It may have
escaped your attention, but the past couple of days have been really hot.
Like, really hot. The kind of hot that if you were a girl, your make-up would
melt and run down your face.
“That doesn’t really happen, does
it?” I asked Amanda the other day.
“It might if you use really cheap
make-up,” she said in the same tone Kim Kardashian might use when she’s giving
shade to someone she really hates. Like Taylor Swift. “But then again, I don’t
really sweat, so I don’t know. It’s never happened to me.”
“It happened to me the other day
when I was walking from City Hall to the library,” Saffy piped up. Her
impressive bosom trembled at the indignity of the memory. “It was so hot, I
literally started sweating the minute I came out of Raffles City. And the thing
is, I was wondering why people kept staring at me funny and when I went to the
loo to tidy up, I got a fright in the mirror. My mascara had literally run down
the side of my face. I mean, I looked like that hot chick in ‘The Mummy!’”
“What hot chick?” Amanda asked.
Saffy gave Amanda a look. “The
mummy!” she said eventually. “I looked like the mummy!”
“Why are you wearing cheap make-up?”
Amanda replied.
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Because I
work in HR and I don’t earn a hundred thousand dollars a month like you do!”
she began, but you could tell her heart wasn’t really into the argument because
she sighed and collapsed back into the chair.
That’s the other thing about this
heat. The air-con unit in our living room decided to call it a day over the
weekend and just died. Which means we’ve all been forced to live most of our
time in our respective bedrooms, but as Amanda pointed out, after a while,
there’s really only so much one can do in the bedroom without going stir-crazy
with claustrophobia. “Especially if you’re single,” she added darkly.
So, we’ve had to congregate in the
living room for company. The worst thing is that we only have one fan and it’s
one of those round Dyson doughnut table fans – the one without any blades and
air just blows out of the round hole. And the reason why that’s the worst thing
is because while the fan looked really good when we were shopping in Courts, in
the midst of all that cold air-con, it doesn’t cool all that much in real life
heat-wave conditions.
“I’m just not getting any air!”
Saffy moaned as she simultaneously tried to lie supine on the couch but without
letting any part of her body have any contact with the warm fabric. “It’s so
hot!”
“It’s already cranked all the way to
the max!” Amanda snapped as she stabbed the remote control in the vague hope
that the fan could blow harder.
“God, I can’t believe we paid five
hundred bucks for this fan and it’s still hotter than a hooker’s armpit in
here!” Saffy sighed. She noticed our looks and shrugged. “What! It’s a phrase!
Barney Chen used it the other day, so I’m stealing it!”
Leave it to Sharyn to come to our
rescue. Later that night, she arrived at our apartment with an old-fashioned
stand-up rotary blade fan, and an entire pot of chilled longan soup. She lightly
wrung out a cloth that had, on her instructions half an hour before she
arrived, been chilling in a sink full of ice cubes, and draped it over the head
of the fan. As one, we sank in front of and moaned at the effect of the cool
air.
“Oh my God, you are a genius!”
Amanda said, her eyes closed in bliss.
“Aiyoh, you all, ah, why you neh-ber
call your air-con man come and fix your air-con? Weather this hot, how to tahan
without air-con?”
“Apparently, he’s super-busy!” Saffy
said. “Everyone has been calling him. He’s coming tomorrow!”
“I offered to pay him double his
rate and he still couldn’t come!”
said Amanda in the perplexed tone of someone for whom that tactic has always
worked in her experience.
“Wah, today, so hot, when I walk
from my bus to my block, all my make-up run down my face!”
“Why do people keep buying cheap
make-up?” Amanda demanded.
“Because I work in HR and don’t earn
tree hun-drer tao-sun dollar a month
like you, mah!”
Saffy nudged Sharyn. “That’s exactly what I said!” she told her.
Amanda says sometimes it feels like
we’re living with Donald Trump.
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