Unforgettable Embrace (18 page)

Now her life was empty of that old, unimportant clutter. She hadn't coloured or highlighted her hair in months. She had at least three inches of brown and grey roots, and usually she was religious about touching up her roots every six weeks. Jen would kill her if she saw the state of her head now. She was all about keeping up appearances and standards. Rachel knew that Jen would be one of those women who would insist on being in the jungle in high-heels and full makeup, with her hair expertly blow dried and a perfect French manicure and pedicure.

The trendiest item of clothing Rachel wore these days was her battered old Ugg boots and they were worn purely for comfort, not fashion, just like the rest of her wardrobe, which mostly consisted of jeans and cosy, baggy fleece jumpers. Her tight corset top and sexy going out clothes were long gone, and whatsmore she was glad to see the back of them. Life wasn't worth squeezing yourself into a top that almost cut off your oxygen supply.

She couldn't remember when she'd last worn makeup and most days she barely cleaned her face with a baby wipe, and her skin had never looked better. Baby wipes were her top beauty product at the moment. Obviously, living in a campervan, she had to conserve water as there wasn't always a readily available supply. Gone were the days of hour long power showers with non-stop running water, sometimes twice a day. Now showering was reduced to twice a week. She "washed" herself with baby wipes every other day, the "Portuguese shower" as Camper John called it, and sprayed herself liberally with perfume and deodorant. Dry shampoo was another life saver. Her hair tended to get quite greasy, so dry shampoo was a God send.

Climbing the ladder at work was no longer an issue. The only ladder she climbed these day was the ladder which helped her adjust the television aerial on the campervan. She no longer had to tolerate irritating colleagues, in fact, the only people she had in her life right now were the people she genuinely wanted in it. Looking back, she thought how infantile office politics truly is, you'd think grown men and women would be able to cultivate an environment of mutual respect, but that was not the reality.

The reality was that the more you were liked, by the right connected people, then the better you got on. Rachel couldn't be fake nice to people she didn't like. She could be polite, but not particularly nice. She would never ask anyone how their weekend went, for example, unless she was genuinely interested, but everyone else asked, even if they blatantly didn't like the person.

Some people would probably think her current life was empty and boring, but Rachel didn't care anymore what anyone else thought or how anyone else judged her, because she had never been happier. Her life was peaceful and simple now.

She was exactly where she wanted to be in life. She felt close to nature and was getting to know people for who they actually are inside and not for how they looked or where they worked or who they knew. It was an altogether more authentic existence. She had the time now to really listen attentively to people and their stories. Sometimes, she caught herself being so completely absorbed in someone else's story that she lost track of hours, which only actually felt like minutes.

She was at peace with herself. She was able to breathe deeply for the first time in a very long time. She was able to live in the moment and fully enjoy it, instead of having her mind wander off in a hundred different directions. She found herself waking up naturally, when the morning sun streamed through the windows of her campervan, instead of being abruptly woken to the shock of the shrill tones of her alarm clock. Now, when she woke, she always felt refreshed and looked forward to the day ahead and what it may bring.

She loved the unpredictability of her days. She realised now that a big part of why she'd been so miserable for so long in her old life was the utter, mind-numbing, spirit crushing, "Groundhog Day" predictability of her previous existence. She loved discovering new places and people and seeing new things and of course tasting different food. She liked the face looking back at her in the mirror these days. It was a happy face, with bright intelligent eyes. Her skin was still pale, it always would be, but she'd lost that sickly grey pallor and now had a certain glow.

She didn't care anymore that she didn't have a five year plan. She barely had a five minute plan these days, let alone a five year plan. She didn't know what she'd be doing next week, never mind in five years. It didn't bother her that she didn't have a clue what she'd do for work when her year travelling in the campervan was ended. She knew that she'd work something out. All she knew for sure was that life was good now, and that was good enough for her.

She got to thinking about the old Rachel and how anally retentive she was. The old Rachel always had a five year plan, actually she even had a ten year plan. According to her old life plan, she and Tony would have been married by now, and she'd be expecting their first baby together. They would have moved out of their old apartment and into a semi-detached house in the suburbs, which would be more suitable for raising children than a city centre location.

She would have taken a year off work on maternity leave to be with the new baby. She would have spent the following few years working her way up the proverbial corporate ladder to become manager of the French department. Once she'd achieved her new managerial position she would have been pregnant again. They would have upscaled to a bigger, detached house by this stage and after another year on maternity leave she'd return to work part-time, working hours suited to their eldest child's school time. So, she'd had her whole life planned and never felt more miserable.

Sometimes, she couldn't fully believe how happy she felt now, even though she had no life plan whatsoever. Her plan these days was that there was no plan. Instead of feeling scared at the prospect of her unplanned life, she embraced it and felt liberated and excited at the future. Who knew what the future had in store for her and therein lay the joy of it all.

Of course, her mother didn't understand this new, unpredictable hippy Rachel. She was all for her daughter taking a break, even a prolonged break, but not a whole year off.

"You can't just quit your life for a whole year and expect to return to it like nothing even happened," she lectured Rachel, "your job will be long gone."

"I don't want my old life back, mother, " Rachel tried to explain, "I don't want my old job back either. It was soul-destroying and not what I want to spend the rest of my
working life doing every day.”

"What about security, Rachel?" her mother continued, "you could have had that job for life, and it paid well."

"I realise now that I wasn't happy before, I was just going through the motions. I'm happy now. I needed a change. I know it seems a bit radical. I'm glad I've taken the year out, and it's only a year out from the whole rest of my life."

