Wi

By Bill Reed

S
urely you all remember Wi, a name especially chosen to fit our attention spans? Him, the world-record kidnappee, nabbee, swipee, snatchee, hoisted so many times even he’s lost count? (How about those three times in five minutes effort? That takes real talent, that does.) I mean, if it wasn’t for our Wi how many of these yabbers, yarns, shaggy dogs and yank-your-chain whoppers could I trot out for you? Even getting across one’s not easy when it’s always against the wind from people laughing in your face. No, really, without our Wi, where would all the odd-balls be, drowning their sorrows by ingesting the food in Dominic’s Eatery, swallowing whole mouthfuls without a thought for their own safety? Would any plate get the Wi wipe and come out miraculously unscathed from what had just been laid upon it? Without Wi, how many screwballs could have hired him to do all they’ve always longed to do but didn’t have the nerve?
God knows, and the Talls say ‘God knows’ because, if you take it that God made him in His own image, then maybe you’ve stumbled across the one time God spoke too soon. Okay, setting that aside, coming to you is a cast of characters – and you’d cast too (and barf, and burp) if you had some of Dominic’s food inside you, let’s not kid ourselves. Not all of us have cast-iron guts and can absorb what could canonize you if you kept it down.
And our Wi can’t help being mostly White, either. Did he ever ask for the hoists he’s had to suffer, or complained about the lack of duty-of-care his kidnappers have shown him -- their kidnappee, after all? No. All he asked was a hideaway high above the stars so bright. At least he got that. And, though having to watchfully wait, at least he received the epiphs, too. With the epiphs, he could epiphicatedly dream, so I guess he had something going for him. Right?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Reed
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648764120

Book preview

Published by Reed Independent, Melbourne, Australia, [e-mail]

This is the Smashwords edition

Printed by IngramSpark, Ingram Content Group.

Available from most major book retail chains, as well as online retail outlets worldwide as:

hardback ISBN 9780648764106

paperback ISBN 9780648764113

ebook ISBN 978064876420

Copyright © Bill Reed 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

also by Bill Reed

about the author

Dedication

For my pious wife. She’s had to be.

Did I miss me?

Headstone

Made head nor tail of it, but thanks anyway

Headstone

I’ve seen enough

Blind man’s headstone

Chapter 1

Who could credit how saying aloud to you those two little words, ‘chapter one’, could conjure up our first Talls tale in this campfire’s now’s-time. Yet don’t you worry; it might start slowly but it quickens up as it comes down to us along the oral-lit smoke trails and recordedly goes:

... how mosquitoes prefer their feet in amphitheatres

Which means to say that, as well as he could with bandages over both feet and whole lorry-loads of mosquitoes loading up his head, the misbegotten youth called Tears Nimalsiri, the first of the White Wi’s kidnappers, jumped off that crusty two-stroke Yamaha yowling, it and him, about how the White horse’s bum had ploughed his ’92 Mazda MR7 into his Yamaha and, woodjahfrurkkme -- his French, not mine, good people -- look, smashed its hhrrrukkken tail light.

This Tears Nimalsiri had tears in his eyes. You could see them when occasionally the truckloads of mosquitoes parted as whenever he slapped himself in the face, which was often because he was always mad at himself. Not that he seemed to notice any mosquitoes on him at all, let alone tons of them departing in a huff because Tears kept punching away at himself with closed fists.

Now, let’s call the mates of this first swiper of the foreigner Sugath, Nishantha, Suresh, or call them by any other nonced-up names, but when Tears Nimalsiri had seen a Whitie behind the wheel of the Mazda, he saw, in one great intake of air of his mind’s eye, that he and his mates had found their meal ticket for the grinding boredom of that late Sunday morning in the log-jammed, stall-squeezed lane dirt tracky thing after Mass on this St Joseph’s Feast Day, where and when hundreds of churchies clugged and clogged on past as a glooping tide that cared not a stuff about rear-enders on tail lights or things -- or, if it came to that, any White guy about to get his throat cut in their pious midst. And that thought lasted as much as the usual Tears-Nimalsiri thoughts could last. It did, too, and that was at least something.

And so, Tears had slid off the pillion, an automatic sign to his mates Sugath, Nishantha and Suresh that the tail-light game was back afoot.

Immediately, in chorus, the four of them were shouting abuse and stabbing at the air with invisible shivs into the car cabin where the white guy Wi sat white-knuckled.

The Aussie called, yes, Wi knew he was in the stook. A surge of danger frizzled panic through him. He was alone in a sea of Lankanness, hemmed in on a back-track half-road of Wattala, whole petrol stations out of the city of Colombo, squeezed, him and the track, into one lane by the huge trappings of a local church Feast Day raising money from stalls along the sides of it’n’all.

And meanwhile to that, Tears was raging on (shockingly, and seeming-so-menacingly pounding his own face) and his Sugath, Nishantha, Suresh raging on by his side because he was raging on, and Wi rooted to the driver’s seat feeling very rooted, the flash flood of churchies eddying mindlessly about them, flowing on viscous only, the stall-holders shouting at the White klutz to move his machine off the road where they were doing business.

So much for a Sundee drive to shake the cobwebs out. Also, whatever happened to the Good Samaritan thing? No wonder there was falling church attendances back in Australia. In any case, as it happened and between moans about his diminishing fate line, Wi was also seeing some middle-aged good-hearted churchie starting to intervene as though he (the churchie, not the Wi, God forbid!) was Moses himself, hands raised against the tide of Tears Nimalsiri’s malevolence, alone in the flood, going:

‘No-no-no, no accident, no hit nowhere!’

just because he had seen how Wi had stopped a good metre away from the tail light. How the sense of justice overwhelms the sense of survival in some, one, like Wi, had to think! It was as if the fellow had been listening to the priest back at the Mass!

But yet, it wasn’t that the mosquitoes could be forgotten.

