Touch and Go

A few days ago, Saffy woke up with a severe crick in her neck. She emerged from the bedroom with her head dangling backwards at such an unnatural angle that Amanda, coming out of the kitchen, dropped her bowl of cereal and screamed.

            “Her head was, like, it was just hanging by a nerve!” she later told everyone who would listen. “Her hair was all over the place and she was wearing that awful white night dress. Seriously, she looked like that terrible girl in ‘Sinister’!”

            “Oh, God, please stop screaming!” Saffy moaned. “I must have slept in a funny position because I can’t move my neck now! I need Song! Can someone call him and book me in? Please?”

            Song is our masseur. And when I say ‘our’, I mean ‘my’. Because I was the one who discovered him. Of course, if you want to be technical about it, it was my friend Peter who’d introduced him to me, but why go that far back?

            The man is a miracle worker. He was in his thirties when he started losing his sight. And when you’re that age and a physical disability is suddenly thrust upon you, there aren’t many career options to take.

But clearly, Song was made of sterner stuff, because he discovered he had a talent for therapeutic massage. I like to say he has magic fingers. If there’s a kink somewhere in your body, he’ll find it. Once, after kneading my temple, and without any prompting, he told me that I’d been having headaches.

I was astonished. “How did you know?”

“I got magic fingers!” he said with triumph.

Over the years, he’s sorted out all my lower back pain, shoulder aches, crooked necks, sore calves and knotted glutes.

            The first time I sent Saffy to Song, she was dubious.

            “Are you sure he’s really blind?” she demanded. Unspoken scenarios of perversion hung in the air. Or so I thought. “Because,” Saffy went on, “if he isn’t, then I’m going to have to wear my nice underwear.”

            Amanda’s eyes widened. “That’s what you’re concerned about?”

            “Well, I don’t want him to think I can’t afford nice knickers. So, if he really can’t see, then there’s no point me wasting Victoria’s Secret on him, is there?”

            She came back from her session glowing and with confirmation of Song’s lack of visual acuity. “Yep, he’s totally blind. He never once looked at my breasts. It’s such an odd feeling,” she said, looking a little perplexed at the sensation. “But more to the point, he’s amazing! Within two seconds, he’d located all the knots in my right shoulder! I love him!”

            Intrigued, Amanda made an appointment and schlepped all the way out to Song’s studio in Commonwealth. Later, she reported that she’d spent the whole hour screaming in pain.

            “But good pain, right?” Song asked as he used his elbow to dig into a nerve ending on Amanda’s left glute.

            “If you…say…so…Song!” Amanda gasped.

            “If got pain, that mean got problem!” Song announced happily.

            Of course, over the years, word of mouth has meant that he’s taken on more and more clients. So much so that where you could once just call for an appointment with a few hours notice, now, it’s like trying to get an audience with the Queen of England.

            “Hah? She want to come now, ah?” Song said when Amanda rang with Saffy’s SOS. “Cannot, lah! I got client now. Tomorrow evening, can?”

            Saffy’s shriek could be heard all the way in Penang. “Tomorrow evening? I can’t walk around like a muppet till tomorrow evening! Tell him I’m in pain! Here, give me the phone! Song, I’m in pain! I need you!”

            “Aiyoh!” Song said. “OK, OK, I see if I can shift my next client. I call you back!”

            And so we waited, Saffy, with her head still thrown back in a rictus of agony, Amanda flipping through Vogue, and me, thinking what I could have for dinner.

            “God, what will happen,” Saffy suddenly wondered, her voice directed to the back of the room, “when Song decides to retire? Or…if…if he gets his sight back?”

            Amanda hesitated. “Uhm. That will be bad thing because…?”

            “He might not be any good any more!” Saffy replied in a tone that seemed surprised that Amanda didn’t see the point.

            “Saf, he’s not the Hulk!”

            “You don’t know that!” Saffy said. “He could lose all his magical powers the minute he can see again.”

            From my corner of the couch, I piped up, “Maybe he’ll lose his sight again the minute he lays eyes on your fabulous breasts!”

