WAITING FOR THE BEDSIDE RISERS

"Miss Parker, did I say something amusing? I did not crack a joke, I asked you a very simple question."

"Yes miss," said Helen, rose-cheeked with embarrassment. "Sorry miss."

The teacher pushed her tiny bronze- rimmed glasses along her sharply angled nose, straightened her body and took a few steps back, like an antique dealer examining an old doll.

"You're such a delicate little thing, aren't you," she commented, in a soft, almost pitiful whisper. "A child in need of a proper, filling sunday dinner if ever I saw one. Why your mother must feed you nothing more than lettuce leaves and grated rhubarb." She folded her thick, white arms. "Well, go on then, I'm not going to get an answer, am I, and if I do it'll only be another extravagant Parker excuse." Her fingers popped out and wriggled. "Go on girl. Be off."

It was on the tip of Helen's tongue to reveal why her Mother never attended Parents' Evening (and by God what an incredibly good reason it was, too) when the Headmaster appeared, leaning in the doorway of the classroom like a black teapot. He disrupted the rare atmosphere of child-to-teacher confession with a pungent cough and glanced at his shining silver watch.

"Shouldn't you be outside, lassie?"

"Yes sir sorry sir," Helen nodded and picked up her carrier bag. She started walking the wrong way - turned, abruptly, and made a swift exit with her eyes trailing on the floor.

"Don't forget your homework, Miss Parker!" Mrs Longhall's piping voice ricochet out into the corridor. "Page eighty six, question nine! Without fail!"

"Yes miss," replied Helen in a convincingly reliable tone.

Helen never did her homework. She couldn't. She had too many flies to catch.

That night, Helen couldn't get to sleep because of the fridge. It was breathing, you see. It often did, of course, but tonight it was gasping, as though there were an old man cuddled up inside the biggest of the two compartments, dying slowly of hyperthermia. She wasn't scared. The fridge never said anything out loud or popped open its doors. It just breathed.

Helen supposed, as she lay quiet beneath a streak of curtained-framed moonlight, that all the other kids lived in houses so huge they didn't have to sleep anywhere near the fridge, let alone be kept awake by its asthmatic wheezing. They undoubtedly had their own private bedrooms with portable televisions and pop posters and bulging wardrobes. (Debbie Fisher probably even had her own personal swimming pool.) Not that Helen was jealous. The other kids were selfish. Greedy. In love with their own reflections. She wasn't. She was content with what she'd got, and she didn't love herself, she loved... Well, she felt a little bit of something for her Mother.

Helen lived in a very small, haunted building that lingered like a rejected puppy on the outskirts of every main housing district in the region. From the outside, it appeared barely the size of a single garage, with an old door the colour of rust, and one dark window that seemed to perminently reflect the sheet white sky and the drab, dying garden as though it were a painted picture.

It was a cottage, officially, and had a name - a beautiful, fairytale name that it most certainly didn't deserve. (During the summer of this year, in fact, Helen had pulled the plaque off the wall and burnt it.) But Helen liked to think that, many years ago, it had lived upto its title, and been the enchanted home of some powerful sorceress who ventured out only to talk to will-o-the-wisps and unicorns in the untrampled depths of surrounding woods. Sometimes, Helen even dared pretend that she was that sorceress and wandered off into the shadowy trees, alone.

There were two small, square rooms with no doors on the ground floor of the cottage, and great piles of books, clothes and colourful clutter splashed randomly in every corner. In the kitchen there was a sink with taps that would only dribble and a plughole which groaned like Neil Harvest when he saw sprouts on his plate in the canteen. (Neil was the boy in Helen's class that she fancied but to whom she had only spoken three times.) There was also an old electric cooker which hissed like a snake, the fridge, of course, which breathed from eight o'clock till nine every night, without fail, and a squealing old cupboard inside which she kept the fresh food.

`Fresh food,' Helen thought and rolled onto her side. `Oh God how I hate the word food.'

Tomorrow was Feeding Day. Mother would have to be fed. The laborious task of filling and preparing the Honey Trap began to menacingly nudge its way into Helen's mind.

It wasn't so much the setting up of the apparatus (that was easy, and relatively simple) but the hiding in the bushes with the pull-string, waiting for the flies to come. Oh, small flies were sucked in aplenty (they just got stuck, like bits of fluff, in the honey); it was the big ones - the ones which lingered only in the lush, green heart of the woods - that ultimately challenged her patience.

Giant flies were rare (nobody at school, believe it or not, had ever even heard of them, except Chris Nightingale, of course) and were hardly the most intelligent of winged beings, but whether she liked it or not, they were Mother's primary source of nourishment. Helen often looked back on all the dragging afternoons she'd spent huddled in the bushes with heart-twisting despair, for sometimes, when the night arrived, the Honey Trap would still be empty, and she'd then have to make do with just the tiny black dots and slither back indoors to endure the consequences.

