SHORT STORY SPOTLIGHT: ‘The Winter Months’ by Emma Ashmere

This week’s spotlight shines on Emma Ashmere’s atmospheric collection Dreams They Forgot, highlighting the story ‘The Winter Months’.

Post written by Polly Grant Butler

I like short stories because, like poems, they zoom in on an incident or a feeling, providing bitesize images and impressions that usually, at first, make me feel rather than think. Then the thinking happens, often in the form of questions instead of answers, the slice-like nature of a shorter work providing room for contemplation. This was the case reading Emma Ashmere’s 2020 collection Dreams They Forgot, an experience that prompted me to extend my fortnightly spotlight to include short stories as well as poetry. 

‘The Winter Months’, the first in the collection, is a story of absence, with the first-person perspective offering, it seems, only part of a whole, and characters frequently running away, coming in and out of focus. For much of the story, character Aveline feels shrouded in mystery, and like the unnamed protagonist I found myself dazzled and unnerved by her behaviour. Meanwhile questions linger about the juxtaposing scenes with ‘the professor’ and his visit.

Emma’s prose is concise and careful, allowing her lyrical descriptions to shine: ‘I look down at my lager, at the froth rising and falling like a million tiny, gasping breaths’. Despite their fragmentary rendering, the supporting characters remain compelling via the dialogue, which is usually witty and sharp, but also eccentric and strange. Throughout the work there is a sense no one is having the same conversation, that these people exist in different spaces from one another, shouting pointlessly into the void.

‘The Winter Months’ is a wonderful example of how a short story can suck you into its detailed, immersive world, and then a few pages later you are done. Satisfied to have completed something for the day. 

The Winter Months

I first see Aveline frowning up at the black twists of iron and the grey stone-pouch balconies of our building on the esplanade. Like her, I’ve come to Hastings in the south of England to do an ‘intensive’ course, learning to teach English to foreigners – or TEFL, as everyone calls it here. TEFL is going to change everything. It will give me purpose. A goal. A life.

At the end of the first day, Aveline asks me out for a drink. I look down at her large green eyes, fenced in by long black spikes of mascara, and follow her into the pub downstairs where all the TEFL teachers and foreign students go.

‘I was going to be a model,’ she says, hoisting her elbows onto the bar. ‘But I was too short.’

Unlike me, Aveline is tiny. Her eyes, nose and mouth align in perfect symmetry. Beside her, I find myself slumping my shoulders, folding one leg behind the other in the stance my mother used to call The Lame Horse.

 

I follow Aveline over to a booth. She lies back, her black high-heeled boots swinging high above the floor. Against the dark upholstery, her skin looks even whiter and tighter across her delicate cheekbones.

‘What about you?’ she says. ‘How did you end up halfway around the world doing this rip-off course?’

I look down at my lager, at the froth rising and falling like a million tiny, gasping breaths. I can hear the people around us drinking, laughing, playing pool. Everybody seems so comfortable. As if they know what they’re doing, who they are.

I tap ash into an abandoned glass of wine, watching it float on the surface before melting away.

‘Hey,’ she says, reaching over and touching my leg.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I know we should find what we love and follow it. But I mean, what’s the point when all we really know is – one day, we’re all going to be dead?’

I wait for Aveline to laugh but instead she squints and says, ‘Sometimes when I’m squashed in the Tube or queuing up at Sainsbury’s, I want to shout: Don’t you realise, you idiots? We’re all going to be dead!’

I smile at her. I want to tell her everything – about how it was arranged I’d come all the way to Hastings, how I’m minding a professor’s stifling little flat with its jumble of cabinets stuffed with dusty moths, how living alone for the first time in my life is both exhilarating and terrifying – but we’re interrupted by one of the foreign students offering to buy Aveline a drink.

‘I suppose they think we’re all whores,’ she says, as we head out into the icy winds slicing along the esplanade. We stand for a moment, our eyes streaming as we look across the traffic at the raging sea, then she pulls my arm and we run down the steps onto the beach, sliding over the pebbles and lumps of tar.

‘See?’ she shouts on the wind. ‘We recognise something in each other, don’t we?’

‘But you must want to do something,’ my mother said, as I toyed with a damp frill of cabbage becalmed on a Sargasso Sea of peas and mince. ‘Everybody wants to do something with their lives.’

We were sitting at the table in our kitchen in Canberra. Outside, the neighbour’s two liquidambar trees were throwing red leaves across my mother’s clipped grass. I’d just informed her that I’d withdrawn from a Bachelor of Arts at ANU and that no other courses interested me. I couldn’t tell her I’d never even turned up for class. How could I explain that every time I’d tried to make myself get out of the bus with all the other students, as they laughed and talked and hurried off, something froze inside of me?

