Jet Scream

Amanda just came back from a work trip to New York and she’s completely shattered by jetlag. Which is pleasing Saffy – a lifetime chronic sufferer of insomnia – no end, because for the first time in a long while, she finally has someone to spend the early hours of the morning with.

            “For reasons that have nothing to do with sex!” Saffy pointed out this morning. “Make sure you include that bit in your column! I don’t want people, and by people, I mean the police, to have funny ideas about me and my personal life. I’m very happy with my non-controversial, law abiding life here in Singapore!”

            Amanda says it’s just so odd that she is suffering this badly from jetlag.

            “I mean,” she said at breakfast, “I can understand it if I was flying economy and couldn’t get any sleep, but I’ve not been in that cabin since high school, so I’m not sure what the problem is!”

            Saffy said Amanda should stop talking like this in public as it’s exactly the kind of sentiments that led Anton Casey to start a new life in Perth.

            Amanda looked puzzled. “What public? We’re in our flat. And besides, how is that even the same?”

            “I’m just saying,” Saffy replied ominously. “The walls have ears!”

            “I wish you did,” Amanda murmured delicately into her hair as she poured herself another cup of anti-jetlag herbal tea.

            “I heard that!”

            I looked up from my 8DAYS horoscopes. “Seriously? It’s going to be like this? For how long?”

            The thing about jetlag is that it’s the strangest affliction. It’s night. You want to sleep. Your body tells you that you want to sleep. Out on the streets, the traffic has slowed down because everyone has gone home to sleep. And yet, there you are, lying in bed, your body tortured with bone aching weariness, but you’re wide awake. 

            Then, during the day, as you drag yourself to work on the MRT, you suddenly find yourself fighting to stay awake just in case you miss your next stop. And before you know it, you probably will fall asleep, your head lolling to the side and onto the shoulder of a complete stranger. And when you wake up, you find that you’ve just been uploaded onto YouTube and mocked on Facebook.

            Meanwhile, Amanda’s into day three of her jetlag. For two nights now, she and Saffy have been working their way through old recorded episodes of American Idol, sighing over Harry Connick, Jr.

            “He’s just so adorable!” Saffy told Sharyn at lunch. “So handsome. So clever. So witty!”

            “He and Keith Urban have such great chemistry!” Amanda added. “But I agree, if I had to choose, it would be Harry!”

            Sharyn sniffed. “I doan like him!”

“Who?” Amanda asked.

“Hair-ly, lah! So cheem! The first time I watch him, hor, he tell the contestant she sing on the lower register. At first, I think, how he know she work in a check-out? She only say she is a single mud-der! Then my son tell me that lower register mean voice range! Alamak, how I know? But Keith I also doan like. I think he got wear make-up!”

            Saffy shrugged. As far as she was concerned, Sharyn not liking Harry Connick, Jr was good news because that was one less woman she had to scratch and fight off should Harry ever come randomly into her life.

            “But you know who else I think is cute?” she went on. “Ryan Seacrest! I just want to pick him up and take him home!”

            Sharyn raised her eyebrows. “First got Blad-ley. Then got Hair-ly. Now got Lie-yan! Wah, your bed very big, is it?”

            Amanda, never one to waste an opportunity for a girls’ night out, asked Sharyn to join her and Saffy for American Idol night. “Come on, it’ll be fun!” she said.

            Sharyn looked doubtful. “Ay, I have to get up early the next day and work, ok? Maybe that’s why you got jetlag. You doan take care of your body, ah, I tell you. You think you still very young, is it?”

            “I always fly business class. I really don't see how I can take care of my body any better. Oh…I see what you’re saying! You mean I should be flying first class instead? Do you think that might be the problem?”

            Sharyn blinked, then looked at Saffy who stared hard into the distance. Later, when Amanda had gone back to the office to catch a nap at her desk, Sharyn asked, “Ay, I ask you, are you sure Amanda got go to Harvard?”

            “Don't get me started, Sharyn!”

The Hunger Games

A few days ago, I was just minding my own business, as one does. To be specific, I was on the lounge, reading my latest issue of Vanity Fair, deeply engrossed in an article about Edward Snowden and the whole NSA scandal.

