Chapter 1
She awoke with a start, choking and gasping for breath. The world around her was a blur of colour and the echoing sound of running water. Panic clawed at her chest as her senses adjusted, and she realized that she was lying in a small, dimly lit bathroom. Drops of water glistened on the cold, white tiles.
Confusion and fear knotted in her stomach. Where was she? What was going on?
A dishevelled and very heavily pregnant woman burst through the door and gave her a scowl.
“Up! You need to get in bed before the girls arrive,” the woman snapped, her words laced with impatience.
She felt herself being hoisted up, her small frame wrapped in a threadbare towel, before being carried out of the rather unkept bathroom. Was that mold she had just seen on the wall?
Actually- scratch that thought. Was this woman smoking indoors? She could clearly see a still-lit cigarette in the woman’s other hand. No good parent would smoke while pregnant, did this woman have no shame?
She barely registered the outdated furniture and decor as the woman carried her into another room, dumped her down onto a small, dirty cot before stumbling back out of the room.
“Go to sleep!” The woman slammed the door shut.
Wendy was fairly certain she was in shock. She stared at her tiny hands. She was clearly a small child – or just dreaming that she was one, hopefully. The hopes that this was a dream didn’t last long though, as a few certainties started flooding her mind. For some reason, she knew for a fact that her name was Wendy. She also knew that the woman who had just left her here was her mother, and she knew that her mother was emphatically not happy about being her mother.
She also remembered drowning. There were two memories of drowning that seemed to be overlapping one another. One where she was happily surfing, enjoying her holiday abroad with her family before she got pulled down under the water by the strength of the waves. Another, being small and helpless and so very, very alone. In the bath.
She choked on the smell of cigarette smoke that hung heavy in the air as she glanced around the room. Wendy grappled with the unsettling dual memories and the ominous realization that something was wrong. The furniture in the room was dilapidated, worn and incredibly outdated. She’d assume that her mother was too lazy or too poor to buy new ones, except for the fact that the dress her mother had been wearing was also outdated. There had been no electronics in the other room she had been marched through.
If there was one thing she could be certain of, it was that she didn’t like this one bit. Not one bit.
It did not take long for Wendy to adjust to her new life, albeit begrudgingly. She understood quickly that she had to start looking after herself, because there was no way that her so-called mother was going to do it. Brenda was a singularly unpleasant woman.
As it had turned out, the girls that Brenda has been expecting to visit on the night that her near four-year-old daughter fell asleep in the bath and drowned were her fellow prostitutes and drug addicts. They spent the whole night getting high in the sitting room and overall being incredibly loud and annoying. Some of the things that came out of their mouths made Wendy’s eye twitch.
London in 1964 was quite… different. To what she was used to, anyway. Brenda wasn’t in the habit of taking her out anywhere, so she spent a lot of time at the bedroom window, looking out at the street below. The streets still bore the scars of post-war urban decay, and the area she lived in was blatantly poverty-stricken. The brick buildings were worn down and bore year worth of peeling paint and crumbling facades. All colour was faded, leaving a grimy appearance. The drainage was poor with murky puddles all over the place, and clotheslines stretched across the gaps between buildings. She was hard pressed to call half of the things hanging from them clothes.
She could hear the distant hum of traffic if she focused, though it was nowhere near the constant modern vibrations Wendy was used to. She hadn’t realised how much noise modern technology made, be it kitchen appliances, the washing machine and tumble driers or even her home computer. The silence was eerie.
She’d take the silence over having to deal with fucking Brenda and her fucking nattering any day, though. The woman was doing drugs. While pregnant.
Brenda appeared to be in her mid-twenties, and her appearance seemed to reflect an image that mirrored the chaos of her life. The weight of her drug addiction was evident in the vacant stare in her eyes. Her unkept image and the hollow quality of her laughter was a constant, and her demeanour conveyed a sense of detachment, leaving little room for sympathy, as her actions and consequences thereof perpetuated a cycle of self-destructive choices.
She also seemed to consider the pregnancy more an unwelcome complication than a source of joy.
Wendy held no respect for Brenda, and honestly the woman lived in filth. Which meant that Wendy lived in filth. The new baby, her new younger sibling, was also going to be living in filth if it survived all the shit that Brenda put her body through.
Every time that Wendy lay eyes on Brenda’s distended belly, she could not help but wish desperately with all her might that the baby would turn out okay. That it would be born healthy. She really didn’t want to spend her life with fucking Brenda as her only family.
Brenda left her at home alone quite often, meaning she spent most of the time lost in her thoughts. While she had been reborn into awful circumstances, she was determined not to remain in them.
Being reborn into the past both gave her options and limited them. She had a lot of decisions to make.
