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

and also earn a great deal of money. What exactly Emma had been doing in Tokyo was vague to Lucie’s other friends; it seemed to vary depending on who was being told the story.
    Samantha Burman gathered that she had been working in “bars.” Sophie recalled talk of “waitressing.” Lucie’s latest boyfriend, a young investment banker named Jamie Gascoigne, had the impression that Emma had performed with a “dance troupe.” In a farewell letter circulated among her friends at British Airways, Lucie presented it as a plan from which she herself was rather detached. “My best friend Louise was going over there to stay with relatives and the opportunity came up for me to go too. I’ve no plans once I’m out there, maybe see the culture, learn the language or become a high class, well paid Geisha girl !!!!!! (Joke) Just a break for a few months, something different—they say a change is as good as a rest.”
    Louise, the girls explained, had an aunt living in Tokyo with whom they could stay rent-free, and this made the proposal seem safer, more comprehensible, and closer to home. It was only to her mother that Lucie explained what Emma Phillips had done in Tokyo and what she and Louise also intended to do. “She said she was thinking of going with Louise to Japan to work as a hostess to pay off her debts, and she made out that it was all going to be absolutely fine. She only knew what it involved from what Louise’s sister had told her. She said you just pour people drinks and listen to them talk, and that they like to sing karaoke. Lucie loved singing, so to her that was money for old rope.”
    But Jane was not interested in the details. Her only concern was to prevent Lucie from going to Tokyo at any cost. “She kept reassuring me that she’d never do anything silly, she’d take extra care. But I just knew that something horrible would happen to her. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d never even thought about Japan before, as a place. But as soon as she said it—Japan—this voice came into my head saying, ‘Something terrible’s going to happen.’ Maybe it was more a thought, not necessarily a voice—a thought that came into my head. I was inconsolable. I didn’t cry in front of her, but on my own I used to cry and cry.”
    *   *   *
    Jamie Gascoigne was almost as dismayed as Jane. In the few months they had spent together, he had fallen deeply in love with Lucie, and the idea of being separated from her, even temporarily, was difficult to bear. Then one night, as they were in line at the cinema, Lucie told Jamie that she didn’t want to be attached to him while she was in Japan. “I was totally gutted,” he remembered. “I slid down the wall, didn’t know what to say. We weren’t rowing, we had no arguments. Over the space of the week before we split up, she just changed. It was as if someone was telling her what to do.”
    Others were puzzled by Lucie’s behavior in the weeks before she flew to Japan, and the feeling grew stronger the closer the day approached. At home, Lucie embarked on a comprehensive spring cleaning, extreme even by her own high standards of neatness. “She went through everything, got rid of bin liners of stuff,” said Jane. “Old letters, personal stuff. She got rid of lots of clothes. It was much more than just a clear-out, because her room was tidy anyway. It wasn’t done as if she was going away for just a few months. She cleaned her room as if she was never coming back.”
    If Lucie saw less of old friends, she went out of her way to look up other people with whom she had formerly spent little time: cousins, godparents, peripheral aunts and uncles. “She did a lot of rounding up, which was a bit weird because it wasn’t how Lucie had usually been,” said Sophie. “She made a concerted effort to see lots of people before she went away. We wouldn’t think anything of it if she’d come back. But because she never did, there was something odd about