Brighton is never quiet, but the pier underneath it tries very hard.
Most people only see the top: noise, lights, movement, laughter that doesn’t always belong to anyone in particular.
But beneath it, there is structure. Old wood. Salt-darkened beams. Spaces where the sea presses upward as if trying to remember what land feels like.
I went down there during high tide.
No one else wanted to.
Even Pedro stayed above, unusually uninterested in anything that could not be classified.
Down below, the light changes its mind constantly.
It becomes strips, fragments, reflections that don’t agree with each other.
And then I saw the messages.
Not carved. Not painted.
Worn into the wood by repetition, as though something had been trying to speak through pressure rather than ink.
Not words exactly.
Patterns.
Like instructions that had been forgotten mid-sentence.
Jack called down to me from above, but his voice arrived late, as though the pier itself was deciding when I should hear it.
When I came back up, I told them I thought the structure was remembering things we hadn’t been told.
Pedro asked if it was compliant.
I said I didn’t think compliance applied.
He seemed satisfied with that answer.
Which made me more uneasy than anything I’d seen below.
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