Hands Up

I love Japan. I love everything to do with Japan. Its cities. The shops and shrines. The crazy fashion. The crazy good food. 

I absolutely adore all the bowing. I always tell my depressed friends that they need to go to a major departmental store in Japan at opening time and then take the escalator all the way up to the top floor. On every floor, the entire staff is lined up to bow deeply and to wish you good morning, their flawless faces wreathed in beatific smiles. Every floor. “By the time you get to the top floor,” I tell my depressed friends, “you’ll be so fulfilled and calm and happy. Better than a bottle of Prozac!”

“They can’t be that happy to see us,” Amanda said once as we sailed up Takashimaya in down-town Tokyo. 

I shrugged. “Who cares? My self-esteem is going through the roof right now.”

Later, when we went to the bank to change some money, we were greeted by a white-gloved attendant who bowed us all the way to the Forex desk. Amanda said it seemed a little embarrassing to be receiving so much attention when we were only changing fifty Singapore dollars.

“I’m feeling very centred, right now,” I told her. “Can you imagine this happening at DBS?”

I especially love the toilets – specifically the Toto Washlets. You know the ones? They look just like ordinary toilets except the cover is a bit bulkier and it beeps at you when you enter the cubicle and the cover rises. And they have warm seats and warm water jets that wash your bits and crevices, then blow dry you, all while puffing out ozone into the air so that icky odours are masked. Whenever I encounter a Toto, even if I don’t need to do a number two, I’ll still sit down just so I can get the full wash and blow-dry. 

“Leave it to the Japanese,” said Saffy once, after a quick business trip to Osaka, “to elevate even the toilet to a fine art form! We really should get one!”

“It costs $3,000!” Amanda said, at which Saffy coughed into her soya bean drink. “And that’s for the starter model. If you want the one that puffs out ozone, it goes all the way up to $6,000!”

Saffy was astonished. “Six thousand dollars? Seriously? For a toilet? Well, maybe not, then.” Her bosom shivered with disappointment. “Oh, that’s such a shame. I barely left my hotel room in Osaka. I just sat on the Toto for hours. Except I don’t think mine was an actual Toto, but the minute I sat down on it, it started piping bird song and the sound of a running stream! I asked my colleague about that and she said it was to hide the noise made by your number ones and twos!”

Amanda shook her head in admiration. “Only in Japan.”

A few days later, uncharacteristically early for a lunch appointment, Saffy found herself with time to kill and wandered into Tokyu Hands.

She immediately texted me. “Have you been here? It’s the craziest place!”

“I practically live there,” I replied. 

That evening at home, Saffy said going to Tokyu Hands was like being in a scene from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, except in this version, Alice goes shopping with the Mad Hatter. “I went back there after lunch and spent, like, three hours just wandering around the shop. I just couldn’t work out where I was! I started out looking at magnifying glasses and teapots. Then I tried on all kinds of eyebrow pens, and then suddenly, I was looking at something for exercising your jaw muscles.”

“I nearly got that for you for Christmas,” Amanda said. “But it was so expensive, so I got it for me instead. It’s supposed to be like yoga for the face!”

Saffy shook her head. “Isn’t it the craziest thing? And they’ve got all kinds of pens and lovely stacks of paper, and even household cleaning products at the back! I mean, it’s just a totally nut job of a shop! I love it!”

Amanda said there probably isn’t a single thing in Tokyu Hands that she wouldn’t buy if she lived in a house the size of the Istana. “It’s all so cute!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I don’t think cute even begins to describe it! What I can’t believe is that it’s taken me this long to get there. Sharyn is always going on about it, but you know, I just thought it was Sharyn being just…well…her usual weird self!”

All of which got Amanda wondering what a Japanese hospital must be like. 

“That would be totally sick!” Saffy said. 

Die Hard

It’s such a cliché that one someone dies suddenly, his friends and family start re-examining their own lives. We immediately start wondering, “What’s it all about? What would I do if I knew I was going to die tomorrow?”

