The flight attendants dithered with the passengers in coach, where they pointed out their seats and patiently explained the need to put bags in the overheads and not in the aisles.
'No, I can't make an exception,' one said politely to a frustrated, balding businessman.
'Yes, it is a trip hazard,' said another to an older woman fussing with the oversized handbag she insisted would remain at her side throughout the flight.
'I'm sure no one will take your Benefit lipstick if it isn't in your line of sight for the next few hours,' a saintly young man reassured a panicking beauty vlogger who hadn't put down her go-pro since she'd boarded.
'Miss. Porter?' a pretty red-headed attendant paused beside Lily's first-class seat and smiled politely. There were very few passengers at this early stage of boarding, and Lily had enjoyed the solitude until that moment. 'Is there anything I can bring you?'
'My bed?' Lily requested groggily. She squinted through the fly-away brown hairs which had found their way into her green eyes and asked. 'How long until we leave?'
'Not long,' the attendant assured her. 'You have time to change if you'd like...?'
The morning had been something of a rush, which was understandable when one considered Lily hadn't known she would be boarding a flight at all until her great-aunt had announced it at five-am, when she'd still been curled up in bed feeling sorry for herself. Hungover, exhausted, and clad in a fashionable set of Disney Princess pyjamas - complete with fluffy socks beneath her boots - Lily had only enough time to throw on a coat before she was bundled into a waiting cab, her bags packed on her behalf by her aunt's long-suffering butler, Samuel.
After she'd stumbled through the airport in a daze with nary a thought to the duty-free booze and make-up, she'd dropped into her roomy, personal cubicle seat in first-class. Lily had automatically curled up in her plush leather chair like a child in the hope of catching another few minutes' sleep before the reality of this new nightmare sunk in.
Tokyo.
Lily was on a plane to Tokyo.
Alert at long last, Lily jumped up from her chair and demanded, 'Where's Grace?'
'Darling!' Grace Sugiyama appeared behind the attendant. She was as fresh as a spring flower, her face glowing with the exuberant youth of a twenty-year-old rather than that of a seventy-year-old. It was her Eastern Blessing, or so Grace often professed, which prevented lines from marring her delicate features. 'Awake at last.'
Lily had a vague recollection of Grace dragging her through security and reassuring them that, no, she was not drunk, just very tired. It was a difficult lie to spin when Lily could still taste bile and beer in her mouth from the previous night. Fortunately, Grace's charm knew no bounds, and she was able to sweet-talk the security guards into letting her through on the promise that she would accept full responsibility for Lily's behaviour.
'Please tell me you have a spare set of clothes for me?' the woman whined pitifully.
Lily's hope was a vain one. A quick glance about the cabin told her the answer was a resounding no, and that her first steps onto foreign soil would be taken in Disney-Nightwear-Chic. Lily had never been one to give too much thought to her personal appearance, but it would have been nice to retain a little dignity. She had so little left, it seemed a shame to tarnish it.
Grace waved her hand dismissively. 'No need.'
'Seriously?' her niece retorted. 'No need? Look at you, you're -' Lily gestured up and down at Grace's elegant ensemble, '- and I'm... Just, look!'
'There'll be a private car waiting for us at the airport, darling. No one will see.'
'Except when we land at Haneda,' Lily reminded her flatly. 'Except when we have to walk through the busiest airport in Japan. Camera phones are a thing now, Grace. Cameras. In. Phones.'
'You're being silly,' Grace laughed. 'But, if it bothers you that much, we'll find you a nice change of clothes in the airport. I'm sure they'll have a few nice boutiques around.'
Lily dropped back into her seat with a groan. The attendant excused herself to continue her preparations for the flight, silently glad to be removed from this domestic dispute. Grace thanked her quietly for all her help and enquired as to the menu for their flight, resolutely ignoring a mortified Lily who'd covered her face with her hands and was stamping her feet childishly to vent her frustrations.
After inflicting the worst of her annoyance on the floor, Lily tried to scrape her hair back into a pony-tail. It was a task which would have been far easier to accomplish with the addition of a brush, and Lily ended up with a lumpy, frizzy, wonky approximation of a respectable and sensible hair-style. Knowing then that this just about summed up her life - a winky approximation of living - Lily fought to process the events which had led her to that moment.
Arguably, her first and greatest mistake had been the moment she'd given Julian her phone number in a department store in Oxford Street. He had been trying to pick a tie and had asked her opinion. She'd chosen something hideous because she'd thought he'd laugh and find an employee, and he'd told her that he would both buy and wear it to dinner if she would accompany him.
Smooth.
That ought to have been the first hint that he was a practiced womaniser.
Everything since had been a by-product of that enormous lapse in Lily's judgement; inviting him to fashion shows, buying him expensive gifts that he'd not-so-subtley dropped hints about, buying a London townhouse and an apartment in LA so that he could network, giving him a new job in management that he was seriously underqualified for, recommending Sarah for his secretary position because Lily trusted him, and then surprising him in his office on his birthday without calling ahead, and throwing the engagement ring into his face.
Admittedly, watching security tackle him to the ground with his trousers around his ankles had been rather amusing, but it had done little to heal the wounds he'd inflicted upon her.