            From the silent glow, you could tell that the thought pleased Saffy immensely.

Children of the Revolution

The other day, I was talking to my best friend May over the phone. Well, when I say ‘talking’, I mean we’d barely said ‘hello’ to one another before her child Mina, my adored 8-year old god-daughter, began screaming in the background.

“Is that Go-Pa?” yelled the Golden Child. “I want to speak to Go-Pa! I want to speak to Go-Pa!”

“Mina,” said her Tiger Mother in the kind of tone that would normally freeze cream, “that is not how you speak to me!”

Mina barely paused. “I want to speak to Go-Pa, please! Please, may I speak to Go-Pa? What? I said ‘please’!’”

Clearly, her mother must have been exhausted from raising her because there was a shuffling on the phone and Mina came onto the line, her pixie voice crystalline all the way from her home in Munich.

“Go-Pa, hello!” Mina said in a rush. “How are you? Guess what? I’m taking ballet lessons? I go three times a week. My teacher is Fraulein Vett and she’s really tall and pretty. There is a boy in my class too, but he’s icky and no one wants to dance with him. When are you coming to visit me? And can you bring me a present because…”

“Mina, that is not how you speak to your Go-Pa! I did not raise you that way! Give me that phone now!”

There was another shuffle on the phone and you could tell from Mina’s subdued protests that her mother had just given her a Look of Death.

May came back on the line. “That daughter of mine. My God…”

“Listen,” I said urgently. “Why are you wasting that child’s youth with ballet classes?”

“What’s wrong with ballet classes? I want her to learn poise and coordination, though to be honest,” May’s voice dropped to a furtive whisper, “your god-daughter has two left feet. But she looks so adorable in her pink tutu!”

“You don’t want her to learn ballet!” I insisted. “She needs to learn krav maga!”

May paused. “Isn’t that a beef stew?”

“No! It’s martial arts! It’s kind of dirty street fighting!”

“And why would I want her to learn dirty street fighting?”

I sighed. “Because the world is a dangerous place. Especially for girls. You’re always reading in the paper about people being attacked by hoodlums and stuff! So she needs to know how to defend herself.”

“Why is it dirty street fighting?” May wanted to know.

“Oh, they teach you the good stuff like how to gouge out your attacker’s eyes, punch them in the throat and knee them in the balls and then you run away! It’s amazing. I was just watching a session on YouTube the other day!”

“And you think it’s a good thing that Mina learns that?”

“Well, what good is knowing how to do a pirouette when you’re facing off against an armed gangster in an alleyway?” I pointed out, adding, “Or the splits?”

“That’s just ridiculous!” May insisted.

“Don’t you worry about her safety?” I asked.

Because that’s the thing about having children, even if, like me, you’re having them vicariously.

You worry about their wellbeing. You worry about their future. You worry about their health. Whether their school is teaching them the right method to add and subtract. Whether they’re getting the right set of values from watching ‘Kim and Khloe Take Miami’. Whether their friends will lead them astray. You worry about strangers they may meet on their way to school. You worry about them crossing the street as you think of all those drivers out there who have one hand on the wheel and the other texting on their phone.

The list is endless. You just worry.

And if you can just tick one of those worries – like being able to defend themselves against unknown assailants – off your list, you convince yourself that you’ll sleep just a little bit better.  

“But I’m not sure I want Mina to learn how to knee some guy in the balls!” May was saying.

“Well, it’s not going to be just any guy,” I said reasonably. “It’s going to be a predatory attacker!”

“This is real life, not an episode of ‘Nikita’!” May said, but you could tell from her voice that she was wavering, as was, probably, her fantasy of seeing Mina on stage at the Royal Opera House in the lead role of the Swan Princess.

Amanda says the whole thing has made her realize that she, too, could do with a bit of self-defence classes. “I always worry that muggers are eyeing my Prada bag,” she said this morning.

Saffy says she will never get over the fact that Amanda has a Harvard law degree. 

