Skins

“Transmission” by Joy Division plays in the night club in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. Cigarette smoke clouds the air. The ceiling looks like the cratered surface of the moon.

Tonight, it’s clubbing. Tomorrow, Frannie says it’s an afternoon visiting an old temple in Stanley Market to see the pelt of the last real tiger ever in the territory.

A week ago, it was a hike. I forgot sunscreen. I blistered so much I couldn’t sleep the night afterward. Even now, I feel the rawness of my skin under my shirtsleeves. Frannie who is one of my only friends in Hong Kong, gave me some Chinese ointment to use, but I haven’t tried it yet because I have the bottle still in its box on my nightstand as my only tangible gift from her. I’m in love with her. It’s hard to be around her, and I can’t not be around her.

If she talks up a hanging animal pelt in a temple, I believe it’s amazing.

I stab out my cigarette and while she’s looking somewhere else, I look—her slight downturned mouth, and the glorious soft edge of her face that I could contemplate forever. All that moves around in my head, all that keeps me going. I’m in Hong Kong for a posting with my investment firm, but I would leave in a heartbeat if Frannie wasn’t around. Problem is, she’s taken.

Her boyfriend Lawrence, also a friend of mine, is sitting next to me on the purple velvet booth cushion, and he says he’s bored. He says we should go to his place off Connaught Road and smoke weed on his roof, where there’s a great view of Victoria harbor, where the windows across the water on Kowloon side gleam like Christmas lights. He’s got some amazing Scotch and all three of us can crash if we need to.

“Don’t you want to dance?” Frannie asks him.

“I suck at dancing,” Lawrence says.

“You dance with me,” Frannie says, grabbing my hand and pulling me up.

A house beat rattles the sound system. The room with its pink and blue lighting spins a little. The floor gives slightly. I play it off like it’s no big deal, but dancing with her is the best thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of beer, but part of my dizziness is her.

Frannie turns and shimmies, then walks toward me and puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Relax!” she yells.

I move. I dance. The rising house music beat dissolves into Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

The crowd around us—another gweilo dude with two blonde women—and a Chinese group behind him, two women and two men, all go from their somnolent movement to paying attention to us.

Lawrence taps my shoulder and steps in. He nods with his cigarette in his mouth, then pats my shoulder again and says, “I goddamn love you man. Don’t ever leave Hong Kong!”

His hands are on Frannie’s waist and they’re up against each other, blending like two liquors in a cocktail, and the truth is, Lawrence doesn’t suck at dancing.

“…once I had a love and it was a gas…soon turned out, was a heart of glass…”

Here we are, a trio of friends. A lot of loneliness on my part, despite it. I live out on Lan Tau in a small flat and Frannie, a Hong Konger, lives far away in Shouson Hill with her sister’s family. Her sister is married to a white guy, a Canadian. I should mention that I’m white, a gweilo, by way of the Chicago suburbs, and Lawrence is half-white, half-American-born Chinese, by way of a childhood in San Francisco and an adolescence attending the American International School in Hong Kong.

One of the gweilo women sidles up and faces me.

Now it’s the four of us on the roof of Lawrence’s building. He’s got a sofa set up under an awning up there, letting it be exposed to the elements, American college-town-patio style, and the gweilo woman from the club asks me for a light. Her name is Mary. She’s blonde and British, living in Hong Kong with her parents, on a gap year from uni, and it turns out she went to King George the Fifth school, and Lawrence knows her brother from high school rugby. Her father is in the government. She lives nearby but won’t say exactly where, and then I know enough about Hong Kong to realize her father is obviously not the governor, but is somewhere high on the bureaucratic ladder, and she lives near Government House, the governor’s mansion. She doesn’t want to say it because it seems like she’s royalty or something, and she just wants to be cool.

Each of us takes turns telling made-up stories about what is going on in the cruise ship docked at Ocean Terminal across the harbor. Lawrence has the best one.

