I hadn’t intended to tell her any other secrets about Declan, but there was a cynicism in her voice when she spoke about him and it stung me to realise that I’d put it there. Plus, I really wanted to show her that my ‘stupid male pride and ego’ could actually accept help when I needed it. And so I set down my fork and I looked at her as I told her a story about her brother that I’d never shared before.
‘We met in our first semester at uni and at the time my living situation wasn’t ideal. I was living with my mother and she was at a real low point. Anyway, eventually Dec came to visit me at home. I’m sure he’d never seen anything like where we were living – a public housing unit in one of those huge towers in Redfern. Back then those places were dangerous and uncomfortable. I’d seen your house so there was no way I wanted him to see where I lived but he kept asking and eventually I had him around…’ It was an uncomfortable memory. Mum had hit a real slump when my biological father finally left, and it had taken her a few years to find herself again. Meanwhile, I was trying to find my place at uni and working two part-time jobs to get some money behind me, and not at all sure if I was up to the task of juggling it all.
‘Did Dec give you money?’
‘Not directly,’ I said, and then I laughed. ‘I would have been mortified if he’d offered and that probably would have been the end of our friendship. But the Dean called me into her office late in that first semester, and she told me that I’d been “selected” for a scholarship. Within a few weeks I had enough income coming in that I could live independently while I finished my degree. It was an embarrassingly long time later that I realised my “scholarship” was personally funded by your brother. Although he always denied it – the Dean admitted it when I finally graduated.’ I picked up my fork again and pushed the food around the plate for a moment, then admitted, ‘I just don’t know if I could have finished uni without that money. And if I hadn’t… Well, there was this whole other world around me then that would have sucked me back in. I’d been in a lot of trouble in my early teens and the vultures were already circling. If I’d slipped back into that lifestyle, it would have changed everything. My life would look completely different now.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ Molly said as she frowned at me. ‘Twenty minutes ago you were telling me nonchalantly about getting shot in the pursuit of your career. Would you really have let money stop you?’
My immediate reaction was to rip that statement to pieces. I gave myself a firm mental lecture – trying to remember that Molly had grown up with a kind of privilege that was as blinding as poverty itself could be. And she’d had a very tough day. Her ignorance was not malicious, but it was still infuriating.
‘Money stops people from my background from doing all kinds of things, Molly. When I started uni, I was the first person from my family to do so. If I’d dropped out, the best case scenario for me would have been to find some shitty, menial job and stagnate there for fifty years. The worst-case scenario…’ I shrugged. ‘Well, my other friends weren’t exactly model citizens and our pastimes weren’t always legal. Even if I’d been arrested just once, I’d never have had the freedom to travel the way I do now. It was the dream of this job that kept me out of trouble – but the path from there to here wasn’t exactly well-worn. No one else I knew back then had a professional career – God, half the people I knew had never worked at all.’
‘But if you’re determined enough that you would literally put your life on the line to do this job, time and time again – and talented enough to build the career you’ve achieved – I just don’t understand why you think you would have let anything stop you,’ Molly said quietly.
‘The thing most people don’t understand about poverty is that it feels like an impossible wall holding you back from a different life. When you’re on the ground looking up at it, it seems insurmountable. When you learn how to build a ladder, you realise it’s just a wall. That’s what education was for me – it was the way out.’
‘Isn’t there something like income support payments? From the government?’ Molly’s gaze wavered, and she pressed those words out towards me hesitantly. I had embarrassed her. I hadn’t intended to, but now that I had, I wasn’t entirely sorry it had happened.
‘There are, but they are very small and studying is a very expensive past-time,’ I said carefully. ‘I couldn’t have sustained it without the scholarship.’
‘I guess there are good things I never knew about Declan, as well as bad things.’
‘Your brother taught me to look for the good in people. Yes, our friendship was difficult and weird at times but it was worth it. Declan was a good guy. If what I told you today makes you think otherwise, then I shouldn’t have told you.’