Tongue Twister

Amanda’s friend Jenny recently started dating again after a particularly nasty divorce. The ex-husband had emptied their joint bank account and run off with his secretary. When the money ran out, the secretary dumped him and he tried to come crawling back to Jenny. And when she refused to take him back, he claimed, during the divorce proceedings, that it was precisely this kind of unusually cruel treatment that had led him to have an affair in the first place. 

Anyway, the dust settled a few months back and quite unexpectedly, Jenny suddenly found herself agreeing to go out on dates organized by Amanda. “You have to keep on top of your game!” my flatmate said even as she organized another drinks party to which she invited all the single men she could think of who weren’t currently attached to a wife or a porn addiction. 

“How come you never did any of this when I was still single?” Saffy complained as she looked over the invitation list. “I mean, you’ve invited that super hot Sam! Did you see his Instagram post today when he did the splits? All I could think of was why the stupid camera was at the front and not to the side, if you know what I mean?”

Amanda sighed. “Well first of all, Sam only dates women who are over five feet eight, and you’re not. So there’s that. And secondly, you’re supposed to be happily in a relationship with Bradley, so why do you care who’s coming to the drinks party?”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Well, I think it’s just weird to have a height restriction when you’re dating. And –,” she hesitated, “I love Bradley and everything, but I kind of miss the excitement of dating. You know, that funny feeling in the pit of the stomach?”

“That’s usually your period,” Amanda snapped. 

Saffy shrugged, by now, long immune to Amanda’s jibes. “Not always! But you know what I mean. That butterfly flutter when you think, ‘Is he going to call? Oh, he’s calling me! He’s asking me on a date!’ I miss that feeling of the first date, and especially the first kiss!”

“Completely over-rated!” Amanda sniffed. “Especially if the guy is a lousy kisser and you have to spend the next few weeks coaching him how to kiss but without him knowing that’s what you’re doing, because if he ever knew, he’d be so offended!”

Saffy sighed, her bosom deflating on cue. “Oh, that bad kissing bit. There must be some school of bad kissing that guys go to. I can’t tell you how many bad kissers I’ve dated in my life. Even with Bradley, I had to quietly coach him.”

As it turned out, Jenny and Sam hit it off like Jon Snow and the Targaryen girl, and within four days of the drinks party, they were posing for wefies in front of the Jewel’s Vortex.

Apparently, later that evening, they took their dragons out of a ride and to hear Jenny tell it the next day at breakfast at Toast Box, it was amazing. “It’s so liberating to be with a man who knows his way around a woman’s body, you know? Not like that low-down scum sucking pig of an ex-husband of mine!”

Amanda was beatific. “You’re welcome!” she said.

“The only thing is,” Jenny said, leaning in. “The next morning, when we woke up and he moved in to kiss me, I nearly gagged!”

Amanda winced. “Morning breath?”

“The foulest!” Jenny confided. “I had to hold my breath and then make some excuse about needing to pee.”

“And I guess it’s too early to introduce him to the tongue scrapper?”

“Not till at least the third date, I don’t think,” Jenny said.

Saffy says that she really should start up a school of dating for men and one of the compulsory modules would be tongue scrapping. “What are mothers teaching their kids these days?” she wondered to the world at large. “That’s just basic hygiene and good manners! I mean, if we women make the effort to wash our bits and put on clean underwear before going on a date, the least the guy could do is to take a few swipes of the tongue in the bathroom before getting into bed!”

Amanda, who has higher standards, added, “And again first thing in the morning before they come near the woman!”

“See, that’s one thing I don’t miss about dating,” Saffy said. “The house training!”

Amanda pursed her lips. “Yeah, and after all that effort, they run off with the secretary!”

Knowing Me, Knowing You

Saffy’s motto in life is: ‘Everyone will eventually disappoint you.’

Each time she’s been let down by someone, say her mother, she’ll announce in dolorous tones, “Everyone will eventually disappoint you.”

