He’d reached his decision on a week in Welmouth by unnoticeable increments, so that he didn’t consciously know he was making it. There’d been a brochure here, a bus timetable there, the blokes at work with mouths that said, ‘Yeah, that sounds nice,’ and eyes that thought it was a bad idea. Nobody mentioned midlife crisis to his face, but the eyebrow telepathy was deafening. No longer needing photographs, he formed his memories now as rectangles in shiny black and white.

  The shingle glistening as the wave withdraws, and footsore women in sharp-cornered glasses staring undecided at the rides. The eight-foot heads of then ubiquitous comedians erupt from poster stars above the Hippodrome, their names and catchphrases in plump, enthusiastic printing that anticipates the audience. Fingers of melting soft-whip dribble on a cone’s soggy embossing, and a starfish, dead and petrified, sits in a seaside bucket of tap water for six months awaiting its revival.

  It wasn’t a revisit then, but an obsessive recreation. He’d booked for a week at South Becks caravan park, but it was called Ocean Vista now. Deciding to go the whole second-childhood hog, he’d got his ticket for an early morning coach ride out to Welmouth, even though there were much more convenient and quicker ways to get there. He reluctantly accepted that a Beano Summer Special for the journey would have been grotesque, and anyway, he didn’t know if they still did them.

  Here’s his father – a demob suit, clean shirt open at the collar – as he trades outdated army banter with the Woodbine-smoking coach driver, heaving their suitcases into the bus’s secret side compartment. Here’s the rounded wall of Southwich castle on the way there, same route every year, taken through fingerprinted window glass, with him, Mum and the camera spectral in reflection. He sits with his mum, an only child. His father and an over-jolly stranger share the double seat in front.

  The four-hour journey had been horrible, mostly on motorways of relatively recent manufacture. He’d sat through closed lanes and LED predictions of delay, his fellow passengers having retreated into earphone-induced catatonia that he had at last understood the need for. Southwich had been bypassed altogether. Its still-standing castle, evidence that lost days had existed, was made hypothetical, and the revised approach to Welmouth went without a first heart-bursting glimpse of distant sea.

  At a coach depot open to enormous sky, short-back-and-sided boys with wooden barrows wheel the luggage to a bus stop for two bob. From there his family ride along the breezy front to South Becks. Here’s him and Mum, his Vimto and her shandy, perched on deco brickwork in the Admiral Nelson’s forecourt while his father saunters down to the camp’s paper shop to get their caravan keys, dangling from behind-the-counter pegboard, sunlight slowly bleaching Kodak ads.

  This time the coach went straight to Ocean Vista, and the full scale of his error punched him squarely in the face. The Disneyesque holiday franchise had remade South Becks into a cloned resort with nursery stylings and a ‘Splash Lagoon’, where students dressed as marine animals prowled the reception area, looking for victims to cheer up. For half an hour, he’d waited to check in by the red lollipop that designated his specific caravan block, and begun to realise his mistake in coming here.

  He runs ahead between the hummocked vans, tin loaves irregularly spaced on threadbare grass. A rare interior shot looking towards light-flooded windows down at the far end, him and his mum to either side across a central table, her with glasses on and crossword, him with a Ray Bradbury paperback, The Silver Locusts. Curtains tied, restrained from the invading brilliance. In a peaked cap that he can’t remember, the lad frowns and thinks about his Martian future in the far-off 1990s.

  Following a handout map, he’d sulked through the obsessively neat grid of spacious mobile homes to 14A, which was essentially a long hotel room. All of its conveniences he took personally, as losses: modern plumbing vanished the camp’s toilet block and its communal standpipes. Electricity erased the gaslight’s whispering miasma. He knew these dissatisfactions were ridiculous. He warmed a ready meal he’d brought from home, then thought he’d spend his evening at the Admiral Nelson.

  Holidays revolve about this handsome building at South Becks’ north end. Its rounded balcony is the rear deck of a brick ship, panes of curved glass there in the bowed façade. Him and his parents sit, year after year, on a low outcropping beside the splintered trapdoor for deliveries, down from the pub’s off-sales bar that does crisps and sweets. His mother rearranges a flower-patterned skirt across her knees while he interrogates a bag of Revels, weeding out the orange fondants.