The good news was that she knew a whole bunch of companies that would get incredibly wealthy. So long as she invested in the right ones, she could make herself a lot of money. No more poverty for her, huzzah. According to a magazine she found in the kitchen earlier that week, she knew that it was January 1964.
While many of the companies she could name weren’t going to be around for another decade or two, considering most of them were technology-based, it would be a while before she could start making money from them. But once she did? She could get away with never working for the rest of her life. She could travel the world and do whatever the hell she liked! She’d heard of elderly folk who spent their retirement basically living out of cruises for months on months – she could certainly get behind that.
The main issue with being born into the 1960s however, was that she was a woman. A woman living in poverty and born out of wedlock.
Wendy had no clue what the state of women’s rights were in the 1960s, but they certainly were not going to be up to her 21st century standards. Did girls get the same schooling as boys? Could they go to university for only certain degrees? What sort of jobs could they get? Could she even invest money in companies as a woman? Brenda wasn’t subscribed to any reading resources that Wendy would consider intellectual, only inane gossip mags, which left her bereft.
She still could not believe that she was stuck in a time period where being born out of wedlock was something that mattered.
She was also undecided on what to do about her education. She did not want to sit through her basic schooling again. Did she pretend to be a normal child, or did she allow for her intelligence to shine through? If she did show the extent of her knowledge, would she even be allowed to skip years of school? Did she even want that?
Fuck, she missed the internet. The moment she figured out how to escape this stupid apartment, she was going to be going straight to the nearest library.
On the second of February, 1964, Robert Mitchell was born. Born healthy, by some strange miracle. Even the doctors seemed stunned. Wendy was relieved.
Relieved… and confused.
It wasn’t a subject that she was particularly well-read on, but she was fairly certain that her new baby brother should absolutely not have been born healthy. Brenda had blatantly and unapologetically been using drugs throughout her pregnancy, and Robert realistically shouldn’t be alive.
How was he alive?
He wasn’t just alive; he was born just as any other child with a healthy mother would have been. He showed no birth defects, and he wasn’t born premature. The entire situation felt off.
Wendy decided to put it to one side for now. If she could accept her absurd reincarnation, she could accept her baby brother’s absurd survival. She hadn’t believed in any sort of higher power in her first life, but it seemed she may have to reconsider that stance.
Over the following months, Wendy grew incredibly attached to her little brother. When she wasn’t feeding him, Brenda was content to leave him to Wendy’s care. She talked to him all the time, in a mix of both English and French. The second language would help him in the future and allowed her to keep her knowledge of it fresh.
The only time she wasn’t talking to him was when she was listening to the radio. She had found a broken one discarded at the back of one of the kitchen drawers and quickly fixed it up, craving a connection to the outside world. She flicked through the various radio stations, listening to what was on offer.
She especially liked listening to the BBC Home Service station and the BBC Third Programme station. If she tuned in at the right times, she would catch a variety of educational programs and cultural discussions.
It also helped prevent her from committing any time-travel related faux-pas. It wouldn’t do for her to accidentally reference something that hasn’t happened yet or hasn’t been invented. She wasn’t entirely certain when TVs came into common use, or when it started showing in something other than black and white. At the very least, she knew they were common by 1969 when everyone would be avidly watching the moon landing.
She wished that she had paid more attention to modern history. All her knowledge from between the end of the second world war and 1990 was all jumbled up into one big ball. She had no clue what happened in which decade, or when particular advancements were made. The radio was a huge help with that.
The radio wasn’t the only thing lying around discarded the apartment. In searching all the drawers, Wendy found various pens and pencils, a notebook, one or two children’s books that must have previously been hers, a compact mirror with a crack through the middle and various empty tins and bottle caps.
She took all of it and hit it away under her bed. The tins she took and cleaned out, filing away the sharp edges and giving them to Robbie to play with.
With the pens, or at least the ones that still had ink left in them, she began to write down every brand and business she could conceivably think of.
Cars, food, clothes. Tech brands, streaming services, electronics.
She was going to write down as many as she could before she forgot – one day when they were founded (although she was sure that some, especially the cars, already existed) that she could invest in them and benefit from them as much as possible.
She filled about a quarter of the notebook this way.
She also found some old cleaning supplies in the bathroom cabinet. She got to work, cracking open the window in the children’s bedroom to air it out. She scrubbed within an inch of her life, ensuring that it was the cleanest it could be under the circumstances.
After their bedroom, she also did her best to scrub clean the bathroom. She attacked the layers of accumulated filth that clung to every surface. The tiles were eventually at least close to their original white sheen, and the sink gleamed anew.
She left the living room as a lost cause. With how often there were people in there, she wasn’t going to bother.
As he got older, Robbie grew more active. He began to walk and talk (more babbling really) and he got into all kinds of mischief. He wasn’t content with building tin-towers and knocking them over for very long, and Wendy didn’t have the means to get him any new toys.
