Still Ill

It seems like so long ago now, since the summer afternoons when we used to sit up on the motorway bridge. It was when Leanne and I were the best of friends, and the bridge, in the middle of the nature park and through the fields, felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. Up those steps you could see the motorway stretching for miles in either direction, and while we told each other secrets, underneath us was the constant buzz of tiny people in tiny cars, speeding away to places we could only imagine.

The motorway signs in view promised adventure and romance in places we hadn't yet seen, and the bridge's railings, with the paint chipped to reveal the oxidised rust, seemed to us just like prison bars keeping us locked in this little town; from the world that, we knew only too well, would one day be ours.

But that was years ago, longer now than it seems, back when we were in the final year of primary school, and filled with self-importance and so many impossible dreams. Back then, we weren't so jaded by disappointment, and our imaginations burned with idealistic fantasies.

At ten years old, of course, you always know that it's inevitable for you to change the world; that you can't possibly fail to become a superstar, famous throughout the world. Taught by fairy tales, we've never really grown up, still secretly believing in the possibility. These days we're expected to act our age, go to university and get a good job. Then though, it was a certainty that we'd defy all the rules while being universally adored, and we spent whole afternoons on that bridge, telling each other stories of our futures while the traffic roared below us.

Eventually one of us would realise the time, and we'd reluctantly hurry home, knowing that if we were late to tea again we wouldn't be allowed to play out again the next night.

No one else went there; we had the place to ourselves, our own little world where we could be whoever we wanted to be. As we got older, we went there less and less. When we started secondary school, homework and after school club got the better of us and there was no time. Lives were time tabled for other things, and for a while the ambitions we had were to be momentarily put aside, but not forgotten. On the occasions when we did escape, the bridge was still a refuge from the day-to-day tedium and grumpy parents.

Soon, we'd be hopelessly caught up in the rules of high school cool, where playgrounds were swapped for parties; we'd continue, as our parents expected, with adolescent rituals and GCSE revision. The apathy and unhappiness of the people around us was as suffocating as the overcast skies above us, but ever since one of the first sunlit afternoons spent gazing through the bridge railings, we'd resolved that we'd be different; that our aspirations would never be crushed by soulless 9-to-5 shifts in the retail parks and their concrete monotony on the outskirts of the cheerless council estates.

Once upon a time, we'd take our friends up to the bridge on Friday nights, drinking cheap wine purchased illegally from the off-licence on the corner. When it went dark early in the winter, it could take hours for us to find our way home; stumbling across the muddy fields where there were no street lamps, and laughing at the stars. Sitting on the cold concrete, cars' headlights flashed past us, dazzling us from a distance, growing brighter and then fading until they soon receded from sight further down the motorway. Even in the dark, they always lit us up in a strobing Technicolour, with neon lights being reflected in our eyes before the cars disappeared into the shadow.

We don't go up there anymore, though there are probably echoes of our presence left there in the discarded debris, chalked graffiti and long-emptied wine bottles. But, sold on the underlying message of hope in every fairy story children are ever told, we held onto our dreams, intent on being remembered forever and living happily ever after.

"Under the Iron Bridge we kissed, and although I ended up with sore lips,
It just wasn't like the old days anymore, it just wasn't like those days"

'Still Ill' lyrics by The Smiths, text by Janie Doll, painting by David Hancock "Still ill" acrylic on canvas, 18 ft x 4, 2003.