In Sickness and In Health

My mother always says that if you want to find out who your real friends are, fall sick.

“You’ll be surprised by how quickly everyone gets suddenly very busy,” she said that time my father was seriously ill and had to be hospitalized for a week. “Good times are one thing, but nobody wants to be around you when you’re sick. Nobody.” I remember how her mouth drew itself into a thin line. My sister said you could just tell Mother was making a mental list of who wasn’t going to get a Hahn Family Christmas card that year.

Of Mother’s three regular mahjong kakis, two found themselves with urgent personal matters that required their undivided attention. Only Auntie Lynne showed up faithfully each day with a stack of Women’s Weekly, a thermos flask of yin-yong, and the previous day’s juicy gossip carefully culled from her maid’s mafia network to while away the hours while the two old ladies sat by Daddy’s hospital bed trying to pretend they were just having a picnic when, really, they were frightened to death.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you,” Auntie Lynne would say. “Joanne’s maid told my Anna that Joanne’s good for nothing daughter is getting a divorce!”

“Good riddance,” Mother would sniff. “I never liked that Mavis, but I liked her husband even less. He tried to sell us insurance once and he never once looked us in the eye. He kept looking at the Ming vase in the study!”

Even at lunch, Auntie Lynn would still be tutting over what she scornfully referred to as “some people”, a category, which, by then, had grown to include Auntie Wei and Auntie Ching, who were still busy with their mysterious urgent personal matters.

            So, a couple of weeks ago, Amanda woke up with a heavy chest cough. Over the next few days, it became a hacking, phlegmy monster. Saffy said every time Amanda coughed, she sounded like her father’s beat up Toyota Corolla.

            “It sounds exactly like that!” she told me. From behind the closed door to Amanda’s bedroom, you could hear her rumbling cough.

“It’s like an automotive fart!” Saffy added as she adjusted her mask, snapped on surgical gloves, and slipped on goggles. Suitably attired, she slid into Amanda’s bedroom with a tray of hot ginger and Manuka tea.

“You sound terrible!” she said cheerfully. “Here drink, this! Would you like some air in here? You could kill a chicken in here, it’s so still!”

             At one stage, Amanda dragged herself out of bed to see our neighbourhood doctor. He prescribed her four days worth of antibiotics.

            “Aiyoh, these doctors, ah!” Sharyn pronounced that evening when she showed up with a pot of home-made chicken soup in which drifted slices of ginseng and red dates. “Every-ting must give antibiotic! Dat day, hor, my youngest son got pimple on his face, the doctor must oh-so give antibiotic. Siow, one!” Sharyn looked around to make sure Amanda wasn’t lurking behind a bookshelf and leaned in. Her voice dropped several octaves. “Some more, hor, he go to Harvard!” she hissed. “If you go to Harvard, how come you doctor in HDB block in Yio Chu Kang, I ask you?”

            “That’s very elitist of you, Shazz,” Saffy murmured, ever the politically correct HR manager. Sharyn sniffed.

Amanda emerged from her room, her hair wild like Halle Berry’s at the Oscars. As one, the three of us pushed up our Air+ face masks.

            “I’m not contagious!” Amanda said before dissolving into a series of turbo-engine-like coughs.

            “That’s probably what the Ebola Patient Zero said,” Saffy told her. She pushed Sharyn’s pot across the table. “Sharyn made you soup. You want some?”

            “Yes please,” Amanda moaned and sank into the dining chair. She looked listlessly around her, and sighed. “You know, I just realized I have 785 friends on Facebook and only two of them are here with me right now, keeping me company.”

            Sharyn stared hard at the ceiling and then looked at me and Saffy. Saffy patted her on the arm. “I left Facebook last month, remember?” 

            “Oh, issit?” Sharyn looked relieved to have avoided a potentially awkward moment.

            “That’s why you should be on Instagram,” I told Amanda. “On Instagram, no one pretends to be your friend.”

            “I’m not sure I like the term ‘followers’ though,” Saffy said. “It makes you sound like you’re Jesus or something.”

            “Can you imagine what Jesus’s Facebook page would look like?” I asked.

            “Loads of selfies,” Saffy said, confidently.

            Sharyn, who went to a Catholic girls school, looked pained. “Aiyoh, you all, ah!”