  The pub teetered derelict in gathering dusk. He stood bereaved and staring at steps cracked by weeds, at yard walls sagging drunk from the main building. Ocean Vista had bought up the Admiral Nelson and allowed it to disintegrate, pre-empting competition with the site’s own-brand drinking establishments. He walked around it twice through settling dark without detecting any Double Diamond pulse, then slouched back to his van for supermarket wine and angry self-recrimination.

  Back inside their creaky lozenge, his dad rattles matches, and gas fittings spill an underwater half-light. Sheets and blankets have transformed one of the built-in plastic sofas to his crackling bed, with him slid gleeful down inside as his mum twists the fixture’s valve and switches on the night. Rain on the roof like drawing pins and sometimes muffled detonations from the upwind surf. He tumbles into sleep, and even his confusingly planned dream-rooms know they’re somewhere else.

  Next morning in the unfamiliar trailer he woke anxious, as if something dreadful had occurred the night before, although it hadn’t. Breakfasting on smuggled cornflakes, he stepped out to see if the Admiral Nelson’s plight might be alleviated by the light of day, but sunshine only made it worse. Half the pub was subsiding as though from a stroke, and its surprisingly unbroken eyes glazed at the empty beach across the road, dunes swaddled in protective chicken wire. He risked a stroll along the front.

  With swimming costumes underneath their clothes, with towels and Tizer in a raffia shopping bag, the three of them slope down the concrete ramp on to the sands. First there’s the glister of the shore, his father wearing outsized black trunks as he dunks his offspring shrieking in the breakers. Later on, they’re up amongst the crumbling hillocks munching sandwiches, a paper Union Jack flown from his castle’s bucket turret and cavalry-trim of crusted silicates down everybody’s legs.

  It was a good half mile beside the seawall into the town’s centre, and the whole way he saw nobody on the mesh-bandaged beach. Rising colossal from the ocean seam beyond, stern pylons harvested the wind. Pale lamp posts towered at intervals with strands of unlit bulbs between them, beaded like saliva on a tensile thread of drool. Across a broad road, residential houses gawped at the remote horizon without recognition, as if Welmouth was unable to remember where or who it was.

  He drags delighted behind Mum and Dad up King Street, a flamboyant main strip running uphill from the seafront. Here are brightly coloured racks of saucy postcards outside giant emporia of novelty and innuendo. Here, insistent men with thin moustaches, cameras and monkeys. They watch an impromptu demonstration of pink words hand-folded into sticks of rock, and at the top end there’s Welmouth Palladium on one side, Louis Tussaud’s indecipherable wax museum on the other.

  Not yet ready to face Pleasureland or the amusement arcades further up, he’d crossed the road to King Street. Self-consciously seaside, this still looked enough like its old self to make erasures painfully apparent. Inappropriate cards had spread mammary wings and flapped away. Nothing was rude, not apes, not novelties, and local ices were displaced by national brands. The rock factory had gone, and taken Welmouth’s sticky spirit with it. Then he saw the freeze-framed waxworks.

  Waist-high in a shadowed corridor he wanders, hushed amongst the roped-off dead and their stiff conversations. Not-quite Khrushchev needles nowhere-near John Kennedy, and grown-up dukes and princes are still children here, like him. Uniformed wax attendants, then a living one that scares his mum. Chamber of Horrors, cringing from a rising damp of English murderers – Crippen, Christie, John Haigh and his acid bath, then, worst of all, the man hung by a steel hook through his stomach.

  Paying his admission, he heard someone further in say, ‘Well, I think that’s Hitler,’ and he laughed, knowing that here at least was genuine, old-fashioned disappointment, unchanged since he was a boy. The Beatles were a malformed Ringo and three Georges. Margaret Thatcher was the sole addition of the last five decades, and the downsized horror chamber had repurposed the hooked man to decorate a poorly conceived torture rack. Even the past’s pain, he realised, was misunderstood.

  King Street leaks into Welmouth’s market, fish and flowers avalanching from its stalls, and accents that are breathed rather than spoken: ‘Hhhary’alright?’ Dad lugs their shopping to a walled pub yard just off the square, where they can have a drink and a sit-down before returning to South Becks. Here’s him with a James Bond hat and mysterious smile, next to a potted shrub. He stands beside his dad to urinate in the gents’ toilet, both made silent and uncomfortable by the graffiti.

