‘Some Vintage Marine Ideal’ by Laura Slattery

When Josh rang, actually rang, Cassie answered straight away; she had given him concussion once – not on purpose, but not not-on-purpose – and owed him a lifetime of picking up his calls. Josh was both lazy about thumb-typing and too sociable to abide by the etiquette of never calling. He didn’t phone often, and hadn’t done much at all since she had the twins, but when he did, she submitted to his chirpy resolve on the off chance it might fail and he would need her assurance. It was not that he was trying to make her feel bad.

‘Good news, Cass,’ he said in the default upbeat mode he had recovered some years after the incident. ‘The Dunes has closed down.’

‘Has it?’ she said, thrown. ‘I mean I guess that won’t be brilliant news for most people.’

She had been barred from The Dunes pub since the midsummer night she had assaulted him in 2014, hospitalising him and – worse, as far as the owners were concerned – spattering his blood on the upholstery. His friend Rory, who she was close to now, told her once that Josh never went in there either, that he refused to do so if anyone suggested it, not out of any lingering sense of trauma, Rory was almost sure, but out of strange solidarity with Cassie, as if he thought her barring, coming as it did on top of her three-month prison stint, was a bit much.

‘I’m not explaining it right,’ Josh said. ‘Those awful pompous guys had to sell the lease because they’ve been drowning in debt since the pandemic, and then this summer they hardly got any tourists in because the weather was so pathetic, no one came near the beach.’

He still sounded cheerful throughout all of this.

‘I suppose that’s not much fun for them,’ she said. ‘They had that pub for ages.’

‘Never mind them,’ he shrieked. ‘The point is that it’s re-opening on Friday under new owners and we’re going to help them christen the place, you and me, a nice early drink in The Dunes.’

‘Josh, are you sure about this?’

‘I’m going to insist, Cass. It’s not as if the new landlords will have our faces pinned to a corkboard, is it?’

She didn’t hold out for long. Aidan, her fiancé, was flying home from London on Friday morning and could re-introduce himself to his children while she devoted the afternoon to making fresh emotional reparations to the friend-of-a-friend she had nearly killed once. Not on purpose but not not-on-purpose – Josh could be reflexively annoying. But then so could Aidan, and she had never given him concussion; the odd playful kick in the shins was the most she had ever dared. Josh had been unlucky. He had chosen the wrong place at the wrong time to pinch the wrong girl’s bottom. Cassie gave herself permission to take pride in the fact she had become a more stable person since 2014, and though she had regressed on one occasion, she didn’t think Josh would be troubled by this recent wobble if he heard about it – it didn’t involve him.

The twins were too enthralled by the return of their dad to make her exit a protracted one, so she got to The Dunes ahead of schedule and wandered over the actual dunes, down to the wan expanse of sand and seaweed that passed for an Irish beach. The tide was out, as it had been the day of her court appearance. She had gone to the beach for a dawn walk by herself, knowing as she did that a prior caution – for a dressing-room duel with her arch-enemy from centre midfield – was going to count against her.

The violence of the sea made Cassie feel calm, but there were limits to how far she was willing to stray from civilisation to hear it, both then and now. She turned her back to the water, and stared up at the horn-shaped dunes with their tufts of long grass blowing in wild synchronicity. Every time she found herself watching a coming-of-age film, there would be the inevitable scene where disaffected teenagers with driving licences surveyed the panorama of their town from some stunning vantage point above. Her town – and it was her town – was best viewed from the dirty sand below. She saw the pub, that disastrous pub, plonked on top of the straightest section of the road, its car park extending charmlessly down the coastline. She hadn’t missed it. But Josh was right. It had been a decade. Like her favourite ex-therapist would say, it was time to reclaim the space.

When she reached the asphalt, he was dragging on a cigarette by the porch and shivering in a thin-knit, but he didn’t look unhealthy behind the eyes as he had in his heaviest drinking days. He looked good.

‘You made it,’ he said, twisting his foot to stub out the cigarette with so much superfluous effort she decided his shivers weren’t all September-related and he had at least some trepidation about his grand plan.

‘Ready?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this.’

‘After you,’ she said, which made him cringe, but he took the joke and went first, and when he attempted an unnecessarily complicated manoeuvre to hold open the door, she ducked under his arm and slipped ahead of him, so he would see that she trusted him and that she didn’t feel as if she had to be on alert around him, as she did around most men – even if a part of him, despite everything, had some residual impulse to be grabby with her, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The murkiness of this outcome did not escape her. That he had learned his lesson left her doubly sad, because it meant that, on some cosmic level, teaching him one – not on purpose, but not not-on-purpose – had worked.

