An Apple A Day

Most people have a number that means something to them. It could be their birth-date, their anniversary. It could be the address of their first home, or the age they were when they first fell in love or, in the case of my Aunt Jane, the day she got an eight-figure divorce settlement after a bitter three-year court battle.

“So worth it!” I remember her saying to her sisters later that evening at a celebratory dinner at the Summer Palace that included lobster noodles and Monk Jumping Over the Wall.

Over at the children’s table, my brother Jack looked up from his bowl of soup and turned to me to whisper, “What is in this?”

“I have no idea,” I murmured out of the corner of my mouth. “But it’s like $80 a bowl, which means it’s probably got at least seven endangered species in it…” For some reason, I had learnt the word ‘endangered’ at school that week and I so loved the sound of it that I used it at every given opportunity. This dinner was a tailor-made occasion for me to show off my precocious vocabulary.

            Michelle, meanwhile, aged 12, had quietly deposited most of her soup contents into the giant pot-plant behind her seat.

“Oh my God,” Jack sighed as he stared at the unidentifiable bits lurking beneath the clear golden broth. That was the evening he became a fully-fledged vegan.

“Really, you children are a disgrace,” our mother told us in the car driving home after dinner. “Delicacies are just wasted on you lot! Such an expensive dish and you fed it to the palm! Next time, we’ll just leave you at home and you can eat McDonalds!”

            “Those poor cows!” Jack said, and burst into tears.

            “What is wrong with your children?” Mother said to Father, who wisely kept his eyes on the road and didn’t reply.

            Despite her sisters’ best efforts, Auntie Jane never did reveal how much she extracted out of Uncle Mok, but we did notice that from that dinner onwards, she was never seen in public again with anything less than 50 carats on her. 

            “I just don’t understand why anyone would feed children expensive soups like that,” Amanda said the other day.

            “It was a celebration,” I pointed out.

            “Yes, but still. In my limited experience, if you give children a plate of anything fried, they’d consider that a great day!”

            From the depths of the sofa, Saffy looked up from her iPad. “I wonder if I’ll ever get a huge divorce settlement.”

            “You’d need to get married first before you can get divorced, so…baby steps, ok?” Amanda said.

            Saffy pursed her lips with dissatisfaction as she turned her attention back to her iPad. “I really want to get the iPhone X…” She trailed off.

            Amanda looked up from her new issue of Vogue. “And…”

            “And it starts at $1,648!” Saffy’s bosom inflated at the sheer implausibility of that kind of money. Even Amanda, who considers a $550 Balenciaga tee-shirt cheap, hesitated.

            Saffy noticed the reaction. “It’s expensive, right? That’s practically a down-payment on a car!” she said, demonstrating, not for the first time, her tenuous grasp of the price of basic consumer goods. “But I so want it! It’s so beautiful!”

            “You just got the iPhone 8,” I pointed out.

            “Yes, but really, it’s exactly the same as the 7! And the ten can do all these fabulous things! I love how it unlocks just by you looking at it!”

            Amanda said how wonderful it would be if you could do the same thing with men, which only served to make Saffy more morose – her boyfriend Bradley still showing no inclination to propose marriage.

            “$1,648!” she told Sharyn the next day at the office. “I can’t get over how expensive it is! For a phone!”

            Sharyn blinked owlishly, as her tongue moved restlessly inside her mouth trying to dislodge some food stuck from lunch. “Aiyah. Air-ree year at dis time is the same. You want a new Apple phone. Your drawer or-redi got eight phone. What for you keep changing? A phone is a phone. As long as I can call you and you can call me, what for you need the iPhone ex?”

            “It’s pronounced ‘ten’!”

            “Issit? Ex is ten, meh?”
            “In Latin, it is.”

            “Wah, Apple so cheem now.”

            “And it unlocks if you just look at the screen! It’s fabulous!”

            “Aiyoh, you so lazy, you cannot even press a button, issit? And then after how? Must still use finger to operate, right? Not worth it, lah!”

            “You are seriously killing my buzz, Shazz!”