A Place Beyond The Horizon

04. THE RIPTIDE

Aidan is on the balcony of the pub, watching the foot traffic in the pedestrian mall below, with his phone on the table and a beer in his hand, alone. There is an excited squeal, and he follows its source to three girls in little bikinis below him on a bench, huddled around a phone, babbling excitedly. It spurs him to pick up his own phone, and he finds himself scrolling through his feeds in the late afternoon sun.

It's fairly quiet in the pub. He'd gravitated to it after seeing Hardy and Flint off on the next stage of their epic adventure around the Australian coastline. Hardy had been all bullshit and bluster, showing no hint of the conversation out on the water. He clearly wanted to keep his travel companion in the dark about the reasons for the trip and how it was being funded. It was wrong, Aidan thinks to himself, but he can see why Hardy is doing it. He has to admit to himself that he would probably do the same. Hardy's destination is preordained, inescapable, the only choice remaining to him now is how he meets the end.

Aidan takes another swig of his beer, feeling the sun on his skin. He tries to imagine what it's like for Hardy, to know that time is ticking away, that he can do nothing about it. Aidan shudders and takes another sip of beer, pushing the dark thoughts from his mind. It's not helping.

With the boys gone, he feels lonely. He taps on the screen, sending a quick message to Kat to wish her a good flight. It feels like everyone's getting on with their plans, going their own ways. They had all given him a subtle invitation to tag along, but here he is, drinking on his own. If the boys had been heading down to Melbourne, maybe it would have been different. Maybe if the arrows of fate had been all aligned in the same direction, he would have followed them. Instead, rudderless, here he is, just waiting for the next thing to happen.

He looks through his message notifications. Ant has commented on his Sydney harbour sunset picture, calling him a tease for clearly having such a good time while Ant is stuck at work. Theo, his boyfriend, has liked the shot too, and there is a steady drip of people on his follower list reacting to his first post after such an unusually long gap. He scrolls to the bottom, reacting back, sending comments on their comments, until he gets to the bottom. Rosa hasn't commented, though he knows she would have been notified. Unless she'd blocked him.

Aidan holds his phone in one hand and his beer in the other. He takes a gulp, tasting the bitterness of the cold, amber drink. In the back of his mind, it still feels wrong to be back on the alcohol after a year of abstinence while they'd tried for a baby. He hadn't liked the idea at first, but he'd done it for Rosa, to maximise their chances.

Not that it had worked. For some reason, the dream he'd had months ago about the clinic comes back to him, of his wife emerging with a purple velvet pouch containing two beautiful golden marbles. After all the treatments and the cycles, they'd just simply run out of viable eggs, leaving the last two. One had gone on ice and the other one had been inserted, but it hadn't survived. Now here they were, separated by a vast distance in space and an even wider one in their relationship. He remembers her face, the last time he ever saw her, in their kitchen in the morning after she'd come home and confessed to sleeping with the guy from the coffee shop. She had been remorseful and scared and vulnerable and gloriously beautiful. She'd broken his heart.

He feels his eyes pricking with moisture and he blinks rapidly, trying to quell the awful empty feeling before it overwhelms him, in public in the bar. His memory is relentless, though, playing that scene back, and then shifting, mercilessly, to his wife in the car with the window down in high summer and her dark hair fluttering around her face, replaying the way she smiled at him. His memory is punishing him, a part of his mind that had very strong opinions on where he should be, and it wasn't here, in a pub, running away. A real man would fix all this. A real man wouldn't just turn tail. No wonder she cheated.