“I would just die!” Saffy announced the other day at the funeral of our friend, James.

We were seated in the Church of St Mary of the Angels and, just a few moments before, Amanda had wondered aloud what she would do if she knew she would die the next day. Would she live her life any differently, for example, she asked.

Which is what provoked Saffy’s statement: “I would just die!” She noticed our looks. “What! It’s true!”

“You would die today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?” Amanda asked. You could tell her brain was starting to shrivel up trying to come to grips with the logic.

Saffy shrugged. “Might as well. What would be the point of stretching it out another 24 hours?”

We lapsed into silence as our eyes were drawn towards the coffin at the front of the church. After a while, Amanda said she was so relieved it was a closed casket. “The last time I was at a funeral, it was my Aunt Lucy’s and it was an open casket, I couldn’t sleep for days.”

“I hate open caskets!” Saffy said. “When it’s my turn, please make sure the coffin lid is sealed shut!”

Amanda piously crossed herself. “The entire time I was up there paying my respects to Aunt Lucy, I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh dear God, please don’t let her open her eyes! Please don’t open your eyes!’”

“Oh my God, if that ever happened, I would just die!” Saffy sighed in horror. 

“Will you please stop saying that?” Amanda hissed. “You are really starting to freak me out!”

“Oooh, look! It’s Elizabeth!” Saffy’s bosom puffed up against her black top. She waved across the pews as she got up. “I’m going over to say hello.”

That’s the other thing about funerals. They’re such social occasions. If you have friends you’ve not seen in a while, chances are you’ll see them again at a funeral. James’s funeral was no exception. We’d barely taken our seats before everyone started waving at everyone else across the church. 

Old friends hugged one another. We commiserated with one another and tut-tutted about what a shame it was that James had died so young and so suddenly.

“His poor kids!”

“Poor Mary. They just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary!”

“He was so young!”

“He was so gorgeous!”

“I had the biggest crush on him when we were at school!”

“I slept with him one New Year’s Eve a few years ago!” Saffy suddenly confessed.

“Shut up!”

“Don’t tell anyone! If Mary ever found out , she would just die!”

“Ay, Laura, did you know Saffy slept with James?”

“Shut up!”

“Oh my God!” Saffy moaned.

In the midst of this confessional, phone numbers were exchanged. Quick bites of gossip were exchanged. Promises were made to catch up for lunch the following week. 

When Saffy came back to us, Amanda gripped her by the arm and pulled her down to the hard wooden seat. “You slept with James?”

Saffy’s eyes widened and her bosom inflated to unholy dimensions. “Oh my God! How could you possibly have heard about that! I only just told Cathy that like two seconds ago!”

“The whole church knows!” Amanda’s voice carried clear to the top of the roof.

Saffy sighed. “I don’t know what came over me! Why did I tell Cathy that? I think I just got so caught up in the moment of gossiping!”

Amanda looked severe. “Do you even understand how gossip works? You gossip about other people! You don’t go and implicate yourself!”

“Oh oh,” I said. I slid down further into my seat. 

Saffy and Amanda turned to me. “What?”

I lifted my hand to hide my face. “I think Mary just heard about you sleeping with her dead husband.”

Amanda gasped. “How do you know?” 

“Because she’s looking this way and she doesn’t look too happy?”

“Well, why would she look happy?” Saffy began, turning her head to look. “It’s her husband’s funera…Oh crap! She’s staring straight at me! Oh my God, she knows! She knows!”

We slinked out of church faster than you could say ‘Hellboy’. Saffy only stopped screaming after we arrived back in the flat and Amanda slammed the door shut. 

“Wah, jia you, man!” Sharyn later said with deep admiration. “Even at someone funeral you can still cause havoc!”

“I am so embarrassed I could just die!” Saffy told her. 

Flight Pattern

News that Singapore Airlines now flies direct to New York has filled our little flat with a mix of incredulous joy and deep skepticism.

