You always make things better

Honestly, what is the point of an umbrella? thought Lena, as she grabbed at hers, threatening to blow inside out. As she raised her arm, raindrops raced gleefully down her sleeve before immediately soaking into her shirt. The wind surged against her, not only flipping the umbrella frame, but breaking and collapsing it. The canopy detached and flew down a side street. Lena growled but chased after it regardless.

She should have left work before the storm hit, but when Charlotte had come to her desk and said that since it was a rare day they were in the office together, did she want to go for a coffee? She might have said no except for the faint but evident blood vessels in Charlotte's eyes, and the fact that she no longer had any mascara on. It turned out she’d been pre-emptively told to stay silent in a meeting in which the team lead knew she might raise some points of disagreement. She’d sat there, wordless, frustrated, but compliant. She was outraged at the team lead and frustrated in herself.

She held tightly onto Lena and said, “I just had to tell you. You always seem to make things better”.

Lena knew the team lead well. Mark wore a Bluetooth headset even when he wasn’t on the phone and brought in his BC Rich electric guitar “on the days he had band practice”. He made his team take on more projects than they had people. He had been known to inspire more than one resignation, and more than one “resignation”. Just somehow, Lena had always avoided being looped into his direct sphere of influence: the “Circles of Hell”, as they were known.

So instead of having a whole afternoon on safeguarding training, as she had planned to do, she spent half of it with Charlotte, first thinking about the best thing to do, and then helping her craft some messages. “No, you definitely can’t call him an arsehole…”

And even after they had finished and she should have thrown herself into the training, she found herself wondering what else could be done to, let’s say, decrease his influence.

Someone who walks home should keep an eye out for torrential downpours, but she hadn’t. By the time she left, London was soaking, spitting and roaring into an eldritch night. She didn’t have a waterproof coat. She didn’t even have an umbrella: someone had offered her one on the way out. 

“You poor love”, the woman had said, her own umbrella already up. She reached into her bag, “look here, take my spare. Always got to have one on me for the grandchildren.”

Lena stared at the crumpled polyester in her hand, trying not to think about what it was dripping with, having landed in the corner next to the bin. She’d just begun to feel sorry for the grandchildren who’d had to use this rickety thing, when - 

*

*

*

“... sorry about ... injury.”

Lena grunted. She tried to open her eyes and winced. The back of her head was throbbing. She could feel her wrists and ankle cable tied to something - a table? Her heart rate began to accelerate. The last thing she remembered was that she'd been in the side street.

“I said I’m sorry about the head injury. I considered so many ways to overpower you and I’m afraid I couldn’t come up with one better. I’m no stronger than I look, you see. No chance I was going to get you here conscious. I’m quite lucky it worked at all. I didn’t do it lightly, I hope you know. 

Lena struggled to pull her arms free, but felt the angry slice of the cable tie and stopped struggling.

“I can do something for the pain,” her captor said. Lena blinked repeatedly, willing her vision to come back, but she began to realise the room was dark. There seemed to be someone standing across the other side.

“Stay where you are,” she said. She wanted a minute’s thinking time. The figure didn’t move.

“I wanted to do something a bit more subtle, but I sort of, ran out of time,” they said. “Will you let me help you?” They stepped forward. Lena yelped and the captor immediately recoiled, holding their hands out, palms open. “All right - all right. I’m staying here.”

“You can’t hide in the darkness,” she said. 

“I’m sure I can’t,” the figure replied.

They regarded each other. The room was very still, although Lena could still hear the storm. Their form began to appear. Lena recognised the features but they seem to have taken on a different nature than when she had seen them earlier, on her way out of the building. The older woman’s eyes were narrower, more inquisitive. She was braced. She still held her umbrella, but it was closed at her side.

“Do you even have grandchildren?”

The woman nodded. “I have four. I don’t suppose now is the time for photos.”

She still didn’t move, looking intently at Lena. Other than having seen her briefly, earlier, Lena didn’t recognise her, but she had a reassuring quality, like a smell memory Lena couldn’t place.

Beyond the pain, something sprung up in Lena. A cold rivulet ran through her, like an underground river which had just found its way to the surface. It was refreshing. It dulled the pain. It ran into her blood like an understanding, not of anything specific, but calming her fear for her life.

“You know you’re here - on purpose,” the woman said, speaking very deliberately. She paused again.

Lena tried to focus, but the more she tried to hold on to something specific, the more she seemed to lose whatever recognisable shapes and sounds might be forming in her mind, like trying to grasp water. She stopped trying to concentrate, and instead listened to what was already, deeply, there. 

It’s very easy to explain away things about yourself which might be exceptional. There were things about Lena’s life which might be thought of as unusual. It’s reasonable that in your life, perhaps you’ve never come to great harm. Never broken a bone, never been seriously ill, never even really caught the flu - all possible. It’s less likely that those around you haven’t come to great harm. No significant deaths, illnesses, or other catastrophic but entirely normal vortexes you might expect to encounter with more than three decades to your name. 

Then there were the things which were harder to dismiss. Lena had spent her twenties youthful and energetic: fizzing with life. Not so unusual. She was thankful that she could be the life and soul, and when you never want to be any other way, there’s no reason to question it. She was grateful that she could go into her thirties with a kind of relentlessness that was becoming less common in the people she knew. Maybe nonexistent, now she came to think of it. But these were people having children, working longer hours in more senior jobs, maybe with worse mental or physical health, people whose additional responsibilities in life always provided another explanation as to why they - again and again - couldn’t match her spirit.

