Chapter 3

I had the best lunch today! Ms. Read’s Banoffee Pie was – oh, just divine! A bit pricey at RM10, but it was worth it to have such yummy toffee rolling on your tongue! And if you shared it with two other people, you won’t feel so guilty – both calories and cash wise. Hmmm, just thinking about the pastry makes me melt! And the chunky chips, and the mysteriously yummy salad dressing, and the –

Sigh, ok ok, I was supposed to tell you about this guy.

Well, I think I mentioned that Bambi is the cousin of a friend of the wife of my colleague – Ean, that’s his name. Well, Ean is, how should I put it, a very nice guy. Ok, a very nice and charming guy. And charismatic, funny, sensitive, smart – and drop dead hunky! I know! How can anyone be so perfect? But he is – well, he was – erm, I’ll explain later.

Ean and I are a team. We started at SD & Co. about the same time, and slaved our way through many late nights and early mornings at the office, working on projects which mostly didn’t go anywhere, or took a long time to get somewhere, and some which disappeared so quickly we weren’t sure if we actually did work on them at all. Anyway, Ean and I supported each other, and kept one another sane when either one of us was about to lose it – and this happens often when you are working at SD & Co. Believe me, I know.

Ean hugged me and made me laugh when I was crying in frustration and about to throw the P&P case plus half the content on my desk out the window. We were on the 17th floor, it wouldn’t look very pretty.

I baked him a tray of his favorite chocolate chips muffins when we had to work through Christmas weekend, and we spent 2 hours sitting on the carpet with our back against the wall, swapping Santa Claus stories.

He finished my JT's report for me when I collapsed on the office sofa, and that was after he had completed his own presentation and had been on his feet for 40 hours straight. I woke up to find myself tucked under his Nike fleece pullover, and my report sitting on my desk, printed and bound.

Ean’s favorite color is dark green, and he looks gorgeous wearing it. He takes his coffee after lunch, but he makes me a cup every morning when I get in, with milk and one sugar. Yes, he can be so sweet.

I can go on and on about Ean, but I don’t think his wife will appreciate it. Yup, that’s the one flaw about him – he’s married.

And I didn’t find that out till one rare night when we managed to leave work on time, and a group of us were trying to decide if we should have dinner at Friday’s or Jake’s, when a black gleaming BMW 325i drove up to the building entrance and a Caucasian woman with long hair and even longer legs stepped out and threw herself into Ean’s arms. The rest of us gawked on while she kissed him long and hard, right there at the front entrance of SD & Co.

Funny thing was, Ean never mention about his wife, before or after the incident we witnessed, and I didn’t know how to ask him about it, and so it was left at that. By then, we’ve worked together for a year, through 8 projects, slept over at the office almost 30 times, and shared countless meals and thousand cups of coffee. Yet the subject of his marriage never came up, not once.

I guess you could say that I had a crush on him. But I’m all over it now, really!! The moment Long Legs stepped out from that black BMW, I knew it was all over. It was a good thing I never did anything foolish like profess my undying love for Ean to the world or something. It was a pure and simple infatuation, led on by all those hours we spent working together. It could happen to anyone, even the tea lady, if she had to work under insane pressure during even more insane hours making two thousand cups of coffee or something. She could vent and bitch and share her frustration with, say, the janitor, and anything could happen, right?

Anyway, like I said, I’m all over my crush now, and now Ean and I are good friends. And good friends help each other. So when he told me about a poor girl who was homeless and desperately looking for a place to stay, I was only too happy to help. But – sigh – look what being nice got me into now?

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Bambi is 5’ 2”, slightly plump but in a cute sort of way, pixie-cut hair styled funkily with lots of wax and clay, and she wears nothing but 4 inch high heels – I mean, shoes wise, not that she walks around in the nude save for a pair of heels – please, what were you thinking? (wink wink) Yes, Bambi doesn’t own slippers or flats of any kind.