I can feel the beginnings of that same paralysis as I approach the sliding doors of the Hastings mini-mart, but I manage to force myself to leave the blasting January winds for the sudden hit of overheated air. I start in the vegetable aisle, feigning interest in an outrageously priced tray of pale French beans trussed together on polystyrene. I finger a black ball of lettuce burnt by the frost, until I can no longer resist the glittering chocolate aisle where the reds, silvers, golds, purples and yellows jostle for attention, luring me in. I remain calm as I weigh each specimen in my hand, consulting my list of imaginary chocolate-eating friends: Dairy Milk for Donna, Aero Bar for Adam, Twix for Therese. Then it’s off to tread between the gleaming parapets of jam, honey, lemon curd and peanut paste.

‘Aveline?’

She whirls around, her shopping basket tucked behind her back. I spot the two tell-tale jars of Nutella and peanut paste, white bread rolls and jumbo-sized chocolates tucked beneath her copy of Learn to Teach English to Foreigners in 30 Days.

‘Aveline,’ I say, but her eyes stare straight through me and she darts away.

The next day at lunchtime, Aveline asks me to walk along the beach. I wait for her to mention the incident in the minimart as we trudge beneath a low sky, bruising with the threat of snow.

‘Kippers,’ Aveline says, pointing her cigarette towards a group of tall wooden huts. I’ve seen these huts perched along the beach. Some are lopsided, as if cowering from the relentless wind. ‘This is where the fishermen cure their kippers and string them up. People come here in summer to take photographs.’

I put my eye to a crack but there is nothing there, just a greying light.

As we sit down on the leeside of a hut, I tell Aveline that before I came to Hastings, all I’d ever read about it was 1066. Invaders and defenders in nosepiece hats. The infamous soldier on horseback, riding about with an arrow stuck in his eye.

I look along the whitened beach wondering if this is the very place they waded ashore. I can almost hear them, the cries of dying soldiers, the yelps of the victors, the screeching of circling gulls.

‘I didn’t know Hastings was also known for these kipper huts. My mother made kippers once,’ I say. ‘It was when …’

‘Kippers? They don’t put kippers in here,’ Aveline says, suddenly standing up. ‘It’s where the fishermen dry their nets.’

‘But I thought you said …’

‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘My family’s coming.’

‘What? Now?’

‘Look. You’re beginning to do my head in,’ she says, striding off, the pale snake of her scarf flailing with the angles of the wind.

My mother made kippers when the professor came to stay with us for a few days in Canberra.

‘He’s a lepidopterist,’ she’d said with a tremble in her voice. ‘A professor of moths.’

Apparently he’d worked with my father.

 

As the professor’s visit loomed, my days became punctuated with instructions to put my shoulders back while I vacuumed the cornices, not to slouch as I pruned the privet hedge, or frown when I edged the grass around the steps leading out to the Hills hoist, and not to sigh as I tidied my unruly piles of books. My mother hummed as she whipped up new curtains and bedspreads. She consulted the butcher on prime cuts of meat. She had her hair re-done startlingly. Together we shunted wardrobes, beat the dust from carpets and aired the crumbling yellow foam mattress she used to lie on during the long, hot nights when my father’s breathing was at its worst.

The professor arrived late. I stood in my bedroom, sensing the air in the house had changed as he swept in, bringing with him the rarity of laughter and the stale whiff of aftershave and pipe smoke. I couldn’t sleep knowing this man who’d once worked with my father was now lying two inches away from my head, separated only by two headboards and one hastily re-papered bedroom wall. I got up several times to tug at my new curtains, which didn’t quite reach at either side. At one point I half-dreamt or half-saw a creature’s face pressed up against the flywire, peering in with metallic eyes.

In the morning, my mother’s neck was damp and flushed beneath her pearls. As she shooed me away from the oven, puffing out its smoky hot fish smell, I could see the back of the professor’s khaki shirt, seated at the freshly lacquered table beneath the walnut tree. His milk-white legs and short yellow socks contrasted with his sturdy brown mothhunting sandals. Every now and then he looked up and tilted his head, as if listening to something swooping past.

‘Go and welcome him into our home,’ my mother said, shoving me out through the back door. ‘It’s not every day we have an international visitor in our midst.’

I haven’t been sleeping well in the professor’s flat, with its strange bathroom smells and piles of scientific papers stuffed in kitchen cupboards and under chairs. I am still in the process of deciphering his cryptic series of notes about lighting the stove and where to leave the rubbish bin. I know I won’t sleep again tonight. Tomorrow, we begin teaching English to our very own class.

Aveline and I run out of the classroom and down to the beach. I throw a handful of pebbles into the hungry wash. Aveline turns her back to the sea, opens the arms of her coat and leans there against an invisible wind.

