People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Back in Sasaki House, she kissed Scott but refused to allow him upstairs. “At first I think he was a bit disappointed, but at the end of the day—anyone can have a load of one night stands but really all of us want some one to love, & have someone to love us back. So I did what I knew would completely mesmerise him about me over any other girl here. I gave him beautiful soft kisses with enough tease in them to keep him hooked, long warm cuddles & tenderness … & it worked.”

  * * *

  Lucie met Scott on Friday, June 9, 2000. The twenty-two days that followed were ones of happiness and excitement. They arranged to meet again early on Sunday evening. While Lucie was getting ready, Alex the barman called her from Sevenoaks. Only a few days before, this would have been the most exciting event of the week; today, he was a footnote. “As usual it was good to hear from him,” she acknowledged in her diary, “but feel he is getting more distant every time … So, back to Scott.”

  Half an hour late, thanks to Alex, she arrived at the rendezvous, Almond, the pink coffee shop on Roppongi Crossing. “He was in jeans & a blue top. He didn’t see me as his back was to me. I tapped him on the shoulder & he turned round—he is absolutely beautiful. His eyes were bluer than I remembered, his smile more warm, and his kiss more breathtaking.”

  They took the train to Harajuku, the weekend resort of the Tokyo young, and walked down Omotesando, the most romantic street in Japan and the closest thing in Asia to a Parisian boulevard—a wide, tree-lined avenue that gently sloped down towards the entrance of the Meiji Shrine. “We got on so well,” Lucie wrote. “I feel very comfortable around him, & very comfortable with myself around him … We talked loads, but where we were being so chuffed & smiley we lost about 80% of our trail of conversations—it was a really cool feeling. I felt like I was drunk—a really giggly feeling. But all the time I kept very cool.”

  They had dinner in an Italian restaurant, then crossed one of the long pedestrian bridges that span the avenue at the height of the plane trees. In the heat and wet of June, the leaves were their greenest and most rich. “As we walked over, we began kissing,” Lucie wrote. “It was dark, & the lights of Tokyo went as far as the eye could see, Omote-sando was buzzing with life & as we kissed I lost myself and felt as though my heart had leapt up into my throat … as I pulled away an enormous sense of contentment rushed over me.”

  At the back of her diary, Lucie drew a picture of this moment—kissing Scott on the bridge over the beautiful avenue of trees.

  Lucie wrote: “Today I think is the first time as long as I remember that I—100%—can say I am content. I have never had so little, yet felt I have so much.”

  * * *

  After meeting Scott, the days flew by. “Average day and average night,” Lucie wrote on the Monday after their first date, “made fantastic as I was walking on air.” The next morning she woke up early, hungover and exhausted, and had to go to Tokyo Disneyland, far on the eastern fringes of the city, with Louise and a customer of hers. “It was absolutely pissing with rain and we both felt like shit … When we arrived I felt fine and was really jumpy and excited.” On Wednesday morning, there was a crisis when Lucie looked in the mirror and found her lip painfully studded with cold sores. She canceled her date that night with Scott. “I’d have felt shitty—not to mention extremely self-conscious—and unattractive.” Instead she went on a dōhan with Ken at the Georgian Club, “the most beautiful restaurant I’ve ever seen—I felt like a Princess.”

  By the hostess’s code (some clubs even required girls to sign a document promising as much), one never, ever spoke to a customer about an “outside” boyfriend or lover. But it is clear that Ken could sense the difference, a slackening of Lucie’s interest in him. The sustaining illusion, for which he was paying extravagantly, became harder to maintain. Ken’s defensive anxiety glimmered through his e-mails to her.

  “You do not need to apologise anything to me at all,” he wrote breezily in mid-June. “I understand that a hostess job absorbs a lot of energy from you more than you have imagined … Anyway, I thought that your boyfriend was also coming to Japan, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, , , , , , , , , ,” But a few days later, he was full of affection and need: “I am missing you so much. See you on Sunday, I hope!” Sunday came and went with no reply from Lucie. A tone of timid reproof could be heard in his next message.