“Oh, that is so amazing!” Amanda gushed when she first heard the news. “All the way through! No more stops in Frankfurt or London!”

Saffy bosom trembled with doubt. “Really? Sit in a plane for 18 hours? That doesn’t sound like too much fun…” she said, completely ignoring the fact that she had just completed a marathon binge of an entire season of ‘24’, rising from the sofa only to go to the loo or to let in the Deliveroo guy. 

“Shall we go to New York for Christmas?” Amanda said, her face beaming with the kind of joy normally associated with a Victoria’s Secret model wearing the million dollar diamond bra. 

I said no, immediately. “I’m not flying for 18 hours straight in economy.”

Amanda smiled beatifically. “The plane doesn’t have an economy section. It’s either Premium Bee Hoon or Satay Class.”

Saffy sniffed. “I’ve never trusted the premium economy cabin. You get like two centimetres more leg room and the chair tilts back three extra degrees. Big deal!”

“Well Sharyn said she did the Premium Bee Hoon flight to Perth and she enjoyed it!”

Saffy’s bosom rose like perfectly kneaded dough in the oven. “That woman gets excited when a Toyota Prius shows up on her Grab booking. I’m sorry, but she’s not my benchmark for transportation.”

I nodded. “I’m with Saffy on this one.”

“So we can go Satay Class, then!”

“And how much will that cost?” Saffy wanted to know. 

Amanda pulled out her phone and tapped a few buttons. She turned pale and murmured something. 

Saffy frowned and leaned in. “What?”

Amanda dropped her head. “Sdhsven hadnand…”

Saffy turned to me. I rolled my eyes. “She said ‘seven thousand’!”

“Seven thousand?!”

Amanda rallied. “It’s not too bad…” she began.

“Compared to what? Walking? Seven thousand dollars for a plane ticket? Are you mad? Do you know how many char kway teows that is?”

“Two thousand,” I told her. 

“Two thousand!” Saffy repeated. By now, her breasts had inflated to a dangerous volume. 

“Well, they’ll serve you satay!” Amanda bleated. 

For days after, it was all Saffy could talk about. 

“Seven thousand!” she told Miriam, our condo security guard. 

“Who has that kind of money?” she asked the office tea-auntie who, clearly, had better things to do because she snapped, “Ay girl, I’m very busy, hor. You want biscuit or not?”

“Seven thousand!” Saffy repeated to Sharyn who said that didn’t sound so bad considering that it was already more or less that amount to fly Satay Class from Singapore to London. “And New Yock is much further away than London!”

Saffy told Sharyn that clearly she, Sharyn, was being paid far more than any HR administrator she knew. “And the thing is, I actually do want to go to New York for Christmas, but seven thousand would have been my budget for the entire trip and not just for the airfare. And we’ve not even included the hotel or food or shopping!”

Sharyn shrugged. “Who ask you study arts in uni? If you study law, now you can fly Wedgewood Class! Even Satay Class too low class for you! Can you imagine? Aiyah, you fly Bee Hoon Class, lah. Is good enough.”

Saffy’s chin stuck out stubbornly. “Not for 18 hours, Shazz. I think I’d rather die.”

Still, the idea of spending a white Christmas in the Big Apple haunts Saffy’s waking moments. Every hour or so, she’ll stop whatever she’s doing and go online to Singapore Airlines’ website in the hope that miraculously, they’ll have a fire sale and slash prices off the business class fares. This despite Sharyn assuring her that Singapore Airlines only ever has sales for economy flights. 

“When you are rich, you dohn need discount, mah! Is like Prada. Prada where got discount, one!”

“It’s just not fair!” Saffy puffed. “That’s discriminating against rich people. Rich people should also get discounts!”

Meanwhile, Amanda has been trying to recruit me for the Christmas trip. “We have no children! Who are we saving our money for?” she asked the other day. 

But I held fast. The other day, I was on the 105 bus home and I was scrolling through my online bank statement. It made for depressing reading. As I later told Saffy, I could easily stop working today and live quite comfortably for the rest of my life – so long as I died by Saturday. 

