I made many false starts by imagining the ad I would place in magazines and papers: ‘Looking for Luke who grew up in France. Came back to Hong Kong in 1994. Met you at Berlin Lan Kwai Fong. Last saw you at your shop in 1999’. The placement does not matter; I will the wandering eyes of the readers’ to stop at the small rectangular box. But my words are meaningless: none of the readers will know Luke; Luke himself will never see the ad.

“Give it a try,” a friend said to me.

“Slight chance it’ll work.”

“It’ll make a good story.”

“Expensive way of getting one.”

Local papers are out of questions since Luke cannot read Chinese. Entertainment magazines in English are the hype these days, but Luke has never been a reader. The ad might – by some miracle – catch the attention of a friend or colleague, but how much they know about Luke is another matter. I don’t remember Luke talking about his life with others, or I don’t see him having friends who would listen.

* * * 

It was twelve years ago when that stranger knocked the glass over. Broken glasses glittered in the dark; the faces of my peers’ became indistinguishable at the end of the bar. I escaped to the dance floor, where a slender woman in black bra top entangled herself with me. I was fifteen and did not know if I should touch her or scream.

“C’mon, Sandra.”

A young man pulled Sandra away and took my hand. I studied the way he turned his head and the collar of his linen shirt, as if they were clues to what I was doing with myself. The dance continued with a French couple and their friends at the club called 1997, a name still fashionable before the handover. Intoxicated by the freshness of things, I whirled around in a circle of strangers and a dazzling mixture of scents and colors. “Tequila time!” A handsome Spaniard dragged me away and passed me salt and lemon. The French couple performed their kiss to anticipated applause. The one between Luke and me lasted too long, to everyone’s laughter.

At 5 a.m. Luke and I finished a dozen bottles of Corona at the Wan Chai harbor, threw empty bottles into the sea and ran away from screaming police. With too much sun in my eyes, I saw the world turn into an alien space outside the cab’s windows: trees and hills made furious brushstrokes, crossing out the housing estate that was my home. I woke up on Luke’s shoulder with vague terror.

“I’ll pick you up for lunch later.”

The image of Luke and me kissing goodbye still cuts through the morning mist. And his words to the driver: “give me a free ride back to Hong Kong Island, will ya?”

I still feel there’s too much sun in my eyes when I remember Luke thronging through the Women’s Street market or a crowded temple. In the seas of shoppers or worshippers, Luke turned around and reached for my hand, his short and dark eyelash leaving its mark in my memory. His hair gel smelled of watermelon; his white shirts, always wrinkled, smelled of fresh laundry and hugged his muscular body. Luke seemed to have more clothes than any other nineteen-year-old I knew, or he looked more exotic to me in the endless white shirts he had brought back from France.
Most typical Hong Kong stuff fascinated Luke, such as an ad on a streetlamp. “What does it say?” “Room for rent. Can blow.” “A room with a prostitute?!” “The word “blow” means “cook” in classical Chinese. It means there’s a kitchen.” In a cheap Chinese restaurant Luke noted the pencil above the waiter’s ear. “I thought you only see that in old Cantonese soap.”  The waiter pretended he had not heard it, the way most strangers avoided Luke after taking a second look at his handsome face. In the food court of a shopping mall, Luke rolled up his sleeve to his upper arm and showed me his scar. “From my granddad’s rivals. He was the head of a gang.” “Not a glamorous story.” “I like hanging around with you, but you don’t always have to be a smart ass,” he smiled and recollected the discos he went to and the girls he screwed in France. On the phone he asked me what I had done in that department. I told him the truth.

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not seeing me coz you’re scared.”

“You don’t know me.”

I ceased to know myself as well. On any Saturday night I could be sitting on the steps outside Berlin, running my fingers on an ugly scar on a cute guy’s arm, or watching him raise money for alcohol and drugs in and out of toasting clubbers. One night I let go of Luke’s hand on the dance floor and a man took me in his arms. The music did not stop as the crowd dispersed; the security guards appeared and shepherded me outside. Luke and his friends were yelling at his attacker, who apologized to me with a sheepish smile from the other side of the road. I stood on the pavement and watched them in silence. Luke turned to look at me; he looked stunned.

