‘I assumed you were walking to the cab rank,’ she muttered.
I laughed. ‘Wait here, Molly. I’ll get you a ticket.’
‘You’d better keep me safe,’ she said, as she followed me through the turnstiles.
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ I remarked, ‘I have a black belt in karate.’
‘That actually does make me feel a bit better. No wonder you think Redfern is safe, you’re probably the most dangerous resident in the suburb!’
‘You might just be right about that.’ Her father would certainly have agreed with that statement.
She still had a death-grip on her handbag when we reached the platform and I burst out laughing. ‘Molly, you can see your place from here.’ I gently spun her round to the window behind her, from where she could see the Bennelong Apartments just a hundred metres away. She huffed and turned around to face me.
‘I’ve had a driver since I learned to walk. It feels weird to be here.’ But she released her grip on her bag. I could almost have had second thoughts about taking her to my part of Redfern if she felt that uncomfortable already, but I was far too busy giving myself a mental pat on the back for coming up with the idea. If she really wanted a ‘defining moment’, she was probably not going to find one if her entire existence revolved around Sydney’s city centre. I walked to a bench and sat down. Molly followed me, and sat gingerly on the edge of the seat. She was probably onto something there – the bench was filthy.
‘I’m going to take you somewhere completely out of your comfort zone and see how you like it,’ she muttered.
‘Do you think I felt at home in Circular?’
She pondered this a moment, then said, ‘Fair enough. So what’s at the other end of this adventure?’
‘Totally Thai,’ I told her. ‘It’s a restaurant near my place.’
‘Okay,’ she said, and then grinned. ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice that ticket you bought me is one way. Should I have packed an overnight bag?’
‘I doubt you’ll want to spend the night at my place – but I assumed you’d call your car rather than make the trek back on the train.’ I laughed.
‘Why wouldn’t I spend the night at your place?’
‘It’s a terrace. Please don’t misunderstand me – I love my house but it’s hardly the Bennelong Apartments,’ I said, a little stiffly.
Molly shrugged. ‘I just can’t wait to see where you live and meet this spoilt dog of yours.’
I wasn’t convinced. ‘Shall we play it by ear?’
‘Who says I want to sleep with you again anyway?’ she said pointedly. ‘Maybe I prefer bed partners who don’t wake me up at seven on a Saturday morning.’
I grinned at her ‘You weren’t complaining for very long.’ Her cheeky smile faded to one of reminiscence as her eyes darkened.
The train was approaching and Molly took my hand to pull herself up, then immediately released it. I wanted to link my fingers back through hers and hold on tight. I understood the need for discretion, and I would respect it, but it was immediately frustrating.
As the train pushed forward into the tunnels that would take us to Redfern, I watched Molly’s reflection in the glass of the window on the other side of the carriage. She was looking around the train, her wide eyes lingering on informational posters decorated with random pieces of chewing gum and graffiti.
‘Now isn’t this better than Circular?’ I quipped. She met my eyes in the reflection of the train window.
‘You have got to be kidding me.’
If I thought her eyes were wide on the train, they were positively saucer-like as we walked through Redfern towards the restaurant. She walked closer to me than she had as we walked together in the city, but stepped immediately out of the way whenever anyone walked past us from the opposite direction. It was a strangely submissive gesture, and I knew it gave away the discomfort she felt at her surroundings.
It wasn’t as if I’d taken her into a war zone. In reality, Redfern was a rapidly gentrifying suburb with a chequered and changing demographic. There were exceedingly trendy cafés filled with affluent locals in designer clothes – the kind of places Molly herself would have frequented had they been a few kilometres further north. However, as we neared the area closer to my terrace, we passed empty shops with heavily graffitied shutters and a burnt-out car, half-parked on a footpath and marked with police tape. There was a shopping trolley full of rotting rubbish right near the restaurant, with a discarded syringe resting on the ground beneath it. Molly stared at all of these things, but she walked in silence.
‘What are you thinking?’ I eventually asked her.
‘I’m feeling very uncomfortable,’ she said, and when I opened my mouth to reply, she cut me off with a pointed, ‘And not because I’m a snob. It’s because as I warned you, I am lazy and yet here you are, making me walk all over the world in search of this probably mythical restaurant.’