Saffy shrugged. “I think I’d have enough if I died by Friday morning.”

Checking Out

One of the things I love about Instagram is how you end up being close friends with complete strangers. And that’s because, for some reason, people love to overshare. 

One post, it’s them having a nonsensical conversation with their child who’s having a bit of a pre-nap meltdown, and the next, they’re celebrating their birthday at a fancy schmancy restaurant with ten of their best friends, each of whom is helpfully tagged, so you can check out the intimate details of their lives and them become friends with them. 

I especially love the holiday posts where they’re leaping into a pool on some remote island vacation. And just in case you missed the splash down the first time, they helpfully film the whole thing in Boomerang mode, so you get to watch it on an eternal re-loop. And they always look so happy.

And then there was the time @markshark posted not just his wedding invitation with the exact date, but also the RSVP address which turned out to be his home address.  

As Saffy, having just watched ‘Ocean’s 8’, pointed out at the time, “This guy has 6,585 followers. One of them is bound to be a burglar!”

Amanda shook her head. “An empty apartment for the whole day of the wedding. The burglars could take a break and have lunch duringthe heist! And he’s got such nice stuff too!” And we know @markshark has nice stuff in his apartment because he’s posted a lot of videos and photos of it over the years.

Of course, there are people who are the complete opposite and who only post pictures of themselves in a hospital, invariably a random shot of them looking unamused whilst posing in their hospital gown.

“Aiyoh!” Sharyn said the other day as we were waiting in line at Tiong Bahru for our weekend dose of zhwee kueh and everyone was scrolling through Instagram. She slurped loudly on her container of sugar cane juice. “Why is she in hospital again?”

Saffy looked up. “Who?”

“Aiyah, this person I follow, lah! I doh-no her, but my son say I should follow her, but all her post is her in hospital. One day, got break leg, another day got headache. Today, doh-no what. She just post picture of hospital bed!”

“Some people are just strange,” Saffy advised. “Meanwhile, can I just say that I’m wishing I was on holiday with Kourtney Kardashian?”

Amanda looked up from her phone where she’d been drooling over someone decorating a cake. “Why, where is she now?”

“Bali! And she looks like she’s having a great time!”

“Oh yes, I saw that. Kim and Khloe are there too, but I think they’ve left already,” said Amanda with the kind of easy familiarity I recognized from knowing the exact location and wedding date of someone I’d never met.

“And did you notice she wears a different outfit in every picture?” Saffy sighed as she shuffled forward in the zhwee kueh line. “Those sisters have the best holidays. My last holiday was to Bintan! What a bust!”

The air turned frosty. “Excuse me,” Amanda said, “but we went to Bintan together!”

Saffy shrugged. “Yes, but we didn’t go with the Kardashian sisters to Bali. They stayed in a five star resort. We stayed in some rickety old beach hut. I’m just saying!”

Amanda’s irritation deflated. “Yeah, alright. That was a crappy holiday,” she admitted with a sigh. “I wish I was on holiday with the Kardashians, too! I bet they flew in on a private jet, or something. And they probably brought a stylist along to style their babies, too!”

“There are times I wish that I, too, had made a sex tape!” Saffy announced. I couldn’t help but notice that several heads in the zhwee kueh line swiveled around in our direction. “Imagine how rich and famous I’d be right now!”

“Yah, you probably got PA to line up for you to get your zhwee kueh!” Sharyn said, completely and loyally buying into the commercial upside of Saffy’s R-rated fantasy. 

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I know right? I’d never have to line up for anything ever again in my life! I’d be so rich I’d pay someone to do it for me!”

Sharyn nodded. “Hannor!” 

“But who would you make that sex tape with?” Amanda asked, demonstrating, not for the first time, her talent for detail.

Saffy barely paused. “Donald Trump!” 

Sharyn coughed up some sugar cane juice.

“If that sex tape didn’t make you millions, I don’t know what would,” Amanda told her.

