{"id":5401,"date":"2023-02-02T16:26:11","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T05:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=5401"},"modified":"2023-02-09T15:36:17","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T05:06:17","slug":"short-story-spotlight-winter-months-emma-ashmere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2023\/02\/short-story-spotlight-winter-months-emma-ashmere\/","title":{"rendered":"SHORT STORY SPOTLIGHT: ‘The Winter Months’ by Emma Ashmere"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This week’s spotlight shines on Emma Ashmere’s atmospheric collection Dreams They Forgot<\/em>, highlighting the\u00a0story ‘The Winter Months’.<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Post written by Polly Grant Butler<\/pre>\n
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\u2019s 2020 collection Dreams They Forgot<\/a>, <\/em>an experience that prompted me to extend my fortnightly spotlight to include short stories as well as poetry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘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.<\/p>\n
Emma\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
‘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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Winter Months<\/strong><\/p>\n
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\u2019ve come to Hastings in the south of England to do an \u2018intensive\u2019 course, learning to teach English to foreigners \u2013 or TEFL, as everyone calls it here. TEFL is going to change everything. It will give me purpose. A goal. A life.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018I was going to be a model,\u2019 she says, hoisting her elbows onto the bar. \u2018But I was too short.\u2019<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018What about you?\u2019 she says. \u2018How did you end up halfway around the world doing this rip-off course?\u2019<\/p>\n
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\u2019re doing, who they are.<\/p>\n
I tap ash into an abandoned glass of wine, watching it float on the surface before melting away.<\/p>\n
\u2018Hey,\u2019 she says, reaching over and touching my leg.<\/p>\n
\u2018Well,\u2019 I say, \u2018I know we should find what we love and follow it. But I mean, what\u2019s the point when all we really know is \u2013 one day, we\u2019re all going to be dead?\u2019<\/p>\n
I wait for Aveline to laugh but instead she squints and says, \u2018Sometimes when I\u2019m squashed in the Tube or queuing up at Sainsbury\u2019s, I want to shout: Don\u2019t you realise, you idiots? We\u2019re all going to be dead!\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n
I smile at her. I want to tell her everything \u2013 about how it was arranged I\u2019d come all the way to Hastings, how I\u2019m minding a professor\u2019s 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 \u2013 but\u00a0we\u2019re interrupted by one of the foreign students offering to buy Aveline a drink.<\/p>\n
\u2018I suppose they think we\u2019re all whores,\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
\u2018See?\u2019 she shouts on the wind. \u2018We recognise something in each other, don\u2019t we?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
\u2018But you must want to do something,\u2019 my mother said, as I toyed with a damp frill of cabbage becalmed on a Sargasso Sea of peas and mince. \u2018Everybody wants to do something with their lives.\u2019<\/p>\n
We were sitting at the table in our kitchen in Canberra. Outside, the neighbour\u2019s two liquidambar trees were throwing red leaves across my mother\u2019s clipped grass. I\u2019d just informed her that I\u2019d withdrawn from a Bachelor of Arts at ANU and that no other courses interested me. I couldn\u2019t tell her I\u2019d never even turned up for class. How could I explain that every time I\u2019d 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?<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
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<\/em>. Then it\u2019s off to tread between the gleaming parapets of jam, honey, lemon curd and peanut paste.<\/p>\n
\u2018Aveline?\u2019<\/p>\n
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<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\u2018Aveline,\u2019 I say, but her eyes stare straight through me and she darts away.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Kippers,\u2019 Aveline says, pointing her cigarette towards a group of tall wooden huts. I\u2019ve seen these huts perched along the beach. Some are lopsided, as if cowering from the relentless wind. \u2018This is where the fishermen cure their kippers and string them up. People come here in summer to take photographs.\u2019<\/p>\n
I put my eye to a crack but there is nothing there, just a greying light.<\/p>\n