The trouble was that Tears was also listening to this Good Samaritan come-lately and what the misbegotten youth heard didn’t improve the het-up of the mosquito swarms around his head. He chucked a nod towards the pious fellow, unleashing his mates Sugath, Nishantha and Suresh onto the poor man before he could hold the, or his, waters back much at all. They dragged the poor chap into adjacent bare land and proceeded to do over his piety with pretty expert kicks to the groin against a backdrop of a cement-block wall there which, at the chap’s back, wasn’t holding up much church dignity either.

Normally -- and this-come goodly Samaritan obviously being an aged pensioner -- they would have ripped off his glasses to sell later and poked one eye so he couldn’t get new ones until it, the eye, re-opened for testing. A concession to the elderly. But even louts knew that that day was a Feast Day and demanded greater dues, so they took his wallet and his glasses and poked both eyes into longer days of temporary blindness just to do the dirty of Feast Days.

None of which encouraged the White Wi to get out of his Mazda despite the pounding it and his ears were getting. Yet for all, it was still the Day of St. Anthony the Great and if any miracle was going to come along now would have been a good time for it not to wait on any formal invitation.

Supposedly, if the good congregation of St Joseph’s was going in to Mass, the blockage might well have been welcomed as an unavoidable delay and as help forthcoming. As it was, the Mazda and the Yamaha and the people thereof comprised a splinter in the mad rush to get away from a whole hour-and-a-half of High Mass, a lot of it hard on the knees. Still, miracles being miracles, almost at once -- and perhaps the assault on the old man was a goodly trigger -- even those stall-keepers there were sharing out pieces of wood to take to Tears Nimalsiri and his three to task, like go make foreigners cough up but don’t do gorbies on temple transactions.

Even Tears Nimalsiri could see that the critical mass had formed.

He and his three hit the Yamaha as hard as it had ever been hit outside of the panel-beater and they took off as if their tail light was between their legs and not allegedly smashed to pieces and demanding money restitution from its injuries.

And on the surface of things, there was no more fuss to it. The tide of the churchies regathered unto itself again, flowed past the White Wi’s driver’s window.

Blessed it was and blessings he wanted to give them by way of grovelling thanks. He should get out and give to the poor box or something with one of those dark, unforgiving slots in the top of it. Blessedly, there was so much crush he imagined he couldn’t get his door open in order to get out and give to the poor box or anything like it. Miraculously, too, there was a break in the tide in which he could move on through before the temptation of giving willy-nilly became too great.

And so did the White Wi drive on, care infinitive, and as he passed St Joseph’s gate he thanked the now-as-then time’s current Good God for his rescue, while at the same time giving Him the flick for being so inconsiderate as to have a Feast Day on the day he was tootling past just minding his own business and just out on a Sunday drive.

… With that flick perhaps not the best hand-gesture thing to do, omen-wise. For, the Wi was no sooner around the next twist of the road when some other sort of intervention flooded the engine.

He was stalled not only on the coastal dirt path on the wrong side of St Joseph’s rear wall, but also smack in the middle of an all-leering smart-alec Tears Nimalsiri, Sugath, Nishantha and Suresh left, right, front’n’back, and no abuse of the ignition key was going to get the White out of it this time. And there, among their ambush alone-at-last, was the re-aggrieved tail light suddenly re-smashed, lying in the dust of that track in handy pieces again. And a graveolent aspect about them all there was too. And not even a straggler of a churchie anywhere to be seen, let alone a Good Samaritan with or without specks. If there ever was an ‘alone-at-last’, this was it, given that it was pretty obvious to the Wi that there was going to be no miracle coming on, even one leaving church late.

And there, Tears Nimalsiri was holding aloft a red shard of that poor tail light and growling through his mosquitoes at Wi, going the same pretty much in any language you’d like:

‘My tail light, dog!’

giving himself a vicious uppercut presumably metaphorically aimed at Wi even if it landed on his own cheekbone, and surely knocking out a number of mosquitoes slow on the duck, then following it up with a left-handed slap to his own cheek as though he wasn’t confused about where the blow should have landed, even if everybody else was.

It was all very grim. Not speaking the local parlance, the White Wi didn’t understand, but, boy, didn’t he ever understand! Even if he hadn’t, the scrawny young thug’s betel-thrupped teeth were enough of a sighter. There was nothing for it but to get out and face the naked world. Shaking he was, oh yes! When he finally did so, Tears hardly even needed to kick the Wi knees in from behind; they were so-already hurtling to earth anyway.

From there, from his knees on sharp little pebbles which alone would have made him give up all by the torture within it, Wi had his wallet taken -- which is to say they discovered the shredded plastic card holder that passed for his Wi way of wallet, so forlorn-looking that even the lesser of the Tears Nimalsiri gang knew that any money in there by once-upon-a-time would have pretty much gone out of currency. There was a bit of plastic that certainly looked creditable, though, which was why they took it as his wallet and, yes, took it. They were right about it being his wallet, but not that they might find something in secret pocket of it later.

Nonetheless, this useless bit of plastic had on it, appropriately, the words Commonwealth Bank of Australia still legible enough, if barely. Tears’s eyes gleamed as he right-crossed himself across his left cheek by a neat reverse haymaker; he had the unerring instinct that this bank had to be foreign and so had to be worth a fortune... as it always is with richshit foreigners down on innocent Yamaha tail-lights, as in you whistle and I’ll point.

Now, apparently, there is one thing about a piece of plastic from a wallet accordingly to tales like this one is: if you pilfer it, you do a scarper with it, no two ways about it. But if you lift it by careful extraction and intend to make use of it, you take the man with it.

This explains why Tears Nimalsiri and his mates took the man as well, including the Mazda. And, before Wi knew it, or almost, he was back in the Mazda with the ones called Sugath, Nishantha and Suresh, one of which started the old bomb up effortlessly with one turn of the ignition, after it had just broken down in the middle of this disaster area. Going to show if you’re a stranger in a strange land, when you need an escape, there’s never a spark.

