Bloc Party

My mother always says that if you want to get the latest news, don’t bother turning on the news or waiting for the feed to drop on Facebook. Just go get your hair done, she advises. Your hairdresser will update you. “That’s how I found out Uncle John had died in the arms of his mistress!” she told us once.

“Wait,” my sister said. “Janet told you Uncle John died. With his mistress.”

Mother arched a perfectly drawn eyebrow. “Not just with his mistress,” she said. “In her arms!”

“And Janet knows this how?” Michelle asked.

Mother looked around to make sure Daddy was out of ear-shot and leaned in. “Because Janet was the mistress!”

Years later, as Michelle recounted the story to her therapist, she wondered aloud if this was the sort of conversation a mother should have with her ten-year-old. “I mean, where are the boundaries?” she asked. “Is this why I have so many issues?”

Saffy says that sometimes she really does blame the parents. “Your sister is a mess!” she told me the other day. We were on the couch, sunk deep within its cushions, watching ‘Game of Thrones’ and wondering, not for the first time, just how some people are so daring they can just take off all their clothes for the whole world to see.

“I mean, look at what’s happening right now!” Saffy said, waving a chicken drumstick at the screen. “If this was a 3D movie, she’d have poked my eyes out with her thrusting boobs! What must her parents think?”

Just then, Amanda marched in the front door. She crossed the room, picked up the remote and hit pause.

Saffy’s bosom inflated above the cushions. “Excuse us!”

Amanda waved her hands. “Shut up, Saf. You’ll never guess what, but we might be going en bloc!”

Saffy gasped and stopped chewing on her chicken.

Apparently, Amanda was downstairs in our condo hairdresser’s getting highlights in her hair when Irene casually asked her how she was going to vote.

Amanda looked up from her latest issue of Women’s Weekly and stared at Irene in the mirror. “Vote for what?”

Irene’s brush paused in mid-stroke. “Ay? You doh-no, ah? On block, mah! How you doh-no?”

Turns out that one of Irene’s clients is the condo’s secretary and as she was giving Mel a unicorn highlight, Mel had said that several committee members were proposing to put the matter up at the next condo meeting. The last time they’d tried this stunt was five years ago, but there was such a complete lack of interest from our condo’s population of aged retirees that the whole thing died a quick silent death like poor Madame Wong in #07-08 who died last year of a heart attack in her sleep.

“So why are they trying again?” Saffy moaned. “My God, I don’t want to move! I’m too lazy to even get off this sofa to go pee and they want me to move house? Seriously?”

“Apparently, some owners here don’t actually live here,” Amanda said. “They’ve bought several properties as investments, but the rental market is so soft, they can’t service their mortgages, so they’re desperate to sell, especially if they can increase the plot ratio and get some developer interested!”

Saffy turned her head towards me. “Did you understand a word she just said?”

“I stopped listening after ‘some owners’”, I told her.

According to Amanda, Irene also said that she’d been talking to a number of the other residents, including Mrs Yeo and Mrs Chan in block 246 and they both said that all their friends are going to vote against any en bloc. “They’re in their 70s, and Irene says the only way they’re going to be moving out is into an ambulance!”

            “Oh good!” Saffy sighed.

            “But on block is good what!” Sharyn later said, offering her considerable expertise as the owner of two apartments that have both gone en bloc for considerable sums of money. “Wah, when my Gillman Heights go on block, I make so much mah-ney, you know!”

            “Yeah, good for you, Shazz!” Saffy said with just the faintest edge of bitterness in her voice. “But we’re renting! So the only person who’s going to be celebrating is our landlord, not us!”

            “Oh yah hor. I forgot you got no money! Aiyoh, so how, ah?”

            “I may have to move in with you,” Saffy said. “I’d have nowhere else to go.”

            Behind Sharyn’s Coke bottle-thick spectacles, her eyes widened. “Hah?”

            “Well, you’re the one who said en blocs are good!”

            “I got say such ting, meh?” Sharyn said weakly.

            Saffy later said she lives for such moments.

