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some kind of voodoo ritual.

    The girls had called it various names (Sweet Pinky Boo Boo, Kushaaar Vulture Lord of Thraaall, etc. etc.), but I didn’t bother with the whole naming business, because I couldn’t bear to get too emotionally attached to what was clearly a profoundly damaged individual.
    As well as the animal, there were a couple of Lego bricks so tightly jammed together you’d need dynamite to blow them apart, so they weren’t much use for anything other than throwing at Ruby and Ella, and I had better tools for that job.
    The DUNNO pile was a lot bigger. It had things in it that I knew I wouldn’t ever use again, such as swords, bows, shields, toy cars, Junior Scrabble, Junior Monopoly … all that kind of stuff. But the thing is that even though I knew I wouldn’t be using them again, they all had good memories. It also had all my Star Wars Lego, loads of Warhammer, some rare action figures – the evil black Spiderman, for e.g., plus the whole set of The Lord of the Rings figures, including the very rare and hard-to-come-by Witch King.
    ‘Remember,’ I said to Jim, ‘when we swapped round Ruby’s Barbies and Ella’s demon puppets, and they united their forces and came for us and we had to fight them off, and I was wearing my Roman Centurion outfit—’
    ‘And I had this crossbow.’ Jim pulled the trigger on the crossbow, despite the fact that the arrows had been lost at least three years earlier, and even the string was nothing but a memory.
    Jim looked at the Lego and other stuff in the DUNNO pile. ‘ Star Wars is a bit lame …’ he said. ‘Remember that Jedi lunch box I had last term?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I deliberately lost it so my mum had to buy me a different one.’
    ‘What did you get?’
    ‘Just plain. Totally er, unthemed . No icon, no logo, no nothing. It’s the only way to go. Anything else and you know you’re going to regret it in three months’ time.’
    I nodded.
    I was impressed with Jim. His thinking had progressed lately, and he was obviously now at a higher stage of development than me.
    ‘It’s sometimes useful,’ he said, ‘to have a big brother to kneel on your chest and slap your face and tell you exactly what it is that’s lame about you.’
    ‘I’ve got sisters to do that.’
    ‘Sisters just aren’t the same. They can tell you you’re a rubbish dancer, and let you know that you’ve got uncool hair, but the important stuff, you know, which toilet cubicle to hide in when there’s a maths test, how to spit on the back of a dorky kid’s head in the dinner queue without them realizing it, how to give a decent dead leg … for all that, you need a guy’s touch.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I agreed.
    The fact that girls couldn’t give a decent dead leg was one of those basic truths about the universe that only a lunatic would deny.
    ‘Look,’ said Jim. ‘Deep down you know what we have to do …’
    I nodded.
    Five minutes later we were standing around the big pile of leaves in our back garden that Dad had been heaping up ready for burning for as long as anyone could remember.
    We looked at each other. Jim said, ‘It’s for your own good.’
    ‘I know.’
    And then on went the Lego, the Warhammer, the weird mutant cuddly animal – in fact everything from the CHUCK and DUNNO piles. I’d got the special giant matches from the kitchen (the ones I wasn’t supposed to touch) and used one to light the pile.
    I was burning my childhood. It was an authentic Rite of Passage, like when Maori boys get their first tattoo, or Eskimos snog their first walrus.
    I felt my eyes begin to water. At first I thought it was because of all the emotion. It’s not every day you say goodbye to your childhood.
    Then I realized it was because of all the black oily smoke coming off the burning plastic.
    We moved back. It was quite impressive. There weren’t any decent flames, but there was a red glow from underneath the tangled pile of old toys, and so much smoke you’d have thought a