Saffy’s bosom trembled. “I know, right?”

Bloc Party

It’s funny what people of different nationalities talk about when they get together. Spend two minutes with an American, and inevitably, the subject will turn to Donald Trump. With a Brit, it’s Brexit. And with a Singaporean, it’s an en-bloc sale. 

Amanda reports that she had barely seated herself during her recent lunch at Chatterbox when June immediately launched into a blow-by-blow account of the latest en-bloc drama at her condo.

“She didn’t even give me any time to look at the menu,” Amanda complained later that evening. “And you know how I like to order first before I start gossiping!”

Saffy looked up from her da-bao chicken rice. “I’m totally with you. Priorities, people! But I can’t believe you went to Chatterbox again!”

Amanda shrugged. “They have the best chicken rice in town.”

Saffy’s eyes rolled back as she pursed her lips. “For like fifty bucks! This packet,” she gestured at her pile rice and scraggly chicken sitting on oil-stained wax brown paper, “cost $3.50! And it’s just as good!”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. 

Saffy’s chest deflated. “Oh, alright. It’s not as good. But still! Seventy bucks for chicken rice!”

“One of these days, you’re going to get into so much trouble for exaggerating,” Amanda told her. 

But Saffy was unrepentant. “Donald Trump does it all day and he seems to be doing just fine!”

“Funny you brought him up, because June says that the collective sales committee running the en-bloc at her condo has clearly been taking lessons from that man!”

It turns out that that ever since the decision was made a year ago to try to en-bloc the condo, the committee has been using every trick in the book to convince all the residents that it would be in their best interests to sell. 

“They’ve got people lurking around the car-park every day,” June said. “And the minute someone pulls up, they pounce with their clipboards. We don’t want to sell because we just bought the place and spent a bazillion renovating and we’d have to pay the stamp duty, but they’ve been such pests! They’ll call, they’ll email, they’ll even come knocking on the door!”

Amanda put up a finger. “Wait a minute. How do they even know you haven’t signed? That information is meant to be confidential.”

June sighed. “The real estate agent handling the sale gave the committee our details!”

“They’re not allowed to do that!”

“I know! So, when my husband complained, the real estate woman told him, ‘Oh, if you hadn’t wanted us to give out your details, you should have told us!’”

Apparently, when June’s husband said, again, that he wasn’t signing, the committee member who accosted him in the carpark then told him he was being irresponsible. “You must think about your children’s future!” 

“We have no kids.”

“Oh. You must think about your retirement nest-egg!”

“My company just had an IPO. My nest-egg is set.”

The member hesitated. “Uhm…your parents?”

“Both dead.”

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!” the member said desperately. “It will never happen again!”

“That’s what you told the previous owner five years ago when you tried to en-bloc. It didn’t work then and it’s not going to work now. Plus even with the extra money, we’d have to downsize and downgrade to get an apartment that’s the same size and in the same convenient location!”

Amanda was impressed. “Wow, your husband is good!”

June preened. “Yes, I married well. Yale Law School, ok?”

“I went to Harvard and…” Amanda began, but June was not going to be derailed. Because she went on to say that the following week, the police were called in to the block across from her. 

“Apparently, two residents, one remainer and one seller, got into a fight and one guy spat at the other!”

“Wait!” Amanda said, again putting up a finger. “They spat at each other? And these were two guys? What kind of fight is that?”

June hesitated. “Well…”

“And someone called the police? Because of spitting?”

“Welcome to Singapore,” June said, stabbing her fork into her rojak, which Saffy later told everyone cost a hundred bucks. 

Amanda said that if this is how grown men behave, it’s no wonder the world is in such a state. 

“God, if anyone spat at me, I’d smack them so hard their teeth would get jammed into the back of their head!” Saffy threatened. 

“You’d be arrested and thrown into jail!” Amanda told her. 

Saffy was unmoved. 

Amanda tried again. “Think of your children’s future!”

