Rash Decision

Amanda recently woke up with a rash on the lower right side of her ribcage. After getting over the initial shock of finding tiny red bumps on her otherwise impeccably milky white skin, she scrambled up out of bed and marched into Saffy’s room to show her.

            Saffy’s immediate reaction was to let out a little piercing scream. To her credit, she recovered her poise and leant in, still in her nightgown, to peer at Amanda’s dermatological development.

            “What is going on with that?” she sighed as she tilted her head, the better to cast more light on the red rash.

            “I just woke up with it!” Amanda moaned. “What is it? Oh God, I’m deformed!”

            Saffy hesitated. “Well, I’m no Dr Sandra Lee, but that looks like a rash!”

            “You think?” Amanda snapped. “Can you be less specific? You’re the one who’s always watching her YouTube clips. Hasn’t this ever come up before?”

            From beneath her sheer nightgown, Saffy’s magnificent bosom puffed up. “Well, she’s more into huge lipomas and infected cysts. This kind of little rash isn’t really her kind of thing. There’s nothing to pop!”

            Within half an hour, Sharyn had been summoned to the flat. She arrived in a dizzy haze of something fried. “Aiyoh, what is so urgent? I was making prawn noodle, you know!”

            “Oh, is that what I’m smelling?” Saffy said, managing to look both repulsed and ravenous at the same time.

            “Here, look at this!” Amanda commanded and lifted her shirt.

            Sharyn, a veteran mother who has seen her fair share of unmentionable skin conditions, peered over her spectacles and sniffed. “Aiyah, is only heat rash, lah! Eidder dat, or is allergy. You got eat shell-fish last night?”

            “She had laksa!” Saffy piped up.

            “Ah! Yah, lah! Is allergy, lah! Confirm!”

            “But I have laksa all the time!” Amanda wailed. “This is the first time something like this has happened! Will there be scarring?” Her eyes swelled in terror.

            “Aiyoh, a little allergy and you so drama. Wait you have measle or mump, then how?” Sharyn said.

            It was a question that Saffy later said reminded her of any number of scenes in ‘Game of Thrones’ when someone is threatening another with death, dismemberment, or just general deprivation of life and liberty. “You can tell she’s a scary mother!” she said with the kind of admiration normally adopted by people who don’t approve of children in general.

            Meanwhile, Sharyn swept out of the flat to hurry back to frying prawn shells for her noodles, promising to be back later that evening.

            As the door closed behind her, her piercing voice floated back: “No need see doctor! I got medicine at home!”

            While Saffy and I went off to the Coconut Club in Chinatown for lunch, Amanda spent the better part of the day holed up in the bathroom, peering at her rash. Every time she scratched, two dots would join up to form a larger bump.

            “I can’t stop scratching!” she WhatsApped Saffy.

            “I’m going to turn my phone to silent,” Saffy decided. “I need to concentrate on this nasi lemak and I can’t focus with her going on and on about her rash. I just hope it’s not contagious. Because that is one ugly rash!”

            “Shut up and just eat!” I told her. “I think we need to order another otak. Isn’t it just so good?”

            “Amazing! But you can’t tell Amanda I’m eating this, because I’ve not told her that I’m no longer vegetarian! She’ll kill me!”

            Later that evening, true to her word, Sharyn returned with her maid in tow, lugging a big pot of herbal soup that she swore had cured three generations of skin ailments in her family along with topical creams and extra packets of herbs from Eu Yan Sang.

            “I specially pick these herbs for you!” Sharyn said with pride. “The Eu Yan Sang pharmacist try to teach me, but I tell him to just follow my instruction! Nah! Saffy, you boil with two cup water and then give her drink tree time a day. Confirm by second day, all your rash gone, one!” she told Amanda. “But hor, you cannot eat any more prawn otherwise lagi scratch some more!”

            By lunch the next day, Amanda’s ugly red rash had faded to a pink bloom, and by that evening, you could barely see it.

            “That woman is so wasted as an accountant!” Saffy said. “She’d make such a great doctor, don’t you think?”

            “And that Dr Sandra Lee would be so out of a job!” Amanda predicted.