  I guess that I could not communicate with you well. I thought that you would like to have dinner with meeeeeeeeeeeeee. Anyway, I would appreciate it if you would let me know when you changed your mind.

  Two and a half hours later came another message with the subject line “Sayonara!!”:

  I am sure that my small heart is to be broken as usual. But, it is OK, my young lady! I just wish that you will have present [sic] time in Tokyo. Au revoir!

  Lucie, of course, had spent the weekend falling ever more deeply for Scott.

  The night before her next date with him, she was awake until 6:00 a.m., “my stomach flipping … keeping my body awake while my eyes are aching to sleep.” They met in the middle of the afternoon, sat under a tree in Yoyogi Park, “and just talked & talked & talked.” The sun was warm; people lay stretched out on the grass, or danced to a band that was playing in the open air. “It slowly grew darker so we decided to make a move,” Lucie wrote. “Scott will never know that we then engaged in one of the most incredible conversations of probably our entire relationship which made me connect with him more than he will ever realise.”

  Musicians and street performers gathered on the weekend in the plaza between Harajuku Station and Yoyogi Park. Lucie and Scott passed a brilliant and spectacular juggler, and paused to watch him. This led to a conversation about talents and personal accomplishments, about people who have them, and those who don’t. Lucie wrote: “He then said how one of his largest insecurities (& fears that this will always be) was that he felt SO AVERAGE. I felt my legs buckle & I nearly cried (without meaning to be too ridiculous).”

  From Scott, Lucie had heard the articulation of her own thoughts. “I just couldn’t believe it & still (as I write this 1 wk after) I can not describe the sensation I felt—all I could liken it to was a feeling of huge relief/connection that this person you are embarking on a relationship [with] felt this too & it makes me feel no longer so afraid or lost. If he ever saw this he’d probably think I’d lost the plot—but maybe one day I will reveal I feel the same so that his fears dissolve too.”

  They had dinner together at a steak restaurant. Scott, unsurprisingly, “missed” the last train home and stayed the night with Lucie. “It was a beautiful day,” she wrote. “I am so glad I stuck it out that 1st night—it’s amazing how these little decisions we make everyday change our life’s path in an instant.”

  * * *

  The summer of 2000 was a time of political tumult in Asia. On May 14, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi had died in the hospital, six weeks after collapsing with a sudden stroke. On June 13, as Lucie and Louise visited Disneyland, the leaders of North and South Korea met to discuss peace for the first time since the Korean War. All over Japan, candidates were addressing crowds and loudspeaker vans were blaring party slogans in the campaign for a general election.

  None of this public drama touched Lucie and her world.

  On Tuesday, June 20, she met Scott again for breakfast and another day in the sun in Yoyogi Park. “I feel we fit, just like a key in a lock,” she wrote. “My feelings grow with every fear I learn of, doubt I hear & passion I feel.”

  On Wednesday, she had a dōhan with an investment banker named Seiji. The following night, it was a salaryman named Shoji, who worked for JVC.

  On Friday evening, she sat in Casablanca with a Mr. Kowa, who spoke excellent English with a faint lisp. Louise also sat with them for a while. He drank champagne and cognac. Before he left, he promised to call to arrange a dōhan the following week.

  Sunday was Japan’s election day. Lucie spent the weekend with Scott, ignoring abject e-mails from Ken.

  On Tuesday, she we
nt to a workout class at the gym. On Wednesday, June 28, she had a dōhan with old Mr. Watanabe, Photo Man. They agreed to meet for dinner the following Tuesday.

  On Thursday, she saw Scott again. By this stage she had fallen hopelessly behind in writing in her diary, but later he recalled the meeting. “She was deliriously happy,” he said. “I had told her I loved her and she said she was glad I had said it first. She told me, ‘I feel the same about you. I think the world of you.’ Lucie said she felt so strongly about me that she had butterflies in her stomach and felt queasy. She told me her legs had gone weak when I said what I felt.”