Up ahead was Tears’s Yamaha in full procession of the very first kidnapping of Wi. How notable was that! Upon it… the Yamaha and not the notable part… and proudly, the re-clustering mozzies made a dark storm cloud over Tears Nimalsiri’s head. They combined to make a merry wave to the envisaged throngs of Mass-stung red-blooded humans lining the way as they went and offering up, freely, gallons of the stuff for when they got rid of this white guy and could buzz on back, as in patience, you humans you; all bleed into the proboscis soon enough.

----------------

And so, as this Talls retelling soon has it, they had the White in the toilet of some patchwork of a house-hovel among more mold than even mulch which came from the mango tree up above the broken roof sheets.

It was so slimey in there that his White rear end kept slipping on the wet’n’oily concrete floor as rutty as it was, with some mud-lurkened lumps of some organic unthinkable beneath him bunching up enough to stop his head from slagging down the wall and claiming the unforgiving floor for its pillow. The roaches were making audible munching party sounds that could be heard over the mosquitoes making audible munching party sounds, so Wi kept himself mentally aside from it all by not thinking about what the organic unthinkable beneath him could be.

There was one stage in the night when the plank door was opened to let in a little shaft of light which shed maybe more than any horror movie would have it.

Through the resulting horror mozzie swarm, it proved to be Tears Nimalsiri himself looking very darkly but somehow reasonably content to find Wi still there, so that, if push came to shove, he still had something contemptuous to vent his spleen upon. And smell. Oh, you can talk about smell, but in that confined place, Tears wafted the why-for of his nickname, before indulging himself in a torrent of abuse at the White dumbcluck, so foulmouthedly that only someone like Wi, still without the local lingo, could have any doubts about its murderous intent.

In fact, Tears’s abusive outpouring even worried the ‘skitter herd of blood-suckers around his head. They whined very much about it. They did! And that in turn obviously worried Tears Nimalsiri himself because he landed a right short-arm jab right onto his own left ear hole, trapping by ears-ringing many of the said blood-suckers right in there for a start.

It was no good omen. After all, Wi had the same fearful reaction to the man as everybody had, but that didn’t help. In his darkly puce’n’pratted sarong and skin that looked as slimey as what Wi was sitting in, Tears’s ducktail looked as sharp as any spur claw. The youth threatened slice-by-slice, bit by bit, piece of you by piece of you and, if that wasn’t nightmarish enough with that backlighting there, he suddenly launched into another rage.

And as he ranted down at Wi, calling him unintelligibly in locally-sounding lingo to Wi thudding heart a dog, a shatmeat, a shyst-eater, a slug he was finding it so rootingly hard not to screw his blade into, Tears’s own whites of his eyes jolted there in the dimness like the lights of a truck flying dementedly over a bad bush track, and made more berserker by those cracking slaps he kept giving to his own face, his own ears, his own neck, as though he was at the punching bag.

Now, we are all anxious to suspend the Talls suspense while we hear about the mosquitoes and how they like their feet to be in amphitheatres... but I beg a little patience. After all, this going ten rounds with himself by Tears Nimalsiri was only part of it for, as eye-catching as it was, you see, Tears Nimalsiri’s launching himself at himself actually didn’t compare to the smell of him.

Despite the unofficial rumours going around some misguided yarn-going campfires, his nickname did not come from the tears he brought to his own walloped-up eyes. It wasn’t. That nickname mainly stemmed from the weeping he brought to the eyes of others by way of smell, and to accomplish this -- which he was mightily proud of, as young as he was -- were the highs of his feet at the bottom of it all.

It was more than idle tittle-tattle to say that Tears Nimalsiri’s feet were so moldy-cheesy that they were stand-outs in a land like Lanka where sandals allowed the utmost foot-wind interchanges, which in themselves were a normal item of local Met Bureau’s TV segments.

You could blame a lot in the country on the heat and humidity but, if feet didn’t come into it, you were generally up-wind of Tears Nimalsiri. By that is generally meant: you had nature’s way of all-round circulations of monsoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, stiff sea breezes, overhead fans as the first things you reached for, window rusted on the open position, but Tears Nimalsiri, still a teenager when all is said’n’done, had feet which should really only just be starting out on their journey but which, when come across, nostril-wise, could only be whiffed at as having unfinished rotting business after ages-sent.

It is commonly Talls retellingsly said, those feet were two of the few things Nature, with all its holes above and holes below and holes at the end of invaluable tunnels, couldn’t cope with. They were. And this, as the retellings are trying to get around to, badly affected those Tears’s adherent mosquitoes, poor things.

No, they did.

It was like this...

Tears Nimalsiri’s feet being the cheesiest, the blue vein-iest, the fester-iest, the gorgonzola of feet that had ever blown into town from the Himalayas... well, they simply brought all the South-Asian high-ender insect extras with them.

Often, often yes, it is conjectured that Tears Nimalsiri was the object, the sole reason, why the bug-laden winds did blow off the Himalayas to torment hundreds of millions of human beings.

Tears... you know, the flowing kind rather than rents...were right! Yet, as is often wont, and certainly wanting in this case, Tears Nimalsiri remained in blissful ignorance of his on-the-nose self -- and deliberately so, since he never trusted a person in his life, and wasn’t going to start when all they wanted was to try to insult him about his feet. Somebody’s always looking to have a go at you over something. Taking personal advice, you should always try not to take any notice, not on this you shouldn’t. Tears had the policy of just shrugging too -- and shivving. That could bring additional tears to your eyes.

Still, it begged the question as to why he still put bandages on both feet.

He claimed he was only doing so because those feet of his were his most sensitive part. He couldn’t stand them being touched, tickled, fiddled with. Most of all, how those hfrurkking (pardon, but it’s apparently still how the narrative thread must thread it) mosquitoes always wanted to hitch a ride on his feet drove him crazy and, of course, the bandages did the trick. It might come over as a bit cumbersome, looking as it did as though he had oldtimer gout, but he didn’t believe in running from any copper anyway, so those gouty bandaging really didn’t hinder him much. He was really much more of an impertinent saunterer anyway when it came to sloping off, and sauntering off gave time to practise the shivving, you see.

