Geneviève

 Geneviève has been my best friend since Uni.

She's from Mauritius, a French-speaking island off the east coast of Africa, and her family migrated to Australia when she was in her final years of high school.

I met her in Third Year French class. She was a fluent native speaker and I had just come back from a year as an au pair girl in France so I automatically wanted to test my fluency out on her and any of the other native speakers in my class.

She's very exotic looking and curvaceous: the epitome of femininity. Brown smooth skin, curly almost black hair, the most beautiful almond eyes and a great big beaming smile that steals the attention of everyone. She's also very gentle and demure and puts everyone's interests before her own so most people love her to bits.

I have really enjoyed getting to know her over the years: being introduced to her family - mum, dad, brother, the occasional aunt or uncle visiting from Mauritius - all gentle people.

But the thing I loved most was Geneviève's insistence on a good time. I have been to so many restaurants in Melbourne thanks to that girl, the entire Cheap Eats or Good Food Guide it feels like, a lot of dances, mostly Mauritian ones, where I learnt le séga. And one time, an amazing Italian New Year's Eve dancing the Tarantella. 

Life is never boring with her. She always seems to be planning the next catch-up no matter where I was living at the time (Mission Beach, Eildon, Ballarat, Horsham) and it is always a fun one.

One of my funniest memories of our friendship is actually the time when Geneviève decided we needed to go and have a weekend away and we must go to Echuca. We were both excited about it until she decided to tell me that she had booked us into a Bed and Breakfast that seemed to cater to the gay community. "We'll be right", we thought.

Well, we arrived and yes there was a rainbow flag flying proudly out the front. We were greeted by our host, who was a retired entertainer from a cruise ship and now an artist and a photographer down at the Port of Echuca. He gave us a flamboyant grand tour. He had a baby grand piano downstairs and a whole room full of dolls in mirror cabinets that he had collected during his travels around the world on cruise ships. And then he shows us our bedroom. No twin beds. We're sharing a Queen. No problem.

We had a great time in Echuca doing all the touristy things. We also took up the offer of our host of an Olde style photograph in 20th-century costumes from his caravan in the Port.

Anyway, Geneviève was really in the mood to relax so she asked our host if he could recommend a masseur and he arranged a massage for her. I'm not sure what I was doing at the time, shopping, reading, sleeping in, but Geneviève told me all about her massage when she got back. She was summoned to the dolls in mirrored display cabinets room for her massage. In the middle of the room, there was a massage table and her masseur asked her to strip off and place a towel over her. Her masseur had a lazy eye so she told me she wasn't sure where he was looking while he was massaging her but he made her feel very uncomfortable telling her about the nudist colony he belonged to and how they had a naked cross-country run they did every year and that she should join them. But the final cringe was when he finished the massage, he whipped the towel off her to reveal her completely naked form in a mirrored room overlooking the back yard. Definitely not relaxing!

I really wanted Geneviève to get married and have kids because she did the domestic goddess thing so well. Unfortunately, Geneviève had a series of ill-fated romances. She seemed to attract the attention of older men, none of whom were particularly committed and were also rather abusive of her niceness. Eventually, through friends, she met a really nice man called Pat and in 2014 they married.