  On Friday, June 30, she sent an e-mail to her mother, Jane, who had not heard from her for several days and had been anxiously asking for news. Its subject line was “I’m still alive!”

  PART THREE THE SEARCH

  7. SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED

  Lucie Blackman and Louise Phillips were born in the same year, attended the same school, loved the same music and clothes, and lived twelve miles from each other. One thing divided them, meaningless to the two friends themselves but reflected in the judgments and perceptions of others: the invisible fissure of English social class.

  The Blackmans—privately educated, the children of businessmen, residents of the genteel town of Sevenoaks—spoke in the accents of the Home Counties. Louise’s pronunciation identified her as the child of working-class southeast London. Her father was a successful builder who settled his family in a big house in the village of Keston, outside Bromley. His death at the age of fifty-one was a terrible blow to his wife and two young daughters’ affluently secure, upwardly mobile life. Louise was able to attend Walthamstow Hall only thanks to a scholarship. This, along with her accent, immediately separated her from the other girls there. The snootier among them referred to her as the “guttersnipe.”

  A different personality would have been crushed by such snobbery, but Louise met it with defiance and scorn. She was fearless in the face of bullies; at school, she saw off Lucie’s would-be tormentors as well as her own. As a teenager, she was wild and adventurous. Lucie’s other schoolmates did their underage drinking in the Sevenoaks pubs, but Louise took her to thrillingly sophisticated bars and clubs in Camden and south London. The Blackmans treated Louise with affection, although she was sometimes conscious of their disapproval and of being seen as a bad influence over her friend. If the two teenagers stayed out too long or too late, it was Louise, Lucie often felt, who ended up getting the blame for transgressions in which Lucie had been a willing and active partner.

  Louise was intimate with Lucie’s insecurities and saw at close hand the effect of her parents’ separation and divorce. She took an early dislike to Tim, partly because of his disapproval of her, and also for what she saw as his habit of undermining Lucie’s confidence with casually critical remarks about his daughter’s weight or appearance. She knew that Lucie rarely felt confident in her looks and that she looked on wistfully as Louise felled men with her prettiness. But Louise had deep vulnerabilities of her own.

  The death of her father affected her badly. For years she struggled with a self-destructive hopelessness that expressed itself in anorexia nervosa. It was Lucie, more than anyone else, who saw her through this painful period. This was what other people missed in their friendship—the extent to which Louise depended on, and idolized, Lucie, with her talent for languages and drawing and cookery, her loyalty and her sense of humor.

  Louise’s original intention had been to go to Japan alone. She was delighted when Lucie agreed to come too and had even paid for half of her ticket. But Louise insisted that she had not pressured her friend. The move to Tokyo fitted the pattern that had been established at school, of Lucie following in Louise’s footsteps. She wanted to go, and she had plenty to escape from.

  “The debts really bothered her,” Louise told me much later. “She’d wake up in the middle of the night worrying. She needed a quick solution. She couldn’t see any other way of paying them off that wouldn’t take years and years. I think that she felt guilty about getting away from her mum. It wasn’t that she wanted to escape Jane. But she wanted to be carefree, she wanted to be able to act like a twenty-one-year-old. Jane didn’t want her to go, but it wasn’t really because she thought that something bad would happen to Lucie. I mean, Jane believed that herself, but most of all she just didn’t want to be left behind.”

  The first few weeks in Tokyo were bewildering for both women, but harder for Lucie. Her failure to flourish as a hostess, and Louise’s success, imparted an unfamiliar tension into their friendship, although neither of them spoke of it. But by June it was as if a corner had been turned. “The first month emotionally has been hard in different ways for both of us,” Lucie wrote to Louise one day. “But since yesterday I feel the closest I have ever felt to you I think. You truly are my soul mate and you know in me things no one does, you see in me what [o]thers miss. You only have to walk into the room and you can sense my mood in an instant.”

  When they woke up late on the morning of Saturday, July 1, both girls were full of optimism. Lucie, finally, had begun to acquire a roster of regular customers. Louise had patched things up after a row with her French boyfriend, Côme. The night before in Casablanca, the two of them had sat with a pair of pleasant young salarymen named Yoshida and Tanaka, who had agreed to take them out on a double dōhan the following week.