Next morning, I arrive to find half of my students have crossed out their names and written them onto Aveline’s class list. All day I can hear her students shouting, ‘Miss! Miss!’ in the room next to mine, followed by bursts of laughter. Now and then, there’s the sound of somebody running on the spot. Doors slam. Voices cry, ‘No madam, dear. Is it half to nine?’ or ‘The eyes are not blue’ or ‘What can you know of that town, Mister?’

My students remain hunched, still and quiet. Whenever I ask them a question, they lower their eyes and study the wood grain of their desks. At the end of my second day, Ahmed from Riyadh raises his hand and says, ‘Miss. Why your face go so red?’

Whatever I try, they will not speak. When I give out the exercise books, they turn to each other and whisper at length in their native tongues. The three Swedish girls are the worst, scribbling notes to each other and convulsing noiselessly in their seats.

On Aveline’s advice, I introduce a conversational exercise on housework, to be practised first in smaller groups. A simple dialogue about ironing your clothes, cleaning your room, et cetera. According to Aveline, it can’t go wrong.

‘First we will write a list of our clothes,’ I say, to fifteen pairs of lowered eyelids.

I’ve bought a similar scarf to the one Aveline wears, and I’ve done my hair a bit like hers. A hand shoots up.

‘Of your clothes?’ asks one of the Swedish girls, called Annika.

‘Just write the list,’ I say, towering over her bent blonde head.

She is three or four years older than me, but I feel grateful for my unusual height, perhaps for the first time. I move to the window, staring out at the blasting rhythms of the sea. Snow has begun to swallow the pebbles along the beach.

‘Annika,’ I say, ‘please read out your list of clothes to the class.’

Annika raises her head and looks over at the other Swedish girls.

‘Yes, Miss,’ she says. ‘A list of my clothes?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Well, Miss. Leather pants. Leather jacket. Leather bra.’ She looks up at me for a few seconds. ‘Oh and I forgot something, Miss. Leather whip.’

 

Aveline takes me to an Italian restaurant in the old town. She orders another basket of garlic bread to accompany our two carafes of red.

‘You’re doing fine,’ she says, her eyes sliding away from me.

‘But even the housework one didn’t …’

‘I’ll have to go in a minute,’ she says, frowning past me towards the door. ‘My family’s coming.’

‘Again?’

She waves to somebody over my shoulder. I turn to see some of her students coming in, brushing snow from their coats. We watch as they claim a large table up the back. Aveline stands, as if about to leave.

‘But I can’t eat all this garlic bread by myself,’ I say.

‘Can’t you?’

I watch as she moves towards the back of the restaurant, through the red-and-white checked tablecloths, the students calling out for her to join them. After ten minutes or so, I take out my students’ assignments and a pen. After about half an hour Aveline appears, stopping by her students’ table to laugh with them. As I shuffle my papers back into my satchel, I knock her handbag from the seat. When I reach down to retrieve it, I see half a dozen pill bottles jammed inside.

We say goodnight in the icy tunnel of the street. It’s time to walk home up the hill to the professor’s empty flat, with its grimy little kitchen overlooking the out-of-bounds patch of garden far below. Before I turn off the high street, I stop at a window full of televisions, all showing Neighbours. I hold my glove up to the glass as if the tanned glowing faces, blonded hair and whitened smiles are something I might recognise from home, then I look back down the street at my tracks swerving and looping through the snow.

‘Think of all the starving children,’ my mother said, as she spooned out the brussels sprouts. ‘Think of the poor.’

Across the table, the professor of moths sawed away at his medium-rare Scotch fillet steak.

‘I’m not hungry,’ I mumbled.

‘Nonsense,’ my mother said.

I began fiddling with the cutlery.

‘As I was saying,’ said the professor, waving his knife. ‘The moth known as the Sphinx has the most intriguing markings. It is also known as the Privet Hawk Moth.’

‘The Sphinx,’ said my mother, ladling wide brown rivers of gravy across my plate. ‘How interesting.’

I managed to save a drowning brussels sprout with my fork. It looked like a little skull.

‘You ladies may have heard of the Death’s Head Hawk Moth, named as such due to the remarkable skull-shaped motif. It’s also known as the Acherontia atropos,’ continued the professor. ‘And is attracted to honey. Several specimens have been discovered sealed inside bees’ honeycomb cells, suffocated and slowly entombed by …’

‘The consequences of indulging a sweet tooth,’ my mother laughed. ‘I am always telling somebody at this table about curbing her terrible sweet tooth.’

‘You may have read Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Sphinx”,’ said the professor.

I could feel him staring across at me.

‘Ed-gar-Al-lan-Poe,’ laughed my mother, as if trying her jaw on every syllable.

