Purgatory

16th October 1987 

Life is exhausting.

That was all she could think as she paced along the desolate seafront, the wind and rain at her back, the steady hum of nature disturbed only by distant groups of drunk men shouting nonsense to each other. The late autumn night was as peaceful as it was distracting, both allowing her to relax and find comfort, and offering enough background noise to block out all the emotions she was too scared to feel, let alone express. She knew this wasn’t the safest place to be, but at least it wasn’t there. Being there was too much right now. 

Wrapped in a thin coat hastily grabbed from a cupboard, she clutched it around her for warmth. Chunky boots hitting the ground at regular intervals, she shivered and walked and sniffled and, despite all her best efforts, she thought. 

These quiet, contemplative 4am walks had been a tradition of hers for months now. At least once a week, she would get out of bed, dress quietly, slip out of her window and escape. The sea calmed her. It let her be the person she could not be at home. Recently, the arguments had become too much, the indignant shouts of her father and the quiet passivity of her mother creating an environment in which she couldn’t breathe. Every day felt like falling deeper into a mass of quicksand, until she couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t speak a word, without slipping a little bit further away from the life she wanted for herself. 

She had tried to convince them that it wasn’t what they thought. Endlessly, she tried to make them believe that those diary entries were only an exercise in fiction, that each girl was only a friend, that those flowers meant nothing. She said it so much, over and over on countless tense evenings at the dinner table, that even she started to believe it. But they knew better. They’d known for years, so they claimed. Of course, they had hoped this day would never come. If they raised her right, taught her how she should behave, what not to do, maybe those ‘unnatural inclinations’ could be trained out of her.  

Jacky let out a quiet laugh. They were so sure of their own abilities that it was almost endearing. No matter how much it pained her, how much she suffered day to day with their words ever-present around her, she had to admire their dedication.

Sighing, Jacky descended a short set of cracked wooden steps down to the stony beach below, moving carefully against the winds. She started to crunch her way over to the pier. The world felt empty. The waves were her only companions, and she liked it that way. Beneath the dark beams of the pier, among the wrought iron supports, she had found a place where one could feel weightless, unencumbered by life’s struggles. 

Curled up there on the stones, knees pulled close to her chest, she finally let her emotions loose. Sniffling and shivering, her sobs muffled by the thin material of her coat cuffs, Jacky felt all the pain she had been made to feel without needing to confront what tomorrow could bring. Here all that mattered was freeing herself from the constraints of her everyday life. And so she sat there, half propped up against a rotting wooden beam, stones digging into her legs, and let it all go.  

That was when she heard it. A low rumble of thunder in the distance, unnervingly loud against the silence of the night. ‘Shit,’ she thought, immediately recalling the weather warnings she’d heard on the radio earlier. It had been a bad season for storms, but tonight had been the first night in weeks that the rain hadn’t been too heavy, and she’d thought it would be safe.The rain began to get heavier, steady streams spilling through the gaps of the pier, and the rumbles of thunder began to get closer. Jacky started panicking, her mind making a mental map of the area, searching for an ideal hiding spot. The winds were picking up, and she didn’t know how far she could get or how fast she could move against them. 

CRASH!

The skies lit up momentarily in a fantastic burst of lightning before flicking back to black. Jacky fumbled for the torch in her pocket and flicked it on, dimly illuminating her surroundings. She somehow felt more hopeless than she did when she left her house a few hours earlier. The thunder was almost deafening now, crashes sounding all around her. She covered her ears with her hands, feeling the wind rocking her back and forth, begging for it to stop. She was so desperate she could’ve started praying. Distantly, she heard other noises coming from town, things slamming and smashing and breaking, shouts of worry, the almost inaudible sound of a baby wailing. She didn’t think she’d ever experienced a storm quite like it. The wind was terrifyingly strong. 

All of a sudden, she realised that pieces of the pier’s wood had started to break off further down by the sea. Whole planks were coming away and flying down the beach at incredible speeds. She was forced into a split-second decision: run into the open and face the full force of the winds or stay under the pier and risk being hit as the pieces broke apart. She knew she stood no chance out there, not with the irregular blasts of lightning, and so she curled into a ball and hoped.  

BANG!

A plank fell mere metres away from her, and she jumped up in shock. She started to half-walk, half-crawl further up the beach, away from the debris littering the stones, hurried and anxious. ‘Everything will be okay,’ she told herself, ‘you’ll make it through.’  

And then everything went black.