  They left the club at two thirty, took a taxi home together, and sat up until four in the morning drinking tea in the kitchen and eating buttered toast. “We were both so excited,” Louise said. “We thought, ‘We’ve done it.’ We’d been there two months, we were being paid on Monday, and everything was going great. We both felt that we’d got through the rubbish bit and that it was going to be fine now.”

  * * *

  It was Saturday afternoon when Lucie walked out for the last time. It was Monday morning when Louise went to the police and Monday afternoon when she had received the bizarre telephone call. But it was late on Monday evening, more than two days after Lucie’s disappearance, before Louise could bring herself to tell anyone in the Blackman family what had happened. This was the middle of the afternoon in Britain; Jane was at home when the call came, about to go out to the post office with a parcel of sweets for Tokyo. Even after Lucie’s safe arrival in Japan, she had remained inconsolably tense; this news, the confirmation of all her fears, pitched her into a torment of panic and dread. Sophie and Rupert were summoned home to the small house in Sevenoaks, Val and Samantha Burman immediately came over, and Jamie Gascoigne drove down from London as soon as he heard.

  The information was impossible to digest. Not only that Lucie was missing but also the strange details of the phone call that Louise had tearfully recounted: a “newly risen religion,” “ training,” “Akira Takagi” and “Chiba”—whatever or wherever they all were. “It was absolute pandemonium in the house,” said Rupert Blackman, who was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at the time. “Mum was like a headless chicken. What do you do when someone goes missing in Japan? No one knew what to do. I was there on the Internet, looking up ‘newly risen religion.’ I remember getting in touch with an old judo instructor of mine to ask for his advice, because of the connection with Japan. And then something comes over you, and suddenly it’s as if you lift off the planet, and you’re far above, looking down, and you’ve got to find this person, like the needle in the proverbial haystack. It’s very strange. I could never express what that felt like. The feeling when you’ve lost something—that’s bad enough. But when you’ve lost someone, it’s awful. And to lose someone in a shopping center is one thing, but to lose someone in a different continent—you don’t know where to start. You know no one there; it’s a completely different culture. It was the worst place in the world for that to happen.”

  After she began to absorb the news, Jane telephoned Tim at his home in the Isle of Wight. He was sitting in his back garden, enjoying the late-afternoon sunshine. It was the first time that they had spoke
n since their divorce. There are two versions of the conversation that followed: hers and his.

  JANE: Tim, Tim, it’s Jane. Something terrible has happened—Lucie’s disappeared.

  TIM: Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.

  JANE: Our daughter’s disappeared in Japan. Can’t you … Won’t you go out and bring her home?

  TIM: I’m sure that the Foreign Office and the police are on to it. There’s nothing much we can do that they can’t.

  JANE: But, Tim …

  TIM: Look, I’m in the middle of a barbecue. Bye.

  JANE: Oh, Tim, please …

  TIM: Fuck off.

  He hangs up.

  JANE: Lucie’s gone missing! You’ve got to do something!

  TIM: Whoa, hang on, slow down. Is that Jane? Slow down, Jane—what’s happened?

  JANE: Our little girl’s gone missing in Japan! You must go and bring her back!

  TIM: What do you mean, gone missing? What’s happened exactly? Try to calm dow—

  JANE: You bastard! I told you: she’s gone missing, you shit. You’re not going to go, are you?

  TIM: Jane … I … I can’t decide in eight seconds. It’s a lot to take in. Tell me what’s happened again. I’m just having a barbec—

  JANE: You fucking bastard! Something terrible has happened to your own daughter! You just don’t give a shit about anyone, do you?

  She hangs up.

  So it was Sophie who announced that she would fly to Tokyo the following day; Jamie Gascoigne would go with her. “We know that she’s in Chiba, so I’ll go there and find her,” she told her mother. “If she’s been kidnapped by a religious cult, then I’ll offer myself in her place. I’ll bring her home.”

  * * *