Trouble In A Bubble.

Cristina Jaide Williemsen Regep

I met Jaide in a chatroom in 2002. At that time, my human contact was minimal. Most of my days were spent sleeping, and my nights I spent making music. Confined in a dark room for ten or so hours, recording amateur raps with amateur production, mooching off my parents, and healing my soul and my brain from the unusual events of the previous year. It was an odd time in my life.

Jaide was an insomniac when I first met her. She spent her days going to uni, and her nights trying to stay awake. She told me she had a recurring dream. She would be lying on the beach, and somehow she’d go out to swim and end up drowning. She was lying there in shallow water, and a lifeguard came to save her.

“Is this her?” he would say. Her father and her siblings were standing around her in the water. She lay there floating just under the surface, unable to speak or move.

“No, that’s not her,” said her father.

Her lifeless body drifted out to the ocean, and deep under the water. Her body would reach a place where the water was hot, almost boiling. There was a volcano, and written on one of the smoldering rocks were the numbers “79-3″. A man with slick black hair in a tuxedo would greet her. “Hello,” he said.

She would awake, sweating heavily, with her heart full of terror.

When I first chatted with her, every ten minutes she would type “brb, going to do a handstand.” How frustrating when you’re trying to flirt with a girl and she keeps walking away to do handstands. And how intriguing.

A couple of weeks later, she gave me her phone number. Two weeks after that, I worked up the nerve to call her. I was so nervous and had no idea what to say. She talked a lot, in a North American accent. She lived in Melbourne, but she was born in Nova Scotia.

“It was so disgusting… You know that doctor guy I told you about. He asked me and Marco the other day what we thought of child pornography. I said it’s disgusting, it’s terrible and it’s exploitative, and anybody who does that sort of thing should be locked up. He paused for about ten seconds and then he said ‘Oh. But thirteen years old – that’s not really a child, right?’”

“What the fuck?” I laughed.

A week later I called her again.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Who’s this?”

“It’s Jones.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“What are you up to?”

“I’m just outside of a cafe with my friend.”

“What happened to your voice?”

“What do you mean?” She said in a regular Australian accent.

“You sound different.”

“It’s because I’m on my mobile!”

“Ah… okay.”

“Anyway I can’t talk long – can’t be rude! I’d better go. Talk to you later!”

“Okay… bye.”

She told me she lived with her father, a successful businessman, her stepmother, who was a nervous wreck, and her step-brother, who was intellectually and physically half-ape.

“Hey Jaide.”

There was a moment’s delay. Then a typed reply. “Hey bro. It’s not Jaide. It’s Alex.”

“Jaide’s stepbrother?”

“Yeh.”

“Okay. What’s up?”

“Found Jaide’s diary and reading it.”

“Okay. You probably shouldn’t be doing that.”

“Why not, it’s a free country.”

“It’s private.”

“So is my dick. Except when it’s not. Hahahahahah.”

“Right.”

“I’m in love with her.”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“Man, can you tell me anything that would help me have sex with her?”

“Uh… I don’t think so.”

“Come on, help a brother get laid. What is the deal with that Marco guy anyway? Are they fucking?”

“I doubt it…”

“You gotta help me out here. What can I do to get inside her head? You must know what she likes.”

“I can’t think of anything. Even if I could, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Don’t be a dick. Man, you’re pretty protective of her considering what it says about you in her diary.”

“I don’t care what it says.”

“Just sayin’… It’s not good. Anyway gotta go rub one out. See ya scro.”

“Later.”

Later that day, Jaide signed into MSN, and said Alex had been telling her that I’d been asking him to read her diary. I said “That’s not exactly accurate.” She believed my side of the story, and I was pleased that she trusted me, even over her step-brother whom she detested. At the time I was lonely and starved for affection, hooked desperately on what some girl on the Internet thought of me. Nowadays, I hardly even give a shit what I think of me.

A few weeks later she logged in and messaged me.

“Jesus Christ. One of them left a steamer in my bathroom.”

“A what? Who?”

“A big, nasty, smelly turd in my toilet. Of all the things… if you’re going to invade someone’s house like that, you could at least flush. It’s ridiculous.”

“Who?”

“The police. They raided my home.”

“What? Why?”

“Did I ever tell you about my father?”

“You told me he was a businessman. Corporate executive or something.”

“Right, a businessman. My father operates in pharmaceuticals.”

“I see…”

“My father is a drug lord. They came to collect evidence. Of course they didn’t find anything. There’s nothing here that they could use to convict him. That didn’t stop them hanging around for a day, going through all my things, and leaving a big, fat, sloppy abomination in my en suite.”