            Just then, Amanda walked in the front door, burdened with shopping bags from Prada and Gucci.

            “I’m not proud to say this,” she announced, dropping the bags onto the floor with a sigh, “but I’ve probably spent enough money in one afternoon to put three African orphans through Harvard.”

            “Well, don’t say it too loud, the NSA might hear you!”

            Amanda, who was just about to kick off her right high heel, paused. “What?” she asked eventually.

            “I’m just reading this riveting article in Vanity Fair,” I said, waving the magazine at her. “It says here that the NSA have the ability to turn on any mobile phone, even one that is off, and use it as a microphone.”

            Amanda sniffed. “Good luck trying to get any useful information out of our conversations!”

            “They might think we’re talking in code! And get this, the NSA has a five billion dollar budget!”

            Amanda sighed, her lovely eyes misting over as she thought of all the shopping she could get done at Prada with five billion dollars.

            Saffy chose that moment to storm out of her bedroom in a whirlwind of agitation.

            “You’re an hour late!” she yelled into her handphone which she clutched in a white-knuckled clench. “It’s now 1.30pm! Our reservation is at 12.30, and you’re still not here…Don’t you dare tell me to calm down! I don’t care if there’s a traffic jam on the PIE, you should have thought of that and left your house an hour earlier! By the time we get to the restaurant, it’s going to be time for dinner!”

            With that, Saffy stabbed the off button on her phone. Instinctively, Amanda and I ducked, though even in that moment of crisis, I couldn’t help but notice that Amanda had automatically stepped in front of her shopping bags to shield them from any collateral damage.

            Saffy glared at us. “What are you doing?”

            “Uhm,” I said from behind Vanity Fair, “we thought you were going to go all Naomi Campbell on us.”

            Saffy put down her phone and took a deep breath. “Honestly, I’m so angry with Bradley! He was supposed to pick me up an hour ago. Now, it’s 1.30pm and I am starving! It’s going to be at least after 2 by the time we sit down at the restaurant, and 2.30 by the time we eat! Who has lunch at 2.30?”

            “Have a biscuit now?” Amanda suggested as she moved slowly to pick up her shopping and edged around Saffy to her bedroom.

            “I don’t want to have a biscuit, I want to have lunch! Now!” Saffy snapped.

            Later that afternoon, after Bradley had shown up, having broken every speed limit to do so, and taken Saffy out to a very late and expensive boozy lunch, she came home in a considerably more cheerful mood.

            “Honestly, I’m so embarrassed!” she said. “I just turn into such a hormonal witch when I’m hungry! It’s like an out of body experience and I’m just seeing the world through this haze of red hot anger!”

            “Apparently there’s a word for that,” I said.

            “For what?”

            “For that feeling of anger, panic and aggression you get when you’re hungry. It’s hangry!”

            Saffy looked impressed. “Really? Hangry? That’s an actual word?”

            “I read it in a British newspaper the other day, so it must be true. It’s their language, after all.”

            “Well, I skipped lunch,” Amanda said, coming into the lounge room and wearing her latest purchases. “I was so busy shopping, I forgot it was lunch time.”

            “You see, I just don’t understand how people do that. How do you forget it’s lunch? It’s like saying you forgot to breathe!”

            “Well, that’s exactly what happened to me when I saw this handbag in Gucci!”

            “That’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever said, Amanda,” Saffy sniffed, clearly coming down from her post-meal high.

            Later, it occurred to me that Saffy would make the world’s worst spy. If she were ever captured, all her kidnappers would need to do would be to deprive her of lunch because by dinner time, she’d be ready to spill every single state secret she knew.

            “Imagine if she had high security clearance in the NSA!” I told Amanda.

            “Maybe that’s why there’ve been so many leaks,” she pointed out. “Maybe they’re all hangry!”

            Sharyn says it’s a good thing Singapore isn’t run by stupid people like me and Amanda. 

Just Kidding

The thing about fairy tales is that they never tell you what happens after the ‘Happily ever after’. Sure the prince and the scullery maid fall in love and ride off into the sunset, but even as a child, I always wondered, did the maid have to sign a pre-nup agreement?