“A widower grandfather is taking the cruise again, mourning the death of his late wife, wishing his son would call or write him letters. The happiest time of his life—an ocean cruise to Hong Kong where his wife and him got tailored clothes and wore them to the captain’s dinner where they started with the lobster bisque,” Lawrence says.

“Dude,” I say. “That’s fucking sad.” I get jealous of him, his ingenuity. And I find myself trying to copy his attitudes.

“No shit,” Frannie says. She punches his arm.

“Give me a hit from that,” Mary says. Lawrence is cradling a joint in his palm, which is the reason he’s getting so philosophical.

“Remember tomorrow, we’re going to see the tiger skin!” Frannie says.

“Tiger?” Mary asks.

“The last tiger in Hong Kong. The skin hangs in a temple in Stanley. I’ve always wanted to go,” I say. “All that’s left of that poor tiger—its skin.” I say it like it’s my idea, but Frannie was the first person to bring this up.

“We planned this weeks ago,” Frannie says.

“That kind of shit is supposed to be exotic and exciting but it’s usually a letdown,” Lawrence says.

“You’ve seen it?” I ask. Sometimes Lawrence talks big and knows nothing. And even though I want to be confident like him, I get annoyed with his dismissiveness.

“He has,” Frannie said. “That’s the temple his grandmother used to go to. A Tin Hau one.”

Lawrence looks at me, then looks away. He grabs Frannie and they kiss.

“Get a room,” Mary says, the kind of thing people feel like they have to say.

The night meanders on, conversations and drowsy kissing like winding smoke from incense, and eventually Mary and I fall into each other’s arms on Lawrence’s couch, but in his apartment. Down the hall I hear Lawrence and Frannie. Some arguing, maybe about him going on another trip, and then it’s quiet and I try not to imagine more, but I do because when I close my eyes, I just see her.

“Look this way,” Mary says. “This way,” and she pulls my lips onto her neck, then further down. The room swirls. But we don’t go further than that.

“I’ve had such a long week,” I say.

We lay there holding each other.

In the morning, I smell Mary’s perfume and her cigarettes and sweat on the throw pillows. Frannie is gone too—she had an opening lunch shift at Smuggler’s Inn in Stanley Village to get to.

Lawrence hands me a mug of coffee.

My head hurts.

“I got to get to the airport,” Lawrence says. “Business.”

I remind him that today Frannie wanted us to join up with her to see the tiger skin in the temple in Stanley Village, even though I know he’d avoid it.

There’s a knock on the door—it’s Mary dressed for a day out, Ray-bans on to hide the hangover.

“Can’t,” Lawrence says to me as Mary stands at the threshold. “You can. You should. Like I said, it’s kind of underwhelming but everything is worth doing once.”

I got the Hong Kong posting all excited on my East Asian Studies minor. I got here, and I thought I was supposed to go find all the obscure Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian sites in the city, study the paths of feng shui and dragons. That wore out quickly, all those places close-up and distant at the same time. Full of reverence and strangers. I met Frannie and Lawrence at a pub quiz night in Lan Kwai Fong and since then, she’s what I’ve been chasing.

“This temple in Stanley,” Mary says. “Historical, innit?”

We have more mugs from Lawrence’s Mr. Coffee pitcher. I take some of Lawrence’s clothes and shower and Mary and I, awkward strangers, get on the bus to meet Frannie at the temple. Both of us nod off in separate seats. I wake as the bus veers around a corner and upstairs where we sit, a leafy tree branch brushes into the window, across Mary’s head, and she snores through it.

When we arrive at the stop with the long railing and tin awning overlooking the market and trees, I gently tap her shoulder. Stanley, with the awnings and the one cement basketball court and displays and piles of things—a street pointing north with vegetables and fruit and one seafood stall and then the alleys south we’ll walk through, with the overpriced lacquers and ceramics and art, and the deeply underpriced name brand clothes in folded stacks like a basement bin sale in the U.S. There are American and Japanese tourists, and the only Hong Kong Chinese around here seem to be the shop workers.