As we sit down on the leeside of a hut, I tell Aveline that before I came to Hastings, all I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018I didn\u2019t know Hastings was also known for these kipper huts. My mother made kippers once,\u2019 I say. \u2018It was when \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Kippers? They don\u2019t put kippers in here,\u2019 Aveline says, suddenly standing up. \u2018It\u2019s where the fishermen dry their nets.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018But I thought you said \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018I have to go,\u2019 she says. \u2018My family\u2019s coming.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018What? Now?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Look. You\u2019re beginning to do my head in,\u2019 she says, striding off, the pale snake of her scarf flailing with the angles of the wind.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
My mother made kippers when the professor came to stay with us for a few days in Canberra.<\/p>\n
\u2018He\u2019s a lepidopterist,\u2019 she\u2019d said with a tremble in her voice. \u2018A professor of moths.\u2019<\/p>\n
Apparently he\u2019d worked with my father.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
As the professor\u2019s 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\u2019s breathing was at its worst.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t sleep knowing this man who\u2019d 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\u2019t quite reach at either side. At one point I half-dreamt or half-saw a creature\u2019s face pressed up against the flywire, peering in with metallic eyes.<\/p>\n
In the morning, my mother\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Go and welcome him into our home,\u2019 my mother said, shoving me out through the back door. \u2018It\u2019s not every day we have an international visitor in our midst.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
I haven\u2019t been sleeping well in the professor\u2019s 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\u2019t sleep again tonight. Tomorrow, we begin teaching English to our very own class.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Next morning, I arrive to find half of my students have crossed out their names and written them onto Aveline\u2019s class list. All day I can hear her students shouting, \u2018Miss! Miss!\u2019 in the room next to mine, followed by bursts of laughter. Now and then, there\u2019s the sound of somebody running on the spot. Doors slam. Voices cry, \u2018No madam, dear. Is it half to nine?\u2019 or \u2018The eyes are not blue\u2019 or \u2018What can you know of that town, Mister?\u2019<\/p>\n
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, \u2018Miss. Why your face go so red?\u2019<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
On Aveline\u2019s 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\u2019t go wrong.<\/p>\n
\u2018First we will write a list of our clothes,\u2019 I say, to fifteen pairs of lowered eyelids.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve bought a similar scarf to the one Aveline wears, and I\u2019ve done my hair a bit like hers. A hand shoots up.<\/p>\n
\u2018Of your clothes?\u2019 asks one of the Swedish girls, called Annika.<\/p>\n
\u2018Just write the list,\u2019 I say, towering over her bent blonde head.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Annika,\u2019 I say, \u2018please read out your list of clothes to the class.\u2019<\/p>\n
Annika raises her head and looks over at the other Swedish girls.<\/p>\n
\u2018Yes, Miss,\u2019 she says. \u2018A list of my clothes?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018That\u2019s what I said.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Well, Miss. Leather pants. Leather jacket. Leather bra.\u2019 She looks up at me for a few seconds. \u2018Oh and I forgot something, Miss. Leather whip.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018You\u2019re doing fine,\u2019 she says, her eyes sliding away from me.<\/p>\n
\u2018But even the housework one didn\u2019t \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019ll have to go in a minute,\u2019 she says, frowning past me towards the door. \u2018My family\u2019s coming.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Again?\u2019<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018But I can\u2019t eat all this garlic bread by myself,\u2019 I say.<\/p>\n
\u2018Can\u2019t you?\u2019<\/p>\n
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\u2019 assignments and a pen. After about half an hour Aveline appears, stopping by her students\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
We say goodnight in the icy tunnel of the street. It\u2019s time to walk home up the hill to the professor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
\u2018Think of all the starving children,\u2019 my mother said, as she spooned out the brussels sprouts. \u2018Think of the poor.\u2019<\/p>\n
Across the table, the professor of moths sawed away at his medium-rare Scotch fillet steak.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m not hungry,\u2019 I mumbled.<\/p>\n
\u2018Nonsense,\u2019 my mother said.<\/p>\n
I began fiddling with the cutlery.<\/p>\n
\u2018As I was saying,\u2019 said the professor, waving his knife. \u2018The moth known as the Sphinx has the most intriguing markings. It is also known as the Privet Hawk Moth.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018The Sphinx,\u2019 said my mother, ladling wide brown rivers of gravy across my plate. \u2018How interesting.\u2019<\/p>\n
