My mind keeps going back to the most ganglike gang I ever belonged to, when I was eight years old. There must have been five or six of us in the gang. After school we used to roam the quiet streets of Rosebank looking for things to do. Once we stood at the front gate of a beautiful double-storeyed residence and shouted and screamed and rattled the letterbox in the hope that someone would emerge – ideally some grown-up in a state of puzzled consternation – at which point we would run off, laughing. On another occasion we lobbed pebbles through the open window of someone’s house, scores of pebbles, perhaps hundreds – they must have made a terrible mess.

Why did we behave in this way? Committed by small boys, such acts are usually dismissed as ‘mischief’, as ‘getting up to mischief’. One is supposed to find acts of childish mischief tiresome yet loveable: not to find them loveable brands one as a sourpuss. Yet it was the ambition of those boys not to be recuperated as loveable. The so-called mischief we carried out was not mischievously intended. Our actions, silly and ineffectual as they were, were aimed at creating enemies or victims (in this case the two cannot be distinguished) whose outrage could then be ridiculed and who in the future could be subjected to further attacks. The raison d’être of the gang, I would suggest, is to have enemy-victims who can be attacked in the name of defending the gang. A gang without enemies is inconceivable.

J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015)