Oh, I see!

One of the few things that unites me with my two flatmates, Saffy and Amanda is our collective myopia. We’re all blind as bats. Without our assorted visual aids, we’d be forever bumping into a wall. Which is why when an ocular catastrophe happens to one of us, it’s of immediate deep concern, galvanizing the entire flat into a flurry of frantic and often pointless activity. United we stand, divided we fall with blurred vision.

So, you can imagine the chaos a few days ago when Amanda came out of the bathroom and announced that she was going blind.

“I’m going blind!” were her exact words before she burst into tears and fell to the floor, sobbing dramatically.

“What? What? What?” Saffy immediately started shouting, racing to Amanda’s side.

“I can’t see!” Amanda wailed, hands covering her eyes. “Everything has gone blurry!”

“Well, wear your contacts then!” Saffy said, clutching Amanda maternally to her heaving bosom.

“I am wearing them!” Amanda moaned. “I can’t see a thing!”

“Blink hard!” Saffy advised. “Sometimes, you just need to clear the air from the contacts.”

“I’ve tried everything,” Amanda sniffed. “I’ve put eye-drops. Rotated the lenses. Taken them out. Put them back in. Nothing. Nothing is in focus. I’m going blind!”

An emergency phone call was made to the optometrist. “I’m going to sue if he’s damaged my eyes!” Amanda said stoutly, her killer legal instincts briefly reasserting themselves.

“Uh huh. Uh huh. We’ve tried that,” Saffy said into the phone. “Uh huh. Mmmm. Nope, tried that as well. She’s blind. Uh huh? Really? Huh!”

When she hanged up, she reported that Mark, the cute optometrist had instructed us to come down at once to his office. By the time we arrived, we were all slightly breathless and a little ill tempered on account of a little mascara accident. On the way there in the cab, Amanda insisted Saffy help her put on some make-up.

“I can’t show up looking like a dog!” Amanda said, ever conscious of potential dating opportunities in any situation. Just then, the cab suddenly swerved to avoid a bus and Saffy’s hand slipped while fluffing Amanda’s eye-lashes, drawing a thick black slash across Amanda’s forehead.

“I don’t see why it’s my fault that the cab swerved!” Saffy grumbled to me as Amanda groped her way into Mark’s office. “And hello, but don’t you think there are more urgent things to worry about at the moment besides her stupid make-up? Ooh, maybe I should see Mark since I’m here. I’m also having trouble with my vision.”

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d turned off the stove before rushing out of the flat. It’s funny how people react differently to a crisis.

Amanda wasn’t in there very long before she emerged. Somehow, she’d managed to fix her hair and tidy up her make-up and was presently beaming up at Mark.

“Oh, thank you!” she lisped attractively, laying a hand gently on his arm. “You were just wonderful! Simply wonderful!”

As it turned out, Amanda wasn’t going blind after all. In the misty gloom of our bathroom, she’d mistakenly switched her contact lenses, inserting them into the wrong eyes.

“I can’t believe how silly I was!” she exclaimed cheerfully, the world suddenly bright again as we waited for Saffy’s examination to be over. “And Mark’s asked me out on a date.”

“How do you do that?” I demanded jealously. “You just breathe and you get dates!”

Meanwhile, the world was not as bright for Saffy.

“It’s outrageous!” she reported later. “He says my vision is a bit wonky because the eyes are dried out because I don’t shut my eyes fully how is that at all humanly possible that I don’t shut my eyes fully and how come you got asked for a date?”

“You mean you sleep with your eyes half open?” Amanda gasped. “Like a snake?”

“Apparently!” Saffy huffed. “He wants me to check if my eyes are closed when I sleep and how am I supposed to do that if I’m supposed to be asleep men can be so stupid!”

Then a thought occurred to her and she turned to me. “You have to sleep with me tonight and watch how my eyelids close! I can’t ask Amanda – she’s such an auntie, she can’t stay up past 10 o’clock!”