‘But what’s it about?’ I heard myself blurt out.

While Aveline is away, I force myself to go to the empty staff room to try to master the cafe-bar taps. As I bend down to position my cup beneath a water jet, I hear a voice. The teacher-trainer man with translucent pink ears is advancing towards me with an empty cup.

‘I’ve been meaning to catch you,’ he says, looking up at me with his pink-winged head.

I cannot seem to make myself move back as he shoots a stream of hot water into his cup, then fumbles with an Oxo cube, whisking at it loudly with a spoon. We both look down at the cube floating there, sending up fine brown hairs of beef.

‘Beef tea,’ he says, raising his cup in a kind of cheers. ‘The wonder drink. You’d know all about beef, coming from Australia. I’ve been meaning to ask you …’

I regain my capacity for movement and run towards the fire escape.

My mother was never there when I got home. I’d unlatch the gate and find the key hanging on the hook inside the shed. I’d scuff through the rooms pretending I didn’t really live there, that it was all a mistake, as I flung open cupboards, mussed up the linen, tried on the lipstick she kept beside the small dark photo of my father; his face sallow, withering. I’d turn on the radio and stand in the pantry, shaking packets of forbidden biscuits and empty cake tins. I’d toss the waiting plate of celery and cream cheese at the liquidambars over the fence. I’d sit up on the bench and swig milk from the bottle. Then I’d shout. Not words exactly. Just a high-pitched shrieking sound.

I retreat into a doorway as the Oxo-cube man waves and marches towards me. I turn my back and rummage in my bag. Too late. I jump as he taps me on the shoulder. My students’ assignments leap out of my bag. He scurries after them in the wind.

‘No!’ I shout, but he doesn’t hear.

It was the final night of the professor’s stay with us in Canberra. I’d just lit the special-occasion candles as my mother ushered in her never-fail steak-and-kidney hotpot. Music was playing. A bunch of flowers sat at the exact centre of the linen tablecloth. Under instruction from my mother, I’d spent some time folding and ironing the table napkins into perfect peacock shapes. This was our last chance to impress our guest.

Suddenly the professor leapt up from the table, waving his napkin in the air.

‘I knew it! Look,’ he cried, running towards the back door. ‘I didn’t think I’d see them before I left.’

My mother mustered a tight laugh as she folded up her oven mitt, replaced the lid onto the hotpot and motioned for me to join the professor at the door.

‘Once when I was about to begin my evening meal in the Scilly Isles,’ the professor said, ‘a waiter implored me to come and see the moths swarming about in the most glorious night-scented garden. What a sight. I remember thinking, so much life in such dark flight.’ He turned and peered up at me. ‘See? Out there. The Bogong moth is migrating just as it has done for thousands of years. How remarkable those creatures are.’ He swiped the table napkin at his sparkling eyes. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I’m a very lucky man. I see the world every day in the markings of a moth.’

I looked over at my mother. She despised Bogong moths. Every year, they blocked up the air vents and found their way in through non-existent window cracks to die in great numbers along the sills.

The professor waved his napkin in the direction of my mother.

‘You should encourage this one to find what she loves and follow it. Her father would have wanted it.’

‘I tell her all the time,’ my mother said. ‘Find something you’d like to do in the public service and you’ll never look back.’

‘But what is it you love doing most?’ the professor said. ‘I see you’re a bit of a bookworm. My niece likes to read. She’s young like you. Found herself at a loose end there for a while after leaving school, but now she’s teaching English in Paris. Meets the most fascinating people. You can travel anywhere with a teaching career.’

I put my shoulders back and uncrossed my Lame Horse legs, trying to think of something to say. But it didn’t matter, because the professor had launched into details of an intensive TEFL course he knew of in Hastings. He promised to send us a brochure when he returned to the UK. A friend of his ran it. He’d put in a good word. See if they might consider reducing the fees, given my particular circumstances. If I came to England in the winter months, I could look after his flat while he was away in St Kitts on a field trip.

My mother said nothing, but made a great show of lifting the lid on the waiting hotpot. Later I noticed her hands shaking a little as she ladled out dinner and passed the plates.

Aveline does not come back. Some of her students are moved to my class. Now twenty-five pairs of eyes study the wood grains of their desks.

After class I walk through the blustering snow along the esplanade. I look up at the unlit windows of her flat. Even though I know she won’t be there, I cross the street and call her name into the empty electric hum of the intercom.

There is nowhere to go, so I wait, rereading the letter she left for me: My family is putting me in hospital again.

When I look up, I think I see her hovering at the window.

‘Aveline?’ I call into the intercom. ‘Come over to my flat. We’ll get out of Hastings. We can go anywhere you want.’

She doesn’t answer. I step back and look up. There she is, staring out at the swirling night.

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