"I hope you won't regret it," her mother her.

"I know I won't," Rachel said determinedly, "it's the best decision I've ever made."

Rachel knew her mother meant well, and only wanted what was best for her daughter, and part of her could understand her mother's concern. Angela believed in working hard. She often said "there's a reason why it's called work and not fun." She'd worked very hard her whole life. Her working life began when she sixteen years old, working in a shop in her home-town of Skibbereen during the day and then having a few hours off in the evening and back to work in her uncle's pub until the early hours of the morning.

She had one day off a week, which she usually spent helping out on her parents' farm. When she was twenty she got a job as a receptionist at a big hotel in Dublin, where she worked for several years and where she met Rachel's father. They married in Cork after a whirlwind romance and headed for London where they managed a pub together in Notting Hill.

Notting Hill today is a posh, upmarket place but back in the 1970s it was the complete opposite. The clientele could be described as "choice" to say the least. Angela often shocked her family with some of the stories she recounted that she'd overheard while working behind the bar. "Amazing," she said, "the way the customers would pour their hearts out and tell us their most intimate secrets." They'd even had a drugs bust one early morning.

Angela and her husband and Rachel, who was then a baby, all lived in accommodation just over the pub. Somebody had incorrectly tipped off the police that there were drugs on the premises so they'd done a raid on the place at six o' clock in the morning, frightening the living daylights out of Rachel and her mother. Angela said she was feeding Rachel when suddenly three police men and their German Shepherd dogs burst into the place, tore the place apart looking for the non-existent drugs and then left almost as suddenly as they'd arrived, without so much as an apology. It was this incident that prompted Angela to insist that the family move back to Ireland as she just didn't feel safe raising children in such a rough environment.

Chapter 26

"Damn," Rachel swore as she surveyed her flat tyre.

She'd been driving along a very bumpy, pot-holed road for the last half an hour when she noticed the campervan was getting even shakier to drive. She thought it must be more than just the roads, even though they were quite horrendous. She didn't know how anyone drove them on a regular basis, but all the locals came flying past her at over a hundred kilometres an hour, beeping at her because she was doing a steady sixty. She decided to pull over and check to see if there was any damage to the campervan and had discovered a flat tyre.

Changing tyres was something that Rachel was not familiar with doing as Tony had always sorted her mini out for her. She stared at the deflated tyre as if willing it to inflate itself again. She examined the wheel closer and saw a tiny hole in the tyre. She considered, momentarily, just taping it and crossing her fingers that it would fix the hole, but she realised she had no choice but to get out the spare wheel and her puncture repair kit. It was already getting dark so she knew she'd have to work quickly to fix it before nightfall, and she certainly didn't relish the prospect of parking at the side of the lonely country road for the night.

She got to work and was making fairly steady progress when a man's voice behind her startled her out of her concentration.

"You okay there miss?" the man asked.

Rachel jumped and almost slipped in the mud with the fright. "I think so," she replied, struggling to her feet. She found herself looking into very bright green eyes. They were so green, they were almost yellow in the light. Rachel had a thing about eyes, it was the first thing she noticed about any one she'd just met. He had very blonde hair, that was so light it looked bleached. Rachel wondered if it was natural or dyed, probably natural, she thought. He doesn't look like the type of man who stands at the sink, dying his hair.

He looked like a rugged, outdoors person. His face was very tanned, which made his eyes all the more startling and his body was lean but strong. He was about the same height as Rachel, which was acceptable, Rachel found herself thinking, after all I am exceptionally tall for a woman at five feet ten inches, whereas that is supposedly the average height for a man. She couldn't believe how so many thoughts ran through her mind in the few short minutes that they had met, and was surprised with herself for assessing him so quickly as potential boyfriend material, especially when she'd taken herself off the market.

They stood for a few seconds gazing into each other’s eyes. Rachel had a habit of staring into people's eyes and holding their gaze for too long. She remembered one of her classmates at school yelling at her once "stop staring at me." She hadn't meant to upset the boy, it was just a habit she had, if someone was talking she liked to look into their eyes. So it was she found herself looking into this stranger's eyes. She blinked and looked away in slight embarrassment. It was usually the other person who looked away from her. Their trance-like gaze was broken, and the stranger smiled at her.

"Come here to me and I'll have a go at this thing for you," he said kindly.

Rachel passed him the wheel brace and he got to work on the tyre.

"Would you like a cuppa?" she asked.

"That'd be lovely, thanks, if you're having one yourself," he said.

"I am indeed," she replied, climbing the steps back inside her campervan, thinking the least she could do was offer him some tea, considering he was fixing the tyre.

"All done," the stranger said, just as the kettle was whistling to the boil.

"That was quick. Come on inside," Rachel invited him, handing him the hot tea.

"Thank you so much for sorting out my tyre for me. I've never changed a tyre before, and wasn't looking forward to the prospect of having to do it all by myself."

"No worries at all," he smiled, "Batt is my name, by the way," he held out his hand to shake Rachel's hand.

"Rachel," she smiled back at him, "pleased to meet you Batt."

"Likewise."

He had a warm, firm handshake. "So what brings you up to this neck of the woods?" Batt asked. "We don't get many visitors around here."

"Well, I was heading towards Belmullet, until this bloody tyre waylaid me," Rachel replied. "Belmullet's a lovely spot alright," Batt agreed, "stunning views out over the water towards Achill Island on a clear day. We'll soon have snow on the mountains if these temperatures are anything to go by, and those are views that could easily rival the most spectacular views of The Pyrenees."