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!”