An unpopulated pub fanned out before them, its staff-less bar glittering with bottles and taps as the speakers played Viva la Vida, all pulsing strings and redemptive bells. Hints of daylight seeped in through a bank of semi-frosted window panels. Beyond them lay the canopied smoking area where after going to frenzied town on him, she had wound up on the floor, howling into the stained lino, with Rory shielding her from the owners and telling her she was okay. Not it’s okay, not it’s going to be okay, but ‘you’re okay’, there and then; her terror might be real, he was trying to communicate, but the immediate threat wasn’t. It was her only pure memory from the night. He hadn’t had to say anything like that – he’d been going out with her arch-enemy from centre midfield at the time.

‘They’ve got rid of that swirling granny-carpet anyway,’ said Josh, which confused her as she was still thinking of the old lino outside.

‘Yeah,’ she said. They were standing on bare walnut floors, while the walls, once the papered home to an array of celebrity photographs, were now a clean, lurid turquoise, as if the new people were trying to chase some vintage marine ideal.

‘What are you having?’

‘A glass of red wine, please, Josh.’

‘Shiraz, Rioja, Cabernet Sauvignon?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Rioja, if they have it.’

‘Right, you battle through the hordes and nab us some free seats somewhere, while I’ll see if I can get service.’

‘Non-smoking all right?’

‘Yeah. Trying to give up,’ he said in that sheepish voice smokers used when they weren’t trying to give up at all.

‘You should,’ she said, pretending not to get that he didn’t want to go out to the smoking area any more than she did.

She chose a central table with two low opposing stools. It was funny how keen she was to avoid recreating their seating arrangement from that night, when not out of any particular design or intention, not on her part, they had been jammed up beside one another on a hideous bench, her apparently pinchable bottom right next to his non-existent one. It was neither the glass – a solid tumbler – she smashed into his head, nor the fists she followed up with, that had concussed him; it was his skull banging off the edge of the brocaded seat that did the physical damage. So surprised had he been by her fury, he had not had the wherewithal to fight back. Maybe he wouldn’t ever have known how to anyway. It was Elise, their friend in common, who had scrambled over empties and been first to intervene.

Cassie observed Josh’s progress at the bar. He was deep in chat with the woman who had materialised behind it, as if just by asking for a couple of drinks, he had succeeded in prising out her life story. The woman seemed delighted with herself. She had customers, and one of them was this affable man, still slim and floppy-haired even though he wasn’t a boy anymore, still intact even if his liver was, thanks to Cassie, already the worse for wear.

He returned with a beaming smile and two glasses of red wine, which he slid onto the table with louche skill.

‘Well,’ he said, before he had even sat down, ‘how are the babies? Sleeping?’

‘They are. Just not at the same time,’ she said. She wanted to say ‘let’s not talk about babies’, but she also didn’t want to cut off any avenues of conversation in case they ran out of them and it hastened a raking over.

‘I got your save-the-date email,’ he said.

She gulped her wine. ‘And are you saving the date?’

‘Sure,’ he said in a tone that implied June was much too far away to commit. ‘I’m thirty-one now. I should probably get married too.’

‘To Elise?’

‘She might be a bit grumpy about it, but I think I can persuade her,’ he said.

‘Why not, I suppose?’

‘Exactly. Why not?’

He told her all about Linda, the new landlady, who was his new best friend. She had declared herself under no illusions about the state of the pub business, even if the last owners were definitely useless. Kids just didn’t drink anymore, and if they did they went to the sort of places that had board games stacked on every table, which Linda thought faintly ridiculous. But she had always fantasised about owning a proper seaside pub, and when the opportunity came up to buy this one, she jumped on it.

‘I hope she didn’t overpay,’ said Cassie.

‘You do have to wonder about all these ghost pubs,’ said Josh. ‘At what point do their toilets no longer stink?’

‘You don’t drink as much as you used to either,’ she said.

He nodded. Then, as if making a counter-accusation, he said, ‘for a while, I thought you’d stopped completely.’

‘I only ever stopped in company. Seemed sensible.’

To this, he said airily, ‘I actually wouldn’t mind a game of Connect Four.’

It made her happy, because she had given him an in. She had alluded to the sobriety she had maintained in public – partly as penance, partly as self-discipline – and he hadn’t taken her up on it, he had changed the subject instead.

