Bar Nun

Last week, Amanda caught up with a friend she’d not seen in years. She and Evelyn Wee had met at their first Torts class at Harvard and they immediately bonded over their District 9 addresses, and a deep-seated love for Prada that made Mother Teresa’s devotion to God seem like a one-night stand. And as luck would have it, they were both the same size which, as every BFF knows full well, essentially doubles your wardrobe.

For the rest of their time at Harvard, the two were inseparable. They double-dated the blonde quarterbacks of the football team; they were study partners; they competed for examination prizes; and they went on long weekend shopping trips to New York to shop at Bloomingdale’s. And before Amanda came back to Singapore after graduation whilst Evelyn went to London to work for a Top Three investment banking firm, the two went to Tiffany’s and got each other matching Elsa Peretti diamond bracelets.

“Really?” Saffy said, years later. Her bosom trembled. “Huh. My girlfriends and I just signed each other’s year-books!”

“We went to MacDon-ner to makan!” Sharyn said. “Where got money to go Tiffany, one?”

“Oh my God, I can’t wait to see her!” Amanda sighed, her lovely eyes half-closed with the kind of delirious job you normally associate with an ice-cream commercial. “I can’t believe she’s actually moving back after so many years!”

Saffy pursed her lips with deep dissatisfaction. “If I had the choice to live in London, I’m not sure I’d move back to Singapore.”

Amanda shrugged and adjusted her bootleg “Passion Made Possible” tee-shirt. “Evelyn says the whole place is topsy-turvy right now, what with Brexit and everything, so it’s a good time to leave and come home. I wonder if Goldman Sachs transferred her back?”

“Even the name sound like got money,” Sharyn observed.

“So, where’s Evelyn staying?” Saffy asked.

Amanda frowned. “That’s the thing. The YWCA!”

“Hah?” Sharyn said.

Much later, Saffy said the YWCA should have been the first clue that Evelyn Wee was not the same woman with whom Amanda had gone shopping at Tiffany’s. Because when Amanda came home from her reunion lunch at the Ritz-Carlton, she looked as if someone had made her wear top-to-toe Giordano in public.

Saffy and I were on the couch streaming a marathon session of Dr Pimple Popper when Amanda pushed open the front door, staggered over to the nearest armchair, and collapsed.

Saffy and I exchanged glances.

“Oh. My. God.” Amanda moaned. “Evelyn’s a nun!”

“Well, remember that time I went through a man-free phase and…” Saffy began.

“No!” Amanda snapped. “I mean she really became a nun!”

Saffy looked confused. She turned to me. “What…”

“And not just any nun,” Amanda went on. “A Buddhist nun!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Wait! Evelyn’s a nun?”

“Oh. My. God.” Amanda repeated.

For days, it’s all Amanda can talk about. She says the fact that she was physically in a YWCA may have weakened her defences so considerably that when Evelyn answered the door in her crimson robes and shaved head, the world, for a long moment, blacked out around her.

“Apparently, she went to an ashram in India two years ago, had a vision of the Goddess of Mercy when meditating, and that was that!”

Sharyn sucked in her breath. “You see, lah! Dat’s why hor, my pastor say cannot do yoga or meditate!”

Saffy gave her BFF the side-eye. “He also says TV is the devil’s channel, and you’ve just installed one in your bathroom!”

Sharyn blushed and waved her hand. “Ay, you don’t anyhow tell people, can?”

“I have to say that Evelyn looks very peaceful, though,” Amanda said. “She always used to have this intensity about her. I just don’t understand though how you go from banker to Buddhist like that! And, she’s also a vegan now!”

“Well, to be fair,” I said, “I think that kind of goes with the whole Buddhist nun thing.”

“But her favourite food group is a rare filet mignon!” Amanda bleated.

Apparently, Evelyn is on her way to Sri Lanka where she’s leading a meditation retreat. She’s invited Amanda, a prospect that fills everyone with alarm, not least Saffy who’s been privately moaning to everyone that if Amanda comes back a nun, how are we going to pay our rent?

“Good to see you’ve got your priorities set, Saf,” I told her.

