Chapter 1

Amy Buck knew the girl standing by the door, staring through the wire-reinforced glass panel at the corridor outside, standing with arms folded and her back to the classroom. She couldn’t recall her immediately as well as she might have wished but then it had been long time ago since she had last seen the fourteen-year old girl. Black-haired, wearing a cardigan in the school navy blue that her aunt had knitted for her. That memory came back, and so would others in time. What was this girl’s name? Paula ... or maybe Pauline ... After a moment the memory surfaced: Pauline Gibbs. The surname wasn’t a problem though. Gibbsy, she was called then so that would be what she was called now. However, this was the nature of a ReVerse.

The ReVerse only changed the person. Throwing them back to how the person was but in a younger self. Amy as a schoolgirl again, complete with school uniform. Now her old memories edged back: a girl alone like Gibbsy in an empty classroom meant it was break time. All the kids out in the fresh air while the staff grabbed a coffee, though somehow the girl had dodged the prefects on the doors and had got inside the building.

The world then was just as it was, and only the memory of it was submerged. If, as was the case with Amy, the ReVerse dropped one back well-nigh 60 years you were bound to forget all sorts of details from when you were far younger.

Details like how crap her old school was, just as her first time as Amy had been.

Class 3B at Ashwood Road Secondary looked far more scuffed, generally dirty and a lot more kicked in than she cared to remember. What had been new build in 1958 had deteriorated swiftly while she had been away, growing up, growing old, growing bitter. Except in the nature of a ReVerse she hadn’t been away more than a few minutes in one sense. The place was how it was when she was there as a schoolgirl, many years before.

Amy looked away from Gibbsy and at the marks on the wall by the door to the classroom, and the cupboard inside the door where the lock had broken and someone—a teacher, no doubt—had wedged it shut with a fold of paper. Of course the lock didn’t matter. No one would go in there unless they had to: it contained only text books and of all the things a teenager in 1961 would steal, a book on algebra wasn’t one of them.

Amy then looked down at herself, at her school uniform of grey skirt and navy jumper with a white blouse, white ankle socks and unappealing black shoes on her feet. Then she looked to her hands. Slender and smooth, no longer bumpy with blue veins and afflicted by arthritis. A sense of joy filled the girl as she flexed her hands as they used to be. ‘I’m young again,’ she thought with a glow of excitement, ‘and I know things. I know how it turned out, and it won’t go that way again. I can do what I want. I can really enjoy sex again after all these years,’ but that pleasant thought was replaced at once by the knowledge she would first as a kid and then as a woman have to go through all the crap of her life again unless she was very careful.

The question was with a ReVerse was where did it change? When did the ideal path of life take a turning to the depressing, convoluted world she had endured for so long? Then she remembered; it was when her mother died and that dreadful woman Edwina moved in with her dad. That was when things went sour and Amy endured so much before she could leave home. She would deal with that, but somehow the ReVerse had put her—dumped her more like—back in secondary school first.

‘Something to deal with here,’ she said to herself, and wondered what it might be. She knew though that her life was going to be like the school: scuffed, dirty and kicked-in. Now she faced fifty-eight years all told of doing it again, facing up to what could be euphemistically called challenges but were in fact god-awful moments of betrayal and despair. Amy bit her lip. This wasn’t what she hoped for, but it was what had happened. You never have a say with ReVerse if it comes to you. It just happens.

Gibbsy was unaware of Amy being behind her in the classroom. There was no reason the girl should, as she was alone when she went to look out of the door, waiting for someone to arrive. When a ReVerse happens, it is a silent manifestation. Unless Amy had yelled or screamed as the ReVerse occurred, it would be utterly without sound. Just a figure forming seemingly out of nowhere.

The girl at the door was too focussed on looking out to even see a reflection of the shape of Amy forming behind her, and was humming some early ‘60s pop song to herself. American, as the Liverpool manifestation in popular music had yet to impact in the UK. Pauline Gibbs had her arms folded under her small bust. She wasn’t as big as Madeline Dobson, who was not only the only fat girl in the class but being endowed with the biggest boobs brought her considerable attention, but Gibbsy had the advantage of being turned-up-nose cute and boasted a sort of confident flounce about her which made the boys in the class stare at her more.

She also wore stockings, which was relatively uncommon for young teenagers in 1961, so there was much giggling among the boys and ribald comments about getting to catch a glimpse of the girl’s suspenders.

The old playground rhyme came back to Amy. ‘Lady of Spain I adore you, Lift up your skirt let me explore you.’ But the boys of 3B would be too young for that activity, however much they might repeat the ditty. Rumours had it that Gibbsy was letting some 16 or 17 year old lad explore her. No doubt one with slicked back greased hair, wearing fashionable drainpipe trousers and ‘winkle-picker’ shoes.

She could fight too, and would have no hesitation in showing her willingness if a situation demanded it.

All this came back to Amy as she studied the back of the girl. Stuff she would have consigned to the dustbin of history but now, in the sharp air of a spring day in 1961, the recollections began crowding in. Gibbsy, the prettiest bully in the school, was blissfully unaware of any threat to her and therefore vulnerable. ‘She’ll never know what hit her,’ thought Amy as she clenched her fists, and then decided that as she was now a pupil at the school again then revenge for all that the girl had done to her should be more subtle.