Frannie is late. Or not showing. I build the drama in my mind, that she sees this as cheating on Lawrence. Then I snap out of it. We’re just friends and like usual, I’m being too dramatic. Besides, here is Mary flipping the creaking coat hangers on a rack, looking at beach shrugs, asking what I think.

Frannie finally shows up with a canvas bag. She pulls out a Schweppes lemon squash, a British soft drink she knows I like. We take a moment to look out at the sea beyond the temple as we leave the shopping area and walk along the narrow sidewalk clinging to rocks which approaches the temple, a green and yellow building behind a couple trees.

Then the three of us walk in together.

Indeed, the pelt is there behind glass, darkened with age, smaller than one would expect. It looks a bit shriveled at the edges. It’s mysterious in a sense, but on its own, yes, underwhelming, if not for it being from the very last tiger.

Frannie walks past me to kneel in front of the altar with all the candles lit and the Tin Hau statue with its raised hand of blessing, its peaceful blue dress undulated like a good current from the sea.

I turn away and look up at the curling incense hanging and around at the other gold and red shrines. I kneel myself, then look at the yellow tiled floor, waiting for something. I never got much out of church, or anything like religion. The most I can say is I’ve felt times of loneliness and times where I was less lonely.

Like last week. At a lookout on our hike, Frannie leaned her head against my shoulder as we sat on a granite outcropping, taking in the view, while Lawrence was in the bushes relieving himself. She asked if I thought she should marry Lawrence. She said she really loved him. She took my hand in hers and pointed to her ring finger and said, “I’m not sure either of us is marriage material.” Then she said, “Greg. I want the whole thing. Family and kids. Grandparents. A dog. Everything.”

My own father, a barely employable Jim Beam enthusiast, had a short fuse. I used to wish him dead. He would yell at my mom, who was just getting us through. None of that was my fault, but I feel shame about it. There was a time I asked my mom to leave him, begged her to, after he got especially violent, punching in drywall in our mudroom and breaking his hand.

When Frannie said, “us,” I wanted it to be more than the beauty of the moment and the view, that “us” was Frannie and me. I told Frannie about my growing up, which I’d done before, but never that openly. I said she and Lawrence would never be like that, but I knew it was me swearing I would never be like that. Being in Hong Kong away from home and being with her, it’s like some kind of window opens. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to religious belief.

Frannie gets up from the temple floor and we walk back out into the sunlight. Mary is still inside, silently looking at the statuary, lighting her own incense, acting like she belongs there.

I tell Frannie the pelt looks nothing like the deer pelts in my uncle’s basement in Wisconsin, which is the only thing I can compare it to.

“I really miss Lawrence when he’s away,” she says. “He hates this place because it reminds him of his grandmother and how she’s gone. You know his mom wasn’t around much, or his dad. They had gambling and addiction problems. His grandmother pretty much raised him.”

Whatever that’s like—I’ve never prayed to anything—it still is drifting over her, and I feel like I’m outside of it. And she knows a lot about Lawrence that I don’t. I try to tell her more about Wisconsin, but unlike other times, her mind is somewhere else, and she’s only half-listening.

Mary comes out to join us and says, “Brilliant!”

The three of us walk toward the small beach and sidewalk near the pub where Frannie will start her second shift. “You’re peeling,” Frannie says, pointing to the back of my neck—that bad sunburn I got on the hike a week ago in Sai Kung still doing its damage. I rub my fingers on my neck. Some of the skin comes off.

Frannie says, “I hope Lawrence is okay. There’s a typhoon headed to Taipei.”

“I hope so too,” I say.

What else is there to say? Frannie was praying for our mutual friend, that he would be safe, and that he would come back to her soon with more stories to tell. More than the ones I have, which I’ve already told. And unlike Lawrence, I don’t have the will to make them any better, or to imagine them otherwise.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.