She says she came up with the motto when Jonathan, her first boyfriend in high school, cheated on her with the head girl. “I was devastated!” she told us once. “He was the first boy I ever loved. I thought we were going to get married. And then he had to hook up with that skank, Sarah Chan. Broke my heart.”

Apparently, Jonathan eventually married the skank, but on their seventh wedding anniversary, she ran off with her remisier with whom she’d been having a torrid affair. Some time later, Saffy bumped into Jonathan when he was coming out of the local 4D shop. “He’s grown so fat!” she later reported with immense satisfaction. Her bosom strained with happiness against her tee-shirt. “You can barely see his eyes! Which just goes to show. Everyone gets what’s coming to them.”

Amanda arched an eyebrow. “Is that another life motto?” she asked.

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Yes! It’s the yin to the yang of motto number one!”

A couple of weeks ago, she stormed back into the flat, her face black as night. 

Amanda and I were on the couch weighing up our Netflix options – a Marie Kondo re-run or a slasher flick. We looked up at Saffy’s entrance.

“What happened?” Amanda asked.

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I am never going out again with that Melissa!” 

Amanda sucked in her breath. “Oh my God. She ditched you again?”

Saffy flopped onto the sofa next to us. “I just never learn!”

Amanda later told me that she’d been friends with Melissa first and had introduced her to Saffy. “She’s the absolute pits, but she and Saf seemed to hit it off, so I couldn’t wait to palm her off.”

I’ve met the woman a few times. She’s a transplant from New York, and a lawyer in one of the Big Four firms in Raffles Place. The first time I met her, I was in the midst of my obsession with Dr Pimple Popper and Melissa said that was the most disgusting thing she’d ever heard, so that was the end of that potential friendship. 

But to hear Saffy now tell it, the woman is actually very nice company. 

“When she shows up that is,” Saffy sniffed. “First of all, she does this ridiculous thing of never replying to messages about going out. I have to ask her, like, five times, ‘Shall we catch up?’ before she says, yeah sure! But she never suggests a date, so I have to do that, and then she doesn’t reply. So I follow up. Several times.”

“I’m exhausted already,” I told her.

“It gets worse,” Amanda piped in.

Saffy rolled her eyes. “So if I suggest any day, she’ll say, ‘Oh, my sister may be visiting then. Can I let you know closer to the day?’ Once, she actually said that she might be having her moon cycle on the day we were supposed to meet. ‘Can I let you know?’ I mean, what do you say to that?”

Amanda pursed her lips. She’d been down this road before. “Nothing.”

“We’ve made so many plans to meet up for coffee, for a movie, for drinks and lunch and dinner and manicures. And it’s always, ‘I’ll let you know?’” Saffy went on, working herself up into a simmering rage. 

Amanda asked, “And does she still do that thing where about a week before, she says, she thinks she can make it, and so you start making plans before and after you meet her?”

Saffy’s bosom stiffened. “Totally. I will have the whole afternoon planned out. And she confirms on the day and about half an hour before she’s due to meet, she’ll text and say, ‘I’ve got a headache, I’ll have to cancel lunch!’”

I gasped. “After all that?”

“Well, today, it was a sudden headache. Two weeks ago, she double booked herself. And before that, she had a stomach ache. And before that, her mother was in town. And she would have known about her mother’s visit ages ago. So why string me along? It’s ridiculous! Every. Single. Time.”

Amanda sniffed. “It’s no wonder she’s still single. What man will put up with such crap?”

“I had to have lunch by myself, too!” Saffy’s mouth curled into a pout as Amanda rubbed her back. “Seriously, people are so disappointing! Though why am I surprised?”

“Come on, I’ll take us all out to dinner. It’ll cheer you up.”

Saffy sighed. “I’m not sure I’m up for dinner after all that. Can I let you know?” 

Meat and Eat

It’s been a year or so since Saffy and Amanda turned vegetarian and life has finally settled down. 