And the last thing: the one fact which went completely unacknowledged in her day to day. Lena could so effectively pretend that this one didn’t exist that it caught her off guard when she was forced to confront it. “Lena, what school did you go to?”, “What was your first word?”, “Where did you grow up?”, “Lena, how old are you?”

Because, who knew?

She’d made up answers for each of them, of course. She’d made up things other people wouldn’t connect to, to avoid being caught out. She had stories to hand, and really, she told herself, how were they any less real than someone else’s experiences? They felt as real as things she knew had actually happened to her. Maybe they were inspired by things which had happened to her. 

She told herself that one day she’d try and find out about where she came from. She’d do it when she felt she needed to. As it was, whenever she thought about it, she thought, I’m too happy today to spoil it. She got fake documents and avoided situations where she’d have to look behind her into time. Over many years those thoughts interrupted her less and less often, and became ever easier to brush into the ether. She mostly forgot that she had been born into the world as a young adult.

“You know that you’re different, don’t you?” said the woman. She was still speaking slowly.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m Maggie,” said the woman. “Can I please give you something for the pain?”

“I’m not in pain.” 

It was true: already she felt almost normal.

“Maggie, who are you? Why have you brought me here?”

Maggie gestured to a chair. “I’m going to sit down, all right? This is going to take me a minute to explain.” She pulled it towards her slowly, hardly breaking eye contact with Lena.

“I just want you to remember,” she began, holding out her palms again, “that I don’t want to hurt you. And I’m not going to lie to you.” She took a deep, audible, breath.

“Five years ago, I was a married woman.” She gestured to a nearby photograph of two women cheerfully waving in front of a waterfall. Lena could see well - too well in the darkness - that one of them was Maggie. She had her arm around a woman in a pink bandana, and whose smile seemed so radiant it could allay the storm outside.

“Cherish was an explorer. I wouldn’t have gone to half the places we did if it weren’t for her, I’d have been holidaying in a caravan on the Isle of Wight. But she led, and I followed. She was bold in where she wanted to go in her thinking, as well. She was a professor, you see. She taught Anthropology for decades, at King’s College. So she had access to all kinds of ideas. I suppose somehow, in studying what it meant to be human, at some point, she must have found a little - clue, perhaps. I’ll never know exactly what it was which set her down this path.”

Maggie looked down at her clasped hands.

“She stopped answering her phone one evening. She wasn’t the type … I knew immediately something was wrong.”

Maggie took another deep breath.

“You mustn’t let me get too caught up. All this is to say, no one has ever found her. I mean, if she were - well, she would have contacted me if she could. But I had to look for her. She may have been the academic but I’m not short of a brain cell or two myself, you know. I did the New York Times Mini Crossword in twenty seconds once, and that’s a fact. And with arthritis.” She wagged her finger at Lena.

“So I followed the trail that she left, or at least everything I could find. Whoever took her tried to take her ideas as well. Even the research on her computer had gone. I found your details in an address book that she’d kept but hadn’t used for years, not since she got her phone. You were the only one I didn’t recognise. And in her hidden folders, on her computer, was a poem. She was a one for poetry, now and again, but this was some kind of long, epic thing - very much a touch on the long side,” she said, casting Cherish-in-the-photo a side-eye.

“It was all about these beings: she called them Guardians. They’re protectors. They seem to exist to keep great evil from happening.”

“And these Guardians…” Lena laughed at what she was about to say. “They’re something like… superheroes?”

“My dear, they’re gods.” Maggie said, letting the words hang in the air, like the waterfall in the photo, permanently suspended.

Lena shook. And as she shook, the rivulet of understanding ran cold into her blood again: understanding, but perhaps not belief.

“In the poem, the Guardians had forgotten who they were. Immortal beings, here to keep us from the abyss, forced to forget. In the poem, you understand, it’s one of their own who turns on them. “Slowly drowns their memories in Lethe’s waters” - you did get a little purple there, my love,” she nodded at Cherish, “drowns their memories, before turning on himself. The god who would willingly give up his power. Opening us up, the text suggests, to great evil.”

“Of what kind?”

“I don’t know!” Maggie threw her hands in the air, and threw an accusatory look at Cherish. “She never finished the blasted poem, did she?”

“But somebody knows that I know. It’s going to sound quite mad, but I’ve been having these dreams. I had been observing you for some time, and when I realised the truth of the matter, well I wanted to get to know you, perhaps befriend you - I didn’t want to hurt you, but the dreams… I have this quite insistent sense that I don’t have a lot of time.”

She looked into Lena’s eyes.

“I think you must know it’s true. I’m asking you to remember, and to protect me. I need your protection, me and my family. I don’t think you’ve lost your power. I believe you’ve just forgotten it. With everything I have, I ask you to remember it tonight.”

Lena thought about the memories she believed were real. It was a life she had constructed for convenience, but which meant something to her. In a way she had chosen it. She thought about the truth she had chosen not to live. She looked at the cable ties on her wrists and ankles, and mourned that choice, now unmade by this quite benevolent-seeming woman - except for the violence. She was disempowered, and perhaps she now only had one power to choose. She looked at Maggie, who without saying anything, crossed the room and slid a pair of scissors under the cable ties.