I was iChatting with CC with the webcam on – and it always comes to this when we are nattering on camera, it always comes to one or both of us looking around our respective rooms saying, thinking, “What... can... I... show... you?” – and this time I was showing her the box of Honey and Milk Pocky I’d found on buy-one-get-one-free special at Oriental Delight down in Chinatown, and she was showing me how her camera was balanced on a tower of old food tins – I was iChatting with CC and I was telling her about Tym and Kumix being in town, and she said, “Were you all sitting outside Bar Italia speaking Singlish very loudly?” “Tym is actually restrained and quite quiet,” I said, and she said, “I like that in a person.” “Hey!” I said. “Sometimes I make exceptions,” she said.

We are not always speaking Singlish very loudly, but we do keep up the chatter, Tym and me. And you’d think two girls hanging out 24/7 would run out of things to talk about, but we seem to do OK, barrelling our way through serial commas, our mothers, Penguin paperbacks, simulation as stimulation, London on the cheap, poster-boy poets, Sang Nila Utama, Before Sunrise and Cordon Bleu cookbooks. Among other things.

Sometimes we fall quiet on the bus, but sometimes it is hot in the buses anyway, and it is all a girl can do to not nod off on the number 73.



Meanwhile, two girls in the house means that the ranks of shoes at attention in the hallway have swelled. There is a part of me that is sort of done with having things, but there is also a part of me that wishes they were all mine – especially the shiny red ones. I ask you, is not a pair of shiny red shoes a fair exchange for a bed and a mouse?