  After the strange reassurance of the waxworks, his perverse elation quickly dissipated on discovering that the market had shrunk to a forlorn veg stand and a place unlocking mobile phones. The square was edged with big-name chains, and he picked up more wine and food from Marks & Spencer’s before choosing to walk back to Ocean Vista by a long road angling down towards the front, which he remembered once from real life and a dozen times from over-lit and yearning dreams.

  He’s thirteen, and his mum and dad have let him traipse back to the camp alone while they stay for another drink then catch the bus. He’s got holiday money, and the back roads are where all the eerie second-hand shops are, the corner newsagents with paperbacks that he can’t get at home. He finds a narrow place, all wood and windows, with used books and magazines in stacks, in heaps, in shoeboxes, and all their allergenic dust made into powdered gold by long, low sun. Everything shines.

  He followed his uncertain memories back to the caravan site, and of course all the beguiling little outlets were no longer visible, if he was even on the right street, if they’d ever really been there. He was grateful, grudgingly, to find an Oxfam shop, and searched with barely suppressed desperation for some washed-up shards of debris from his foundered youth. Absurdly, all he purchased was an old transistor radio like the one his parents had, and, at the shopkeeper’s suggestion, some new batteries.

  It’s there in nearly all the photographs: perched on the fold-out table at the bright end of the van; propped up between the slumped dunes, pouring Who and Kinks and Manfred Mann. In maroon plastic, it’s the size and shape of a small handbag with a carrying strap on top. It has two buttons that select for long or medium wave, on/off and volume knobs, and a big dial for tuning, with a silvered speaker like a toy car’s radiator grid. Pop voices underline the Welmouth sunshine.

  Back in 14A, he snubbed the microwave and cooked his meal in the electric oven as a point of ideology. Depressed, he stayed indoors for the remainder of the afternoon and evening, drinking too much wine and getting angry when he found he couldn’t tune the transistor radio properly. The big dial’s hairline calibrations squealed between repeated, mournful foreign call signs, bursts of opera, and then, startlingly, irretrievably, a jingle for a pirate radio station closed down half a century before.

  Yes, yes, he knows they’re not real pirates, but he worships pirate radio, especially here on the coast where the reception’s clearer. Caroline is good, but London’s best with Tony Blackburn, John Peel, Kenny Everett, Dave Cash. He plugs a plastic acorn in his ear and listens to The Perfumed Garden after lights out, thrilling at the thought of DJs broadcasting from listing cabins out at sea, their playlists issuing from a transmitter on the masthead as a pulsing ring of cartoon lightning bolts.

  Just ‘Wonderful Big L’ in electronically inflected tones, and then, though he sat twiddling drunkenly for hours, he couldn’t find it. Clearly, he’d misheard or had an auditory hallucination, born of his increasingly disabling melancholy. At last he gave up and went to bed, partly resigned to not locating the right wavelength, partly afraid in case he did. Was this a breakdown? All night he jerked up from tiny nightmares, lost on waking, that nevertheless deposited unwelcome silts, black residues.

  At twelve, he sees his dreams as just another district of his life, discusses them like real events with other kids. So many places overlap between their different sleep adventures – the same park, same school, same seaside holidays – that it seems natural to think of dreams as a persisting landscape, a geography. Imaginary Welmouth always there, in rearranged and misremembered avenues when he is elsewhere, thronged with short-sleeved phantoms even in the dead of winter.

  He woke with his brain in rags, unsure for a long thirty seconds where he was, and then recalled the radio. Throughout breakfast he caught himself glancing at it apprehensively, and finally put it behind a cushion where he couldn’t see it. Even then, he didn’t want to stay indoors and keep it company, so he resolved upon another walk along the front, this time past the arcades to Pleasureland. After the flashback jingle, he’d begun to feel that Welmouth was concealing something from him.

  There are other memories, pictures that nobody took. The girl his age, one leg in callipers and friends in tow, who propositions him when he’s alone and playing in the sand bumps. The precocious local boy who fills him in on ‘the white stuff that comes out where you wee’, which leads him to confuse urinal cakes with semen. His first and only glimpse of a hydrocephalic child, pushed in a chair under cascading lights, the head impossible, the mother’s eyes haughty and furious with love.

