Bucket
by Jay McKenzie

New York first, because who doesn’t want to taste the saccharine Christmas pudding of Hallmark movies? Shiver past the Empire State Building, dip a head at Ground Zero from the top of a Hop-on- hop-off bus, clutch a coffee, bitter and bleeding through the thin paper cup walls. Coffee on the list of things you avoid, but when in Rome and all... Avoid smoking, obviously, fatty foods, inertia. Do what you can to protect this fluttering thing in your chest. But here, drink a coffee, nibble a slice of Joe’s Sicilian, walk it off in Central Park. Snap photo of the neon billboards, send it to the group chat you’re in with your two children, both of them grown, both of them mildly furious. You’ll freeze Mum, yes, yes, I have warm clothes you know. Wait in line to wait in line to shiver in another line for six hours straight. Big shiny ball drops, ticker tape like the confetti from your wedding to their dad, ah, that’s it then, that’s really it. Tap your chest. Did you enjoy that, sweet girl? 

Bolivia next and the white-blind snow-glow of salt. Is this what death feels like? When you thought you were there, there was no white light, no soft-bearded Jesus coming to lead you off your mortal coil, just a blurred rainbow of static and grey fuzz, like lying amongst lint balls that were bits of sock and fluff of cat that gathered under the sofa when the kids were little. They say salt’s not good for the heart, you tell her, crumbling crystals between your thumb and middle fingertip, but you know that, of course, don’t you? Lived well, lived healthy you did, until you didn’t, forever preserved at twenty four like the way they used to keep meat back before fridges. Encased in a crust of salt to slow the ageing process. Touch the grains to your tongue. Just a touch - do you taste that? Nothing slows the aging process quite like death, sweet girl. Nothing. 

Take the hike slow, don’t try to keep up with the llamas, but wrap yourselves in the quixotic rainbows their wool lends itself to. You ask, did you look for rainbows after the rain? Did you see the swirl of engine oil on puddles as evidence of fairies? You told your own children the stories, of how the rainbow was invented just after Noah’s ark as God’s way of reminding us that hope was a bright striped and glowing thing, back when you still believed in God before he crushed your husband under an Eickhoff SL 300, before he made you raise two children under the Thatcher-sneered title of single working mother. Before he injected cancer into the bone marrow of a recent history graduate with big dreams tucked into an atlas. Breathe hard and long, hand pressed to your heart, her heart. Here we are sweet girl, we made it to the top of the world where time stands still. 

The Sherpa you hire to take you to EBC is called Tsin, which he tells you means long life. The folds that run between his nose and his chin remind you of a pair of drawn back curtains, crooked-tilt smile unveiled, an open window to his high-altitude breath. If he is surprised to accompany a sexagenarian with a relocated heart to base camp, he disguises it well. We go how fast you want he says, when you apologises again for your tortoise pace, looks away when you take your medication. You want a photo? he asks, handing you a stone with EBC 2025 scrawled in orange marker. You smile through the boot pinch, bite cold momo, construct the message you’ll send to her parents later. We made it, you nod, hold the rock to your chest. 

In Laos you contract a parasite. I told you not to go, frets your daughter, tear ducts magnified over the whatsapp video call. I’m fine, you tell her. You are not fine, but you will survive, this you know. 

The hotel owner's daughter Katae cares for you under the bare bulb in your Luang Prabang hotel room. I want to be a nurse, she says in shy, halting English. You tell what you know about ventricular arrhythmias while she feeds you khao piak sen and sings something that reminds you of the greenfinches from the woods by your grandmother’s house. You tell her about the way your arrhythmias were drug-resistant, stubborn little things like your toddler children, how you were certain your body would reject anything they put in there. She asks if you’d like a blessing and an orange-clad monk comes and ties white string around your wrist. Later, at the All Lao Elephant Camp, the largest cow, Toul Song Bee strokes your face with her trunk, presses the prehensile tips to your breast and you cry silent, clean tears for two days. 

You were poor once, because in eighties Britain there was no help for mine-widows, no savings, just a too-high mortgage on a crumbling terrace in a not-so-great part of a town on its knees. You worked then, worked to feed and clothe your children, typed up Green Forms to decide which unfortunates were allowed to put their red paws on some legal aid. Sometimes you did shifts in your cousin’s pub where drunk welders pawed you and breathed smoke and stout into your nostrils while a neighbour watched the kids. You were poor and working hard to keep the strings from unravelling like an old cardigan. These Balinese women work hard, but they wear their poverty in bright lace and printed batik and in crescent smiles that suggest the incense-toasted, frangipani-sprinkled offerings they present to their Hindu deities are working. Grace, poise, this is what they have, and you want some. Would you have grown in grace? you ask your torso. You didn’t. You yelled and raged and sweated and angered your grown children, the neighbour, your cousin with the pub. You wore your poverty in choice swear words and hoarse phone calls to the council. I should have been better, you tell the woman who brings you a banana pancake breakfast. Oh, she says, sucking her teeth, squeezing your arm. The insta-swing is a disappointment, but you hop on anyway, let the gentle titters of the young and the beautiful fade as you swing over the treetops. 

