As a student at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education, Jayne spent a month’s teaching placement in a boys’ prison, euphemistically called a Youth Training Centre. Classes were voluntary, few boys attended and those who did objected to lessons, agreeing only to play games or use the computers. Jayne spent most of her time, as the inmates did, trying to find ways of overcoming boredom. To this end, she took the boys up on their offer to teach her to play pool, unaware of an unwritten and uniquely Australian rule that a player who fails to sink a single ball is required to ‘drop their dacks’ and run a lap around the table. Only when she was one shot away from losing did the boys enlighten her, the beefier ones moving to block the exit in case she thought they were joking. The frisson of risk lifted her game and while she didn’t win, she kept her pants on.
The game proved addictive and over the years she’d honed her skills. She could hold her own against off-duty bar girls at the Woodstock Bar in Bangkok’s seedy Nana Plaza and even won on occasion, at her best when she’d drunk just enough alcohol to boost her confidence without diminishing her skills. If she drank too much, which she usually did, her bravado would increase and her skills decrease at the same rate. If she was ever forced to teach maths again, she could use this phenomenon to demonstrate an inverse mathematical relationship, it was that precise.
Jayne decided on the open-sided beachfront bars of Central Pattaya as the place she was mostly likely to get a game of pool without going deaf. She walked along the footpath sussing out the options, when a howling electric guitar called to her from amidst the pedestrian slow rock and R&B. Jimi Hendrix. He beckoned from a bar called B-52, a bamboo shack draped in camouflage webbing with upside-down helicopters painted on the ceiling, chopper blades formed by the ceiling fans. The walls were decorated with American flags and movie posters. Good Morning Vietnam . Platoon.Born on the Fourth of July. Full Metal Jacket. A third of the floor space was taken up by an L-shaped bar, bamboo-panelled to match the walls, the short side fronting on to the street, the other lined with barstools with a sea view. The remaining space housed a few tables and chairs clustered around a pool table. The men behind the bar wore camouflage pants and tight black T-shirts, the female staff high-cut khaki shorts and black bikini tops with dog tags around their necks, homage to a war that was over before any of them were born. A chalked-up list offered the eponymous B-52 cocktail and others called ‘Tet Offensive’, ‘Napalm’ and ‘Agent Orange’.
It was tacky and tasteless and about as far from the New Life Children’s Centre as Jayne could imagine. She took a seat at one of the tables where a Heineken Bier ashtray and a Tiger Beer coaster competed for her custom. When a waitress appeared she thumbed her nose at both and order a Singha. She sipped it slowly and sussed out the competition.
Four men whose crew cuts and banter gave them away as US Marines were playing pool. Two black guys sat at one table, a white guy at another, his redheaded companion leaning over the pool table to take a shot. Jayne picked up that they’d recently spent six months in Da Nang searching for the remains of Americans still listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War.
They were finishing their fourth game and Jayne her third beer, when she stepped forward and placed a ten baht coin on the table. This was enough to make the redhead miscue and sink the black.
A waitress stepped forward, pocketed the coin and racked up the balls. Jayne dusted her hands with talc, selected a cue and chalked the tip.
‘Which one of you is going to sit out?’ she asked the winners.
They frowned at her unexpected accent and she had to repeat herself before the taller of the two raised his hand.
As Jayne leaned forward to break, both men moved into her peripheral vision either side of the table, a ploy designed to put her off.
‘Game on,’ she murmured to herself, as she smashed the cue ball into the triangular configuration and listened for the plop of a ball falling into a pocket. She heard it twice. A quick count told her she’d sunk one of each.
Jayne surveyed what remained and chose her target, sinking one small ball and then another. She misjudged the next shot but the white ball bounced off the side cushion on to another of her balls and sent it on a trajectory towards the corner. Her opponent gasped when it dropped into the pocket. Jayne feigned nonchalance. Although she missed the next shot, her opponent never recovered his composure and she won the game.
Her next challenger was one of the white guys, who brushed past her with a ‘’Scuse me, m’am’ to take his first shot, which also proved to be his last.
The Goddess of Pool was indeed smiling on her.
The tall black marine was the next to take her on.
‘Mitch here ain’t as good as me, m’am,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘I’m Tommy.’
He shook her hand. His high forehead and prominent cheekbones framed wide innocent eyes, but the dimples either side of his generous lips hinted at mischief. He was—to use the Australian idiom—built like a brick shit-house. His biceps, triceps and other muscle groups Jayne couldn’t name strained at the sleeves of his white T-shirt.
