Astonishing short fiction collection
TEN years ago, the writer Stacy Hardy worked on a collaborative short film project with theatre director Jaco Bouwer called I Love You Jet Li. The film tells the story of a woman born with an atrial septal defect – a hole in the heart. The hole makes her defective when it comes to love. “I only love someone if they don’t love me back,” the unnamed female narrator says.
Her passage from adolescence to adulthood is strewn with troubled relationships because she falls for men who are unable to reciprocate love. In university, she develops a crush on her English tutor but nothing comes of it. She writes him anonymous love letters which he discards.
Next she gets involved with a married man who slams the phone down every time she calls his house in the dead of night to say I love you. Thereafter she dates a heroin addict who uses her only for money. Then she falls for a musician who comes home high or drunk every night. One time he splits her lip open when he throws her over the bed.
The pattern continues until she has a breakdown. A psychotherapist tells her she’s confusing love with fear. The thing she most desires – romantic love, a meaningful connection with another human being – is the thing she is most repelled by.
I Love You Jet Li is a remarkable study of loneliness and desire. (At the end the main character falls in love with Jet Li after seeing one of his movies.) These are themes which thread through Because the Night, Hardy’s astonishing debut collection of short fiction. The majority of the 21 stories are told through a first-person female narrator. For the most part, Hardy’s people are alone. They’re stuck in bad relationships or some form of addiction or grinding away at dead end jobs. Hardy is exceptional in capturing their distressed emotional states. In Flatliner, for instance, a story about a depressed counsellor who works nights at the University Crisis Call Centre, the writing mimics the flat, characterless tone of a depressed person.
She writes: “Working at night is like entering a twilight zone. When I go to work the rest of the world is winding down, the streets are empty, windows shining soft blue from humming TV sets. In the morning I’m too tired to do anything. I sleep until midday, make breakfast that I eat in my underpants.”
In an interview with Litnet, Hardy, who teaches creative writing at Rhodes University, said Because The Night comprises stories she wrote when she was younger, more than a decade ago, straight through to last year. Read together they present a portrait of a “writer trying to find a voice, trying to come to terms with a compulsion to write”.
Conjoined is one of the standout pieces in this collection because it brings together all the bright traits of Hardy as a writer – the luminous quality of her prose, willingness to experiment with form and the depth of her observations. On the surface, it tells the story of a woman who goes in search of her missing brother.
It begins like this: “I take the train because I think that’s how he would travel. I sit in the half-empty carriage. I stare out. The quickly darkening other side – stations that flash into sight, glaring one moment, extinguished the next. Standing to get a better view, how my feet always slip with the movement, holding on to the rails above the double doors that swing outwards. How I stare into the darkness. How there are moments when looking I become uncertain. I think it’s this station, the next, no maybe the one after?”
Through the woman’s looping, endless journey, Hardy explores what it means to write this place, where the violence of the past is still braided into present. “So easy to get in this country. Our history is full of removals. Whole neighbourhoods are torn down and rebuilt and rebuilt again,” the narrator says. “History is written and then written again.”
Sometimes it feels like the boundaries which have stood between people for so long in this country are being buttressed rather than broken down. Hardy knows this and how relationships between people are distorted. Like all of us, what most of her characters desire is to reach out and to forge a meaningful connection with another human being.
In Kisula, a short short story, an affluent white woman ends up dancing with the Congolese man who guards her block of flats. “He stands and raises his arms, muscles turning and tilting in the light, angles and shadows, his eyes shining,” Hardy writes. “I stand too. I dance on the spot with my hands in the air. We both dance. We dance and laugh together like we share something deep and real and eternal.”
What most desire is to forge a meaningful connection with another human