  Self-aggravated, he stamped down the prom and, passing King Street, carried on. Across the road were the amusement palaces, strung in a flashing, avaricious strip but decorated now with characters from recent fantasy and horror films. He couldn’t stand the world, and knew that if some politician – even Enoch Powell or Oswald Mosley – promised to relocate England to the 1960s, he’d most probably be voting for them like a shot. Perhaps fascism was always just weaponised nostalgia?

  The seawall he skips along to Pleasureland, ahead of Mum and Dad, is strung with novelties. Sandblasted kiosks, ceilings veiled by a low-hanging fruit of buckets, spades and beach balls. There’s a trampoline farm where the greenstick fractures wait around to happen, golf that’s inconvenient but hardly crazy, and a model village where the inch-tall people frantically pretend there aren’t bored giants everywhere. The pier, the roller rink, and then piped barrel-organ music, Doppler screams.

  The miniature urban location spooked him by still unexpectedly existing, like the Radio London jingle. There’d been minor alterations, prurient and inappropriate with nude micro-adulterers on window ledges, although otherwise the open-air attraction was disturbingly unchanged. It was as though the future was avoidable on smaller scales. He thought of his two children, out of nowhere, and then hurried from the barely post-war Lilliput before he sat on its foot-tall town hall and wept.

  There’s more untaken photos: unidentifiable brown lumps ringed with white legs that screw themselves into wet sand, and jelly marbles like peeled grapes on the flat mirror of the tideline. There’s a bald man looking lost on the night boulevard who stares at him with frightened eyes, then runs away before he can alert his parents. At the Ripley’s Odditorium, a murderously angry crocodile endures an extra brass hide of the pennies thrown by little boys, and waits years for its moment.

  Exiting the model village, he found other odd survivals. Penny mechanisms had been rescued from the modernised arcades across the street and, trading a pound coin for pre-decimal currency, could still be played. Enthralled, he won a tube of sweets on the spring-loaded bagatelle, and hurt his wrist cranking tin jockeys to the finish line. Most startling, though, were clockwork tableaux under dusty glass, where misers and condemned men re-enacted endlessly their whirring punishments.

  The seaside’s witchcraft, that attracts and scares him, is inside these boxes. Papier mâché drunks with psoriatic paintwork jolt through cemeteries, assailed by pop-up skeletons. Usurers on minuscule deathbeds spurn retractable do-gooders rattling collection tins, and are next visited by peeling, sunburned Satans. In stiff fits and starts, the prisoner climbs to the tumbril, where a kneeling figurine is substituted. As the blade begins its fall, a pennyworth of light and motion is concluded.

  From the dead games galvanised to twitching life, he stepped on to a daylit front, surprised by sunshine. He began to entertain the notion that his missing Welmouth might be flirting, teasing him with glimpses of a gone realm that was somehow still there, immanent, concealed. Perhaps the town was testing his devotion before showing him a magic door back to the place he needed it to be. In this dangerous frame of mind, he ventured out on to the boards of a reconstituted pier.

  Peering through cracks into a dark of crash and foam, he knows that this floorboard peninsula exists but on the sufferance of the sea, and even at its iron rail, he feels precarious. A few yards from the mainland it’s another country, having different rituals. Briefly unparented, he tries a What the Butler Saw machine, where photographs with nibbled edges topple past the viewing aperture, a monster flipbook, as a fluttering Edwardian drops her towel and steps self-consciously into the bath.

  Safer and reinforced, the street on stilts had lost its air of rickety intrusion into plankton territories. The only enterprise of note was a historical exhibit advertised as ‘Secret Welmouth’, where he browsed an 1892 trunk-murder, a low-resolution sea serpent from 1947, and a curiously dull newspaper story of an unidentified male body washed ashore in August, 1966. He would have been on holiday there at the time, and reasoned this was why he’d read the uneventful clipping twice.

  Some images developing in his interior darkroom might not be real photographs at all. Is this his father tutting at the Welmouth Herald, saying, ‘Did you see where some poor bugger got washed up?’ Does he remember paddling in the shallows, squinting puzzled at a distant crowd and ambulance up at the beach’s farthest end, near Pleasureland? Or are these pictures counterfeits that place him closer to the morbid action? How much of his past life is a Photoshopped assembly, a director’s cut?