Love, Actually

Saffy recently started dating someone in her office. She’s never been happier, never mind the fact that there’s all kinds of conflicts of interest when the company’s human resources manager dates the payroll supervisor. And never mind the fact, too, that Bradley has the worst case of body odour this side of a boys school locker room.

Well, at least, that was before Saffy located the source of the eye-watering odour – Bradley’s arm-pits if you’re the curious sort – and promptly sent him off to Strip to get his arm pit hair all waxed off.

Even now, Amanda says it makes her dizzy to think how Saffy was able to pin-point the source with such accuracy. “Where else must she have sniffed?” she asked me the other day, her eyes rolling back with horror. I told her that I hoped she was being rhetorical.

A few weeks ago, Saffy brought Bradley back home for the first time to introduce him to us. Amanda took one look at him and dragged me into the kitchen.

“He is gorgeous!” she hissed. “Oh. My. God. No wonder Saffy could get over the whole body odour thing so quickly!”

Just then, her handphone pinged with an SMS. “I know what u 2 r whispering about in there, but hands off!” Saffy texted.

So far, things are looking good. Now that Bradley is smelling so much fresher, his stock in the office has risen considerably. Suddenly, secretaries, who’d previously never dare to venture onto the fifteenth floor unless they had a thick smear of Tiger Balm under their noses, now found all sorts of excuses to visit Bradley’s cubicle with payroll queries.

Saffy soon put a stop to all that by placing a large framed photograph of herself on Bradley’s desk. She also changed his handphone settings so that every time it rang, it would sing, “Saffy calling, Saffy calling!”

You’d think that this sort of irrational behaviour would put most guys off, especially if they look, to use Amanda’s words, like a cross between Brad Pitt circa ‘Thelma and Louise’ and James Franco circa ‘Spider-Man’. But, to his credit, Bradley remembers how Saffy fell in lust with him even when he smelt literally like garbage. “Man, that takes courage!” he told me. I wrinkled my nose.

And for the first time in her life, Saffy finds herself at the epicenter of a man’s devoted attention and she’s enjoying every moment of it.

When her company’s vice-president came to see her to tell her that he didn’t think it was appropriate that the human resources manager should be dating the payroll supervisor, she told him to mind his own business.

“And don’t you dare threaten me with the sack, either!” she said. “I have, in a very secure location, signed affidavits of three secretaries in this company who say that you made drunken lewd remarks to them at last year’s Christmas party.”
Saffy says the vice-president couldn’t get out of her office fast enough.

A few nights ago, Bradley took Saffy to a steak dinner at MBS.

“Where’s that?” Amanda asked over the phone when Saffy rang to tell her.

“Marina Bay Sands!”

“My God, what is it with this country and its stupid acronyms!”

“I know! At first when he told me where we were going, I thought it was some kind of contagious respiratory sickness!”

But the bigger news is that over a perfectly charred filet mignon, Bradley told Saffy that he thought he was falling in love with her. Saffy choked back a cough and the piece of steak she was chewing.

Then she promptly burst into tears. She got up from the table and rushed to the ladies where she immediately called Amanda who was, at the time, at home watching American Idol.

Amanda turned off the TV and started screaming. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

“I’m so happy I think I’m going to throw up!” Saffy said.

Of course, since the dinner, every single moment leading up to that declaration has been replayed, dissected and analysed by Saffy and her core group of best girlfriends.

Sharyn says she couldn’t be more shocked if the Prime Minister had shown up on her doorstep. “Wah! That Bradley so smelly before and now so ke-ai! Aiyah, so sayang I never appreciate him more before. So smelly how to even talk to him, you tell me? But good lah for Saffy. She deserve him!”

Amanda says the whole episode has reaffirmed her belief in redemptive love while Barney Chen says Bradley’s declaration is the most beautiful thing he’s heard since volume 4 of the Glee soundtrack.