The mosquitoes of Lanka had no such problem with the reverse of the equation, which was, of course, identifying themselves with Tears’s feet. In fact, by the particular way each and every one of the little peskies became so jealous of being able to get at his balls-o-meat, you could trace their lineage from the great fromagère houses of France, Italy and England along favourable trade winds over the ages. These were known in certain circles as the Great Moldy-Cheese Mozzie Migrations, in themselves the subject of completely separate narrative threads that have had many a creature thralled while sitting around a campfire, somewhere, some place, with his or her or its feet up over the ages.

As far as the mosquitoes from around that part of the world called Wattala were concerned, though, Tears Nimalsiri stood on Stilton heaven. He walked on Roquefort Rocky Road, gave fragrance Gorgonzola Gorgeous. To we-r-mosquitos.net.lk, those feet were so blue-cheese wow-whiff-ful that there were booking arrangements a mosquito had to go through to get near those feet no matter how high up it was in skitter-land. And even then, only get-in-get-out noshing allowed, no sitting back engaging in postprandial deipnosophies with the bigshot snozzle parked next door.

The luckier ones higher up on the proboscis pecking order found paying muscular substitutes to stand in line for them to be a good answer to the problem. Scalpers that wouldn’t stop buzzing around were another. The more desperate blood-suckers gave up their daily shade-rests to get near Tears’s hot’n’sweaty delights and often, tis said, became so sleep-deprived and microbial-lethargic that Lanka had fallen to very low on the dengue-and-malaria scales internationally by Tears Nimalsiri alone. In other words, those mosquitoes had become, as mosquitoes, useless to man or beast.

Look closely and any hair below Tears Nimalsiri’s knees and above his shins comprised the hoi-polloi stalls on which the less fortunate skeeter could watch the lucky upper-crusters passing through the Danish-blue turnstiles below. Depending on the seat, at least they could sniff the breeze, savour the ordures that occasionally wafted. At any one time, there were so many mozzies around those cheesy clodhoppers of Tears Nimalsiri that it sounded like a performance of The Ring Cycle on the Rind.

As already question-posed down the Talls retellings centuries… did Tears Nimalsiri notice any of them down there or feel such nightly puncture carnage that those chosen-one mosquitoes ravenously inflicted on him? He did not. He was blithe to them poking their noses in in any language you might tell it by.

Besides, long ago and unbeknownst, his feet had hardened to the point that in we-r-mosquito.net.lk they were so overrun with ads for hiring out jackhammers as proboscis aids that they had to close all the windows and doors of the website and then use chemical impregnation against their own fellow blood-suckers using the net.

However, you should not be mistaken. All this did not stop Tears Nimalsiri from hating mozzies with even more a vengeance than he did his fellow man -- or, even, as it appeared with his self-biffing, his own self. He might have refused to entertain having a skeeter problem down below, but he never tried to pretend he didn’t know he had a mozzie problem, at least from the neck up. Indeed, had he been as insensitive to the blood thirsts around his feet as he did around his head, he might well have been a nicer human being.

One never knows, but with such a greater self-awareness might have come less hysterics, less being driven nuts day’n’night with the constant dive-bombing around his ears, the ever in-his-face, up-his-nose, your-lobe’s-my-lobby, screw-your-wits tampering with his brain, or any of that constantly trying to get blood out of his eyeballs.

But, as it was, up above the neck, all Tears Nimalsiri could do was to keep pounding away, with only had his self-inflicted facial injuries to give himself any sense of relief. It was like the Battle of Britain; one might get through but the torment it could cause was nothing compared to what he could do to himself trying to stop it.

The satisfaction he had, it is suggested, was never giving in.

---------------

And so, there we were’n’are at that first now-as-then night of Wi’s first kidnapping in the shaky old toilet there.

While in that slimey dark, the White couldn’t actually see the swarming thunder storm-as-if around the fearful young thug’s head, he could hear them, and hear them as African locusts on the move towards him.

It made Tears’s rage at him and the subsequent making a punching bag of himself all the more terrifying to the prone Wi in that Wattala shouse there. After all, every night isn’t the first Wi-night of one being snatched. Before something horror-movie like this happened, a person ought to reasonably expect a period of settling in first. That’s what our White Wi was thinking anyway, and if it was, you can take it for a fact of kidnapping lore.

But hindsight in its warped way doesn’t stop time backing up and riding itself home, does it?

Nothing hindsight could do could prevent Tears Nimalsiri suddenly looming as a raving lunatic in the doorway, then, just as suddenly, absolutely suddenly not be there. Lone mosquitoes, either left behind and confused or chancing their little legs on this other nightlife venue comprising a bit of the White stuff named Wi, bzzzidddled about, but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it… that without their Tears suddenly not being there they were kind of lost. Nor can we think the situation, with or without Tears Nimalsiri chain-saw-esque presence, was all devastating for the White Wi.

No and instead, he experienced a desperation that charged him up and, in that, he remembered what he had meant to say to Tears Nimalsiri, there or not there, as soon as he could see a way for a word in edgeways, going aloud to the gaps in the plank door beneath the edges of his poor kidnapped body:

‘I ain’t me, you know’

but it was all too late for Tears Nimalsiri, or anything appearing human, to hear. Already, with some earwigs tagging along, the roaches were returning to him before the mozzies got the best parts. In that they were not wrong; they hadn’t survived nearly a half a billion years, give or take a few months, by being elbowed aside from the trough, not a foreigner-laden trough like this Wi one, with more than a pinch of the old kidnapped spice thrown in.

----------------

This time, or as near as the very next day, there comes the tale of minor interruption to the funny-boner of Tears Nimalsiri and how mosquitoes like their amphitheatres. It comes in under the guise of another campfire headliner, going:

... the primless on the waist-less, and the dimmer ray of sunshine.

The ATM of the local Wattala bank they parked outside of wasn’t working. (It had pasted to it: ‘Please wait while we crunch the numbers. Await outpourings’)

Waiting in the Wi old Mazda for a quick getaway, Tears Nimalsiri was really going to town on himself facially out of the frustration of it. His mates, Sugath, Nishantha and Suresh, were more lip gnawers.

