Yusuf is twenty six and everybody he went to university with appears to be buying a house.

When it lands, the sentence in his head is always the same shape. Everyone else worked it out and I did not.

He tries arguing with it. He lists the reasons the comparison is unfair, the different salaries, the parents who helped with deposits. It holds for about four minutes and then somebody else posts something.

What he tries instead is one sentence, and it is not an argument. He says, out loud, that a great many people his age are exactly where he is, and that if his younger brother had said that sentence to him he would not have replied with a word of what he had just said to himself.

The flat feeling does not vanish. The layer on top of it goes, and that layer was most of what he had been carrying around.