So here I am in bed with Saffy and she’s only just fallen asleep. I can feel my allergies acting up. It’s very dusty in here and there are far too many pink frills about. It’s incredible what I have to put up with. Meanwhile, I’m too scared to move in case I wake Saffy but I’m a bit concerned that I may have left the stove on after dinner.

Doggy Position

There I was, quietly having breakfast a few mornings ago in the little apartment I share with my flat-mates Saffy and Amanda. The sun had only just begun to peep over the neighbouring HDB blocks, turning the sky a mellow gold. 

Saffy emerged from her bedroom, doing her best “Girl coming out of the TV in The Ring” impersonation.

“I’m fat!” she announced by way of greeting and promptly collapsed on the sofa, clearly exhausted by the effort of talking so early in the morning. “Ooh, don’t forget we have yoga tonight.”

A few weeks ago, Amanda had arrived home, flushed with excitement. “I just signed us up for yoga class!” she declared with the kind of fervour she normally reserves for a new Brad Pitt movie. “It’s very tomorrow, and I’m surprised we didn’t do it years ago. And Tock Oon is taking it. He’s gorgeous!”

And after a few false starts – we missed the first two lessons on account of The Voice – we were finally ready for our first lesson; the girls primed for their yoga debut on Orchard Road with a whole new wardrobe and matching scrunchies for their hair.

As usual, we were late, this time on account of the fact that you can never find a single taxi in Raffles Place on a Friday night. After a breathless dash to the MRT and loud complaints on my part that going to yoga on a Friday night with my flatmates was one reason why I was still pathetically single, we arrived in class with everyone already into the Archer’s Position.

And for the record, Tock Oon looks like a dog, and not in a good way either. He also has an annoyingly fake American accent that makes you want to turn off the radio, except he’s not on the air.

“What! Is Amanda kidding us?” Saffy mumbled as she grabbed a mat, looking splendid and not a little like Wonder Woman in her tight Spandex yoga outfit. “He’s a dog! But PS, I’m loving that guy in the third row. He can rearrange my chakras any time! Let’s go sit next to him!”

For the next hour, Tock Oon made us do things that I’m sure would be banned if they ever appeared in a cinema near you. At one stage, I suddenly found myself flat on my back and my legs thrown over the back of my head. It occurred to me that from this position, the world looks very strange upside-down amid a forest of unidentifiable legs.

“Hmm,” Amanda murmured beside me. “This reminds me of that time I dated that Italian gymnast, Paolo. Remember him?”

“Remember him? The painting on the wall between our bedrooms fell off its hook!” I gasped in pain, losing complete sensation in my ankles and wishing I’d worn some tighter underwear.

Meanwhile, Tock Oon had stopped next to Saffy who was struggling with her Forward Bend position.

“Stretch!” he exhorted her. “Reach for your toes! Reach! Why you not reach, one?” his perfectly modulated Mid-West, East Coast, West Coast and Texan inflected accent temporarily abandoning him.

“Well, maybe if you cut off my spine, I would be able to!” Saffy snapped, her body fixed at the vertical, her fingers unable to get past her knee-caps. “This is not natural!”

By the time we progressed to the Wheel Position, I was hurting in places that had no business feeling pain, convinced I’d dislocated my shoulder in several spots while Saffy moaned that her head still hurt after her fall from the head-stand position.

“I’m still waiting to be energized!” Saffy complained bitterly in the cab home. “And if this is how I’m supposed to feel with aligned chakras, then I want a refund! I can’t believe we actually paid money for that. What a rip-off!”

The next day, we received an email from Tock Oon announcing that Monday’s class was cancelled as he’d torn a ham-string while doing his Sun Salutation, completely vindicating Saffy’s conviction that yoga is an inherently dangerous activity, on par with bungee jumping and parachuting.

“It’s karma, I’m telling you!” she huffed with satisfaction as she picked up the phone and dialed the yoga school. “It’s for all that pain he put us through, the sadistic sicko. Yes, hello? I want to cancel my classes. I would like a refund. Yes, immediately. In this lifetime, definitely.”