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soon she rarely snapped at anyone, even the young skateboarders who came whizzing along the footpath by the estuary too close to the girls’ ankles as they walked past the pier.
    Aurelia, too, had been preoccupied since that day and night spent on the heath, though her thoughts turned in a distinctly different direction, and always returned with predictable inevitability to the stranger and his kiss.
    At first she had simply replayed the feeling of his lips against hers over and over, but when those thoughts became tired she began to imagine how his mouth would feel on other parts of her body until, eventually, she wasn’t sure which parts of her daydreams were memory and which parts invented. Sometimes she felt that she had dreamed the whole thing and other times she thought that it must have been more than a kiss, but that she had somehow forgotten the rest. Her memory of the event was in some respects so absolutely keen and clear, and in other respects impossible to get straight in her mind. Thinking about it was like trying to find the edge of water.
    When she was alone, Aurelia’s thoughts were always accompanied by self-pleasure. She went about her routine with the slow, concentrated languidness with which she approached everything that she set her mind to. Often, she ran a bath, surrounded the rim with a hundred or more tea-light candles nestled side by side and lay in the water touching herself until it turned cold hours later. She rarely came, preferring instead to enjoy the residual feeling of sexual frustration that permeated her being for days.
    She had, of course, told Siv about the kiss. Siv initially reacted with eager interest. It was the first time she’d known her friend to have a crush. But as time went by and Aurelia continued to be fixated with the stranger, Siv grew bored and stopped asking her to try to at least remember what he had looked like or what he had been wearing.
    The only thing Aurelia recalled with any certainty was his scent.
    ‘Pomegranate,’ she told Siv.
    ‘Pomegranate?’ Siv scoffed. ‘Men don’t smell like pomegranate.’
    Aurelia began to eat the flesh of the deep-red fruits for breakfast most mornings. She was surprised by the bitter aftertaste, but soon began to enjoy the contradiction of the harsh and woody tang that followed the initial sweetness of each mouthful. And she liked to run her tongue over the seeds and think of the stranger.
    Eventually, though, the fun fair became just another memory, and the girls returned to their usual routine of school interspersed with drama and dance classes, Aurelia’s part-time job at the florist in Old Leigh and Siv’s Saturday mornings behind the till selling playing cards and whoopee cushions at a local emporium. Sundays were reserved for spending their wages and socialising. Life continued in much the same vein for several months. Exams came, were duly ticked off, and a time for decisions was nearing for both of them.
    The weekend following their final exams, both Siv and Aurelia managed to get monumentally drunk on a pub crawl they had unadvisedly joined with friends from school. That night, at Siv’s inebriated insistence that she finally find herself a proper boyfriend, Aurelia had flirted heavily with Kevin, a good-looking if somewhat vacuous student from the nearby academy.
    By then, the memory of the stranger’s kiss at the fun fair was fading fast and, after a few hours, Aurelia had agreed to go back to Kevin’s house, only for him to stumble as they made their way to his car, hand in hand. He fell badly on his wrist, breaking it, and had to go to A and E, which put a dampener on any further activities of a sexual nature.
    Aurelia was beginning to think her love life was cursed. Or, thinking of some of the more lucky escapes she’d had in her teens, that maybe she had some kind of guardian angel. She quickly dismissed the idea, despite that odd feeling she’d had for some time now that she was being watched. It was