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piss and soap, blown around the concrete floor of the shower block. A thin man – possibly an uncle – braces down his back, shaving in the chipped mirror. The moles on his shoulders are bright pink in the wash of morning sunlight and he accompanies himself with a rhythmic little ditty, ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ the emphasis always on the last ’cha’, Gulls are squawking overhead. While along the horizon a freighter weeping rust proceeds jerkily, as if it were just a larger version of the plaster ducks in the shooting gallery on the Palace Pier. In this sharpened past I'm always sinking my mouth in my mother's hair, which is frazzled by her accumulated sexual charge. It's sweet, undulant, as sticky as candyfloss. You get the picture. Mine was a childhood that was sufficiently problematic to make me interesting, but not enough to disturb. The on season, that is.
    I was about eleven when Mr Broadhurst came to live at Cliff Top. I had passed the eleven-plus and was shortly to become indentured to Varndean Grammar. This would mean an eight-mile round-trip every day to the outskirts of Brighton. To celebrate the result, Mum had bought me a new briefcase of blue canvas and black vinyl, and stocked it with a tin-boxed Oxford Geometry Kit and plastic-backed exercise books. I was carrying this self-importantly around the caravan park, very conscious of the interplay of my feelings: the adoption of the correct professional stance when holding the briefcase and the sense of foreboding I always had, standing on the verge of the off season.
    Under quickstepping clouds, a chorus line of nimbus, the Downs, the cliffs and the sea form a frame within which to direct fresh action. In the clear air the resort towns are strewn over the land, each pocket-sized manse perfectly visible. I watch, playing with my sense of scale, as toy cars, each one a different colour, process along the coastal road.
    Then a schoolfriend's dad, Mr Gardiner, pulled off the coast road and drove his bulbous black truck down the thirty yards of track leading to the caravan park and into actual size. I stood against the wall of the bungalow, my plump palms wedged between buttock and pebbledash, while Mr Gardiner talked to my mum. Then I accompanied him as he backed his truck between the caravans, down to the cliff edge.
    ‘You did all right in the exam then?’ he said, shouting over the banging engine.
    ‘Yes, I did,’ I replied brightly, anticipating more praise to add to my aunts’ and cousins’.
    ‘Well then, you'll be off to Varndean with the other smartarses.’ Too late I remembered just how thick Dick Gardiner was. But I swallowed my humiliation and helped his father position the big metal hooks under the base of one of the caravans.
    ‘I'm having this one,’ he said. He was poking around inside it. He sat down on the boxed-in bed, squashing the foam mattress pancake flat, and fiddled aggressively with the dwarfish kitchenette appliances. ‘Not that it's worth eff-all, mind. I'm just gonna put it on blocks in the garden. I'll use it to store tools.’ He stood and the caravan rocked on its defunct wheels. Mr Gardiner was larded with avoirdupois. His breasts bulged out on either side of the bib of his overall, as if it were a garment specially devised to enhance his womanliness. He poked his finger along the top seam of the caravan. ‘Mind you, I'll have to put a deal of work into it. I reckon I'm doing your mother a favour just by takin’ the thing away. Look – look here.’ He had been addressing me via the mini-dormer, but now I stepped inside the fibreglass cabin.
    ‘See that?’ His digit had dislodged a wet gobbet from the ceiling. ‘I'll have to get busy with me mastic. Frankly it's a wonder your mother gets anyone to rent these things – they're probably infested.’
    After that he wouldn't talk, he just hitched the caravan up and made ready to drive off. He was already in gear when I chimed up, ‘But what's going to happen,