father; he had died suddenly of cancer when she was twelve. And the two friends’ mannerisms, their mode of talking, their love of makeup and nail varnish marked them out as a pair; even their names were similar. Jane thought of them as “soul mates.” Tim was more down-to-earth: “Louise could babble for England, just like Lucie,” he said, “so they babbled all the time and found one another hysterically funny.”
    Their closeness was obvious in the trajectory of their careers; at each stage of her life, Lucie followed a path earlier marked out by her friend. Louise left school at sixteen and went to work for an investment bank in the City, as Lucie would two years later. Louise joined British Airways as a stewardess; Lucie followed. And it was on Louise’s initiative that the two of them went to Tokyo to work off the debts that had become such a burden to Lucie.
    Later events tainted perceptions of Louise, particularly among Lucie’s friends and family. It was difficult to separate those feelings of suspicion and mistrust from the way Louise was regarded before Japan. But Samantha Burman, the daughter of Jane’s friend Val, was wary of her. “She’d been Lucie’s friend a lot longer than I, so I didn’t say anything. But Lucie felt that Louise was the prettier one and Louise was the more confident one, that she was the uglier friend, trying to live in her shadow. I don’t think Louise did anything to change Lucie’s feeling about that.”
    The two of them had been working since they left school. They had often talked about taking a break to travel together, along the familiar backpackers’ route through Thailand, Bali, and Australia. But Lucie had no taste for budget travel, and no money, in any case, for travel of any kind. It was Louise’s older sister, Emma, who told them about Tokyo, where she had lived two years earlier. There, she promised them, they could live in an exciting and unusual city