We had disliked one another intensely at first. Well, as intensely as a three-year-old can hate something, which on reflection is quite a lot. There’re no half measures when you’re three. Kimberly locked me in her attic and in retaliation I rubbed her face in a handful of Laburnum; its golden, sugar-puffed pods a potent poison. We duelled like this for a short while before realising we were two sides of the one coin.

Our gardens backed on to one another, separated by a wooden fence so enveloped by hawthorn that the two were indistinguishable. From May the May bloomed white, and we’d tape it onto crudely made paper crowns. As we approached double figures we biked everywhere, casting our net more widely, discovering new places to hide and seek; where huge beech trees held and shaded us, or scuffed and splintered us if disrespected. 

In the summer of 1995, we were fifteen. For the first time Kimberly holidayed with us. Journeying to Kent in the car my parents played Neil Diamond and The Kinks. Kimberly relished the music my parents played, our day trips, the food we ate. She’d look at me in horror if I disrespected my parents, but I yearned for pints of shandy in her back garden, a Chinese take-away, free rein in Tammy Girl. Not Laura Ashley, Café Gandolfi and elbows off the table.

Arriving in Hythe we ran to the beach the way you do when you’re caught between girl and woman. Well, at least I did; loose limbed yet self-conscious about bits that newly jiggled. I jumped onto the shingle from the sea wall awkwardly, while Kimberly touched down like she’d parachuted in on silk. The sun had been baking the shallows all day and we paddled, progressing to a wade as we saw off the outgoing tide. Kimberly smacked water towards me with her hand, and I clasped my hands together and pumped a jet that landed on her shorts, she shrieked, then pondered, ‘I’ve never been to a chuckie beach, there’s millions of them, wonder how they even got here?’

‘They’re pebbles. It’s a shingle beach.’

‘Chuuuuckies! Chuuuuuuckies!’ she sang, so loud and Glasgow.

I met her eyes and added my own line.

‘Big wans, wee wans, pink wans, white wans!’

We raved in the water, dancing in circles, two wild things singing our new anthem. We couldn’t stand for laughing, so bobbed on our backs holding hands, like sea otters cast adrift for a while. When we stood, a group of boys were shielding squinting eyes from the sun, staring at us from the shoreline.

‘They think we’re mermaids!’ Kimberly mocked in an English accent. 

The next few weeks were campfires, cider, kisses on the beach. Milestones that left us with proper secrets to share. To compare it to a marriage would be to say it was the honeymoon period. The very best of days, bathed in sunlight. No half measures.