Orange juice saviour

‘Tell her I was caught for riding my motorbike without a helmet,’ urged Takraw Ball.

He was pleading with his friend, Sorn, to call his girlfriend and explain why he’d be home late again.

I met my takraw friends, Ball and Sorn, as I was leaving work. They were passing on their motorbike, and picked me up.

We decided to share a drink at our regular, a shaky roadside hovel just down the road.

Ball, however, was agitated. He had told his Lao girlfriend, Nan, that he would be home by midnight. And yet here we were, having just broken open a bottle of beer, with no apparent end to the evening in sight.

Sorn resisted his entreaties to call on Ball’s behalf, and Ball wasn’t willing to do it himself: 'I am scared of what she will say.’

Ball is 25, Nan just 22. ‘She still thinks like a child...she complains about the smallest thing, gets jealous and possessive easily. Yet I love her with all my heart,’ said Ball.

‘Why don’t you tell her the truth – that you met me as I was leaving work?’

'I can’t tell her that. When you called the other day, she asked about you. I told her we had just met. She reckons you are gay, and we are seeing each other on the sly,’ Ball told me.

I have never met Ball’s girlfriend Nan. How can she know so much about me, I thought?

Sorn chipped in.

‘You can’t tell her you were caught by police for riding without a helmet. She’ll worry, and won’t be able to sleep,’ he said.

I took out two bottles of orange juice from my bag, which I had intended to take home for Maiyuu.

‘Here...give her these. Say you bought them as a present. She’ll forgive you if she sees that you are still thinking about her,’ I suggested.

Ball, who looked grateful to have found a way out of his dilemma, took the juice.

Ball, I thought, looked as handsome as ever. I saw him most recently before the Songkran festival, which he spent with family in Lop Buri.

As he contemplated the fate which lay ahead of him – ‘she’ll criticise me, for sure’ – his face clouded over.

‘She has threatened to leave me if I do not cut down on my drinking,’ he said.

I have another drinker in my life already...a young man who happens to share the same nickname, in fact.

‘I stay out late every night with Sorn,’ he said. ‘Nan says she can’t take it any more, and is willing to walk out of my life.’

Ball lives with Nan at an apartment nearby. He sees his mother and father, who live 5min away, once a week.

Ball is an only child. His mother comes from Lop Buri, his father from Surin.

He is sensitive and passionate, but will have to cut down on his nighttime carousing habits if he wants a stable home life.

As I watched him pour himself one glass after another, knocking the beer back with barely a thought for what it was doing to his body, I was reminded of another Ball who lives not 15 minutes away.

While I am enjoying the company of my takraw friends, I do not want to enter their lives as an 'enabler'.

Ball asked me for a loan of B200, to help him with expenses through to the end of the month.

I put him off until today, when we are likely to meet again. If I help with his spending – he makes just B8,000 a month from his job at a medical equipment company – I have to be sure it is going on useful things, rather than beer, which will only succeed in driving him and his girlfriend further apart.