When Paul Harvey - sensitive, isolated and desperate to fit in at school - is invited to join the most popular pupil's gang, he will do whatever is required to please the ringleader Andre du Toit. Now a man in his sixties and living abroad, Paul is drawn back to Pretoria to revisit his boyhood home. It has taken him most of his life to grasp and make sense of his past: the other boys, the masters, his own and du Toit's parents, who so puzzlingly populated and controlled his world.