I managed to save a drowning brussels sprout with my fork. It looked like a little skull.<\/p>\n
\u2018You ladies may have heard of the Death\u2019s Head Hawk Moth, named as such due to the remarkable skull-shaped motif. It\u2019s also known as the Acherontia atropos,\u2019 continued the professor. \u2018And is attracted to honey. Several specimens have been discovered sealed inside bees\u2019 honeycomb cells, suffocated and slowly entombed by \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018The consequences of indulging a sweet tooth,\u2019 my mother laughed. \u2018I am always telling somebody at this table about curbing her terrible sweet tooth.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018You may have read Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s story \u201cThe Sphinx\u201d,\u2019 said the professor.<\/p>\n
I could feel him staring across at me.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ed-gar-Al-lan-Poe,\u2019 laughed my mother, as if trying her jaw on every syllable.<\/p>\n
\u2018But what\u2019s it about?\u2019 I heard myself blurt out.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019ve been meaning to catch you,\u2019 he says, looking up at me with his pink-winged head.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Beef tea,\u2019 he says, raising his cup in a kind of cheers. \u2018The wonder drink. You\u2019d know all about beef, coming from Australia. I\u2019ve been meaning to ask you \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
I regain my capacity for movement and run towards the fire escape.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
My mother was never there when I got home. I\u2019d unlatch the gate and find the key hanging on the hook inside the shed. I\u2019d scuff through the rooms pretending I didn\u2019t 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\u2019d turn on the radio and stand in the pantry, shaking packets of forbidden biscuits and empty cake tins. I\u2019d toss the waiting plate of celery and cream cheese at the liquidambars over the fence. I\u2019d sit up on the bench and swig milk from the bottle. Then I\u2019d shout. Not words exactly. Just a high-pitched shrieking sound.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
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\u2019 assignments leap out of my bag. He scurries after them in the wind.<\/p>\n
\u2018No!\u2019 I shout, but he doesn\u2019t hear.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
It was the final night of the professor\u2019s stay with us in Canberra. I\u2019d 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\u2019d spent some time folding and ironing the table napkins into perfect peacock shapes. This was our last chance to impress our guest.<\/p>\n
Suddenly the professor leapt up from the table, waving his napkin in the air.<\/p>\n
\u2018I knew it! Look,\u2019 he cried, running towards the back door. \u2018I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d see them before I left.\u2019<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Once when I was about to begin my evening meal in the Scilly Isles,\u2019 the professor said, \u2018a 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.\u2019 He turned and peered up at me. \u2018See? Out there. The Bogong moth is migrating just as it has done for thousands of years. How remarkable those creatures are.\u2019 He swiped the table napkin at his sparkling eyes. \u2018Forgive me,\u2019 he said, \u2018I\u2019m a very lucky man. I see the world every day in the markings of a moth.\u2019<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The professor waved his napkin in the direction of my mother.<\/p>\n
\u2018You should encourage this one to find what she loves and follow it. Her father would have wanted it.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018I tell her all the time,\u2019 my mother said. \u2018Find something you\u2019d like to do in the public service and you\u2019ll never look back.\u2019<\/p>\n
‘But what is it you love doing most?\u2019 the professor said. \u2018I see you\u2019re a bit of a bookworm. My niece likes to read. She\u2019s young like you. Found herself at a loose end there for a while after leaving school, but now she\u2019s teaching English in Paris. Meets the most fascinating people. You can travel anywhere with a teaching career.\u2019<\/p>\n
I put my shoulders back and uncrossed my Lame Horse legs, trying to think of something to say. But it didn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/h1>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t be there, I cross the street and call her name into the empty electric hum of the intercom.<\/p>\n
There is nowhere to go, so I wait, rereading the letter she left for me: My family is putting me in hospital again.<\/em><\/p>\n
When I look up, I think I see her hovering at the window.<\/p>\n
\u2018Aveline?\u2019 I call into the intercom. \u2018Come over to my flat. We\u2019ll get out of Hastings. We can go anywhere you want.\u2019<\/p>\n
She doesn\u2019t answer. I step back and look up. There she is, staring out at the swirling night.<\/p>\n\n\n
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