He gave me his necklace at a park in Wan Chai. It was a platinum box chain.

“From my late granddad. I want you to always keep it.”

At 6 a.m. an elderly man was practicing tai-chi in the park. The moment I realized the beautiful morning mist was really air pollution, I woke Luke up and said it was time to catch the first train. 

* * *

Luke looked older when I saw him half a year later: longer hair, unshaven face, thicker around the waist. I stared at the table; he drank and talked.

“There’re many things I would have liked to share with you.”

The light was flashing as we got out of the pub. I strode across the road, only stopping in between cars. My ears hurt, my hair being shorter than ever that winter. Luke and I stopped in front a fashion boutique, laughed at dummies with heavy make-up and big grins. I lost balance and half stumbled.

“I should teach you how to walk properly.”

“We’ll see.”

It became a running joke: that Luke would start a modeling class for me, which meant walking around his place with a dictionary on my head or a coin between my knees. Luke liked to mimic the way I walked in front of Jenny and Siu Ming: he jerked, knocked down a file of clothes, turned around and saw me sitting on his bed, savoring one of his porn magazines.
I stayed at Luke’s place whenever we hanged out. Luke’s childhood friend, Jenny, lived next door to Luke when Siu Ming and her were still together. Luke had told me Siu Ming moved into Jenny’s place when she was thirteen, and I had not believed it until we met Jenny’s mother one Sunday. She heard Jenny was married to some guy who had got her pregnant, avoiding creditors by dancing at various clubs. Siu Ming, with thick furrowed brows and a sad smile, continued to pay off some of Jenny’s debts and had no clues to where she was. Luke whined about how Jenny “couldn’t do without a man” and “got herself all screwed up at twenty-three”, not saying he himself had lost slept over it. I was invited to Luke’s family gathering another Sunday afternoon, where his mother pointed at his suede jacket before I even said “Hello.” “My son can make soup with this $HK5000 jacket when he’s broke,” she laughed. Luke’s uncles shook my hands and giggled. I saw them a few more times and remained a topic of gossip, especially when they had to lie to Luke’s girlfriends.

Luke and I laughed at those lies in the same bed in different apartments, when his girlfriends thought he had gone camping in the mountains. We stayed up to watch weirdoes gobble live octopuses and insects on Japanese reality shows, in an apartment where there was no bathroom door but only a plastic shower curtain. On his bed, Luke spread photos of himself practicing Thai boxing and letters from his sister in Paris, exchanges of love in a foreign language, anecdotes of longing and loss. There were tales about his departure from Hong Kong at the age of eight: taken away from home, sent off to the airport, landed in Paris the next day; stories about his reunion with his mother after eight years of separation, about his half-sister’s daily dose of bird-nest as cure for skin allergy. “They have the money,” Luke motioned me to turn over for a back rub. I spent my sixteenth birthday at his next place, a two-storied house a relative rented him for practically nothing. At 2 a.m. Luke put an open can of sausages outside the store across the street. Luke took a few shots from his window; I never saw the mice and only laughed. Deep into the night, I would feel Luke’s arms around me and I would reach out for them, out from the realm of heaviness or lightness, the two having merged. I never made it; I fell back into troubled sleep. Some other times I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror in the bathroom, trying to grasp the world Luke had made me enter: things he used to love, colleagues he did not like, characters and settings I could only imagine. I could not see why Luke wanted to see me or why I stayed, or if we would have nothing to say to each other one day. I never understood why some people wanted to keep me in their life, why they could not let go and walk away.

“You listen to people and their life stories,” Luke said. Some took my silence as a sign of understanding, which was true in most cases. Luke knew I never explained myself to anyone. “You should learn,” Luke hushed me, “‘To Love Somebody’ – this song is for you.” I did not say I could sing that song at twelve. At seventeen I saw many things were illusion, such as Luke’s moving houses in pursuit of a better home.

I was eighteen when Luke had the fight with his regular girlfriend, a rich girl who had a luxurious house on the Peak. She had heard too much about my presence at Luke’s place, and called to order him to send me home.

“I told you. I never slept with her!”