On the neighbouring Gili Air, a lion-haired Canadian baptises you into the world of scuba. You lie on the form, say you have no pre-existing conditions in case this boy who reminds you of your son says no, you can’t tick this important thing off the list. You sit on the bottom of a pool with a twelve year old from Singapore and a Danish couple who can’t stop touching one another. The instructor taps out a silent applause when you manage to take out your reg and retrieve it without drama, unlike the Danish man who spits and thrashes for the surface. The sea that stretched beyond your hometown was a rolling grey blanket flecked with lint-white wave peaks and sang only of shipwrecks and jagged- toothed rocks ready to swallow a boat, a dream, a woman and her two children. But here is like sliding inside a sapphire, and when you drift past the rocky armour of a green turtle, the ventricles in your chest thump a percussion to the muted soundtrack down here. There it is, sweet girl. Is this what you hoped it would be? 

At a tachinomiya, you are propositioned by a salaryman in a crumpled suit who wants to feed you edamame beans. You laugh and say, haven’t you got a home to go to? He asks if you have regrets and you stare at the neon reflections on the Tokyo pavement before quietly saying, not anymore. You buy cutesy t-shirts for the grandchildren, a onesie for the newest, a little girl. She carries your name, you say, touching your chest, and when I breathe in that sweet, sticky scent, I do it for the babies you won’t get to hold. She’ll be big by the time you get home, walking perhaps, setting off on her own little adventures around rooms, around parks, around her mother’s watch. They say you learn more in the first three years than in any other period of your life, a million neural connections a second, they say, but you beg to differ. You have learned more about life and purpose and why you are here in the year and a half since someone else's ending signalled your second chance. At Zōjō-ji temple you pray for the first time since the 80s, tell a monk that yes, you very much understand reincarnation because this is your second go around. 

The Opera House reminds you of a ladybird cracking her wings ready to take to the air. You remember the insect hotel you built with your son, rough and ugly, how you’d been embarrassed but your boy looked at you with shining saucer eyes and said, you’re the best mummy. How you’d watched beetles and ants make their way to the terrace. Ah, this is the life, you’d said, putting on fancy voices and growing an inch in the bask of his burbling laugh. How you’d rushed for the bus on fine days so you could be out in the garden again until he switched his allegiance to Warhammer and you were left watching lonely spiders weaving quilts for absent babies. At the top of the bridge you close your eyes, grip the steel rail the way he gripped your hand in the hospital when he thought that you might not come back and he was the little boy with the bugs again. When you get home, you will remind him about the insects, tell him that you love him and his sister more than you thought possible. Your heart, her heart, hammers. Did you ever feel love like this? you whisper, and she responds in a shiver like sleigh bells. I will love so hard, you won’t be able to stop feeling it, sweet girl. 

In Queenstown you give yourself time to sit and stare at Lake Wakatipu. This is it, last stop, last chance saloon. On the table in front of you lies the handwritten list. You have examined the writing, the neat loops, the light touch on the paper. You were surprised when her parents handed you something handwritten, assumed that young people these days just typed, but you should never underestimate a history graduate and their desire to hold onto something from the past, particularly when the future has just been snatched away. You have kept the list in a plastic wallet, and by each point, scratched a respectful tick. It felt wrong to cross out your words, you say now to the list, so you kept it light and as neat as the list itself. Only one item remains unticked, and there’s a sense of melancholy that after tomorrow, you will have nothing left to accomplish. Write your own list, says something, a lick on the breeze, your heart, you. I’ll write my own list! you laugh. Want another adventure, sweet girl? Tomorrow, you will take a helicopter ride to the top of a glacier, etch a new list into the sugar-crusted snow. Then you’ll fly home and hold your children, inhale the clean-laundry smell of your grandchildren. You’ll hand the list back to her parents and they’ll cry and you'll hold one another, and for a fragment of time, they will feel that they are holding her once more. I’ll live so well for both of us, you will tell her parents. 

You close your eyes, listen to the rhythm of a heart that has beat for two, lay both palms flat across your chest. We made it, sweet girl. We did it.