I know this makes me sound like I was a precocious toddler, but in my family, ‘pre-nuptial’ was one of the first words we learnt. I remember my mother playing mah-jong with her sisters and one session, the topic of gossip was their cousin Cheong’s son who had just married a girl whom everyone unanimously agreed was a brazen gold-digger.

            “She wouldn’t sign the pre-nup!” my mother said as she swirled the tiles with unusual aggression, no doubt thinking about the financial drama awaiting her future gold-digging daughters-in-law.

            Auntie Wai-ling sucked in her breath. “I bet she was already pregnant before they got married! That’s how they lure their prey these days. These girls are just so desperate and clever!”

            When you’re a child whose head doesn’t even clear the edge of a mah-jong table, you tend to have the attention span of a dead mosquito, but somehow, the word ‘pre-nup’ stuck. Later that night, when my father was putting me to bed, I asked him, “Papa, what’s a pre-nup?”

            To my father’s eternal credit, he didn’t even blink, he was so used by then to the strange things that came out of his children’s mouths. A pre-nup, he explained, was when two people, before their wedding, agreed on what to do with their money if they ever divorced.

            “Do you and Mama have one?” I remember asking.

            “No,” he sighed. “Which is why we can never get divorced! Otherwise, she will take me to the cleaners.”

            “What does…”

            “That’s tomorrow night’s bed-time story,” he said firmly. “Marriages are very expensive. That’s all you need to know. And, uh, don’t repeat to your mother what I just said to you, ok?”

            So, that was one of the first real life lessons I learnt – that marriage is expensive. And that it’s a big secret. It didn’t take too long for me to realise that they never told you that at the end of the endless fairy tales we read. Not Cinderella, not Snow White, not Rapunzel, not Jack and the Beanstalk, not any of it. In every one, the hero and the heroine fell in love, got married and lived happily ever after. There was no discussion about money.

            The other real life lesson I learnt was that not only are marriages expensive, children are even more so.

            This lesson we all learnt very early on. My mother was always moaning about how expensive we all were, though as my sister would later point out to her therapist, this was really rich considering it was my father who was paying all the bills, not Mother.

            I bring all this up because I was reading an interview of Kui Jien in a back copy of 8DAYS the other day and he said that school fees for his kid were between $20,000 and $40,000.

            “Shut up!” Amanda said when I told her. “That’s how much it costs to send a kid to school these days?”

            “If it’s an international school,” I said. “And the kid’s daycare costs $1,000 a month!”

            “Twelve thousand dollars a year?” Saffy shrieked. “That’s…that’s…”

            “That’s more than a business class ticket to New York on SQ!” Amanda cut in, looking very disturbed.

            “Why does it cost so much to teach a kid the alphabet and to add two and two?” Saffy wanted to know.

            “Imagine if you had more than one child, like Sharyn does!” I went on, thoroughly gripped by this horror bedtime story.

            As it turns out, nothing drowns out the loud ticking of a biological clock more efficiently than the sheer brutal noise-cancelling reality of $40,000 a year. Until recently, Amanda could not be relied on to pass Le Petit Bateau or a toddler without getting all misty-eyed and emotional. Now, she says, when she sees a child, all she can think of is the fact that it’s costing four Hermes Birkin bags.

            “Per year!” she will emphasise. “Or maybe just one crocodile skin bag. But still…”

            When Saffy next met up with Sharyn, she gave her best friend a big hug. “Oh, you poor thing!” she sniffed. “And I mean that literally, too!”

            “Aiyoh, you siow, ah!’ Sharyn moaned, squirming in Saffy’s tight embrace. “What do you want?”

            “Do you need money?” Saffy asked.

            My sister says, right there, is a sentence you never read in a fairy tale.

           

             

           

             

White Noise

A few mornings ago, Saffy emerged from the bathroom sobbing piteously.

            Amanda looked up from her copy of Vogue, blinked as she assessed the damage, and then went back to reading. Always taking my cue from Amanda, I suddenly felt lost, unsure of how I was meant to react. My eyes swiveled madly back and forth, my mouth opening and closing like a drowning goldfish.

