When I needed to rest, I made my way not home but to the grand State Library of New South Wales, an imposing cream-colored pile on Macquarie Street. There were books, and a spare, elegant café, and other readers. I began to make my way through Tolstoy; I found his multitudinousness a good antidote to the emptiness of my new life. There was a sweetness and a purpose to my solitude in the library. Late in the afternoon I had to exit the cool gray dim into the hot afternoon and make my way back to Redfern. If I didn’t get home before six o’clock or so, I would have to take a cab that I could ill afford—I couldn’t walk around my neighborhood after dark.