There's a hole in my bucket

The bucket had already started to leak. Shit. This must be one of the plastic ones. Plastic never lasted that long outside anymore. All that fear surrounding biodegradable and non biodegradable materials didn’t matter much now that most materials would erode with a strong gust of wind. The image of the metal one sitting by the ladder burst into her mind, with its dark navy paint. Oh well, this one would have to do. She could feel the sweat start to accumulate under her gloves too, causing the metal rung to dance in her palms and attempt to dislodge. Time to run.

The camp was in a small valley in what was once luscious fields. The campers who lived before the Eradication say fields used to all look the same, but Charlotte reckoned that was bullshit. Now they were all the same. Dry and scorched and home to nothing, nothing except a small selection of humans doing everything they could to survive. In the past they would have had life. In the past they would have had grass and plants and wild flowers. Some fields would have been separated by trees, big trees with branches that stretched over and created shade, not just walls that had been built to withstand the years. A lot of those walls were still around, somehow. Rock over rock, declaring nothing but a memory of ownership. Charlotte would have given anything to see a wildflower. A buttercup if she could choose. Mum used to tell her stories of when she was a child, they used to pick them out of the grass and hold them under each other's chins to see if they liked butter. The fluorescence of the flower would always glow, which made sense because everyone liked butter, what wasn’t to like. Mum had said even vegans liked margarine, which was just butter but not with milk and not as good. Charlotte would never know, the cows had gone with the second Eradication. They didn’t even have margarine.

The scorched earth’s cracks became slightly smaller, little pieces of rock were bouncing around her feet, which meant she was getting close to the marks in the ground that would direct her to the cover. This was always where she struggled. It was confusing, directions and spatial awareness. She had been taught her left and right as a young child but still struggled to master it. The longer she looked the quicker the water was leaving the bucket - it was only a drip at the moment but it could crack, widening the hole and leaving them without washing for a week.

“Why is there a hole in your bucket?” The sharpness of her spin splashed a tablespoon of water over the side of the bucket. That would cost her, she thought, it took every milimetre of liquid to add to the Steamer, and they needed the water to purify the bandages that had built up in the infirmary. That was a voice. A voice she did not recognise. Dragging her gaze from the spill which had already evaporated off the ground, she saw a boy. He was wearing thick black boots and thick black jeans that must have been hell in the heat, but would definitely keep out the elements. What was once a white t-shirt was covered in dirt, reddish brown and small lines of green across his chest. Where had that come from? There wasn’t any green dirt that she had seen, and when the stream they gathered water from gushed it picked up the terracotta from the clay, not any sort of water weed that would make that colour.

“What are you looking at?” came the same low voice.

“Where’s the green from?” Charlotte said without thinking. She really shouldn’t be answering his question, especially not with another question. She should get back to the camp, but she also didn’t want to lead this stranger there.

“Grass.” Her gasp was audible. Now she knew he was full of shit. Grass hadn’t been on these lands in years. Decades even. Surely the shirt wasn’t that old.

“Not from round here” he clarified, seemingly reading her mind. “From while ago”. He spoke funny, in riddles almost. His accent wasn’t glaringly different but the emphasis on his syllables seemed to be. He couldn’t be that much different in age to her, but why was he on his own?

“Look, I need to get this back. I don’t know what you want but please leave me alone.” She’d hoped the strange boy couldn’t hear the slight quiver in her voice. Confidence was how you showed people you weren’t to be fucked with.

“I ain’t mess wi’ ya. I have a fix for your bucket.” Out of his pocket came a tight reel of something black. The strange boy picked at it until a section of it came loose, making this awful ripping sound. Taking his teeth to it, he ripped it again, separating one small rectangle from the larger piece.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s tape, you ain’t seen it?” She stared at it as he came closer. “Don’t touch, don’t want to lose its stick”. He seemed to miss words when he spoke. He may know ‘tape’ but he didn’t seem to know grammar very well. Kneeling on the floor, the strange boy covered the expanding hole in the bucket with the sticky rectangle of ‘tape’, and the water stopped. She couldn’t stop the gasp from leaving her mouth, which was the second time it had happened in his presence. From this angle she could see all the colours in his hair. It was brown, but it was historically a dark brown, made red and gold in the heat. It was long and it curled slightly. She wanted to touch it, wanted to feel the texture, it looked so different from hers. She’d run her fingers through boy’s hair before. She was 18 and there wasn’t much else to do on a camp except survive and kiss to pass the time, but it had always felt quite scripted and stilted. She’d read about it in books and ancient copies of women’s magazines and thought that’s what one was ought to do, it hadn’t come to her from desire. Just as her fingers had nearly reached one of the curled locks sitting on the top of his head he looked at her. Her fingers snapped back to her chest.

