On a hot afternoon in farest North Queensland the rain poured down to settle the dust. Louie, the Local King, looked with disgust at the pair of ragged barefoot hippies who’d come in out of the rain, bought a couple of lemon squashes, and gone to put 40 cents into the pool table.

The male hippie was intending to play a game with his ripened little girlfriend whose thin dress was sticking to her wet protuberances.

“I’ve got the table!” said Louie, thinking he should have the girl as well.

So our hippie complied with the local rule of playing the previous winner, set the balls up, selected a stick and broke them.

Nothing down.

Louie potted two easy shots but went in-off on the third. He didn’t worry about it though. The game would be sewn up.

He watched with steadfast contempt as the hippie he considered a disgrace to mankind. The guy’s blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail and the arse was out of his pants. “Just another dole-bludging vego parasite up from Melbourne.” thought The King.

But the hippie, whose name was Mitchy, didn’t really care about Louie, he’d seen the same person a thousand times before in a thousand pubs and places across the country. His kind was one of the motivating forces behind Mitchy’s demonstartive denial of the macho mentality. He just wanted to win the game so that he could then play a game with Barbara. She was a wonderful girl. They hadn’t met until that morning but already they were getting along very well.

As Mitchy bent over the table he eyed the nine, then the side pocket, and then the cue ball. He carefully calculated the necessary force and precise angle of collision before sliding the cue across the bridge of his hand accordingly. The nine ball rolled to the pocket and fell in. More importantly, the cue ball had stopped in line with the eleven. An easy ball.

Mitchy chalked his cue and thought about meeting Barbara.

“If I hadn’t rolled out of bed ten minutes before I’d wanted to she would have wandered right on by.” Mitchy marvelled at the tenuous links between all lives and the essential accidentality of our modern world. “Unlike pre-modern human groupings”, he thought, “our beer and pop culture relies almost solely on the incessant search for sensation and security to drive it. The world is not a predictable place. The words of the elders are obsolete so the more that you are old, the more out of date you are.”

Mitchy hit the eleven too hard. It bounced back out of the pocket. So he went to stand over by the wall with Barbara and take a toke on his beer.

Louie potted three; the 1, the 2, and then the third. He was striding around the table like a slave-keeper. Inspecting the table as though he were buying a human. But on the fourth he missed an easy shot and stood back holding the cue beneath his bristling chin.

Mitchy had to be nudged to get his attention back onto the game. He was losing, but more than anything else he was bored, The rain had ceased so they could keep moving. What point was there to such childish competition? But, he’d started the game and so he was expected to finish it. Especially if Barbara did still wanted to play.

Down dropped the 14, the 15 and the 10. Mitchy watched the chains of cause and effect and recognized the cultural acceptance of the form of the game and its calculations for the strike the collisions and sinking or missing; and the generated consequences. He looked across at Barbara. What a girl! He was in love. All he wanted was to be alone with her.

By then Louie was getting worried, “No little fart of a hippie is going to make a fool out of me in me own pub and get away with it. That’s for sure!”

He felt relieved though when the little smart-arse missed his final ball and left Louie set up, but he was also aware of the attention the game had begun to attract from the cowboys along the bar previously engrossed in simply leering at Barbara. Louie stepped up, grabbed a jigger, and easily missed. He couldn’t believe it. His whole body was taut as he tried to keep his relaxed tone across the half-mile expanse back to his stool.

Mitchy wanted to finish it, win or lose, but nothing was on, so he lined up the 13 which was sitting against the cushion and tried to roll it all the way down into the corner. Louie saw the shot that Mitchy was going for and chuckled to himself, but as the cue ball struck cleanly and the 13 rolled gently toward the distant pocket Louie realised that he could still be beaten.

“If that little fuckin’ faggot freak pots the 8 I’m going to instantly hit him right between his beady bloodshot eyes with the end of this cue.” thought Louie. “Nobody, but nobody, makes a fool out of ME and gets away with it!”

Mitchy was thinking too, about all of the events which had brought him to this place, how any single different decision at any time in his life would have put him somewhere else so that he may have never met Barbara. Whatsmore, he was highly aware that every move, every effort and all of his decisions would affect their future. Mitchy walked around the table, he glanced across at his opponent who had an odd look on his face, he looked over to Barbara who was looking out of the window. He bent at the waist to look down his cue at the cue-ball and the eight-ball, and then at the pocket, “What am I doing here when I really should be finding a swimming hole or sandy beach to be alone with my girl?”