Planes kept flying over head, but more than one had come to look at the disaster that had been and ships had come to collect debris. Since Rachel couldn't really swim that well – though what could happen to her? If she stopped swimming for whatever rest she might need, she would not drown or be eaten by sharks – she got on board. It was going to Ireland, which was apparently closer to where she was than anywhere else.
The first thing she did was go in search of anything that would tell her time, of which she was uncertain. Her ghost watch could no longer be made to work. Surely her real watch would still be in working order, she thought to herself, it was waterproof wasn't it? She'd paid enough for it to be so, though what had weighed with her at the time was how it looked. Who asked in a shop about resistances to airline crashes? From the ship's clock, was six thirty in the evening on the day of Ross's wedding.
What would be happening now, she wondered. Would they realise that she was dead, and if so, what would they all have done about it? How had the wedding have gone, knowing that? It must have gone ahead, since she wasn't there to stop it. He was now with her. She might not have been apart from any official part of the wedding plans, but Rachel knew in detail what was supposed to happen. Tomorrow, Ross and Emily would be going on their honeymoon to Greece. Ross would forget about her in his new happiness and he would be gone for good. But she was gone for good too, and not just from him but from all her friends. Her yearning to be with them grew stronger, a stronger feeling than any she'd had since the plane had gone down.
When the ship docked, she disembarked and found her way to London, by hitching a ride to Dublin, a plane to London, an then a ride to London. There was plenty of transport there for those who didn't take up space and didn't need to pay. She knew already that generally, no-one had a sense that she was there. She had tried on board the ship to make herself known, but one seaman had just shivered in her presence and had stopped helping himself to the small store of brandy he'd kept stashed away, strictly against regulations. She didn't want to written off as someone's alcoholic delusion so she didn't try again.
Once she got to the hotel, late the next morning, she could find no-one there. She went to the room number that Monica had mentioned and found that the beds had been stripped. That meant they had probably gone home, although it would have been nice to get confirmation of that. Unfortunately no one left open a convenient page in the reservation book for her to be sure, but it was more likely that they had left rather than just changed rooms. So that meant going to the address on the RSVP.
How to get there was another challenge. There had been any amount of signs pointing the way to London, and with the tube it was easy enough to find a central location, but Maskelyne street was another story. She had seen the advantages of being invisible and now she was experiencing the troubles you had when you couldn't ask the way. It took her four hours to get to a place that should only have taken forty minutes.
She hesitated at the front door, steeled herself, and walked through. She didn't want to make a habit of doing spooky things, but after the time she'd had getting here, she wasn't in the mood to wait around until someone opened the front door.
Inside, she looked around. She would go and find someone, and sooner or later, they would mention what had happened about the wedding. Perhaps they might even mention where Monica and the others were. Rachel hadn't been able to remember the name of the hotel. From one of the downstairs dooms, she heard voices.
'Well,' said a female voice that Rachel didn't recognise, but one that she instantly disliked by pure instinct, 'You're going to have to do something about that daughter of yours.'
'Leave her alone, Andrea,' said a male one.
'Yes, dear, but we can't pretend there isn't a problem. She doesn't have a man, doesn't have a job, and she doesn't have a flat.' Rachel revised her opinion. A voice that could deliver such good news could not be owned by a woman she disliked. Emily wasn't with Ross. Would she say how that had happened? She moved towards the door. 'What's she going to do about, is what I ask? Mope upstairs on her own forever?' She walked into a room in which a middle aged man and woman were standing arguing. The man was looking ready to go out, the woman was in a dressing gown, but fully made up, nonetheless.
'For God's sake, it only happened yesterday!' exclaimed the man. 'She's hardly been there forever.'
'Yes,' whined Andrea, 'But, she's got to start thinking about what she's going to do some time and she might as well get on with it. She's been jilted, so she should go right back out on the dating scene and find another man. At the very least she should be making an effort.'
'She hasn't actually split up from Ross yet,' the man said. That was unwelcome news to Rachel. No wedding but no break up? What had happened then?
'Well darling, it's only a matter of time, since they've called off the wedding. From the way she's acting it looks split off to me. She looks like a bloody a funeral.'
'Just leave her be,' the man said irritably.
'I just think,' Andrea said, 'That we should encourage her to face facts. Mollycoddling her the way you do isn't going to help, encouraging her to feel sorry for herself.'
'She's got more of a right to feel sorry for herself than you do!'
'I've had to explain to everyone why it got called off!' Andrea exclaimed, 'I've had a very hard time. I tell you after being on the phone all day I have no energy to take any trays up to her.'
'You haven't even taken up one tray to her,' the man said scornfully. 'You didn't even do that when she had a broken leg.'
'Well it did her good at the time! With exercise and all that. Stairs are good for the hip extensor muscles – or do I mean flexors?' The man did not look impressed at the excuse and Andrea tossed head defiantly. 'Anyway, it's the principle of the thing.'
'What principle is that?' her husband said with unexpected nastiness, 'the principle of causing you the least disturbance possible? She's not actually making any bloody noise you know and I'd be surprised if she ever actually asked you for anything.'
'I can feel her presence, up there, all of that misery,' Andrea said waving a hand to the ceiling. 'It's depressing.' She had been apparently unaffected by the tone of her husband's voice, which Rachel would have thought would have sparked a reaction of some sort.
'Well how do you think she feels?' her husband snapped. 'Just leave her alone. I've got to go, I'm late for a meeting.' He turned his back on her abruptly and Andrea followed him to the door.
'That's it, run off and hide from problems. It won't get any better if you ignore it!' The front door closed. She muttered. 'At least we can be sure that she's his daughter.' She glanced up the stairs. Rachel hoped that Andrea would go up and talk to Emily, and that the conversation would reveal Ross's whereabouts, but instead, she walked into another room and picked up the decanter to refill a glass that was only half empty. The phone rang, and Rachel waited to hear some more information but after a long conversation about the merits of one hair salon over another and what was heard there this morning, she realised she'd have to go to the source.
AN: (trivia) Rachel was actually an hour out when she checked the time on the ship, because the ship was on GMT, not on local time. London time is GMT +1