monique

i have a sieve for a brain so i can't be sure i even remember this girl's name properly, but all i know is that whenever i think of monique i get a sad and troubled feeling.
it was my first year of university and i was still a child, only 16 and always trying to turn female friends into my mother. monique was a couple of years older, small, slender and cute, and played pool better than any of the boys at the uni bar. she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and listened to great music, introducing me to neil young (i must have known "heart of gold" but i'd never heard "down by the river" and in her little white car on the way to the beach it was a revelation), donovan (not quite so cool but still cool) and ed kuepper.
she lived just a few houses away from campus so i took to inviting myself over and sometimes staying the night. i was still living at home in the suburbs at that point, so staying over at a friend's house was an act of freedom for me. also, one of her housemates was good friends with a boy i had a crush on, so in my mind i was killing two birds with one stone, although nothing came of that.
after a while of putting up with me, monique said "guy, i think we'd get on better if you didn't come over to my house so often". i was hurt but i loved her for it.
despite her air of assurance, her great dancing and her skill at pool, the thing was that monique had no confidence. she thought no boy would ever look at her and didn't realise whenever one did, which was often. maybe that's why she stuck with the first guy who made his intentions unavoidably clear, a slightly creepy guy i think i met once at a party, who got monique into heavier drugs than pot or acid. everyone at uni was doing those except me - i hated pot and was too scared to try anything stronger in case i exposed something unacceptable about myself.
for the last year or two of uni i didn't see too much of monique, she finished (dropped out or graduated i'm no longer sure) and i have a feeling that i was a little worried about her, although that might just be hindsight. in 1996 i graduated and moved away to melbourne, but in perth for a holiday a short time later i heard that monique had gone to cambodia with her boyfriend and there died of a heroin overdose.

Hi, how are you

Hi, I'm starting this blog inspired by Dennis Cooper and wanting to feel justified in posting comments on his. My name is Guy, I play music, run a record label, and make a living as a journalist (in that order!).
Cooper's recent post about the author Jean Rhys got me thinking about how I first discovered her work. In the late 90s I met a girl named Fiona who was playing bass in a band recently relocated to Melbourne, my hometown. She was about 20 years old, stick thin with a button nose and played bass with her back to the audience. I'm pretty sure her band and mine at the time did a show or two together and we became friendly.
Fiona said she had a solo project and invited me to a show. In the band she just played bass, but solo she sang and played guitar. She was hurt and angry and her voice was surprisingly powerful for a girl so slight. She reminded me of PJ Harvey, who she idolised, but there was something unique about her too. Her lyrics were abstract but full of feeling, and she sometimes sang wordless sounds that gave me shivers.
Either I offered, or she asked me to play keyboards with her, and so began a stretch of weekly rehearsals at the big old weatherboard house she shared in Brunswick with her on/off girlfriend, the singer in her band. I really enjoyed these afternoons, Fiona would cook and we'd talk about her life and her musical obsessions - Patti Smith and Harvey mostly, but others I can't remember now. As I got to know her I liked her more and more. She spoke slowly in a small, trembling voice, but she was full of enthusiasm and shy humour. The music was wonderful too, hypnotic, distorted and held together by a thin, pure thread of melody. I loved being involved in it, and we talked about making a single for my label.
Fiona chose a name, we played live a couple of times, and the shows went well. Fiona also played with a drummer, two separate bands with the same name, and I think on one occasion the three of us played together unrehearsed.
Things became strange gradually. Already frail, Fiona started looking more and more unwell, her nose always red and running, her eyes bleary. It took me a while to realise that she was using heroin, but the signs eventually became too clear to miss. I already had many friends (and bandmates) who had become junkies and dealers after I moved to Melbourne from Perth in 1995, and it was impossible to be around them without getting depressed and frustrated.
My memory as usual is hazy, but I'm pretty sure Fiona moved house a few times and eventually became kind of homeless, living in a caravan park in the outer suburbs. I stopped seeing her out at gigs and after a while, without a phone number for her, we lost contact completely.
Fiona and the drummer made a CD together, which I still have and love. One of the songs on it is called Tigers Are Better Looking. One day at a book sale I found a collection of short stories by Jean Rhys with the same title, and was curious enough to buy it. The lonely, outcast women in the stories struck a chord with me and reminded me so strongly of Fiona.
By then I wasn't playing music with her anymore and hardly ever saw her, so we never got to talk about Jean Rhys. But I started to read everything by Rhys that I could find, and soon she was one of the authors I loved most in the world, each slim novel so harrowing and tormented but written so elegantly that they haunted me for months.
Now Fiona haunts me too, one member of a group of women that includes an old friend who died of a drug overdose in Cambodia, a troublemaking girl who kissed me drunkenly at a party when I was 17 (the night before moving to Sydney and disappearing) and a final friend who was so beautiful and warm and full of charisma when I was 16 years old and starting university that I still think of her often.
Those other women were strong and wild, where Fiona was insular and timid, but they all had a fiery inner core that many of Rhys' women share.