Not afraid of the dark

Inside your body there are flowers *****
Diane Awerbuck
Karavan Press

Sometimes they are sharp bursts of pleasure, other times a good short story becomes a lingering thought or memory that persists and slowly becomes an itch unable to be scratched. Diane Awerbuck’s collection of shorts is all of these things at the same time — Inside your body there are flowers is 15 pieces of fearless storytelling.

Awerbuck is not afraid to smush genres successfully, have fun, face the darkness, create characters that are real as well as somewhat fantastical (loathsome, likable, relatable, lonely, sad, fatalistic), she knows how to build tension and when to end the story (which is far more difficult than it might seem), and she gives the reader space to interpret the narrative.

The stories are linked in a way that makes sense when you look at them as a whole. There are recurring characters, often one we see in different times in her life: nearly adolescent; newly adult searching for love and sex; living with fatal illness; and coming home to find answers to her father’s suicide.   

In her first story, Tempe, we meet three young teen girls who are on a train journey from Kimberley to Port Elizabeth, hoping to impress the boys in the other carriages who have joined the army. “They came back and they were different, blander, more blue eyed.” 

Diane, the main character, has the usual struggles of coming to terms with how others perceive her changing body. “Until quite recently, I had been invisible. I still sucked my thumb; I still thought I could fly. There was a spot of grass just under my mother’s washing line where I liked to stand, flanked by the moist patterned sheets and the transparent pillow cases...

“But then one of my father’s friends, a faded man except for a deep red V tanned into the skin of his chest, noticed me. He used to come to our house and shave the stubble off his bleary face with an electric shaver he kept in his shirt pocket. He didn’t need a mirror: the planes of his own face were known to him, however his hands shook. That day he put the shaver back. ‘Come here, Dimples,’ he said. He fiddled in a little leather purse and then pressed twenty cents into my hand. ‘Call me when you’re fourteen,’ he said and stowed the purse. It was a long time to wait. ‘It will cost more than twenty cents by then,’ I said, but he laughed and walked to the back stoep, where my father was holding a helpless knife and staring at a dead springbok lolling on the table. I wrote the request down in my book, near where my mother had written: 

You are not an American beauty. 

You are not an English rose. 

You are just a plain old schoolgirl. 

With freckles on your nose!”

Raw, real, and gut wrenching does not sound like a good read, but Awerbuck handles these emotions like a maestro with her careful, playful, absurdly beautiful and profound descriptions that draw one immediately into Backstage, a homecoming story of sorts: “To go away from your hometown and then to come back is the only story. It’s the worn, persistent thread that runs through the histories and the science fiction and the novels solving crimes; it binds the famous explorers and their nameless lost sons; it ties together all the holy books and the sagas and the songs. In even the technical manuals and the cookery books: this way of seeing past the people and the things you were given. And in the poetry and the spells, of course, which is the reason I ended up in Kimberley after the terrible things that had happened down, down, down in the deep south. How to go home again: it’s the only secret worth knowing.” 

In Leatherman we meet Joanne, a 25 year-old searching for her place in Cape Town — friends, a boyfriend, sex. She’s not quite fitting in with the people at her job at a magazine. She is given a chance, a ticket to an art event at The Castle by her editor:  “‘Oh, please. Take it,’ Siobhan had told her. Joanna found her dyed hair difficult to look at, brickish, hard against the hand. Siobhan breathed neglect and necrosis: her stomach was digesting itself. The editor fluttered her starved fingers. ‘Another fucking art event’ .”

Here she meets Hili. Earthy, manly. “Joanna looked for somewhere quiet to sit, but she was distracted by the man with the wheelbarrow, who zigzagged back across her vision. He was so close she could smell the petrol in his ragged bush of hair ... The capering man reminded her of someone. She marked his enormous bristling head, the narrow shoulders, his goatish legs stiff in their garters.”

Things happen with the goatlike Hili and then, they don’t. The end, the immediacy and intensity of it, is the beauty of this short story.

But it is Awerbucks’ last story, the titular one, that hits all the feels. For a short story, it is packed with bravery from the author who is not afraid to venture out and parlay the solemnity of suicide, the internal horrors of a slave lodge and inexplicable writerly experiences into beautiful sentences. The narrator is mourning her dad’s suicide, but unlike other times where she could ritualise her loss via solitary hotel stays and candles, she is at a book festival. “Writers’ festivals are the culmination of inner travels. We tour: we give lectures, answer questions, read the work of other writers like and unlike ourselves from all around the continent. A lot of the time, we don’t know what journeys we have made until we write down their winding pathways. It’s exhausting and exhilarating and illuminating. At the end of the journey, there is a final door, and there is light under it. The beam widens as we open it. Inside the rooms of our understanding, the objects of memory are covered in dust. Writing is also peering under the sheet, peeling away the old labels, trailing a finger through the motes. But the discovery is not enough. Writers bring the light of the other side back with them.”

Awerbuck’s short story collection brings the light, the shadow and the darkness.