The Guard To The Doll House

Men in uniforms always made Aoife feel as though they should know a lot, simply because she thought it would otherwise be an awful waste of so much gold embroidery and hours of ironing for just anyone.
Yet all her encounters with men in uniforms had proven otherwise. Once, she asked the uniformed gatekeeper at school if she could sit in the school canteen to wait for Granny, who had been a whole 30 minutes late to pick her up after school.
"No."
"Why?"
"Just cannot ok? Principal don't allow."
"Why?"
"Cannot means cannot lah."
"Why?"
"Just cannot."

So Aoife had waited outside, terrified of getting run over by maniac trishaw riders or surly bus drivers speeding down the narrow lane outside the school gate. By the time Granny showed up, late from her afternoon mahjong session, Aoife's legs were aching from squatting by the drain. Another time, a guard who wore a smartly pressed blue uniform with dark blue lapels and (also) gold embroidered stripes had refused to allow Aoife into a classmate's condominium unit because Aoife had forgotten the unit number.

"You no know unit number, you cannot go in," he had said, unsympathetically shaking his head and peering down his nose from under his hat.
"My friend's name is Shahirah, and she is having a birthday party by the pool," she had explained, struggling to recall the exact name of the block and her classmate's address.
"What's your I/C number?"
"I don't have an identity card yet. I have to wait until I'm 12. But I'm only seven. I'm tall for my age."
"Like dat ah? Ok. Like this I must go and call the pool guard first. You not down here resident. I must check."
"Ok."

Who gave them these uniforms so they could look so important even though they never did anything all that important, is what Aoife wanted to know, and if they couldn't help people out, why did they bother wearing them? Why did they always act as though she was planning to do something wrong? Thirty years later, Aoife would again stare into the face of that same security guard when his picture made the front page of the newspapers for his involvement in a terrorist plot to blow up the underground train system in Singapore.

So when Ping invited Aoife and Twink over after school that day, and she saw a man in a white uniform sitting at a guardhouse to a side of a very large gate, Aoife felt her pre-test pangs in her stomach and neck sweat a little; the same feeling she had got right before her first big maths exam, just a few months ago. "Are you sure she wanted me here?" she had asked Twink, who had repeatedly assured her reluctant friend she had indeed been invited to Ping's house after school so they could all play with Ping's Barbie doll house and full Barbie wardrobe complete with Malibu Barbie beach wedges.
"I don't like pink."
"Aiyah. Don't be such a spoilsport."
"I don't like Ping."
"But don't you want to see her doll house?"
"What for?"
"Stop asking dumb questions. Everybody loves Barbie," snarled Twink.

Everybody but me, thought Aoife. She never did understand the fuss about a yellow-haired doll with so few clothes, who had a boyfriend who always so many clothes he looked like Lee Majors from The Six Million Dollar Man. Or why the doll always seemed to have a crik in her neck that made her tilt her head to one side, but yet always wore a disturbing grin anyway. Or why they never had a Barbie with brown hair and eyes wearing a kebaya or a cheongsam or a sari or something (this was, after all, years before Oriental Barbie was ever conceived, of course).

"Are you hear to see Miss Ping?" he asked.
"Yes, please sir," said a suddenly polite Twink. "Could you please tell her that Lee Ting and Aoife are here?"
"Certainly. Step right in."