The Half-Child (16 page)

I should be so lucky
, Jayne thought.

Frank Harding had a nerve, counselling her not to work late. Jayne couldn't get out of there fast enough. Fuck the penguins. Fuck the warthogs. And fuck the fondue. The minute she got cleaned up, she was heading out for a beer, a smoke and a game of pool—preferably all at the same time.

19

C
haowalit watched the nurse fasten the strings of the baby's top.

‘It's a boy, right?' he asked.

‘Does it matter?' she snapped.

Chaowalit kept his expression neutral. ‘It might. What if I bump into someone who recognises the baby? I'll need to be able to explain that I'm taking
him
or
her
to see a doctor on behalf of my employer—which is true, in a manner of speaking.'

She grunted, reluctant to concede the point. ‘Yes, he's a boy, okay?'

‘Okay.'

She swaddled the baby in a white muslin cloth and checked under his eyelids before handing him over. The baby had been drugged and didn't stir as Chaowalit placed him inside a striped
phakhama
sling across his chest. He checked his reflection in the mirror on the back of the nursery door.

He'd swapped his navy security guard's uniform for a pale yellow polo shirt, green slacks and black plastic sandals.

To anyone passing in the street, he looked like an honest worker—a tailor, perhaps—making his way home at the end of a long day, carrying his baby son. The casual clothes softened the harder lines of his face, making the furrow on his brow seem less intense, the lines around his mouth less pronounced. Experience had prematurely aged Chaowalit, but in the guise of a parent, he looked younger.

He straightened his shoulders and with a nod from the nurse, set out for the orphanage wing. He took a long detour, making the most of what it felt like, albeit briefly, to be
tamada
, to blend in with the crowd.

He sauntered along a
soi
transformed at night into a strip of makeshift cafés. Small blue plastic stools clustered around low tables against the outer wall of an office block.

Vendors with cooking carts dished out local specialties: rice noodles with fish balls and
tom yam po taek
, ‘broken fish trap soup'. The smells of fish, galangal, lemongrass and basil made Chaowalit's stomach rumble beneath the weight of the baby. With no time for a meal, he satisfied his hunger with a spicy sausage on a stick, before continuing on his way.

A car whizzed past, sounding its horn to clear the way.

Chaowalit felt the baby stir. He pulled back the edge of the sling to check on him. A fleeting observer could have mistaken the gesture for affection, but Chaowalit was concerned only that the sedative didn't wear off.

The baby stayed asleep. Chaowalit resumed his walk.

He wished they could meet in twenty years' time. He'd like to call in the debt this baby owed him for the service he'd performed. But by then this baby would be a farang, wouldn't even speak Thai.

Son of a whore
.

It was one of the worst insults that could be thrown at a person. How much worse, then, when the insult were true?

‘You can't escape it, you little bastard,' he whispered to the baby whose name he didn't know. ‘You can try to hide, but shame sticks like shit. They'll smell it on you wherever you go, even inside the temple. Not that you'd wanna live the life of a monk, eh? Fuck that for a joke.'

He leered at the sleeping baby, imagined him taking it all in, hanging on every word.

‘There's only one way out, little brother,' he said. ‘You gotta leave behind everything you have—your name, your family, your friends—and start again. You gotta find a place where you have no past, only a future. You gotta seize whatever opportunities come your way with both hands because no one else is going to help you. It's every man for himself.'

Chaowalit knew what he was talking about. His father was a nameless john who fucked his mother for money. His mother was dead to him long before the disease that killed her. He'd lived among aunts and cousins in his maternal grandmother's home where he was treated as an unpaid servant, until the day he decided they could all go to hell.

Chaowalit looked up at the billboards over the intersection. A pale man with Chinese features punched the air with his mobile phone. A woman with white skin, Asian eyes, a European nose and ringlets in her hair seemed ecstatic about the tea she was drinking. It was fashionable now to be
look kreung
, a mix of Asian and farang, provided the mix resulted in whiter skin. But Chaowalit's was the wrong mix. His features were big and blunt, not small and refined. His hair was the wrong tint, neither glossy black nor chestnut. More like rat-brown. And his skin was scarred and black as an Isarn farmer, making him a second-class citizen in the eyes of many Thai people.

Without Chaowalit to help him, the baby in his arms would have been destined to suffer the same ignominy.

‘You may never know it,' he whispered to the sleeping boy, ‘but I'm the best friend you'll ever have.'

20

A
s 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.