“Don’t they need a warrant or something?”

“I don’t know if they need a warrant, but I do know that I need an exorcist for that bathroom. Anyway, I bought this record today. It’s Skip Williams. Found it in a little second-hand record store on Little Collins. Funny thing is, the clerk probably had no idea that this record is worth about $500. I picked it up for $3.50.”

She never mentioned that incident again.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Nothing. Updating my resume. You know, I made a stupid mistake the other day.”

“How’s that?”

“I had a job interview the other day and I e-mailed them the wrong resumé. I e-mailed them a resumé that I made up for creative writing purposes.”

I laughed.

“They were all gathered around the table, saying stuff like:

“‘So. Jaide… it says here you speak four languages, including Cantonese, Japanese, and Algerian?’

“‘Uh… yeah. No, that’s not quite accurate. I must have given you the wrong resumé. I wrote that one as a work of fiction.’

“They sat there somberly nodding their heads, smiling politely. They were a bunch of Seinfeld types.”

“So, completely humourless then?”

“I’m afraid so.”

A few weeks or months later, she typed to me “I can’t stand living here any longer with that woman and it.”

“Who?”

“Alex and his mother.”

“Heh oh yeah. That pervert.”

“Pervert? Well not really. It’s not like we’re related by blood… Though you’re right, he is a pervert. He once put down a hundred dollar note on the breakfast table and said it was mine if he could suck my left nipple for one minute. His mother was washing the dishes at the time.”

“What did his mother say?”

“Nothing. Just pretended not to hear it. Anyway I’m moving out next week. Probably won’t have Internet for a while so I probably won’t talk to you for a few months.”

“Call me.”

“Sure.” She never called me.

Two months later, she signed in. I did a chode-jump to my computer and typed carefully: “Hey.”

“Hey. Listen can you do me a favour. Call my dad’s house and ask for me. I’ll explain later.”

“…Okay.”

I looked up her number, picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Is Jaide there?”

“Jaide? I’m afraid there’s no-one here by that name.”

“Oh… uhh… okay.”

I turned back to the computer. “They said you don’t live there.”

“What? What did you say to them?”

“I just said ‘is Jaide there?’ and they said you don’t live there.”

“Jaide? No, they don’t know me by that name. You have to ask for Cristina.”

“Huh?”

“Sorry, I’ve just had a memory lapse – how do I know you again? From uni?”

“What the fuck is going on here? Who is this?”

“Okay, okay. This is Scott, Cristina’s boyfriend. I need to know where Cristina is.”

“Cristina?”

“Yes, Cristina.”

“Well, why don’t you call and ask for her?”

He went offline.

The next time she came online, I asked her why this guy thought her name was Cristina.

“When I was very young, we were leaving Romania. My father had a lot of enemies, and so they wouldn’t find us, he swapped our first and middle names.”

“So your first name is really Cristina?”

“No, my first name is really Jaide, but on my passport it says Cristina.”

“Right… I thought you said you were born in Canada.”

“What? Who told you that?”

“Who do you think?”

“I don’t see why I would have told you that. I was never born in Canada. I did live in Nova Scotia for five years when I was very young.”

A few months later, she changed her name by deed poll, from Williemsen to Regep. Regep was her father’s surname.

“You know, if you wanted to change your identity, you probably shouldn’t have changed your last name to that of a known criminal figure.”

“Oh… yeah.”

Sometimes she was compassionate and tender. Other times she was full of venom, just spitting distilled oil of vitriol, or even casually telling me that I would die alone and unloved, in a friendly, relaxed tone.

“Why do you have to make your music so… shithouse?”

“Have you ever heard of constructive criticism?”

“Sure. Yes I have. And here it is: You must be a delusional, straight-up psychotic, schizophrenic freak, if you think that anybody is going to listen to that trash you call music. You really ought to see a psychiatrist. Is that constructive enough for you?”

“Right.”

I never met her in person. I don’t talk to her any more. When I think of her, what I’m reminded of most is my own naïveté. For many many months I was fascinated with her. But now I realise, if I were to believe everything she told me, I’d have to believe that she had at least four marriage proposals in the couple of years that I knew her, that she’d been abducted and kept in a basement, that she’d been sexually abused by her uncle at a young age, that her ex-boyfriend (and then later, boyfriend again) had tried to kill her – among other various claims, contradictions and exaggerations. She was probably the most mysterious person I’d ever met. Some mysteries are not worth solving.

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