He reached up and took her hand, his was warm and rough, worked. “You can touch” and he placed it on the top of his head. What on earth was happening? But she let him, she caressed the strands, surprisingly soft, and chased them through her fingers around the shape of his jaw.

“I don’t even know your name.” but she didn’t stop.

“Root” He seemed to be enjoying it as much as she was, gently leaning his forehead into her hand so she could cup it. Would it be a good time to stop? She was just touching this stranger’s hair in the middle of the land near her camp. What if someone climbed up and saw them?

“That’s a strange name”

“No, it’s from tree.”

“Have you ever seen a tree?” She’d like to see one almost as much as the wildflowers that lived in her imagination.

“When I little, yes.” Root had seen a tree? How long had he been out there for? In the elements? His skin was a tanned brown colour, which could be natural or it could be from being outside for a long stretch of time. He was too young to have seen the Eradication, she was certain of that. Unless he was hiding another 40 years under that hair. “You?”

“I’ve never seen a tree” His laugh had a soft sound, a rolling around sound, like a tap of the knee or a click of the fingers.

“Ya name”

“Oh” her cheeks mimicked sun damage, a slightly bolder red sneaking across them. She hated getting things wrong.

“Charlotte.”

“Charlotte.” He moved the sound around in his mouth, the way you do with a word from a language you’re not used to. “Why your cheeks red Charlotte? for me?”

“No!” Her eyes rolled, the scarlett deepened, and her cheeks now felt physically hot to touch. It could be the elements, she had been outside for too long at this point and she needed to think about going back inside to get questioned by her mum on where the hell this rectangle of tape was. “The elements. I need to get back. To camp.” Root’s eyebrows raised a small fraction as he looked at her, innocence written on his face. “Do you have a camp? A family”

“No, not anymore.” The sad nature of loss didn’t change his expression, didn’t hurt him to admit, it just was. It was a fact of this arid land, of the sun pelting down onto the land and turning it to dust, of the way the wind cut like a knife and moulded plastic to its whim. "I thought you'd be Liza."

"Liza?" She had no idea the reasoning behind that, but at least it wasn't a name like 'stick' or 'mud'.

"yeah, you got a hole in bucket. Like Liza" She didn't know this Liza person, probably someone from his family that had perished in their explorations outside for long stretches.

All of a sudden, Root started to sing. It was more of a hum at first, repeating a little tune that sounded like some sort of nursery rhyme, perhaps something she'd heard before. He got louder, she tried to school her features into something less quizzical until he clapped his hands with gusto and added the lyrics.

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.

She didn't know where it came from, the deepest parts of her memory maybe? But she knew what came next, it just arose out of her, from her brain through her throat and into the dry air.

Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,

Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, mend it.

Root laughed again, harder this time, the sound bouncing instead of rolling through the air, clapping his hands with joy. He had, mended it. He'd had exactly what he needed and knew what he needed to do. It wouldn't hold forever. It could be a stupid decision of course. But it felt like the right one, to bring a wanderer in from the heat. Mum had told her to read as a child, had made sure she was always borrowing books from the communal pile, would question her on the stories she inhaled, she understood the messages and the lessons held between the pages. But the one thing she learnt from books was that other people’s stories are valuable, they are wealth. Charlotte’s lived experience didn’t stretch further than the stream that cut through the dirt half a mile from the camp hidden under the valley of what used to be English Countryside. Her hand graced the contours of the green stains Root said had come from grass and made up her mind.

Without speaking, Charlotte turned around, finding the triangle carved into the mud and side stepping twice to find the rope pull that heaved open the cover. Root’s face was shocked, she’d seemingly showed him something he’d never seen before. She can’t imagine how he would react inside.

“Are you coming Henry?”

"Yes Liza, I am."