He looked like he could snap his cue in two and use it as a toothpick.
‘That ain’t true and you know it,’ said Mitch.
‘How many balls did you make in that last game, man?
Four? Well, you jus’ keep an eye on Tommy, here. You’all might learn a thing or two.’
Tommy flashed a dazzling smile at Jayne as she leaned down to take her break. His skill wasn’t on par with his cockiness; she won even more convincingly than she had against Mitch.
The other two Marines spoke only to tell her their names, Jerry and Earl, and to challenge her again. She defeated each in turn, at which point they both threw money on their table and left. Mitch and Tommy stayed, challenging Jayne to more games, raising the stakes by playing for drinks.
‘What’s happenin’ man?’ Mitch protested as they both took her on at the same time. ‘I gave you that ball and you didn’ make it?’
‘Jayne’s just too damn good, man,’ Tommy countered, winking at her, ‘that’s how come we’s in this predicament.’
Even having a handsome man flirt with her was not enough to break Jayne’s concentration. She took a deep breath and won with the following shot. Smiling, Tommy shook his head and insisted on buying her a cocktail.
‘Jeez, don’t you’all wish Leroy was here to see this,’ Mitch chuckled, ‘the two of us gettin’ our asses whipped by a ch—’ he looked sheepishly at Jayne, ‘by a lady.’
‘Leroy’s my cousin, m’am,’ Tommy added, ‘and he reckons that ladies can’t play pool.’
‘Well, tell him to come on down,’ Jayne said. ‘I’ll set him straight.’
‘Was a time you’d have found him here with us, m’am,’ Tommy said. ‘Only him and his wife, they just got themselves a baby. Leroy’s a proud daddy now. Ain’t nothin’ gonna tear him away from his family.’
‘What do you mean, got a baby?’
‘Well, m’am—I mean Jayne—Leroy’s wife, Alicia, she couldn’t have no kids. So they come to Thailand to adopt.
Two nights ago they sent word they was on their way to meet their little boy here in Pattaya. It’s jus’ luck we was here at the same time.’
‘So you went along to the ceremony?’
Tommy picked up his camera and waved it in the air.
‘I was the official photographer. We was there jus’ before we came here. They gotta wait a few days in Bangkok for the kid’s passport, and then they’s headin’ back to North Carolina.’
‘In my mind I’m goin’ to Carolina,’ Mitch started to sing. ‘Who was it sung that song?’
‘So they’ve adopted a Thai baby?’ Jayne said to Tommy.
‘Well, looks like his daddy was one of us, know what I’m sayin’?’
Jayne thought of Kob and the other look kreung at the New Life Children’s Centre and nodded.
‘John Denver?’ said Mitch, still humming the song.
‘Don McLean,’ said Tommy.
‘I think you’ll find it was James Taylor,’ Jayne said.
‘Hey, I ain’t gonna argue,’ Tommy held up his hands.
‘You the one on the winnin’ streak.’
A waitress set three drinks on their table, bright pink liquid in tall glasses with fruit skewered to the swizzle stick, cocktail umbrellas and coloured straws. Jayne picked up a glass, sniffed and sipped. It tasted like Red Bull, the sugary, caffeinated drink long-haul truck drivers used to wash down their amphetamines.
‘What’s this?’
‘Ah…’ Tommy scanned the drinks menu on their table.
‘That’d be a Wartime Romance.’
He grinned and actually licked his lips. Jayne gave him a withering look and set the glass back down.
‘So,’ she said, lighting a cigarette to get the taste of Wartime Romance out of her mouth. ‘Which one of you wants to get your ass whipped next?’
It was after midnight when she returned to the Bayview Hotel. She was tipsy and her mouth tasted like cough medicine. But it felt great to have had a night out. Her pool form had never been better. And it didn’t hurt being the target of some serious flirtation on Tommy’s part.
As she entered her room, she found a message slip just inside the door. ‘Rajiv called to you, 21.30’. She felt a twinge of guilt, shook it off. It wasn’t as if anything had happened between her and Tommy. For that matter, it wasn’t as if much had happened between her and Rajiv either.
She’d allowed Tommy to take her photo before they left the bar—‘a pin-up shot for my locker,’ he said—and accepted a kiss on the cheek. But she declined his invitation to meet at the same time and place the following evening.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m otherwise engaged.’
‘Aw man, did you hear that?’ Tommy said to Mitch. ‘She’s engaged!’
Jayne smiled at the memory, raised her hand to the cheek Tommy had kissed.