Molly, companion in Hackney

About Molly

Mare Street does not try to charm anyone, and Molly has the same approach. Curvy, 164 cm, dark brown hair long and waving properly once the weather gets to it, brown eyes that crease before she has finished laughing. She dresses comfortably and deliberately: a dress with sleeves, a coat that has seen a winter or two, boots that have been resoled once and will be again.

Mid twenties, English spoken fluently and at a conversational gallop. Molly is the sort of company who has you talking about your family by the second drink without quite knowing how it happened. She sings badly and often, knows the market traders on Chatsworth Road by name, and has a low opinion of anyone who calls Hackney up and coming, which she considers a phrase invented by people who do not live here.

Mare Street Market is the easy answer for an evening: an old building with a bar at one end, a proper dining room at the other and enough noise to make a table feel private. Ten minutes from there and you are on the canal or in the park. She lives up in Soho and describes the journey without any romance at all, twenty five minutes by road at nine, and worth it for an evening she actually wants.

Hackney is two minutes from Hackney Central and six from Hackney Downs, so the trains back into Liverpool Street run late and often. Costs are set out on rates. Message booking with the evening you want; the answer usually comes the same day.

Booking her

Give Nell the address and the hour and she will confirm in writing, with a real arrival time rather than a window. Molly takes same evening bookings when she has the room, so it is always worth asking.

Every figure she works to is public on the board, and the steps sit on the booking page.

An evening with Molly

The best evenings with her are the least organised. One drink at the bar end of the old building, a table when one frees up, and an hour of conversation before anybody thinks to open a menu. She is genuinely interested in people, which is rarer than you would hope, and she always asks the follow up as well as the opener.

Afterwards she likes the walk: down Mare Street with the buses going past, left towards the canal, and along to the bridge where the houseboats are tied up and somebody is always awake. She keeps hold of your arm on the towpath and claims it is the cobbles. Back at the flat she puts music on quietly and makes tea nobody asked for, and the last hour goes faster than any of the others.