Before, Wendy could keep him in the bedroom with her and away from Brenda’s guests. Unfortunately, one hot summers day a year later, Wendy woke up to a piercing shriek. Her eyes shot open, and she snapped upright in the bed, her heart racing.
The bedroom door was open.
Robbie wasn’t there.
She threw off the covers and stumbled out of bed. The dim light of the living room spilled into the hallway, casting shadows on the walls.
As she entered the living space, a chaotic scene unfolded before her. Brenda, dishevelled and wide-eyed, sat on the sofa with a strained expression. Two of Brenda’s girlfriends sat beside her. A scruffy older man occupied one of the chairs, nursing a bottle of cheap beer.
None of those were Wendy’s concern though.
Her eyes latched onto the ominous figure towering over her baby brother. A built, dark-looking man was swaying in place, the scent of alcohol wafted through the air. His speech was slurred as he bellowed, clearly inebriated and angry.
“Leave him alone!” cried Wendy, her eyes darting between Robbie, the man and her mother, who didn’t seem like she was leaving her seat anytime soon. Her pulse quickened as she rushed towards Robbie, who was sitting on the floor surrounded by shattered glass and pooling liquid, which she quickly identified as formerly being an unopened bottle of vodka.
“He did this!” the man roared, pointing an accusatory finger at the little boy. “The little brat knocked over my damn bottle!”
Robbie’s eyes quickly began to tear up, and Wendy’s protective instincts immediately kicked in. She used all her strength to lift Robbie and bring him clear of both the man and the shattered glass.
“He didn’t mean to!” exclaimed Wendy.
“Oh, he didn’t mean to did he?” breathed the man. He began to advance on the two children, arm outstretched as if to grab at them.
“I said leave him alone!”
All of a sudden, Wendy felt a rush, and the air seemed to crackle. Wendy, feeling adrenaline course through her, held her brother tighter to her chest and, glaring at the still advancing man, focused all of her frustration and fear on the looming threat.
The man, still sneering and closing in, found himself thrown backwards into the air and slammed into the opposite wall, as if impacted by an invisible force. Panic flashed across his face as he collided with a loud bang that left the room in shocked silence.
Wendy, wide-eyed and trembling, stared at the unconscious man slumped against the wall. The silence was broken only by the soft sobs of Robbie, still cradled in Wendy’s arms.
She quickly backtracked back into her bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her, stunned.
What the actual fuck was that?
--
After putting Robbie to bed, Wendy didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. She tossed and turned where she lay, her thoughts racing.
She knew that she was what had thrown the stranger across the room.
How did she throw him across the room?
Her immediate thought was that she had superpowers, considering the new Marvel releases that she had been bingeing prior to her passing. Was she some sort of mutant?
No. Surely if something like that existed, she would have heard at least hints of it on the radio she had been glued to for the last year.
Maybe the weight of her adult intelligence forced into a smaller body had made her telekinetic. Maybe this was some Matilda type shtick.
Whatever it was, she was going to figure out how to do it again.
To keep Robbie safe, she could do no less.
She started with the bottle caps she had stored. She had originally collected them in order to give to Robbie to play with, either when he got big enough that they weren’t a choking hazard or when she acquired some glue to shape them all into something bigger.
Wendy sat cross-legged on the worn floorboards of the bedroom, caps scattered in front of her. Focused and determined, she fixed her gaze on a lone bottle cap. Channelling her newfound awareness, she envisioned the cap lifting off the floor. Her small hands trembled with concentration as she willed it to defy gravity. Minutes turned to hours weighted in silent intensity. She didn’t dare turn the radio on, lest she wake Robbie up.
Unfortunately, the bottle cap remained stubbornly grounded, resisting her.
Frustration welled up within her. Her brow furrowed deeper, and her hands balled into fists. Only the moon shining through the window bore witness to her growing impatience. What, was she seriously capable of throwing a whole man, but not a bottle cap!?
Doubt crept into her mind, and frustration gave way to a sense of inadequacy.
“What the fuck is your problem?” she hissed towards the bottle cap.
The cap in questioned remained unmoving.
Well fuck this.
“What do you want me to say, Wingardium Leviosa?” she snapped. She was done with this bullshit.
The moment she finished, she felt it. A rush, and then a crackle, and then BANG.
The entire pile of bottle caps shot up into the air, hit the ceiling, and rained down on top of her.
She sat frozen.
A good quarter of the caps hit the pile of tin cans stacked in the corner with resounding clangs. Robbie shifted in bed with a whimper, and turned to face her, eyes cracking open.
“Wen?” he whimpered.
“Go back to sleep Robbie.” Wendy whispered. “Just go back to sleep.”