Inside the bank, shoved in from behind to look like he had come alone and of free-will, Wi had to confront a young lady who’d seen it all in her six long months of being in the banking sector. She was at her prime in a primless suit too small for her upper half which relieved the pressure at her midriff as an overflow of yeasty material which looked like it could still be rising.

From behind her customers’ service desk with Wi upright before it, she was spending too much time looking at her computer screen as though his name displayed on it was an absolute abuse of her integrity. She had a lovely tinge-grey skin that sounded less exquisite than it was and pearl-black eyes which could only have come from the flashiest of nacres. Her English too was as sharp as her tongue, and was about to be used on him as though he needn’t pick himself up off the floor when it struck him, thank you.

Obviously, what she was seeing on her monitor led her to an oh-so-superior looking-up and going:

‘Can I ask what are you doing here, sir?’

‘I’m being kidnapped’

Wi went, thinking it best to do it out of the corner of his mouth for dramatic effect since rescue now had to be at hand but not presumed in this foreign land, but only succeeding in getting her verbal black pearls going right through him as she went back mouthily, going:

‘Don’t be silly. You haven’t got any money to be kidnapped.’

‘They won’t believe me either!’

did he whine back at her, pointing to Tears and co out beyond the front doors.

‘Well, if they ever let you go, don’t come running in here asking me for a loan for the bus fare home’

as she went referring to the sum-remaining she had next to his name on her monitor. To add to her dignity, he was escorted out of that bank by a security guard holding an old Remington shotgun, the single barrel of which looked about as straight as the fellow’s handlebar moustache.

Wi didn’t know if that roughly-hewn escort counted as another highjacking in itself, but it felt like one and sure looked like one.

Outside, deposited, Wi found himself alone. He kept waiting on the footpath for his kidnappers to show a little duty-of-care kidnappers ought to have for their kidnappees.

But, there was no more Tears Nimalsiri or either of his Suresh, Nishantha or Sugath. No, there wasn’t. Or his old Mazda. Tears Nimalsiri had either been rushed off to hospital for self-inflicted wounds that had gotten the better of him or had taken the rust bucket and run, as in a supposedly better near nothing than nothing. In truth, Wi had a bit of sympathy with the latter course of action at least. If they dug deep enough they could well find a part or two worth breaking the Mazda up for. There was a door handle not broken, a blinker light replaced some time ago but still good. Mazda-y things like that.

Himself, he had nowhere to run, even though now there would have been no stopping him making a break for freedom, unless wandering up and down that footpath aimlessly constituted making a break of sorts. Besides, he didn’t 100 percent know whether Tears Nimalsiri wasn’t coming back.

What if he got caught red-handed in the middle of a break attempt, and that broke some fundamental law of how both parties to a kidnapping should act?

In that otherness world there, then, the White Wi actually felt lonely, unloved. Was it so hard to think that all parties to a kidnapping would follow the rules of civilised engagement?

He decided he would wait a half an hour before he got jack of it. In that time, he was hopeful of working out what he was feeling jack of. Apart from that terrible visitation in the night by Tears and his biting, buzzing army, kidnapping hadn’t proved too bad so far. Being urinated on and such could have been handled better if you wanted to nitpick, and then breakfast could have been improved past that nothing-at-all, but other than that hoping for something to eat had helped pass the time pleasantly enough.

--------------

As it happened, Wi’s second kidnapping began on that very spot outside that bung ATM, and not ten minutes later.

He was standing astride a black-water open drain, not feet away from the bank guard with the crooked shotgun who kept eyeing him suspiciously but apparently not very closely.

It began with a tap on the shoulder and being groped around the face and shoulders by a dim-looking man not much brighter in outlook and being asked as the fellow went:

‘Are you white?’

Wi gave the same response as he had to Tears Nimalsiri, going:

‘I ain’t me, you know. I’m definitely not worth it.’

‘No, are you the White. You feel right.’

did the dim-looking and dim looking fellow go, jerking a thumb going ‘walk’ above a nastily-naked screwdriver in the ribs from out of a loose villain’s shirt, sloppy but whogivesaroot, and of quite a nice whiteness really. Meaning the shirt, of course.

This new Lankan’s lack of height had him squinting up at Wi with the expression of an explorer peering into the distance, though, given the fellow’s extreme shortsightedness, it stretches the imagination a bit, I admit, for the retellings to mix the metaphor of a keen-eyed explorer with ‘distance’ for him. He wouldn’t have admitted he could only tell it was the White he had been sent to haul in due to Wi’s colour; all he could hope for was he had lit upon a man and not a woman in his fog.

Fortunately, statistics were on this new-comer’s side since even if he was wrong the light skinned Burghers only took up less than one percent of the population and one Whitie tourist would just about double Wattala’s tourist intake for the year. So this newcomer with the prodding thumb into Wi’s ribs would have to be dead unlucky to nail the wrong White or even something with a human’s outline not White.

Under his vanity of not wearing glasses, with the consequence of his desperation of squint being really only the way he could discern anything at all, Wi’s new kidnapper’s eyes, muddy waters, should have been widely glopped open. But they weren’t. They were as beady as his face was beady on a pointed chin and flattish crown. The sweat on his caramel skin made him appear runny rather than sweaty. His betel-ruddled mouth made, at least for the White Wi, whatever he was growling look hellish if resisted. All round, his sudden poking appearance came as a bit of a shock.

He was, appropriately, the thirteenth son of the head of the Wattala’s Phalarahu screwdriver gang and no more of a shock to Wi than he had been to his father for the last twenty-four years.

They had him nicknamed Dimmer.

Meanwhile, name of Dimmer or no name of Dimmer, the sheer panic of it-as-another-kidnapping happening again was making Wi go limp. All he had left in life to fork over was his ATM card and that hadn’t proved much of an attractive asset thus far. Still, he cried out in English totally not-understood by any within earshot, going:

‘Another ATM, try. I believe in fairies!’

yet found this not much help. Still, he did have the bit of plastic ripped off him after a number of wide-of-the-mark grabs from Dimmer that finally got there by falling less and less short, homing into the target, then felt himself shoved on once more, although held onto by the shirt in case the shove pushed him out of Dimmer’s sight.

