Die Hard

My mother always says that you can never take anything for granted.

            “Never!” I remember her telling me firmly after I came home from school one day with a blood-caked knee. During recess, whilst playing, I’d tripped and fallen on a stray shard of glass. “Just when you think you’re happy, it will come along and rip the ground from right under you. Always remember that!”

            Amanda says that little piece of maternal advice probably accounts for my slightly morbid approach to life. “I mean,” she said the other day, at breakfast at PS Café, “you’re the only person I know who insists on walking in the opposite direction of traffic flow just so you can see an out of control van coming at you!”

            “As if you could ever get out of its way fast enough if it was!” Saffy said, her bosom inflating with the sheer absurdity of my pedestrian habits.

            “Better than be taken by surprise from behind!” I told her.

            “Sounds like one of my recent dates!” Barney Chen growled from the other side of the table.

            “It’s just so morbid!” Amanda went on hurriedly. From bitter experience, she knew that once Barney got started, it would be impossible to get a conversation back on a PG-rated track. “You’re just going through life expecting the worst!”

            “Is good, what!” said Sharyn. She looked up from her pancakes, and chewed with a smacking sound. “If you expect the worse, den cannot be surprise, mah! Like my neighbour, Madam Chen!”

            “The one with the five cats?” Saffy asked. “Why, what happened to her?”

            “Tree day ago, when she bathe, she kena slip, fall down and knock her head!”

            Saffy gasped, her bosom expanding dangerously. “Oh my God, what happened?”

            “Aiyoh, she eighty five, she die, lor!” Sharyn stabbed at her pancakes with enthusiasm. “She always say she know she die in the bathroom. Sure enough, kwaaak!” She crooked her right index finger into a question mark and brought her whole arm down on the table with a smack.

            “Girl….” Barney breathed out heavily.

            “But…but, didn’t someone come to her rescue?” Amanda said.

            Sharyn waved her fork. “Aiyah, she live alone, who will rescue her? But larrr-ky, her five cat make a lot of noise and the neighbour so fed up, he call police and complain and police come, bang down door and find her. Only one day she die. If longer, hor, can you imagine the smell?” Sharyn wrinkled her nose. “And by den, hor, her cat so hungry, confirm start eating her, one!”

            Saffy stuffed her napkin in her mouth and squealed.

            “Seriously, that is such a disturbing image, Sharyn!” Amanda told her.

            “Dat’s why not good to live alone, lor! Must always live with someone.”

            “I live alone,” Barney said, sighing, his mouth pursed in a pout.

            “Where got?” Sharyn said primly. “Your bed is like Tan Tock Seng A and E, always got people come and go, one!”

            Barney blushed.

            Much later, back in the flat, we were still haunted by the image of poor Madam Chen lying on the floor of her bathroom with her five cats looking at her like she was the first course haunted.

            “What a way to die!” Saffy sighed.

            “Well, can you imagine it?” Amanda said. “She would have woken up that morning thinking about what to have for lunch, who she was going to see and by evening, she was dead and one day away from becoming an amuse bouche for her cats!”

            “I know,” Saffy said, her bosom deflating. “If she’d known what was in store for her, she’d probably have just slept in. I know I would’ve. I mean, what would be the point of getting out of bed?”

            “Like my mother always said,” I piped up, “never take anything for granted!”

            “I don’t want to ever die alone,” Amanda said firmly. “Isn’t there some kind of microchip they can implant in you so that if your vital signs go wonky, an ambulance will come immediately?”

            There was a look in Amanda’s eyes that she tried to hide by staring hard at her coffee. But we’d seen it. Not fear, exactly, but a kind of wistfulness. A sense of lost opportunities. Saffy and I exchanged a glance. 

            That’s the thing about always being prepared, which my mother neglected to tell me. Every so often, an event comes along that you could never be prepared for. If you’re lucky, someone is there to catch you. If you’re not, you’re basically cat chow.

            Saffy gently placed a hand on Amanda’s shoulder. “You don’t ever have to worry about that ambulance.”