Ben Watts

It’s 6:30am so no one says anything. Everybody’s waiting for their coffee to kick in. The air’s humid, sticky. There’s a breeze but it doesn’t help, it just tosses the light drizzle and sea spray at us. Every so often I have to wipe my glasses down. The ocean and sky are the same dull grey, and the waves slosh seaweed and bits of plastic onto the shore. Rye beach. It’s a Thursday.

“Can we get started already?” a bulky man at the back shouts. He’s with his wife and daughter. The rest of the tour – 14 total, split into various families – look blankly, tired, no opinions at all.

“We’ll give them another minute,” I reply. One of the groups joining the tour has pre-booked but not showed up. It’s a group of six, each probably paying around £20. Were the group smaller, I would have left already. They might call up for a refund if we leave without them, which wouldn’t be a problem if Morrison weren’t a soft touch. Unfortunately, Morrison is a soft touch, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s offered a refund and taken it out of my payslip.

“We have a lunch booked after this,” the bulky man says. “We can’t be late for it.”

If I wait longer, I might have to deal with two lots of refunds. £120 for the no-shows plus £60 for this group of three. I can’t have £180 taken out my pay. I couldn’t make rent and eat.

“Let’s head out,” I say, trying to sound like I’d decided this independently.

We make our way across Rye beach. My tour is automatic. I know what to say, when to say it, when to make jokes, when to pause for laughter, when to pause for breath. There are no new questions so I don’t even have to think when replying to people. It’s not a hard job.

*

I was five when I first saw the sea. It was a bright, sunny day back when the summer holidays lasted forever, and my parents took me down to Hastings in the car.

I didn’t really know what to expect. My parents wouldn’t let me take my DS out of the house so most of the ride down was spent with me hoping the trip would be a quick one, meaning I could get back home and play some Pokemon before bed. Not that I said any of this, of course. We never did many day trips and my parents were very excited for this one.

We parked some way from the beach, ate the sandwiches mum had packed, perused a couple of shops but didn’t buy anything. 

And then we hit the seafront.

A merry-go-round, a haunted house, a Ferris wheel, a helter skelter, bumper cars, coconut shy, Punch & Judy, hook-a-duck, candyfloss, doughnuts, churros, burgers, hot dogs, chips, ice cream.

I was in.

I ran around like a mad thing, my poor dad trying to keep up. Eventually, he got hold of me and we went back to mum. They both wanted to sit on the beach and show me the sea but I was hooked here. So, dad, after calculating what he’d need to save for fish and chips and fuel home, placed a £1 coin in my hand and said I could spend it doing anything I wanted.

What to do? What to do?

A stand was selling fresh, warm doughnuts. I nearly wasted the £1 there but just before I did, I saw it. 

The arcade.

The place seemed impossibly huge. The lights were loud and the sounds were colourful. Mario and Spider-Man were together on a wall. Machines rocked and spun and buzzed and twinkled. I didn’t stand a chance.

My parents, having learned their lesson, kept a grip on me as we went in. The question again: what to do? Racing? Basketball? Dancing? Guitar Hero? 

No. There was something better.

A row of penny-pusher machines. Great piles of coins moving back and forth on sliding trays with prizes dotted around on top. A few of the machines were video game-themed. In one of them, already half-hanging over the prize pit, was a Pikachu key-chain.

I tried to force the £1 coin through the 2p-sized gap. Mum laughed, plucked it front my hand, and changed it up for me.

The whirr as they rolled down the railings, the clang of metal coins landing on metal coins and pushing other metal coins to hit other metal coins. My parents have said since that, in trying to win that Pikachu, I had an almost hypnotic stare and were asking themselves what they’d done.

Eventually, I was down to my last 2p coin, and Pikachu was still in the machine, though seemed to cling on by impossible odds. Most of his body was hanging over the winning pit. He was only held up by the fact the ring end of his key-chain had a coin on top of it, weighing it down. My mum debated changing up another £1 herself if this last coin didn’t make it. She had recently been made redundant and had little savings for groceries, so this wasn’t trivial.

But she needn’t have worried. With the very last 2p coin, the ring came dislodged and Pikachu fell, followed by a cascade of coins. I hadn’t felt a rush like that in my life, and to tell the truth, I haven’t felt it again since.

That evening, we ate fish and chips on the beach. It was a far cry from the stale, dry affair we got from our local chippy back home. The fish was fresh, the batter thin, the chips perfectly cut and seasoned.

But the food could have tasted like anything. It didn’t matter – I was fixated on the ocean. It seemed to stretch without end in every direction. The streetlights hit the water and the waves made constantly novel, ever-altering patterns from them. The sea crashed as it hit the shore and crackled as it dragged itself back. I wanted to be there forever.

*

Tour numbers are already dropping. Last week, the least-populated group was 20 but this group of 14 is this week’s largest. It’s only the first week of September. In previous years, these kinds of drop-offs began happening around the third week of the month. Winter’s on its way. People don’t go on tours in the winter so I must save all I can. The night sea breeze come January can be lethal. It would be nice to have some heating. This year will be tight.

The rain starts coming down harder. Some people break away from the tour—that’s fine, they’ve already paid. I tell everyone to be careful not to slip on the wet pebbles. A bit of Lego the sea has thrown up is lodged in the sole of my boot.

Morrison affords me some creative freedom. He lets me stop by the cliffs if I want to, instead of just walking on. They are fairly impressive, so sometimes the tours appreciate being able to stand beneath them, though on a day like today we won’t stay long.

“The cliffs here reach up to 140 feet high and have stood for hundreds of millions of years,” I say. “As you can see, pockets of moss are forming in various points. The most striking aspect, of course, is how jagged the edges are. Some parts are sharp, jutting out towards the ocean. Other parts are carved deep into land, so much that you can see the peaks and troughs from aircraft. This is the sea eroding the rock. For many, many years, the cliffs have had to withstand a constant battering from the tides, and though they are strong, they are gradually starting to wear down. Eventually, it is thought the barrage will continue until there is nothing left at all.”

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