“You better get used to eating boiled chickpeas, my friend, because if Amanda moves into a nunnery and we have to pick up her share of the rent, that’s all you’ll be able to afford!”

Pluck Off

In the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda, we’ve all been haunted by the recent death of Sharyn’s neighbour. For those of you who came in late, Madam Chen was eighty-five years old, and lived alone with her five cats. She slipped and fell in her bathroom, cracked her head and died. She was discovered only because her five kitties made such a racket, her irritated neighbour called the authorities.

            “Larky that neighbour so kay-poh, and call police,” Sharyn said.

            “Yeah, why didn’t you call the police?” Saffy asked.

            “Aiyah, I have so many chil-ren and their friend at home, always so noisy, you ting can hear cat, meh?”

            Saffy sighed. “At least it was a quick death.” That’s the thing about Saffy: she’s always up for a silver lining. When she found out that she only got a ten percent pay increment, she said at least she hadn’t been fired. Admittedly, she said this only after she’d ranted for half a day and then went down to Boat Quay and gotten blind drunk with Sharyn, but you get the point. “What if she’d been in a coma!” she went on, eyes widening in horror.

            “Nothing worse than being in a coma!” Amanda said firmly. “Imagine being trapped in your head like that!”

            Saffy hesitated. “Well, it’s not like you’re conscious or anything like that…” She trailed off.

            “You don’t know that. Nobody knows what people are really experiencing when they’re in a coma!”

            “But wouldn’t you remember when you woke up?” Saffy asked.

            “Not if the mind is so traumatised by the whole thing. Maybe when you wake up, you’re flooded with that chemical that makes you forget the experience….like after a woman gives birth which I read somewhere is nature’s way of making sure you go on to have a second child.”

            “That didn’t work with my mother,” I said. “Her favourite story when I was growing up was how as she lay there in the delivery room after I was born, she’d sworn to herself she’d never again have another child.”

            Amanda patted her hand. “It explains so much,” she said cryptically.

            A few days later, when Saffy was in the office and pretending to work, she watched a new episode of Dr Pimple Popper on YouTube. She suddenly gasped and reached for the phone to call Amanda.

            “Do you know what Dr Sandra Lee has?” she asked in the same tone she’d used to divulge the news that Melissa Chan had contracted an STD from her Italian boyfriend.

            “Saf, I’m busy, so unless…” Amanda began.

            “She has this pact with her girlfriends that if one of them ever gets into an accident and is in a coma, the others have to take turns to pluck out her chin hairs! Can you imagine that?” Saffy asked with great drama.

            On the other end of the line, Amanda stopped typing. “I don’t have any chin hairs…”

            “But you might!” Saffy told her. “Who knows with comas! You could slip into one with SKII skin, and wake up in desperate need of a Browhaus wax!”

            As Amanda later pointed out at dinner, it’s not as if life isn’t already full of unpleasant surprises, but who needs to wake up to chin hair?

            “So will you pluck mine out, if ever something happens to me?” Saffy asked, stabbing morosely at her mushroom pasta.

            “Yes, and I’ll even make sure you’re waxed every month!” Amanda promised, though you could tell her heart really wasn’t in it.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “No, don’t wax me. If I’m in a coma, it’ll mean I won’t be working, so I can’t afford to get that done. And anyway, unless I’m also six months pregnant, there’ll be no reason for anyone to ever look down there!” she added with emphasis. “Just pluck out my chin hairs, so that I look respectable!”

            Apparently news that some women have chin hair has sent Sharyn into a spin. “Hah? Got such thing, meh?” she said when she first heard about it. She immediately called her regular therapist at Browhaus who said that a great number of her clients have prolific chin hair.

            “But not you, lah!” Bernadette said reassuringly. “Usually, is my ang moh client. They got hair on their chin, they got hair on their lip, they got hair on their face! Aiyoh, I always scared when they come in for appointment! Their session take forever. The ang moh man lagi worse, ah, I tell you!”

            “See!” Saffy told Amanda. “At least it’s just my chin you’d have to pluck!”

           

           

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.”