I am not allowed a knife, but the National Treasure’s son is. He has a red-handled Swiss Army one that incorporates a can opener, a bottle opener, two saw blades and a detachable pair of tweezers. He shows it to me in his back yard, levering the primary blade out of the handle with his thumbnail. ‘I killed a bird with it last week,’ he tells me. ‘Like this.’ He turns it in his hand so he’s holding it by the blade and flings it at the lawn. It bounces off the grass, handle first, and rolls into the mulch beneath a rose bush. He frowns and says, ‘It’s hard to do it right, but I did it. I hit it in the wing and it stuck it into the ground.’ He points at a spot farther down the lawn. ‘Right there. Then I stabbed it and killed it. Blood went everywhere.’

I don’t believe him. I want to, because I think that if I had a knife I could do amazing and outrageous things like that—although part of me knows I couldn’t stab a bird. I know he couldn’t do it either, and that he’s bragging about made-up exploits because I’m a year older than him. But just seeing the knife in his hand is enough to inflate my desperate want for one. Five or six years later, I will realise that the only thing I’ve experienced that can contend with my yearning for a knife is the smash of hormonal agony that pulsed through me when a girl I was infatuated with made it clear she had no interest in me. Nothing else compares.