The only time he let them down was the time they let him go.

It was nice to belong there, with the gang, with the crew, with the homies – ok they never called themselves homies, they weren’t of colour or cred – but it was nice to belong with them nonetheless. There was something about togetherness, something that roused a surge of vague emotions inside, something that was printed in thick black comic sans on stickers in tourist shops and the dusty two-dollar racks in the corner of greeting card stores. It was a kind of strength, or a joy, or a pride or something similar that crept down from oiled hairs to tightly laced shoes. He was one of them; they had a purpose. He could saunter into their afternoon gathering and give someone a high five and another someone a friendly nod. They were a gang of familiarity, names were known and stories told. Like what he’d had for breakfast (eggs) and why everyone’s mother was a Class A NAG. He said things like ‘fucking A!’ and no one thought he was joking, or had made a mistake; he rolled previously forbidden words around with his tongue, considered them as they bounced between cheeks, and gently flicked them out. And it was ok.

And people laughed. They laughed at his jokes, this gang. They lifted their heads from the photocopy jobs, from the cartoon images of Engels winking cheekily at Marx, and they smiled, one by one, a flood of watery association.

It was in university he had come upon them, a chance flyer sitting on his tutorial table, and he had nothing better to do, no one to see, so he went to them. They were all long-hair, all dank cheeks, all swing low boys and girls, with their feet up up up on the table and big thoughts on their shoulders. They understood things that he didn’t know this kind of people understood, they networked with the small town campus politicians and sometimes they spat about them later. They read old paperbacks and hated coca cola, but they had liked him, had shook his hand like a businessman and not an undergraduate, lent him flannelette shirts and reworked soviet dreams.

He felt uneasy from the moment that he brought it up. He pushed it outward with a tentative tip, tapped it just beyond his bottom teeth, until it flowed out quickly and naturally, like the contents of a jerry can, setting all the catechisms alight. It was something to do with economic management, something he had heard his father say, something other men said over the newspaper, with a coffee in hand and a deep authority; something he had wondered but never understood. It came out in questions, angrily, in warped confusions of text and integrity, in a quick and awkward flurry. And suddenly the doors were shut, if not proverbially, then quite literally and he wondered, his organs curdled, why he had ever even spoken at all.