Sing Like You Know the Words by martin sowery

the lower
classes as about the legal profession and her place in it. She’d
told herself she was prepared for the routine frustration and
humiliation of being a pupil working her way up. She’d been told
what it would be like, but the daily reality was not so much the
crushing embarrassments that were painful enough when they arrived,
as the deadly dullness of it. And she didn’t want to become bitter.
She was conscious that the experience of being an outsider,
struggling for a foothold in a strange world, was leaving
scars.
    Friends noticed something hard
developing in her character. She became prone to sarcasm. It would
have been easy to conclude that the cause was related to the
contrast between hers and David’s experiences. Her brilliant
academic career had led to humiliation and begging for work, while
David, who’d never studied seriously, seemed to rise without
visible effort. If there was any tinge of jealousy to her
frustration, she would never allow David to see it. Other people
close to her, Matthew for example, caught occasional glimpses of
suppressed rage that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her calm
exterior.
    None of them saw much of Tim in
those days. The army had sponsored his studies and now, as he said,
he had to repay his debt to society. He thought that he would spend
another year with the army of the Rhine, perfecting his German with
as many girls as would speak to him and researching local brews. He
came back on leave from time to time and didn’t seem much changed.
Apart from the short hair there was nothing military about him
without a uniform: just the same skinny imp with dark eyes and a
malicious sense of humour. It was the rest of them who were
changing.
    Matthew was still ever present
in their lives. Like David and Patricia, he had stayed in the city
after college. More accurately he’d never left. His family lived on
the poorer south side of town, so going to university had only
moved him a few miles north of home. He seemed less a leaf in the
stream than a leaf in a flat becalmed pond. Matthew himself said
that anything that happened to him resulted less from his conscious
decisions as from his constant indecision.
    An unspectacular version of good
fortune attended Matthew even when character failed him. When it
had come to choosing colleges, he’d not wanted to stray far from
home, preferring to be near to his mother. That had led to a
problem about his grant, but somehow Mrs James had settled that
with the education authority on his behalf. His father was long
gone; dead so far as Mrs James was concerned, so an exception was
made. He seemed reasonably intelligent and he applied himself
moderately. At the end of three years he was duly certified
Bachelor of Arts, but that left him with very little idea of what
he might do next.
    For a while, Matthew drifted,
until someone from the faculty who remembered his name put him
forward for a work experience vacancy with the local newspaper. It
was an unusual kindness, but Matthew seemed to provoke a general
goodwill in others without inspiring anything so positive as
friendship. He put it down to the general air of haplessness that
he supposed attached to his person, making others feel sorry for
him.
    The idea was that he would spend
a few weeks at the paper finding out whether he might be interested
in going on to journalism school, but when his placement expired,
it happened that the paper found itself short of a junior writer,
so instead of returning to school, he stayed on as junior
reporter.
    It wasn’t much but it was a real
job. So long as he was careful to avoid being noticed enough to be
singled out for promotion or dismissal, he might keep at it for
years without his inner life being too much disturbed. It was
enough that he had to contend with a vague competitiveness that he
didn’t understand and preferred to deny, without the outside world
getting in the way of his wish to lead a quiet life.
    When it was known that he would
be