Final Destination

My mother says it’s a sure sign of aging when you spend a lot of time at the doctors or hospitals. “It’s usually the beginning of the end,” she tells all her friends. Of course, this kind of gloomy announcement invariably follows news that someone has died unexpectedly. 

            Like the time one of my great aunts, who’d been playing mahjong for twelve hours straight without getting up, bent over to pick up a tile that had fallen to the floor. The blood rushed straight to her head and she died instantly of a massive stroke.

            For years after, the unnatural manner of Great Aunt Rhonda’s death was trotted out as a salutary lesson every time the conversation turned from boasting about the accomplishments of one’s children to one’s medical appointments.

            “Just like that. Kweck!” an aunt would said, bending her right index finger into a crook. 

            “That’s why every year I book myself in for a full medical check-up!” Great Aunt Rhonda’s elder sister, Great Aunt Teresa, would pipe up. To which everyone at the mahjong table would sing out, “Aiyah, Terry, you put us all to shame!”

            And later, behind her back, those same aunts would say to each other that the only reason Great Aunt Teresa was still alive and kicking at 94 was because she was determined to outlive her daughter-in-law just so the dreadful woman wouldn’t inherit her jewels. 

            When my great aunt eventually died at 98 – after lunch, she lay down for a nap, and never woke up again – it surprised noone that when her safety deposit box was opened by the lawyers, it was empty. Apparently, she’d sold everything and spent the money on that four-month cruise around the world the year before. Her daughter-in-law had to be sedated. 

            “What a great life Terry had,” everyone agreed at the funeral even as they were busy making phone calls to their respective cardiologists and oncologists for a full body work-up that week. As my mother observed, you can always tell when someone in the family has died by the subsequent stampede to the doctors’ waiting rooms. Nothing makes you realize how fragile your grip on life is until someone you know lets go of theirs.

            And recently, came news that one of Amanda’s classmates had died suddenly after a routine gallstone operation. It was so unexpected.

            “We were meant to have lunch next week!” Amanda told Saffy in the taxi as it zoomed towards Gleneagles hospital in Novena. As soon as the news hit social media, she immediately booked a full medical exam. “Something happened to her heart!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated and deflated with a sigh. “That’s so scary. And she was our age, too!”

            “Exactly! And she had everything going for her. She’d just had a promotion. She was engaged finally. Then she goes into the hospital and never comes out again!”

            “And here we are rushing towards one,” Saffy observed.

            “Well, when was the last time we had a medical check-up?” Amanda asked. “Since never! We could all be ticking time-bombs right now!”

            “Well, as long as I don’t die before the Il Divo concert, I’ll be ok,” Saffy said, demonstrating, not for the first time, her shaky grasp on priorities and life goals.

            The whole check up took a few hours, the girls being shuttled from one room to the other. “They did everything,” Saffy later reported to Sharyn. “Blood-test, heart, blood pressure, kidney scan, chest X-rays. The doctor even asked me if I wanted to do a prostate test and I said, I don’t think so. I told her that I don’t even let my boyfriend touch me there, so what made her think I was going to let her anywhere near it?”

            “Aiyoh,” Sharyn sighed.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I know right!”

            But apparently, what the girls couldn’t get over was that they had to produce a stool sample. Amanda says it’s not so much that they had to provide one on the spot, but it was the idea that some lab person somewhere in the hospital would have to open the container and examine the contents. 

            “And they’d have to do it all day!” Amanda exclaimed. “I mean, that’s his job! Open one container of poop after the other and then look at it through a microscope. All day!”

            Saffy wonders if when that lab person was growing up and his relatives asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, whether he could ever imagine that looking at other people’s poop all day long would be in his future.

            “I think I would just die!” Saffy predicted.

             

Cold Front

It’s been so hot lately. Every day, I poke my head out the window to scan the sky, hoping for the slightest sign of a dark gathering of rain clouds. And every day, I see the same bright blue dome and shimmer of heat that promises another scorching day. 

