Chapter 3
Dead Sexy
This is Jean.
Right now, she's looking turning her head this way and that, critically appraising herself in a mirror.
Jean's the sort of girl who turns heads and diverts traffic (into lamp posts, and pedestrians) whenever she walks down the street. She's a shampoo advertisement on long, well-honed legs. Men don't so much swipe their eyes over her like a credit card, as pan over her slowly with infinite care, drinking in every precious detail like a horizon shot in a national geographic documentary. She's not so much eye candy as optical dinner, complete with fine dessert wine and complimentary cheese, caviar and a roast pig to boot.
Jean's got the full complement of exotic good looks that FHM usually takes 100 pages to describe. Men generally falter around page three and mysteriously excuse themselves to the lavatory for some strange reason.
Long luscious hair, immaculate eyebrows, coolly-amused but unexpectedly (ie when she wants them to be) soulfully expressive almond-shaped eyes, a delicately regal nose, and exquisitely perfect lips sit upon a neck made for sin. Her shoulders are just broad enough to suggest strength of character, without falling off the deep end into the testosterone-laden waters of club-wielding masculinity.
Let's gloss over the rest of her, including that waist to hip ratio guaranteed to turn other women sickly green with envy, and those long, lean legs that ooze sex appeal to men, women, and puppies alike.
And let's just say that those aren't the sum total of her (cough) assets.
She's also got a brain. A rapier-keen wit combined with a depth of perception that often leaves armchair philosophers in her wake sitting bemused on the floor wondering where their armchair's been spirited away to, simmer behind those coolly appraising eyes, waiting for that instant to leap out and devour her opponents alive.
And then spit them out, completely bewildered in mushy, well-masticated bite-sized chunks.
If she'd wanted to, she could easily have been a doctor, or a lawyer. Or a nuclear scientist, although, seriously speaking, nobody outside of characters from badly written novels or poorly scripted screenplays wants to be nuclear scientists nowadays.
Instead, she's a Political Dissident.
*****
He's staring balefully at the pills gently resting in the curve of his palm.
They're pretty pink pills. They stare back silently and eyelessly at him, and he can almost hear them imploring him to "eatttt meee!".
Kit's going through his second-ever start-life crisis. (The first one was at twenty, when he grew out of teenagehood and graduated from Boy to Boring.)
He's just been taking stock of his life...
At the grand old age of twentysomething, he's practically an old-man in fresh-faced, ephemerally beautiful teeny-bopper Singaland. Or so the media would have him believe. As if it isn't bad enough that he doesn't have a steady girlfriend, and hasn't had one since, well, since forever, everyone around him including mum, dad, Chee the family dog (and even Simon Notsos Lim on the radio) appears to be pointing jeering fingers directly at him and laughing. To add insult to, well, insult, several of his well-meaning friends have been subtly suggesting he take up a lifetime membership with SDU, the Singalanders Desperate-people's Union.
"You can get cheap holidays, and free food and electrical applicances from them! Really! All you have to do is marry some ugly person who you have zero chemistry with, for life! Is that a bargain or what?"
It doesn't help that his friends are all married to hot nymphomaniac chicks intent on reproducing like energiser bunnies, or maybe just going through the motions. Or so they tell him.
Kit hasn't had any in a while. Make that ever.
He's probably the world's oldest virgin, and it isn't even as if he's trying to save himself for anyone. His cup overfloweth, generally into the toilet bowl. Even Singalander slappers (who are women with loose morals, sorta like Jordan the UK starlet, sans the classy boob implants) give him a wide berth, and pretty much an entire ocean liner whenever he goes clubbing, which is really a Singalander euphemism for "on the pull".
Somewhere in the background, the radio is droning on and on (and on) about the wonders of marital bliss, cooking, and children (although not necessarily in that order). Simon Notsos Lim interviews some depressed twenty-five year old bloke who's whinging that he's old, and single, and how everyone looks at him funny when he's out on the street, and how incredibly lonely he feels. Sob, sniff, wail.
Simon sympathetically hears him out, then gently tells him in his calm, gentle and very gay voice that it's not about love, but marriage :
"Don't marry the woman you love, love the woman you marry!
Although, ahaha, for you it's probably too late now. You're on the shelf, buddy, you know, the top shelf where the woman can't, and don't really want to reach!"
Professionally, at least, Kit's somewhere on the map, he tells himself. His subconscious interjects : But it's in the bottom right-hand corner under that big compass thingie next to the Made in Hong Kong mark... Kit ignores it.
He has a steady job with a fancy Three-Lettered Abbreviation title (which is really short for a really, really long title which, in turn means very, very little) which involves crafting quality powerpoint slides for his boss to impress other bosses with. His years of studying _____ (insert choice of word here, they're really all the same thing) engineering are, of course being appropriately employed to the extreme. After all, it does take fine precision and a mathematical mind to make the text fit neatly into boxes, doesn't it?
He's never felt so unfulfilled in his entire life. His life doesn't just not have meaning. It doesn't even have life.
He knows ER doctors with more of a life than him, and that's
saying a lot.
This existential crisis is giving him a pounding headache.
He sighs and slams the pills home, with the help of a swig from his Naive mineral water, bottled from the cleanest and finest springs in JB, or so the advertising label claims. It's been that kind of day.