Wi let the panicked limp of himself take over and he simply closed his eyes to walk blindly into his second swiping in two days. At least it was a breeze by comparison and at least, like him, it had started on the grope, where Wi next found himself in a room of blinding light that couldn’t have been too far away from the bank since he was at least sure that no transport had been provided to swipe him by and the bank had proved just a stroll away, if constant prodding in a sort of zigzag pattern by Dimmer could be said to have been a stroll.

He could fill in the blanks about the events leading to his first kidnapping, but he found it strange how he couldn’t muster up any curiosity about this, his second highjacking.

He remembered voices a little and had a smattering of the local tongue, but, anyway, they were speaking hard-ground slang in what couldn’t be imagined as elucidating the nicest things about him by the sounds of it.

He would never know that this Phalarahu gang had heard about what Tears Nimalsiri and his three had done to a White within their territory, but that was because he didn’t know Wattala. If he did, he would have known that nothing of any bootery nature got past the Phalarahu screwdriver gang unless that meant you were passing up life, often at the Phalarahus’ behest.

The territorial nerve of Tears Nimalsiri aside, the Phalarahus had to act quickly. What they had heard from their bank informer (on the promise they buy her a uniform not so primless around the parts she preferred to be more floppy on the flooze) was that the White Tears had swiped had no funds to fleece, plus Tears had really queered the pitch by breaking up the White’s Mazda into little pieces without finding anything resaleable even in a desperate spare-parts market.

Yet the Phalarahu had to be chary’n’wary. Call him a walking disaster but Tears Nimalsiri wasn’t so stupid to go to so much trouble just to prove he could be so stupid in the kidnapping racket. There had to be something profitable in snatching this White which Tears was cunning-ratly hiding behind his smoke screen of mosquitoes, and which, when the Phalarahus thought about it, was maybe the safest place in the world since nobody wanted to go near those cheesiest bandages of those feet of his.

So saying, for the Phalarahus, a crude lift in broad daylight it had to be, a taking so that the Phalarahus could take a quick look before a profit might slip through their fingers... and profit wasn’t used to doing that... even if that meant sending the family patriarch’s thirteenth son to keep an eye out for a counter-highjack of the White when Dimmer could be said to be the last man they could have sent to keep an eye out.

And here, we come to an important figure when it comes to these particular threads of the campfire Chronicles.

You see, the head of the Phalarahu was an old man, called Family Way. The retellings will have much more to relate on the old boy’s lasciviousness later, but suffice it to say here that, in that then-time of Wattala, the foreigner that he was obliged to stand before the elder Phalarahu and each one of his twenty-five sons.

Wi stood pinned to the blinding light of the room, faced as he was, in standing attention, with sunlight barely on the slant through some skylight that must have been almost above him and most certainly very broken. He could tell he was less barely upright now than he was a while ago above the black-water open drain outside the bank by the way he was reacting to getting clipped over the ears every time he let his standing to attention go a bit floppy. His eyes were full of star bursts, not all of them white. And since the voices of his new kidnappers came at him as less enraged human sounds than Tears emitted, or was able to emit, he decided to talk even if it meant speaking out of kidnap-turn.

Despite those clips over his head he was getting, he heard himself complaining would they mind not hitting him where it hurt, try somewhere else... after last night in the toilet thing he had a lot of numb parts if they wanted suggestions... and also he was feeling a bit crabby from being chained to a flush-chain all night and would appreciate being dropped off back at his apartment for a shower or two with a shave before any further act of kidnapping officially started. If that was all right. He promised he would think about returning back here voluntarily, so that none of them had to wait around for him, kicking up their, or his, heels.

Nor was this all as it is re-told. In no mere afterthought, he inquired he could save them the trouble of dropping him back home if they could point out any local buses he could catch, since he promised he’d be good for a loan of a few rupees for the fare that didn’t have to be anywhere near the whole fifty rupees he had thought of asking the bank for as a ransom.

At home, where his wife was, he hoped, he was sure if he got down on his knees and begged, she’d lend him a few extra rupes to get the bus back here to repay them and if they could spare a few rupees even more he could then get the bus back to his apartment again and his bed without them having to go to any more trouble over him at all. Close your eyes and, poof, I’m out of your lives, ha ha. Also, if they could remember to make sure to point him to a bus pointed in the right direction it would be very Christian or Buddhist or whatever of them.

By this time, the White Wi realised he must be showing nerves, babble being a bit of a dead give-away. Standing there, he suddenly realised too, stark naked didn’t help. Blindfolded didn’t help either. It’s all very much why hindsight never helps, you see.

Besides all that, and since no one was taking any notice of him and his foreign tongue anyway, Wi was Dimmer’s show and Dimmer wasn’t going to give it over to any of his brothers even if they could see and he couldn’t much, even in such a good opportunity for increased filial respect as this situation was. Who needs 20-20 vision if you’re centre stage?

The slight problem with that was the slicing sunlight there mightn’t have been all that crash hot for Wi, but it was worse for Dimmer. It blinded the thirteenth Phalarahu son further out of even the faintest blur, such that he had Wi’s blindfold tied basically around the bridge of the White’s nose and Wi’s right wrist tied to his right wrist.

Wi’s clothes he had piled onto his father’s great chair, mistaking it for a bed -- only his impairment saving him from a thick ear -- he was mistaking for the coffee table he knew was around there somewhere. He had been facing a tallboy which he thought was his father, who was ninety degrees to the left of his father, and was continuing to shake his head sadly at it.

It brought back to Family Way Phalarahu that, with his thirteenth, it might have been one time the family-pool’s genes might have got twisted the wrong way.

And this takes us back in time to the tickle-your-fancy-or-fanny one of:

… how Dimmer got the Dims and no making light of it.

By the time they found the baby Dimmer to be so dim of sight it was too late to throw him back. Family Way Phalarahu knew he should have suspected something amiss right from the start when he stumbled across the infant taking his mother’s milk by way of her squirting it into his little mouth from at least six inches away. But what can a man do?