            

Demand and Supply

Sharyn says that from the minute she was old enough to stand up and walk unaided, she had been brainwashed into getting married. Her very first doll, apparently, had been a bride, resplendent in her white polyester wedding gown and veil that, as with most things white in the hands of children who love to eat dirt, eventually turned brown.

            “And the first movie dey bring me to is Cinderella!” she said the other day. “Not like girl today. Dey see Wonder Woman. My time only got Cinderella!”

            “You make Cinderella sound like she’s a bad role model, Shazz,” said Saffy. “Every day, I wish I was married to someone handsome and rich, so I don’t have to work anymore and other people do things for me!”

            Sharyn waved her hands dismissively. “Aiyah, you can afford your own maid, lah! What for you mare-lee to get a maid?”

            Saffy stiffened, every HR bone in her body on full alert for a possible discrimination law suit against management. “Seriously, you have to stop saying ‘maid’! The correct term is ‘helper’!”

            Sharyn sniffed. “Anyway, hor, mare-lee, is one ting, but dey neh-ber say any-ting about the congee-ger right!”

            A silence settled over our lunch table at Island Café. As usual, Amanda turned towards Saffy, widely regarded throughout Singapore, Batam and the Greater Kuching Area as the undisputed Sharyn Whisperer. As Amanda once observed, if Sharyn were ever the first contact that suspicious, potentially hostile aliens made with Earth, the only thing standing between us and full-blown thermonuclear destruction of the ‘Predator’ kind would be Saffy. “Seriously, most of the time I have absolutely no idea what she’s saying!”

            But this time around, even Saffy was forced to concede defeat. “What?” she said, eventually.

            Sharyn looked surprised. “Hah? You doh-no, ah? I taught your England very powderful? Got English word you don’t understand, meh? Congee-ger right! Is when your husband say he can sleep with you!”

            Later, back in the flat, Amanda debriefed me on the ensuing confusion. “It took a while, but eventually, we worked out she meant conjugal rights!”

            “Oh,” I said. “Conjugal. What about it?”

            Turns out that in the world according to Sharyn, her parents’ deplorable lapse in educating their only daughter about matrimonial sexual demands had been the source of many tensions between her and her husband over the years. Amanda said it was like that scene from ‘Annie Hall’.

            “You know, where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton see their psychiatrists to complain about the sex in their relationship? Woody Allen’s psychiatrist asks him how many times they have sex, and he says, ‘Hardly ever! Maybe three times a week!’ and Diane Keaton’s psychiatrist asks her and she’s like, ‘Constantly! Maybe three times a week!’”

            I was impressed. “You don’t remember what you had for breakfast, but you remember the lines of an entire scene from a 1976 movie?”

            “1977,” Amanda said.

            A few days later, my mother FaceTimed me all the way from Vancouver where she and Father were visiting one of her cousins.

            “My God, I have to tell you this,” she began immediately. “You remember Cousin Lin? The one who married Conrad, that fat banker with liver problems? Well, anyway, we were all at her house playing mah-jong with Cousin Pin and Cousin Jin, and we had barely started the second round when Conrad came home. He stopped by the table and I nearly fainted from his awful BO and then he says to Lin, ‘Honey, let’s go upstairs for a bit!’ And at first, we all thought well this is irritating, can’t you see we’re in the middle of mah-jong? So, then Lin gets up and as she starts to follow Conrad upstairs, she leans in and whispers, ‘This might take about half an hour. He has such stamina, he’s wearing me out!”

            Later, when I told this story to Saffy, she literally screamed. “Wait, what? She went upstairs for a quickie with her husband?”

            “Well, I don’t consider half an hour a quickie, but yes. In the middle of the mah-jong game!”

            “How old is this Cousin Lin?”

            “Seventy! And he’s seventy-two. I asked my mother the same thing!” I told her.

            “Oh. My. God!

            “And so for half an hour, my mother and her cousins just sat at the table making awkward small talk while upstairs, conjugal rights were being exercised! Loudly, apparently. The walls are thin in Canadian houses.”

            “That’s kind of gross, no?” Saffy said.

            “You think?”

            Sharyn says if that ever happened to her at seventy, it would be the last straw. “Confirm die-vorce, one!” she said darkly.