The first few months were a little challenging, especially for Saffy who had never met a cut of meat she didn’t like. She was the ultimate carnivore, an approach very much informed by a complete lack of protein prejudice. Anything that mooed, crowed, oinked, slithered and crawled was fair game. We once watched her crunch her way through a heaped bowl of deep fried crickets in Cambodia. She went on a camping trip in Australia and came back a confirmed fan of grilled snake.

But a combination of YouTube clips of Esther the Wonder Pig and an endless daily barrage of news articles about the environmental and ethical problems about meat consumption started wearing her down. The final straw came when, at a yoga retreat she and Amanda attended in Bali, the teacher said Saffy couldn’t ever really become truly spiritual if continued to eat meat.

Sharyn, who was at the same retreat, snorted. “Aiyah, what for you want to become spiritual?” she asked. “You think you are Dalai Lama, issit?”

For Amanda, the bigger psychological obstacle to becoming a full-blown vegetarian was that she would have to give up leather and silk, but she comforted herself with the knowledge that she could now shop exclusively at Stella McCartney. 

But at the beginning of their vegetarianism, well-meaning friends provided plenty of unhelpful advice.

“Where are you going to get your protein?” asked Mabel, whose family runs a steakhouse. 

“From pulses and tofu,” Amanda replied, serenely beautiful in her new Stella McCartney dress. 

Mabel looked unconvinced. “I read somewhere that people who don’t have enough protein in their diet are more likely to get Alzheimers!” she went on. “I think you should still have a little bit of meat. Just eat the skin of the roast pork! You don’t have to eat the meat if you insist on being a vegetarian!”

Amanda couldn’t wait to get on the phone to tell Saffy who squealed.

“She did not say that! Eat the crackle but not the meat?”

“Apparently, you can still be a vegetarian that way,” Amanda reported. She hesitated. “Though I can kind of see the logic of what she’s saying…”

“Don’t you dare!” Saffy warned. “I need moral support. You cannot abandon me when we’re already in week three!”

Amanda sighed. “I know, but I feel so left out! Last night at dinner, everyone was sucking up the crab claws and cutting into their medium rare filet mignon, and there I was stabbing away at my quinoa salad. It was a little sad!”

“Think of all the poor Esthers in the world!” Saffy insisted, having just spent the past hour cooing over Instagram posts of Esther the Wonder Pig. 

Amanda sighed again. “Oh, alright.”

Then, a few weeks ago, we found ourselves at Cut by Wolfgang Puck for dinner. 

“This is such a lovely restaurant!” Amanda said, looking around.

“My God, why are we at a steak restaurant?” Saffy moaned, her eyes having attained the glassy stare of a recovering crack addict who was looking for the loo and accidentally wandered into a meth lab. 

“Because Sharyn says we need to check out the Impossible Burger!”

Saffy eyed the woman at the next table cutting into a thick cut of sirloin. “Sharyn is the Devil!” she pronounced.

“How can vegetable protein taste like meat?” I wondered aloud. “Not even those mock meats at Chinese vegetarian restaurants taste like meat.”

“Apparently, the ones here are amazingly realistic. They even bleed like real meat and…Ooh, here they come!”

Saffy looked at her plate with deep suspicion. 

Because the Impossible Burger looked just like a burger. Right down to the patty, which had the texture, colour and glistening sheen of a well-charred slab of minced beef.

The girls looked at me as I lifted my burger to my mouth. I took a bite, chewed, swallowed and paused. 

“Well?” Amanda said finally, gulping down her saliva. I picked up my phone.

“What are you doing? Why are you calling someone now?” Saffy demanded.

“We need to buy shares in this industry,” I said. “This is the future!”

“Oh, you’re so dramatic!” Saffy said as she gathered her courage and took a bite. “I mean, how can this be…” There was a silence as she chewed, her eyes closed in utter bliss. 

As meals go, that Impossible Burger was transformative. Even now, we’re talking about it.

“You really can’t tell!” Saffy told Sharyn.

“Yah, lah! I told you!”

“But it’s such a dilemma. It’s not meat, but it’s meat. I love it, but I also know I shouldn’t!”

Sharyn pursed her lips. “Not easy being Dalai Lama, hor?”