            Even Saffy eventually stopped sobbing.

            “Uhm,” she said. “I’m sobbing hysterically here…”

            Amanda’s voice floated out from behind the cover of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. “No, you’re not. You’re just having one of your drama moments about nothing very important!”

            Saffy gasped. “How…how…how dare you! I’ve never been so insulted in my life!”

            “More than that time we went to Taboo with Barney Chen, and the waiter called you ‘Sir’?”

            Saffy gasped again. Her formidable chest inflated to such a dangerous volume, I slowly inched my chair backwards.

            Amanda sighed and put down her magazine.

            “Alright, what’s the matter?”

            Saffy’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t do me any favours! If you’re not interested…”

            “Listen,” I said urgently. “Are you two having that time of the month at the same time? Because I’ve heard of such things happening when women live together, and suddenly their monthly whatsits occur simultaneously and drive all the menfolk to drink and adultery!”

            Saffy’s natural thick skin combined with her need to share her latest trauma overwhelmed both Amanda’s insult and my sheer male pointlessness. In an instant, all was forgiven and forgotten as she pulled out a chair and sat down delicately.

            “Something awful just happened in the bathroom,” she announced as soon as she was comfortably settled.

            “You discovered a wrinkle,” Amanda said in the kind of bored tone that God must use when he comes home and picks up the missed prayers on his Holy Phone messaging system.

            “Oh dear God,” Saffy said on cue, “it’s worse than that!”

            In spite of herself, this got Amanda’s attention. “What can possibly be worse than discovering a wrinkle?” she asked with genuine concern.

             Saffy closed her eyes and shuddered. She drew in a deep breath.

            “I discovered a white hair…”

            “Well, that’s not so bad…”

            “…in my unmentionables!”

            Even though I was fully concentrating on the conversation, for a moment, I frowned, feeling a little lost, though as Amanda later said, I could hardly be blamed. “With Saffy, her unmentionables could be anywhere!”

            Apparently, Saffy had just emerged from the shower and was standing in front of the mirror examining herself with a critical eye, as women apparently tend to do at such moments. Her gaze swept down and did a double take along with a sharp intake of breath. She leant in closer, then turned her head down on her body for a closer look. Which, she says, is when she verified the reality of the strand of white hair.

            “It’s the end! I tell you it’s the end,” she moaned to Sharyn the next day over lunch at the Ion’s Food Republic. “When you get a white hair in your unmentionables, it’s the end! I always knew the day was coming, but I just didn’t expect it to come so soon!”

            Under the pretext of taking off her hairband and re-tying her hair, though you could tell that she was really just very quietly pulling her hair in deep frustration, Sharyn smiled tightly.

            “Ay, first of all, hor, can you please stop calling your thing un-men-shun-able, can or not? Wah, you damn crazy, you know!”

            “And calling it ‘your thing’ is better?” Saffy wanted to know.

            “Ay,” Sharyn repeated. “Ek-skew me, but where got people talk about this kind of thing, one? Next time, hor, at least give me some notice, can? Where got sar-dun-ly tell people you find white hair in your thing, one? I’m eating, some more!”

            “What am I going to do?” Saffy moaned. “I can’t let Bradley see it!”

            “How can he see?”

            Saffy blinked. “How…What do you mean, how? Because sometimes, you know, he goes…he goes…you know, he…he…goes there!”

            The penny dropped. Sharyn rolled her eyes. “Ai-yoooh! Choy!”

            “Can I dye it?”

            “Hah? You want to put ammonia in your thing, ah? You get burn, then how?”

            This morning, Amanda said she’d made a few discreet enquiries with her hairdresser and apparently some waxing salons will dye one’s unmentionables.

            “I’ve booked an appointment for you,” she told an enthralled Saffy. “And I’m coming with you. I want to see how they do it.”

            I was astonished. “You’re going to watch Saffy get her unmentionables dyed?”

            “It’s like I’m in my own reality show!” Saffy said happily. “I can’t wait to Instagram the results!”