            Of course, it hasn’t helped that the unreliable air-con unit in our lounge room decided to pack up again. As did the one in Saffy’s bedroom.

            “What is wrong with these machines?” Amanda said the other day as she stood under the unit in the lounge, looking up at it with the kind of dissatisfaction you normally associate with the arrival of the scrawny male stripper at the bachelorette party. “This is the third time this stupid thing has conked out.”

            “I couldn’t sleep last night,” Saffy moaned as she lolled listlessly on the sofa, trying to find a cool spot. “Even with the fan on full blast, I woke up in a pool of sweat!”

            I pointed out to Amanda that it’s been two days since we rang the air-con man. “Where is he?”

            “He’s coming on Friday.”

            Saffy struggled up onto her elbows, her forehead shiny with sweat. “Friday! But it’s only Wednesday today. Why is he only coming on Friday?”

            “Do I look like Mavis from Panasonic Service Centre?” Amanda snapped. “How should I know? That was the only time she had when I called up.”

            “Did you tell her it was an emergency?”
            “I did and she said every client who calls her up tells her it’s an emergency,” Amanda said. Apparently, you could tell that Mavis was sick and tired of other people’s cooling emergencies. 

            Saffy collapsed onto her back. “Oh. My. God. You know, I can’t stand it another night. I’m just going to have sleep with you tonight, Jas…”

            “No.”

            “…Amanda,” Saffy went on smoothly. She went on in a rush as Amanda opened her mouth. “No really, you can’t say no. I have an interview for a job promotion on Friday and I need to look my best. I simply cannot afford to have bags under my eyes! You don’t want it to be your fault I didn’t get the promotion, do you?”

            Later that afternoon, Amanda texted me in a major mood. “I don’t know why you don’t sleep with her!”

            “I’m embarrassed. I wear a mouth-guard and drool in my sleep,” I replied. Hand on my heart, both true. 

            Needless to say, Saffy’s sleepover didn’t go too well. Because the next morning, both girls emerged from Amanda’s bedroom looking like sorority girls who just woke up inside a trash bin with no memory of the last 18 hours. Amanda went into the bathroom to pee and when she emerged, she said, “I look like a mug shot.”

            Saffy slumped into a chair at the dining table where I was having breakfast. She reached for my coffee and took a noisy slurp. 

            “I’m going to lose that promotion,” she sighed into the cup. 

            I chewed my muesli slowly and looked from one to the other. “But the air-con worked, right?” I asked.

            “I didn’t sleep a wink. Amanda snores like a bulldog in heat!” Saffy reported. 

            Amanda stiffened. “I don’t see how that’s humanly possible since I didn’t sleep a wink either! Because you talk in your sleep!” She turned to me. “She talks. And it’s not random sentences, either. It’s a complete conversation with both sides speaking.”

            I frowned. “What…”

            “As in, she speaks one sentence, and then she replies to herself and then she replies to herself replying to herself! It’s the craziest thing!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I do no such thing!”

            Amanda rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah? Then how do I know that you love it when your boyfriend Bradley sticks the last two fingers of his right hand into…”

            Saffy’s hands flew to her mouth as her eyes widened in horror. 

            Amanda pursed her lips in satisfaction as she went on. “That’s right! And as he’s doing it, you say, ‘Who’s your hot sassy bi…’…”

            “Shut up!” Saffy screamed in panic. “Ohmygodohmygod!”

            Amanda glowed with righteousness. “All night!” she told Saffy. “All night, I had to listen to you replaying your dirty sex talk with your boyfriend! And it went on for hours!”

            Mortified, Saffy immediately got on the phone with Mavis at Panasonic and spent an hour begging her to move the repair appointment up. Eventually, in desperation, she told Mavis about her inadvertent sleep sex-chat to Amanda. Saffy says Mavis must have blabbed because when the aircon guy showed up that afternoon, “He kept twitching his fingers and giving me funny looks!”   

Hot Topic

Saffy says she’s always wondered why fashion retailers in Singapore bother with their whole spiel about their spring/summer and fall/winter collections. 