It was not as if they hadn’t talked about it, through it, around it. Resigned to the certainty he would keep bumping into her, he had beckoned her over with a chastened tilt of his head the first time they found themselves at the same event. They had stood a safe distance apart in a dark corridor, their friends hovering unseen in the stairwell as she looked him in the eye and asked if he was all right, and he struggled to say he thought he was starting to be, before blurting out that he hadn’t expected her to go to prison, that he had been shocked by that. When he wanted to know what it had been like, she told him it was fairly benign really, that she had coped, that the women she met there had inadvertently taught her how lucky she was, but it was okay if he wanted to imagine something harsher, or like a Bad Girls scenario, at which he had laughed, then cried, just cried; and she tried to tell him that it hadn’t been personal, but those words stuck in her throat because they weren’t true. It had been a little bit personal, and he knew it.

Their rapprochement only began in earnest after Rory, tipped off by her arch-enemy, blabbed about the squalidness of her life before the town became her town, prompting Josh to seek her out at her flat one raw Saturday, when she was still in her dressing gown, to pass his surge in contrition on to her. She had gently suggested that all unsolicited pinches were unwise, and that how brittle a girl was, for whatever reason, shouldn’t make a difference. Then she said, again, that she didn’t for one second think her response was anything other than unmeasured and, well, vicious, and that it should go without saying that he hadn’t deserved it. Cassie lived for moments of manageable intensity like these. She was comfortable letting her remorse roll freely between them, if only because remorse was so much more logical and definable a feeling than shame. She could be, and was, honest about her remorse; she was scared she hadn’t touched the sides of her shame.

She remembered Josh telling her that morning that she was one of the few people who understood that concussion was not just a headache, or a bit of a sore head, and that for a while the irony was that she seemed to be the only one who had any sympathy for him; that his bandmates had implied, even as he vomited in their tour van, that it was all a big joke. He’d told her it didn’t go without saying that he hadn’t deserved it – even Cassie’s arch-enemy had been curt with him, making it clear she had picked a side and it wasn’t his.

There was nothing Cassie could do about any of these insensitivities in the years that followed except answer his phone calls, remind Rory to be kind to him, too, and conspicuously fail to take the bait, whether Josh was there or not, whenever someone despaired about callous men gifted suspended sentences. She was stoic, yet open – they both were. At parties, it was not taboo. During one of their pandemic reunions, a fire-lit affair at the other end of the beach, Elise complained that lockdown was like being in prison and Cassie piped up with ‘it is a bit, yeah’, casually as anything, and then the whole group had a grave, even-tempered discussion based on her theories about how the psychological effects overlapped, but diverged – she’d had a release date – until the flame died and their hands went cold.

‘Josh, can I ask you something?’

‘Uh-oh, go on.’

‘The old owners… they didn’t bar you too, did they?’

He exhaled, as if relieved her question was not a stickier one.

‘I was never sure – I didn’t test it. There were other pubs,’ he said, smarting even as he vied to stay sanguine. ‘Christ, though, they really thought they were the victims. Get a cleaner, guys.’

The outline of her phone, which she had left face-down, glowed with a timely notification.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked as she checked it.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Aidan just wants to know my verdict on this place.’

‘And?’

‘I think it’s best days are ahead of it.’

They clinked glasses then, on his initiation.

‘I should take half-days more often,’ he said.

That was their cue to talk about his grown-up job. He said it wasn’t always scintillating, but he liked the people he worked with, and, oh yeah, he had got a promotion without asking for one – it made him feel like he was in the right timeline now. She said her leave from the orchestra was about to expire but she was in no rush to go back; she thought that when the twins were more portable, she might apply to go to college as a mature student. Then they both laughed too hard at the word ‘mature’ until he said he’d forgotten she hadn’t finished her degree.

When they exhausted their wines at roughly the same time, she went to the bar without protest from him and ordered two more from the thrilled Linda.

‘Isn’t it lovely to catch up with old friends?’ said Linda as she poured out Rioja with more pleasure than anyone had ever poured wine.

On her giddy journey back to their table, Cassie dwelled on this synopsis of their afternoon – was that how Josh had described their relationship? There was still not another soul in the pub, which made day-drinking with him feel unreal somehow, like they had taken a ferry to a lost island where there was no contamination, no cause for regret. It struck her that he had no urge to relitigate the incident, as she had half-feared. For him, venturing into The Dunes with her was catharsis enough. She was the one who had dreams about being pinched all over her body – dreams in which a remixed version of her younger self would primly lift up a bony, owner-less wrist, smacking the back of the hand that sprung from it and ordering it to give it a rest.

‘Thanks, Cass,’ said Josh, drumming his fingers against the table in anticipation of his full glass. ‘Now we’re even.’

‘Maybe we should have got a bottle,’ she said.

 

Laura Slattery is a journalist from Dublin. She has worked for The Irish Times for more than 20 years and now writes features and a weekly culture column for the title, having previously reported on the media industry and the economy. She started writing short stories in 2024.