Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer Read Free

collect the excrement would suddenly disappear from
underneath your ass.
    "Fuck. Where's
the tray?"
    Then some Chinese
guy would slide a clean tray in and dispose of your shit manually.
    There were cars but
we had none for ourselves. We had electricity but no tap water in our
home until 1975. When I was a young boy, my mother would travel five
kilometers just to fetch clean water to drink. Fortunately, we owned
a water well with a pulley just outside the house that we used for
bathing and all other purposes.
    As a young boy I
attended the Teck Whye Primary school, which was within walking
distance from my home. During school holidays, my mother would
sometimes call me and say: "Wilson, why don't you go sell some
coconuts?"
    We owned a small
garden with jackfruit - a large fruit with smooth thorns that you can
cut in half and sell - rambutan, durian, coconut trees, plantains and
other fruits. We also had curry trees and a long vegetable that goes
by the Tamil name of 'murungai'. Indian women cook murungai because
it's very good for erections. My mother would hire a guy specialized
in climbing coconut trees and he would collect the coconuts for us.
Then my brothers and I would spend the afternoons peeling them and I
would go out into the neighborhood to sell the peeled coconuts and
other fruits to my mother's friends for small amounts of money.
School holidays were also the chance for me to look for small jobs in
the industrial area near my home; I would use the extra money to buy
school books or a new school uniform.
    There was a lot of
mud and a lot of water everywhere in Chua Chu Kang. Floods were very
frequent, especially during the rainy season. During flooding, people
would often die electrocuted by the short-circuiting wires from
fallen lamp-posts. When I was seven years old, there was a flood that
covered the entire neighborhood with a thick layer of mud. We kids
went out onto the streets to help people push-start their vehicles
and they paid us small change for the trouble.
    Just beside my house
was an old drainage basin that would overflow whenever there were
heavy rains. On such days, my mother would not allow us to go
outside, so I would sit in the kitchen with my legs stretched out
onto the ledge of the window and watch the objects that floated by in
the current. I observed the water's surface attentively, looking for
balls or anything else worth keeping. There was a tiny wooden bridge
that spanned across our property and over the drainage basin which people used as a short-cut to reach the other side
of our neighborhood. The bridge was quite narrow and extremely risky
to cross, especially when the drainage basin was overflowing. When I
was 12 or 13, I saw an umbrella float by in the current; a new
umbrella. It was turned upside down.
    "Fuck" I
thought as I made to get up from my seat. "That's a new
umbrella".
    Then I saw a head, a
girl's head, pop up and go down again among the foamy ripples. I
called my mother and together we ran outside and chased the umbrella
to see if we could find the girl and help her but the current was
just too strong. She must have slipped and fallen while crossing the
little bridge. On the following day, her lifeless body was found in
the Kranji Reservoir up north.
    The train tracks
next to my house were another fatal landmark. When I was a child, one
of my mother 's
friends committed suicide by standing on the tracks before an
oncoming train to escape the abuses of her violent husband. Young
couples that were denied the possibility to marry by their respective
families also took their lives on those deadly tracks, as did our
German Shepherd when I was 17 years old.
    In those years we
didn't have a television set so we went to our neighbor's home to
watch Tamil movies on TV. Father also liked to watch football
matches, as many of his friends were top football referees in
Singapore. One night, when I was about 11 years old, he woke me up in
my bed.
    "Come", he
said, "sit next to me. Let's