            “For starters, we’re not American. So, it’s ‘autumn’, not ‘fall’!” she said the other day as we trailed Amanda around Louis Vuitton like beggars who’d accidentally wandered onto the set of ‘Crazy Rich Asians’. 

            “Unless you’re a Singaporean radio DJ with a fake American accent,” I pointed out.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated with enthusiasm. “Yes, that’s a very good point. I mean, we’ve discussed this since forever, but really, what is with that accent? And they can’t even keep it up consistently. I was in the taxi yesterday? And the radio was on, and this DJ was rolling her ‘r’s like she was from east LA but she kept slipping in a Singaporean ‘right’?”

            By then, I’d lost interest in the conversation because I suddenly remembered where I was. “Oh God, why are we here?” I moaned, my entire spine going soft as I looked around for a place to sit. “We can’t afford a button in this shop!”

            Just at that moment, Amanda sailed past with an armful of clothes, heading for the changing room. “Please behave. You guys are embarrassing me!”

            Saffy eyed the pile of clothes. “Seriously, you’re going to buy all that?”

            “Not buy. Try!”

            “But why?” Saffy pressed. “Thick coats and sweaters. Where are you going to go in them? Katong Shopping Mall?” At which she and I fell about laughing. 

            Amanda floated up closer to us, her head barely visible over the pile. “Seriously? If you guys can’t behave, you should go!”

            Saffy perked up, swiveled on her heels and headed for the door. “We’ll be at Muji! C’mon, Jason.”

            “But I want to have ice-cream!” I whined.

            “The café there has cake!”

            Later, as we wandered the pristine, calm setting at Muji, fingering the cotton tee-shirts and stroking the spines of the lovely notebooks, Saffy said she just didn’t understand how Louis Vuitton made any money.

            “I mean,” she began as she ran her fingers over the soft fabric of the bedsheets, “who buys anything there? Everyone I know who has an LV bag and wallet has just come back from Bangkok, so we know where their stuff came from. I don’t know anybody who buys their books. So, what does that leave us? The clothes and shoes. How does that even pay their rent?”

            “I think Amanda pays LV’s rent,” I said. 

            “And Prada’s, I think,” Saffy said. She bent over to sniff the scented vapour of the diffusers. “Last weekend, she came back with three huge shopping bags. She buys all this stuff, but all she ever seems to wear or carry is Gucci!”

            “She’s paying their rent too,” I told her. 

            “One of the things she bought was this gorgeous sweater, but she’s not going anywhere cold,” Saffy went on.

            Which reminded me of one my aunts, Su-ling, who spent so much time in Switzerland as a child that she only ever felt comfortable if the ambient temperature was below 12 degrees. So, you can imagine how trapped and suffocated she felt when she returned to Singapore where the only time the temperature hits 12 is in the cinema, or on the 105 bus to Toa Payoh. 

            One day, when she was at Fendi in Rome and was so taken by the fur coats on sale that she bought a full length mink sable and then spent the next twenty years trying to hide its existence from her husband. 

            “How did that work out?” Saffy asked.

            “She kept the coat in a commercial cold storage facility.”

            “That’s a thing?”

            I shrugged. “If you have enough money, anything is a thing.”

            “Well, it seems like such a waste to keep something so expensive locked away,” Saffy said.

            Not so much, as it turned out. Her husband, my uncle Raymond, was always away for work. The minute the chauffeur drove him out of the driveway towards the airport, Auntie Su-ling would get the maid to collect the Fendi fur, crank the air-con down to the lowest setting and then spend the next few days walking around her Binjai mansion rugged up in 70s chic. 

            And when she died a few years ago, she was buried in the Fendi. “It was an open casket as well!” my mother reported after the funeral. “I felt hot just looking at her!”

            “She looked fabulous, though,” Auntie Wai-ling said. “That woman always had style.”

            Saffy says I’m not to repeat this story to Amanda. “It’ll give her ideas.”