She arrived at our place – Elsa’s place – with one large suitcase, and a plastic bag full of cosmetics. That was all. Half the suitcase was filled with 4 inch heels of all colors. I didn’t snoop, I just happened to be in the room when she unpacked.

Bambi speaks very good English – surprisingly – but is not very talkative, not around me and Elsa, anyway. She mentioned that she works in some PR company in the city, but PR-ing who, where and what, we never found out. She was still in bed every morning when I left for work, and I was asleep before she returned.

One early Saturday morning, when I stumbled home after submitting a report at 4am, her bed was empty except for the snake soft toy she kept coiled around the bed post. She calls the toy snake Dory, after the fish in Finding Nemo.

At least she is reasonably neat, though her choice of color is quite – erm, let’s just call it different, shall we? She loves black on her furniture. She had black sheets, black pillows, black lamp by the bed, and she almost painted her side of our shared shelf black too! Where she got all these black stuffs I really don’t know. You sure don’t see them at Aussino.


It would have been fine if Bambi is only non-communicative, sleeps at weird hours, owns toy snakes with fish names and decorates in black. After all, she is only a room mate. But of course, it’s never as simple, is it?

The first time I noticed something missing from my wardrobe, I thought maybe Elsa’s took it by mistake as we sometimes do laundry together to save time and water. But of course it wasn’t with Elsa. The following week, the same piece of clothing reappeared, with a missing button. This happened a few more times and I didn’t have time to be puzzled over the mystery as I was too busy at work and too exhausted when I get home.

Then my Thierry Mugler perfume started diminishing fast. My cousin Shauna brought it back for me when she went holidaying in UK. It was a limited edition and you can’t find it in Malaysia. I was very precious about it and only wear it on special occasion – like that time when Ean and I attended a launch dinner at the Westin on behalf of the company.

Then one day, while window shopping with Kaelyn at KLCC, I spotted a familiar figure, wearing an even more familiar Levi’s limited edition black tee over butt-hugging narrow-leg black jeans and, of course, 4 inch heels in black patent. It was slutty-punk, according to Kaelyn, who had wasted no time in pointing out that it was my t-shirt Bambi was wearing, stretching tightly across her 34Ds (yes, D!). Bambi, forever playing cool and indifferent, just shrugged and said she will return in washed and pressed, and I won’t know the difference.

“You never did, anyway.” She added softly, before walking off. Yes, Bambi has a way of leaving people speechless at her wake, I’m sure you’re beginning to realize.

I tried talking to her calmly and rationally, explaining that I really don’t enjoy sharing clothes like some roommies might, and if she really liked something, maybe she could ask first before borrowing?
Her reply was: “its ok, your collection really isn’t very interesting anyway. I’m tired of always wearing the same black MNG. It’s very last year, you know? White is IT this season, in case you missed the announcement.”

Again, one of those flabbergasted moments.

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In a way, it’s good that we are being kicked out from Elsa’s. It means that I won’t have to put up with Bambi anymore. But I really liked staying at Plaze Damas!! Despite the fact that I don’t wake up to the smell of coffee every morning (except the ones Elsa occasionally brewed in her own kitchen), and no one but Elsa and her staffs at Art Café greets me by name; it still is a nice place to live, and Elsa has been a terrific friend and landlady. It’s sad that things turned out the way it did.

I have been checking the papers for a place to rent, and even visited a few places with Kaelyn last week. The horoscope prediction she sent me about new beginnings and new contracts had nothing to show for itself. The only new thing I received were two new projects at work. At least Ean and I are working on them together.

I’ll be meeting Kaelyn again later. She called earlier but was in a hurry and I could hardly make out what she was saying. All I caught was “… found somewhere… you’ll love it… pick up… 3… you’ll love it! … run!…” – and the line went dead.

If I didn’t know Kaelyn better, I would have thought she was being kidnapped or something. But according to her, since we are each other’s bestest friends since 10 years old, we should practically be able to read the other person’s mind by now. The only time she speaks properly these days is when she’s reading me my horoscope.

You see what I have to put up with?