Anyway, old Family Way Phalarahu only had to wait a few years to discover that Dimmer had eyes like a hawk when it came to a fog, no matter how thick.

The Talls retellings have it that that might have been because the boy was born one night in the back of an old Morris Minor when there were two chain-smoking Phalarahu uncles sitting in the front seat and it was too cold outside to have the windows down. Mind you, it is said they had to open one window a bit to help its mother breathe but, even so, the boy came out not struggling in the least for that supposedly first difficult breath. They thought the little thing might have been dead, but Dimmer was just lying there taking in the fog, breathing nice and calmly.

There was no whaa-ing or thrashing around to get the lungs working; nothing of that kind. He even smiled up at his mother when she inhaled deeply from the lit cigarette that had stayed in her mouth during his expulsion. She looked down at her boy as only a new mother can and gently blew out the smoke over him as a blessing as he gurgled sweet goos. She was amazed she hadn’t blown it. Giving birth.

Consequently, Dimmer could see perfectly in a haze, the thicker the better. In school, he learnt to have to keep his eyebrows wet so that the natural humidity fogged up his glasses so much that he could see the blackboard plain as day without them. Put him in a smoky fug of a room and he needed no visual enhancements; he buzzed around happily, sharp eyes twinkling where others watered. Even… to get back to our then-time... to see where to (nearly) put the blindfold on Wi he had to keep blowing cigarette smoke into Wi’s face to make him out vaguely.

They used to laugh he might be blind as a bat but there was nothing smug about the way he smogged.

They were wrong, of course. Even the day they were able to confirm that he could see not much more than some close, sharp movement, there was a fire in the hospital; the whole place quickly filled with smoke; and, guess what?, he led the two top floors -- staff, patients and visitors alike -- through that fug-up to safety down the fire stairs. It wasn’t bad for a five-months-old.

None of this altered the fact that Dimmer had subsequently become a master mariner in much demand by shipping companies. In fogs or murky conditions or fire on board, he could see further than any radar and, of course, in 3D. In a danger to all on any ship anywhere, they would perch him on what was the old yardarm, next to the radar dishes to show them how it should be done. In any lack of clear visibility, they would always believe Dimmer more than the radar. On land, he thought he was at sea; at sea, he thought he was on land. It didn’t matter to Dimmer Phalarahu. All was fog and fog was all.

Now, Dimmer was only twenty-four at the time of the first coming into the Phalarahu midst by the White. But, only a year later he could suddenly see as clear as a bell, eyes of a hawk, fog or no fog -- at least for a full six months or so.

His old father Family Way had always said he, like all of his idjit siblings, was only as good as his first nookie. And Dimmer had his first nookie that year later. True to his father’s word he came out of that Bombay sordid little room with the scales falling from his eyes. Those scales fell like smoke rings. Not that being able to see as well as the next man changed his behaviour much, though. It wasn’t that he didn’t like much what he saw.

In fact, he didn’t. But he’d gotten so comfortable in being around fogs, fag fugs, sea mists and so on, spending all of his life living up to them, that his constant missing them made him all bleary-eyed anyway. It is said he was never sorry about the nookie, though.

--------------

Anyway, at this now-as-then time of Wi’s second kidnapping, Dimmer had prepared himself to present Wi to his father and his brothers by examining Wi with a magnifying glass. It heightened the shock but at least gave him one moment in life he was glad to be myopic. Besides, nothing was going to stop the whole Phalarahu clan talking over him about Wi.

One of the gathered sons there brushed his pointing arm past Dimmer and gave voice to what they were all thinking, going:

‘What’s with this, anyway?’

meaning Wi as the naked whole White and obviously not prepared to call him human, to which Dimmer took exception, and rightly since Wi was his catch, as an attack on his visual infirmity, retorting by way of the tortish, a whine his family members knew all too well, going to the tallboy piece of furniture rather than his father:

‘Father, Whitie’s got no money, got no car. Talk about a blur.’

‘Family?’

his father went, responding in lieu of the tallboy as if he or it didn’t have all day.

‘Hitched to a local, has to be some harpy’

went Dimmer as if he could see it all clearly, how it all was.

‘Kids?’

‘With him, Father?’

‘Okay, okay. Where?’

‘Apartment block, Colombo 3. No security. Dogshags never learn, eh, Dad?’

‘Two million US by Saturday. We set the exchange rate. Go!’

In his keenness to obey his father and under the blinding of the sunlight to his blindness, Dimmer’s compensatory keener sense of blur deserted him.

He belted off but ran straight into his father, and shuddered to a halt, standing there confused as to why his, or any, father would want to be parked in the doorway like that. Which this father was nowhere near.

‘Idjit!’

old Family Way went, going:

‘some idjit take the idjit and show the great big kidnapper the way out!’

Wi didn’t know why there was such movement away from him but it left a glaring silence that he became keenly aware of until the old man piped up in a better mood, Dimmer having gone, this time going:

‘I can’t believe what I’m glaring at’.

If Wi had understood a word of the local gab, if he knew the Phalarahus then as he was going to come to know them, he might have appreciated that even at that stage the elderly head of the Phalarahus prided himself even more fiercely now than ever before on living up to his nickname of Family Way, with the dangle-at-rest means between his leg to live up to it.

In this, even the more familiar-to-him of his sons, were aware that in the White before them Nature was showing something so negligible to be considered a piece of life-form outside of some specimen jar. They hoped their father might be so shocked by the sight as to divert himself from always referring to them as ‘squirts’, no altogether unwarranted by his measure. Which he was always proudly doing.

Mind you, their general reverence for the elder was in all things Phalarahu and therefore built around whether one sidelong look could make a roomful of women pregnant at a glance, which made naked Wi job of trying to make himself seem a little better than infinitessimally he looked a very hard task indeed. The point was, while many mob leaders in the country were wealthier, classier, better looking, none would have been more secured in his community than Family Way Phalarahu was.