Running home to her aunt for comfort had seemed the only solution to her predicament. While her solicitor tried to untangle their finances and sell the house that Lily couldn't stand to go back to, Lily drowned her sorrows in any pub or bar she staggered into and hoped to spend the rest of her time sleeping.
If only she'd remembered how crazy Grace's life was, she might not have thrown herself on her mercy during such a tumultuous time.
'You're frowning,' Grace observed. 'You'll wrinkle, you know.'
'I don't care,' Lily huffed. She turned in her seat to face her ridiculous great-aunt. 'Why Tokyo?'
'Heritage, my love. Heritage and beauty.'
Lily was a quarter Japanese at most, and had never been there. Her half-Japanese father had moved to America as a boy, and fallen in love with an English woman in college who was studying abroad. After a romance which apparently ended with a tearful goodbye at the airport, he packed his bags and followed her across the sea to London. This was where they'd stayed and set up their business with the patronage of his aunt Grace, had only one child, and then both had died horrendously young.
It was all very Annie, but without the singing, the orphanage, and with much more money entailed upon her in her parent's will...
Fine, it was nothing like Annie.
'Work or pleasure?' Lily asked.
'Can't it be both?'
'No.' Lily knew her aunt too well to believe the spontaneous trip was, indeed, spontaneous. To have a car waiting at Haneda airport upon their arrival, the tickets purchased for first-class, and her suitcase packed overnight smacked of preparation. 'Modern or historical?'
'Neither! Darling, it's fantastic. They're adapting Sins of the Fathers into a television drama! They invited me out to consult for a few weeks of filming so they can get an insight into the characters.'
Of all the books Grace had written - and there had been many, almost all of which were set in Japan - Sins of the Fathers was one of Lily's favourites. It was the first book she'd picked up after her parents had died, and losing herself to a fictional world of intrigue, seduction, and crime had distracted her from the horrors of reality.
It probably hadn't been an age appropriate read, but Grace hadn't attempted to discourage her.
'Grace, honestly, that's amazing,' Lily enthused. Still, she had to ask, 'But, why am I here?'
'Inspiration! I thought it might help you get back into things. Besides, I couldn't leave you home alone,' she said. It was the coddling tone a mother used with her precocious child; a mixture of unmatched affection and genuine desire to spend time together, and a deep concern that should the child be left unwatched for more than five minutes, they would set the house on fire.
'Samuel would've been there,' Lily countered.
'Yes, and he's very much occupied with communicating with your legal team, as you well know,' Grace's tone had adopted a far sterner edge. Lily was an adult again. An adult who'd been an utter idiot. 'Why you were so foolish with your money, I'll never -'
'This from a woman who has an entire room dedicated to her shoes?' Lily interrupted.
She didn't need reminding that she'd been a fool. Seeing Julian with his secretary in his lap had illustrated that point rather well.
Grace painted a smile upon her face. It was a false expression, her lips pulled tight with the effort of maintaining it. 'Yes, but those shoes didn't ask me to loan them half a million pounds.'
Lily groaned and turned away from her aunt, bringing her knees to her chest as if she could curl herself into so tight a ball that she might become small enough to simply disappear entirely.
'Fine. Enough.'
Satisfied at least that her niece wouldn't protest the arrangement any further, Grace drew across the screen on her own private cubicle and prepared herself for take-off. Lily reciprocated in kind, glad to have some privacy on the first stretch of their journey.
There was very little that could have roused Lily from her slumber. She dozed through the announcements with her seatbelt fastened, the take-off, and the first rumblings of turbulence which shook the plane. The shuddering and noise had made a few of the less experienced travellers whimper and stare out of the windows as if they might see some gremlin on the wing, tearing out wires and upsetting the engines.
Far more disturbing than any of these things was the sound of a man practicing his Japanese in the seat beside her. The journey was almost twelve hours, and by the time they'd entered the second, she couldn't stand much more interruption to her sleep.
'Oh, for God's... Hey!' Lily waved over the partition at her neighbour to gain his attention. The man pushed his headphones off his head and stared back at her. 'Look, I know it's a tough language, and it's super important to know the way to the bathroom, but can you just wait until we land? Please?'
'Was I speaking aloud?' he asked, oblivious. A sheepish smile spread across his lips, illuminating his features.
All the illumination in the world wasn't enough to save him from an exhausted woman's wrath.
'Clearly!'
'I'm sorry,' the man laughed. Sweat beaded along his hairline as Lily glared down at him. If looks could kill, hers would have eviscerated him. 'Just nervous.,' the man explained. 'Can I ask... is it arigat-oo or arigat-oh?'
'The second one,' Lily snapped. Her Japanese was terrible, but she knew that much. 'Now, please, stop.'
'Your English is great, by the way,' the man continued merrily. 'How long have you been studying it?'
'My entire life,' she retorted waspishly. 'Clearly, yours needs work. Do you know what stop means?'
The man flushed with colour and mumbled an apology. He put his headphones back on and continued to mouth the words trickling through on the audio, eyes closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. It was all of ten minutes before the silence was broken with his muttering once more, and a ripple of giggles spread throughout the cabin.
Lily wasn't quite as amused as the rest. She pulled the airline-issue blanket over her head and tried to smother herself with the pillow, internally screaming in frustration.
First her aunt, and now this guy.
What did these people have against sleeping?