Alex came around to the house in the evening, and Sophie left him and Lucie together. “After I’d gone to bed,” she said, “I began to think of the things I wanted to say to Lucie before she went away, and I thought I’d write them down. I began what was meant to be a farewell note, and it became something intense. I started to say how nice it was to have grown up having a big sister to protect me and look after me, and how she had helped me in hard parts of my life. It developed into an eighteen-page letter. I remember writing it, and I was really teary—not just a bit upset, I was properly sobbing. I always find it ghastly to say, ‘It’s almost as if I was writing to her for the last time.’ But it was a painful experience. She was only going away for three months; she’d been away before. But there was something about this letter that was heartbreaking.
“There was something very final about it. On Lucie’s trips with BA, we’d say goodbye but make plans. But when Lucie talked about Japan, I wasn’t able to picture what it would be like when she got back. I found it difficult to create in my mind an image of her return.”
The flight to Tokyo left at noon. It was Louise’s mother, Maureen Phillips, who came for Lucie before dawn and drove the two friends to Heathrow. Lucie came into Sophie’s room in the dark and kissed her goodbye. “She gave me a card, and I gave her my letter, and said, ‘Don’t open it until you’re on the plane.’ She lay down on my bed and snuggled up. We were both quite emotional. Then she had to go. I said, ‘I love you,’ and she left.”
Lucie was twenty-one years old when she left home for good. How loved she was by her friends and her troubled family: sibling, or even mother, to her own mother, as well as to her brother and her sister. She had flown on many aeroplanes before, but this was the first time that she had traveled so far and so directly away from everyone with a claim upon her—and to a country through the looking glass, a place as distant and as obscure as anyone who knew her could imagine. Those who cared for her were anxious. In the last weeks, Lucie—whose heart had always seemed so open and clear—had acquired mysteries. No one, except Louise perhaps, knew the whole story of what the two of them expected in Japan and what they intended. Questions were asked, but the answers brought no clarity or satisfaction. The truth about Lucie Blackman was already becoming hazy.
PART TWO TOKYO
4. HIGH TOUCH TOWN
It takes fewer than twelve hours to fly from Heathrow to Narita Airport, but few single journeys bring such a dizzying sense of transition. Lucie and Louise lifted off to views of London rooftops, the fields of East Anglia, and the North Sea. By the time lunch had been served and the first film shown, they were above Siberia, where they remained for seven hours. Unimaginable volumes of empty space gaped on all sides; forty thousand feet below were expanses of tundra, churning mountain ranges blown with snow, dark rivers of vast width shining as the sun caught them. It was a journey that pitched the traveler forward through time as well as space. The two friends left at midday, flew through a long afternoon and evening, and landed at what their bodies registered as bedtime—blinking in the brightness of a Japanese morning.
“It’s 9:13 here in Tokyo, making it 12:10 midnight behind in England,” Lucie wrote in her diary minutes after arriving. “I am sitting on a suitcase at the railway underground feeling completely overwhelmed. I am very tired … also afraid, anxious & lost & v. hot! I only hope that I will look back at this with hindsight & laugh at my innocence—of how I was so unaware of what was in store for me.”
For all their months flying as air stewardesses, neither Lucie nor Louise had ever been to a country so immediately and intriguingly alien. The barbed-wire guard towers of Narita Airport looked out over paddies of
“There was something very final about it. On Lucie’s trips with BA, we’d say goodbye but make plans. But when Lucie talked about Japan, I wasn’t able to picture what it would be like when she got back. I found it difficult to create in my mind an image of her return.”
The flight to Tokyo left at noon. It was Louise’s mother, Maureen Phillips, who came for Lucie before dawn and drove the two friends to Heathrow. Lucie came into Sophie’s room in the dark and kissed her goodbye. “She gave me a card, and I gave her my letter, and said, ‘Don’t open it until you’re on the plane.’ She lay down on my bed and snuggled up. We were both quite emotional. Then she had to go. I said, ‘I love you,’ and she left.”
Lucie was twenty-one years old when she left home for good. How loved she was by her friends and her troubled family: sibling, or even mother, to her own mother, as well as to her brother and her sister. She had flown on many aeroplanes before, but this was the first time that she had traveled so far and so directly away from everyone with a claim upon her—and to a country through the looking glass, a place as distant and as obscure as anyone who knew her could imagine. Those who cared for her were anxious. In the last weeks, Lucie—whose heart had always seemed so open and clear—had acquired mysteries. No one, except Louise perhaps, knew the whole story of what the two of them expected in Japan and what they intended. Questions were asked, but the answers brought no clarity or satisfaction. The truth about Lucie Blackman was already becoming hazy.
PART TWO TOKYO
4. HIGH TOUCH TOWN
It takes fewer than twelve hours to fly from Heathrow to Narita Airport, but few single journeys bring such a dizzying sense of transition. Lucie and Louise lifted off to views of London rooftops, the fields of East Anglia, and the North Sea. By the time lunch had been served and the first film shown, they were above Siberia, where they remained for seven hours. Unimaginable volumes of empty space gaped on all sides; forty thousand feet below were expanses of tundra, churning mountain ranges blown with snow, dark rivers of vast width shining as the sun caught them. It was a journey that pitched the traveler forward through time as well as space. The two friends left at midday, flew through a long afternoon and evening, and landed at what their bodies registered as bedtime—blinking in the brightness of a Japanese morning.
“It’s 9:13 here in Tokyo, making it 12:10 midnight behind in England,” Lucie wrote in her diary minutes after arriving. “I am sitting on a suitcase at the railway underground feeling completely overwhelmed. I am very tired … also afraid, anxious & lost & v. hot! I only hope that I will look back at this with hindsight & laugh at my innocence—of how I was so unaware of what was in store for me.”
For all their months flying as air stewardesses, neither Lucie nor Louise had ever been to a country so immediately and intriguingly alien. The barbed-wire guard towers of Narita Airport looked out over paddies of
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