The old man put this down in equal measure to his own karma and to divine providence that was just waiting to become part of his karma. His own karma contained the unique nous of getting him to shoot through on all his ladies after they had delivered the Phalarahu clan a son, and before could come up with trying to swing a daughter past him. Girls didn’t count, and weren’t. Sorry to any of you dear campers offended, but the fact was that girl were not in the Phalarahu family-tree’s bark. Not that any of Family Way’s little shes upwards weren’t respected or weren’t treated by the whole family as any second or third or removed cousin might.

After all, they would grow up to be women and no male Phalarahu could reject that, unless you could make cold showers biologically selective.

Here, I will try to be as delicate as, it seems, the Talls retellings allow. The thing is, the divine-providence part of Family Way’s karma had him so well-endowed that whoever called him Family Way Phalarahu really meant Family Weigh Phalarahu at which even first-graders in Wattala’s school got the drift and the giggles. Another was that the old man was more than just Family Way; he was so divinely kitted out down below that it was always getting in somebody’s way. Maybe it should’ve been Any Family’s Way.

Another was that, when you said Family Way, with what he had loaded up with, you meant the freeway, five lanes out n’ five lanes in.

As many, many versions have it, when they sent him for circumcision the gynaecologist called for a chain saw and called for hand lotion to counter the blisters he knew were on the cards from using that chain saw on the equivalent of the worst tree -- and even then, he delayed the operation until he had gotten his pecs strengthened through sessions at his local gym. No good suffering a rick to the neck trying to completely circle a circumference walk around while bending over double.

Not only that, on aeroplanes beyond all known flying carpets, he had been known to be charged excess cabin baggage on threat of being seated in the cargo hold. Or, they would automatically charge him for an extra seat – not next to him but in front of him. And they even stopped offering them that when the passenger next to him sued them for in-flight fright. By then the old boy had given up flying as being too cramped.

All this was widely reported to be the reason that thus far -- and he was now in his seventies although there is some dispute about that which we will touch on later -- none of his ex-wives’n’ladies had complained of his treatment of them by the long shot. It is recorded that any who might have wanted to were kept too busy answering questions about him in bed. Was it a stonker or a stanchion is a hard thing to answer if you don’t know what the hell had just happened to you? You or your wildest dreams?

As the Talls retellings here recommend whispering, it seems most of them lay down with him with their eyes open and got up with them open much wider. Some, tis said, even stopped blinking for years. After Family Way, twas said there was only one way they really talked about it was to gasp wide-eyed. Did they give up and throw their hands up in the air or was it their knees giving up and throwing their hands in the air?

Oh yes, Family Way Phalarahu had twenty-five boys and had no plans to stop by otherwise taking his mind off things.

----------------

Yet, retracing our steps, in that particular room of the Wi second kidnapping time... where the re-kidnapped Wi was on display in all his naked missed glory… there was still the stunned silence of the Phalarahu clan upon the sight of the naked Wi, a silence which lasted without breath until the old man finally managed to regain his voice at the what-the-hfrukk? standing otherwise voluntarily snatched before him and again going:

‘I said can any of you idjits tell me what I’m glazing over at here?’

which was precisely the sort of thing Wi was having to cope with as well just then, but from the other end of the microscope.

If you weren’t worried about there might have been you but for the grace of the divine-whoops, you might have felt sorry for him. I mean, we can see how Wi started to suspect he needed something to take his mind off things that, blindfolded so, he couldn’t see. But only this one thing from his childhood kept popping up in his mind, and just wouldn’t keep itself to itself as he started to hum-sing, humdingingly and how embarrassingly, going

Passengers will please refrain

From passing water while the train

Is standing in the station or passing through...

with, about that moment, Family Way going:

‘Where’s the prong’s prong?’

‘See, we reckon what you’d have to do, Father…’

went the third oldest son made brazen by the years he had had in the breach of answering up and still surviving:

‘is take a razor and start cutting, n’ stop when you come to a hair that bleeds’.

‘What’d you say he was?’

‘Australian.’

‘Eee, I like Australia. I could be living there if I could swim. One of you idjits get onto their embassy and say they shouldn’t let this sort of thing outa the country. It ain’t right. They got no national shame?’

‘We know where you’re coming from, Father’

went one of the youngest from the back, eager to contribute to his own reason for existence, once-or-twice in a lifetime, his father no-minging him:.

‘I’ve seen cold’n’snow but I ain’t seen shrivel like that. Any of you hiding something like that, speak up and we’ll see you put down humanely’.

There was apparently more of the like too as Wi stood there in the nude, blinded blessedly by the evening light unashaming him... blessedly, too, under the influence of the lines running around his sad and wrought synapses in a pitiful huddle, going:

... Bums and hoboes underneath

Will cop it in the eyes and teeth

And they wouldn’t like it, nor would you.

----------------

I know, many of you could well be asking: this White, what affrighted him? This creature called Wi, what’s fraught? To make of his salients you had better be a para-swami of the highest kidnapping order and/or cantanker of impeccable standing, with a piercing intellect to match your diverted and startled orbs taking a bashing at the sight of him.

Well, on one level, you might be forgiven for concluding if God created man in His own image then God mustn’t have much hair; would have to have pretty bad teeth like the gaps would play merry hell with sunsets and sunrises and such; would have to possess feeble eyesight with an enfeebled observing capacity which would probably explain a lot to a lot of people; would have to be sporting vital organs on the downturn, with a bladder not alone in a tendency to unGodly leak; must be a real advertisement for Scholl’s sandals on account of fallen arches and peculiar toes, would be corned up and warted in embarrassing spots; must have an imagination too big for His own liking as in a real dud at sport and art unless your theory defines both in terms of being flat out on the canvas; got a memory like a sieve and a brain full of pit bulls; couldn’t stand up first thing in the mornings on account of the day being already too much of a burden to bear; couldn’t dare lie down at night because by doing so dawn was brought that much nearer and so the cover of darkness was already coming to an end; couldn’t remember what the loss of His memory was called or why he worried about it; got birthday cards for his 75th on His twenty-first.

Made in God’s image?... it’d be