On the edge of that village there is a White Bridge and all the houses on the north side of the hill overlook it. At dusk, if you stand on the bridge and look towards the hill you can see the curtains and blinds closing one by one by one.

When the bridge was built it was brilliant white, but now the cars have spat their soot and the rain has found the cracks in the paint to make it rusty and orange. They painted it 10 years after it was built, 20 years after, 30 and on and on until one year they painted it and the next day it looked grey and orange again and the council said they weren’t coming back for it.

“What, never?” Mrs Norris said, in the post office. “They can’t leave it like that.”

The White Bridge was built in the 1930s, on the site of an ancient bridge that rotted and fell into the river. In those days, several of the men still owned paddle boats, and used to go over to the market on the other side with shopping lists stuffed in their hands.

Poor pretty Mrs Williams. On market day her husband quite often couldn’t make it back in the evening. The other wives would pop round discreetly with a plate for her and the children. Mr Williams would come back the next day at lunchtime, curiously seasick for a river crossing.

Until one night, in a fit of remorse, or exuberance, he decided he should row back home by moonlight. Since then, every night when poor pretty Mrs Williams lay listening to her children playing in the room next door, she imagined him, stepping into the rocking boat in the dark, the slap of the water against wood, him sinking into the water with a gollop, floating gracefully above the mud below.

It was years before they built the White Bridge, and in that time the village had taken on a different character, like that of an island. A feeling that the villagers had formed an imaginary circle around the centre point, and turned their backs to the sea on one side and the river on the other. They applauded the White Bridge, of course. They had a regatta on the day the mayor cut the ribbon, and a fête with a band and cakes and delicate white sandwiches.

But they had learned to live without the bridge, they had seen what would happen if it disappeared, and they knew they could survive. The White Bridge seemed to know it too. Some of the people in the houses on the hill complained about it, quietly, behind their hands. “It’s an eyesore”, “It’s too bright”, “It’s all I can see out of my window.” They closed their curtains on that side earlier and earlier. And the White Bridge waited.

Now the White Bridge really was an eyesore, its rivets crying orange tears down its sides, but the people had forgotten how to live without it. None of the men in the village had a paddleboat in this day and age. A few had fishing boats that they took out into the bay in good weather.

There was talk of a new bridge being built, a few miles up the river. European funding. Enough room for two lanes of traffic, and a bike path. People in the village talked about this a lot. The younger ones, who worked in town, looked forward to it. “Have you sat in that traffic jam at eight o’ clock?” Joggers and hill walkers ruminated about finally having a loop around the edge of the river longer than three miles.

“It will bring tourism into the area,” the Mayor said.

“It will bring tourists into the area,” Mr Price said, outside Church, while the wind tried its best to blow his wife’s hat off. “The place will be full of commuters. We’ll need a new school. They haven’t thought of that.”

There were two schools in the village. The first no more than four classrooms with a triangular Victorian roof and the words Boys and Girls still etched into the separate mantels at the front. The secondary school had been built later, in the sixties. A squat, glass-faced building that once gleamed with progress and now took too much time for the old caretaker to clean properly.

There were a group of boys who dreamed that one day they would get the courage to burn that rotten school down and go join the bigger one in town. Bill Michaels’s cousin went to school there. He said you couldn’t beat the townie girls.

The feet of the bridge on the village side made a cave that usually stank of cheap cider and, less often, if the boys were really lucky, smelt of weed. With few role models for their delinquency they looked to television and Bill Michaels’s cousin to tell them how to rebel. Some boys would paint crude tags on the girders, saying nothing they hadn’t heard elsewhere. On windy nights the White Bridge groaned above them and in the dark it seemed as though someone was outside, on the town side, under the other end of the bridge.

They told stories of course, about who was on the other side. Dared each other to wander off down the river bank where the path dropped away unexpectedly. One night they decided to sleep under there, but each found by nine pm that they had other places they needed to be.

Over their teenage years the White Bridge was like an indifferent mother. In winter she shielded them from the rain but the cement floor of the river path still sent their bums to sleep. In summer the animal shit in the scrubby weeds sent flies buzzing around their heads. By the time the boys were 17 they were on the other side of the bridge, making their way to town in their older brothers’ shirts and hair gel, holding cigarettes to fool the bouncers at the night clubs.

As with all the council’s plans, in the end, it was years before the new bridge up the river was built, ecologically friendly, embellished with recycled timber and steel. The poor White Bridge looked like a creature with the light going out of its eye. Some people said it wasn’t safe how much it swayed and groaned in the wind.

Bill Michaels was grown now. His cousin in town had a baby and a mortgage. Most of his friends had taken jobs in the town or gone to university far away from the coast. They met sometimes, in the pub near the White Bridge and joked about how they thought they’d escaped.

Bill hadn’t escaped. He lived in the village with his Mam and Dad and applied with less and less enthusiasm for jobs he didn’t want. Factory packer, cleaner, delivery driver. On sunny days he walked to the beach and kicked at the pebbles on the firm sand. On rainy days he wandered up to the bridge and listened to the younger boys who still met up under there.

One Christmas Eve he sat in the pub with the boys from his year at school and they talked about their time under the White Bridge.

“Aye it was bloody creepy,” Simon said. “Remember that night we were going to sleep under it?”

“They do that for real now,” Johnny said. “All the alchies and druggies over the town side, like.”

“Do you remember that creepy guy we used to see up the river path?” Simon continued. “It was that man wasn’t it, that sailor?”

“Oh don’t be stupid,” said Bill. “Sailor my arse. It’s a tiny stretch of river. You’d get a few paddleboats on it, you’re not gonna sail a bloody great ship down it.”

The conversation turned to James, who wasn’t there this Christmas. He was stationed with the Navy, having Christmas on duty. They chatted then about their work, their courses. Bill excused himself and walked outside for a smoke.

When he got outside, he stood and watched the White Bridge, quiet and still, and the feeling came over him to walk out into the middle. He did, and he leaned his arms over the rail as he smoked.

In the dark below and a little way off he could hear the voice of someone singing. Someone in his cups. A thin voice, it keened and strained over the wind, singing the same three lines in a loop, and he was reminded of that record with the old hobo singing, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. He imagined he could hear the slap of water on a little boat, the drag of a painter sliding through the grass.

He imagined standing on the top of that railing. Pointing his hands like a diver – cigarette first – and jumping graceful into the water. How free. The tattered edges of his life streaming from his trainer heels like ribbons.

The pub door swung and crashed clumsily, and from over that side of the bridge a blurry person shouted, “Oi Bill – you wanker.” It was cold there and he gripped onto the edge. He was suddenly unsure about what he was doing.

“Alright, alright,” he shouted back, and he stubbed his cigarette out on the railing of the White Bridge.

At dusk, if you stand on the bridge and look towards the hill you can see the curtains and blinds closing one by one by one.

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Holly Yuille writes magic realist fiction and poetry that aims to be sweet, dark and unexpected. As well as holding a Creative Writing Degree from Swansea University, Holly has been a headline performer, featured performer and contributor at several spoken word events in Worcester where she now lives. She was the winner of the 2019 Worcestershire Litfest Flash Fiction Slam and her short story “You Don’t Know Me” was shortlisted for the 2018 John O’Connor Short Story Competition.