“I still can’t believe it’s real.”
They were standing, leaning on a low wall that ran along the esplanade, looking out to sea. Below them the entire beach, between two shelves of pitted rock, had been wholly concreted over, right down to low tide, so that the waves now sloshed up and down a gentle slope of cement.
A mobility scooter was parked out on the tarmac among the shreds of bladderwrack and the old woman sitting in it was plucking soft white sandwich bread from its plastic sheath and casting it into the air above her. Overhead a shrieking hurricane of gulls whirled.
The sea was grey, the sky was grey, the cement beach was grey.
“I read about it, you told me about it, but I didn’t really believe it.”
“Everyone always has to make a fuss about the beach,” said his host, “It’s Wales, it’s not as if anyone was going to be sunbathing.”
“But it’s extraordinary,” said the visitor, “It’s like a metaphor made, well, ha - concrete.”
“If I had known you were just going to sneer,” said his companion, “I wouldn’t have brought you.”
“I’m not sneering, I mean it,” said the visitor, “What else is the British holiday but a set of signifiers without the actual things: there is a beach, there is a cafe, there is the sea, but you can’t swim in the sea because it’s too cold and polluted, the cafe only serves egg and chips out of a tin, and the beach is concrete. There’s no holiday there, just the shape of one.”
“This is just sneering with a degree,” said the local, “They’re having a holiday.”
He gestured behind them at a pub with plastic benches outside where a family was arguing about who had ordered what.
“Are they?” said the visitor, “Isn’t it more that they will have had a holiday? When they get home, I mean. They are having an experience that’s more about the having than the experience, if you see what I mean. It’s a ritual, not an entertainment.”
The pub was covered in banners advertising televised sport and a tribute Shakin’ Stevens act appearing next week, but behind the garish hoarding you could just about make out the original Georgian building, a remnant of when the town had been a sleepy little fishing village. A village that was now pushed up and out of the way, wedged between an off-handedly brutalist hotel and faded Victorian pavilion.
“That’s precisely what it is,” continued the visitor, “Ritual. It’s like in the middle ages, when the only holiday anyone had was going on pilgrimage. That’s what they’re doing. Pilgrimage to a holy site.”
“Are you comparing a British holiday to climbing up a mountain on your knees?” said his host, “It certainly feels like punishment.”
“Penance,” said the visitor, “For being British. Do you know why they tarmacked over the beach? I looked it up when you said we were coming here. Storms. The beach kept getting washed away. There was quite a black market in the last century in sand stolen from nearby resorts, apparently. Nature itself revolts against this place being a holiday destination. It’s a religion.”
“You’re a snob,” said his companion, “Not everyone likes the same things as you, that’s all. There are attractions.”
There was an illuminated sign stapled to the side of the pavilion advertising an amusement arcade and an aquarium with a cartoon fish who somehow was managing to give a thumbs up with its fins.
“These aren’t attractions, these are excuses,” said the visitor, “People find themselves here and then have to come up with a reason why. Anyway, you’re wrong, I love an aquarium too.”
“You’ll like this one,” said his host, leading them across the road.
“It read about this too,” said the visitor, “The pavilion and the aquarium. The pavilion was built for the aquarium, did you know that? They had a prize exhibit - a sea monster, at least that’s what it was advertised as, I couldn’t quite figure out what it might actually have been from what I read - lots of ‘merman’ and ‘devil fish’ but hard to tell. Found, apparently, in the aftermath of the Royal Charter Storm of 1859, which took the beach away again, of course, but this time left something in return. Something interesting and something, more importantly, alive.”
The amusement arcade had been carelessly shoved into the entrance hall of the pavilion. Penny falls machines crammed into neo-gothic niches and stickily garish 70s carpet laid over the encaustic tiles.
“See what I mean,” said the visitor, “It's like an ancient temple whose gods are fled and is now being used as a cattle byre.”
“These aren’t cattle,” said his companion, “These are discerning patrons, that’s an original Battlezone machine over there. You don’t get many of those these days.”
Beyond the arcade was a hall full of stalls wedged in between cast iron pillars. Most of them were closed up, the few that were open were desultory affairs, knick knacks made of driftwood for decorating second homes and comical statuettes of the sea monster made of shells.
“Like the little models of gods you get at ruing Greek temples,” said the visitor, “Whence all the sun worshippers have fled to follow their new Bacchic religion of ouzo and sex.”
“What does that make us?” said the local, “The Amish? The last few still following a forgotten religion?”
“You see?” said the visitor, “It was something once. The town made the monster an attraction and the monster made the town a resort. Everyone came to see it, came on pilgrimage to pay homage. And money, of course. Offerings.”
His host bought their tickets to the aquarium and they pushed through the turnstiles. Beyond was dark, a small room ringed with dim tanks, full of muddy water where the shadowy shapes of fish flicked and faded away. In the middle of the room was a small open pool with a sign on it: “Sensory experience. Touch the crabs.”
“This is why off-season seaside resorts are so appealing,” said the visitor, “This sense of abandonment and ruin. Nothing seems quite explicable or rational and so we reach for irrational explanations: something mysterious and haunting. Occult.”
“Perhaps there’s an attraction you’ll like, after all,” said his companion, “Something worth the pilgrimage.”
They came through into a lighted space, a hall as tall as the building, lit from above by a skylight under which a balcony ran round, a floor up. In the centre of the hall was a huge tank, octagonal, thick walls of glass between cast iron uprights.
“The monster’s tank?” said the visitor, “The original one?”
“The original,” said the host, “Tank… and monster.”
In the centre of the tank was a reef of black stone covered in some kind of aimlessly waving seaweed and clumps of dark anemones.
“Monster?” said the visitor, “It can’t be. Still alive?”
“Just,” said the host, “Like the town. You’re right, you know, no one’s ever known what it was, but you’re also right in that I think we always have. It is our religion. It is our god. Only a small god, of course, small enough to fit in a rock pool, but ours. It brought the pilgrims and they brought their offerings and it brought its blessings on us. But the pilgrims got fewer and the blessings got thinner. We have to make bigger offerings now.”
The visitor suddenly became aware that they were not alone in the hall. On the shadowy balcony, people gathered, obscure in the gloom, just their faces white in the watery light, a murmur filling the space.
“The penance must be more significant, the sacrifice must be greater.”
And in the centre of the tank the seaweed suddenly contracted and all the anemone tentacles bunched and the reef pulled itself up and together and the god in the aquarium gathered itself to meet its new devotee.