             

Reality Check

One of the great things about being a late adopter of technology is that by the time you get around to using it, it’s pretty much all sorted out. The teething glitches, the navigational issues the hardware problems and software tricks…all already solved by the time you press the on button.

            “Can you imagine if we’d been the first to buy that exploding Samsung phone?” Saffy said the other day as she opened the box for her new iPhone X. She radiated smug superiority.

            On the other side of the couch, Amanda watched the unwrapping ceremony. “The best thing about buying an Apple product is opening the packaging. It’s so beautiful!”

            With both hands, Saffy carefully lifted her gleaming black phone out of its white cocoon. She held it with the kind of reverence you normally associate with the Virgin Mary presenting the infant Jesus to the magi. “It’s gorgeous!” she breathed.

            “Such a pretty colour, too!” Amanda said.

            “And now, I can stalk Garrett Swann on Instagram in hi-def colour!” Saffy announced.

            Amanda sniffed. “Garrett Swann? You’re still following that pasty white fur-ball?”

            Saffy paused and looked up. “Why? Who are you stalking?”

            “Tmski!” Amanda replied without hesitation.

            “Who’s that?”

            “Prince Mateen of Brunei! He’s hot! And he’s rich!” said Amanda with the kind of confidence that can only come from someone who’s also hot and rich. She scrolled through her phone and shoved the screen in Saffy’s direction.

            Saffy scrutinized the images. “Hmmm,” she said eventually. “Yes, he’s cute, but what is he, fifteen years old?”          

            “He’s at least in his twenties!” Amanda said.

            “He looks like he’s ten!” Saffy insisted.

            Later at lunch with Barney Chen and his best hag Leena, I said it was so weird how Instagram makes us all feel like we’re bosom buddies with complete strangers.

            “It’s like how I follow Naomi Campbell?” I said. “She wouldn’t know me if she walked over me in her stilettos, but I can tell you exactly where she went last night and what she was wearing! Isn’t that weird?”

            “That’s cause you’re new to all this,” Barney said in his rumbling basso, his voice like a row of Rolls-Royce doors all closing at the same time. “It’s intoxicating in the beginning. The first time I started following Cindy Crawford, I felt like I’d grown up in her kitchen with her gorgeous husband and children! But none of it is real!” he added. “Don’t fall for it! Am I right, Leena?”

             Leena nodded sagely. She put her fork down. Turns out that after she gave birth to her daughter, she spent a lot of time in bed feeling very depressed and alone.

“Everyone said, ‘Oh you must be feeling so happy now that you have a baby! You’ve been trying to have Emma for so long!’ And yet, you know,” she said, leaning in, “I was so horribly depressed. It was probably a little bit of post-partum, but I think a lot of it also had to do with Facebook and Instagram. Everyone on it seemed to be having such a fabulous life. Great parties, great beach holidays, amazing meals, fun friends…And here I was stuck in bed all day with a baby that if she wasn’t latched onto my breast with her sharp teeth, she was screaming!”

I frowned at the image.

            “This is what happens when you have children!” Barney said, placing a giant paw over Leena’s hand. “I did warn you!”

            “You also warned me not to buy Facebook shares!” Leena said tartly.

            Barney shrugged.

            “Let me tell you though,” Leena went on. “You can have 600 friends on Facebook and 100,000 followers on Instagram, but do you know who shows up at your doorstep at three in the morning with a tub of your favourite ice-cream and holds you while you cry because your baby won’t stop crying? This guy, that’s who.”

            Barney turned pink and waved his massive steak-like hands. “I am your floor!” he rumbled.

            Leena and I exchanged glances. “What?” I said.

            “I am her floor!” he repeated as he turned to Leena. “I am your floor. If you ever fall, I will be there!”
            When I got home and repeated this to Amanda, she sighed deeply. “Oh my God, that is so incredibly beautiful!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Really? You think?”

            “That’s what you guys are to me!” Amanda said, her eyes turning dewy. “You’re my floor!”

            “Ay, you know, ah,” Sharyn said, “floor very dirty, one, ok? Must every day mop, one! Why must be floor, hah?”

            “You kill me, Shazz!” Saffy told her.