He hung up. I asked her what his girlfriend said.

“She said, “That’s even worse.””

“True,” I laughed.

“One day you’ll turn out an exceptional person. I look forward to seeing that,” Luke lay down beside me, played with my hair on the pillow, fell asleep. I followed his breathing and the shadows on the ceiling; I knew his thoughts were with mine, or mine with his, at abrupt moments when he awoke and nestled against me. The playfulness that carried him through his waking life remained on his lips, and made me think a cat that had killed a possum and come home to sleep. I studied his features for the first time in a long time, details I had absorbed in the last three years. I stayed in that familiar space for some time before I grew tired from lying too still.

It was the first time I could not sleep beside Luke.

The second time was when I checked out his new apartment in Sheung Wan, after I had lived in seclusion for months before my last public exam. The truth was I had fallen into depression, became ill and lost twenty pounds in a month. Luke bounced across the road in a cream-colored Armani suit, looking sleeker than ever as he greeted me with a big smile. Siu Ming looked even more comical with the same furrowed brows and a grin, when he talked about his “fresh start” in life, his new business in office cleaning. We went dancing at an executive club of which Luke was a member, who had switched job after his split with the jealous girlfriend. On the mini-bus Luke talked about how he liked his new place, a spacious studio apartment that overlooked the highway and the sea. “Come over any time,” Luke said, “you know I care for you like a sister.” I leant on his shoulder and pretended one could be happy with someone without complications, and my future could be a reliving of that moment.

I opened the windows once I got inside.

“You’ve grown taller since I last saw you.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Some people keep growing into their mid-twenties. You’re taller than me now. Quit those high heels or you’ll stumble when you run off from people.”

I was returning to the lure of the sea and the noise of the cars, but Luke sat me down on the couch.

“Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

I talked about my summer jobs: how I switched from one to another and did what I hated.

“And yourself?”

“I’m happy to see you.”

“You aren’t talking to me anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know you have irregular heartbeat?”

“No.”.

“I do. I held you when you were sleeping. You’re tense even in your sleep – you keep things from people no matter how much they love you. Do you ever love them back?”

“I do.”

“I’ve never seen it. I know where your heart is, but it isn’t there,” he took his hand off my left breast and slid down the couch. “Where is it,” he touched my knees, “is it here?” He sat up on the floor, took my fingers and put them on my cheeks, “Is it here?” He ran our hands through my hair, his forehead pressing mine, “Is it here?”

I waited before I pulled my hands out of his.

“Let me go.”

“You only have to ask. I’ve never said “No” to you.”

I covered my face so Luke would not see me cry.

“I’m sorry. Let’s go to bed.”

I left in the morning after Luke had fallen asleep.

* * *

Luke got me on the phone a year later. “Promise me you’ll come.”

With that familiar gleam in his eyes, Luke introduced me as the girl he cared about “like a sister”. “I’ve heard lots about you,” a fellow shopkeeper said. I loitered and pretended to check out some clothes, when Luke tried to ask me about my life. I talked about university and avoided anything personal. He told me why he quit his job and how he came up with his designs. “Here’s one for you.” He put a white knitted top into a paper bag. “And something else. Turn around.”

It was a soft silver chain with a moon pendant.

“I’m afraid I’ll break it.”

“Come back for a new one if you do. I’ve missed you.”

He smiled at me in the mirror.

“You’re looking great. A young woman now.”

His shop was gone by the time I changed my mind. The fellow shopkeeper was still around, but I could not bring myself to ask. My landline no longer worked and neither did Luke’s. I wore that necklace several times. It fell apart.

* * *

I don’t write about people in my journal unless it’s the first draft of a story, or memoirs about my closest friends. I devoted one entry to Luke over three years ago, which ended with me getting my phone line reconnected.

The call never came.

I saw Luke in that shopping mall, a year after I had changed my mind. Luke was still Luke: handsome face, stylish shirt, walking up the stairs with two girl friends. For a moment I wondered if one of the girls might get upset, if I put my hand on his arm and smiled as he saw me, his eyes gleaming, expecting a hug. The moment passed; I watched Luke walk away, disappear from my sight.

Nicole Wong