Submerging beneath the house to present Mother with her evening meal was (and never would be) a particularly inspiring task for Helen. It If she had been "lucky" and managed to catch a giant fly, she'd already be sick to her stomach having had to wash and prepare its brittle corpse (assuming that the creature had actually died in the trap and not required Helen to stab it awkwardly - and rather messily - with a knife). However, there was always a far greater portion of unbearable nausea waiting patiently for her arrival in the cellar; such a generous portion, in fact, that in recent months, Helen had come to greatly appreciate cleaning the giant flies' clicking, wiry carcasses. (In the past, when Mother had been able to weave properly, and thus take care of the flies herself, Helen had simply left them buzzing around in the Honey Trap, taken the whole thing down into the cellar and lifted the lid. Some of them had lasted upto eight stomach- melting minutes before Mother had finally...)

Helen decided that she should stop thinking about feeding Mother and going down into the cellar and everything else she associated with nastiness and concentrate on going to sleep before the Risers came.

`The Risers,' she thought and tried to squeeze her eyes even more closed than they already were. `Oh God how I hate the Risers.'

Now it may have become apparent to you that Helen disliked a great many things in her world - her greedy schoolmates, her drab and haunted home, having to catch giant flies every Tuesday and Thursday, Parents' Evening - but she despised nothing quite so much as she did the Bedside Risers.

Up until recently Helen had been convinced that the Risers were Mother's doing - a cruel punishment, she'd assumed, for failing to catch a sufficently filling banquet of flies. And what a sleep-stealing punishment they were, for what in the Lord's name could be more terrifying to a young girl than having to witness the pulsating, putrid bodies of dead flies float up like gruesome balloons from the horizon that was the edge of her very own bedcovers?

But the Risers no longer materialised only during the nights that followed Helen's failure to catch the flies - now, they came almost every night, as though they'd rebelled against Mother and developed evil minds of their own.

The first signs would be the tips of their leathery black antennas, gently quivering above the hills of Helen's sheets like the legs of a centipede on its back. Although petrified, Helen would refuse to bury herself, for she had learned that such a trick only made the Risers angry; should she cower beneath the sheets, the Risers' shadows would crawl slowly across her makeshift `tent', their antennas rattling and creasing lines into the fabric, until they attained a solid grip...

And then, they'd begin to pull. Weakly at first, and then stronger, and beginning to buzz, as Helen battled to remain concealed.

The sheets would curl back or slide off or even rip as she gave in - and then, torn open and abandoned like a disappointing Christmas gift, she'd roll onto her sweat-soaked back, defeated, and lay frozen still, staring at the ceiling, only partially aware that the house was, in fact, quite empty and that her pyjamas were damp between her legs.

The following morning she experienced the longest and most revealing conversation she'd ever had with her would-be-boyfriend, Neil Harvest. It began and came to an end in English, when Neil was caught fighting (or `fratching' as the teacher called it) with Chris Nightingale - the boy who said he had a dinosaur egg in his locker - and as a result had to be reseated.

Helen crossed her fingers and whispered to God that Neil would be assigned the empty chair next to her - and she tottered on the brink of fainting when those prayers were actually answered: Neil splashed his books down onto her desk and fell into the chair beside her. Helen, shaky with excitement, turned away to secretly tidy her hair, and then flashed round again, grinning massively.

"Hi, I'm so happy you've come to sit with me," she whispered.

"What?" Neil looked at her blankly. He was a pale, cherry-cheeked doormouse of a boy, with big, broad shoulders and small teeth. "What you on about?"

"I'm so happy you've-"

"Can I borrow a pen?"

"Pardon?"

"A pen. Can I borrow one?"

Helen paused to think about this sudden request. To let it sink in. "A pen," she recited. "A pen. Oh, a pen! Yes, of course..." She began to root around in her pencilcase for her most impressive biro, the one with shiny green lid and the tiny golden-

"Just give us any, man, I don't care," Neil clicked his fingers. "Come on, hurry up. I don't want a detention."

`A detention!' Helen thought worriedly. She abandoned her mission to find her best biro and gave Neil an ordinary one, as requested. "I'm so sorry," she flustered. She wanted to make her fingers brush his (just so that she could say to herself she'd actually touched him) but he snatched the pen so quickly she barely had chance. He then began to write, furiously, without looking at her, and without even saying thanks.

`Maybe he'll thank me later,' she thought optimistically. `Yes, he'll say thanks when he's finished using it. Some people do it that way.'

But Neil Harvest didn't say thanks, or even return her pen. When the bell rang for dinnertime, he got up and left, without saying a word, leaving Helen alone at the desk and feeling very rejected. She watched him until he'd disappeared out of the door (just in case he might suddenly laugh and turn around and come back, having remembered) and then she frowed and scooped her belongings into her carrier.

"Miss Parker, regarding your mother," Mrs Longhall crept into view out of apparently nowhere. Helen stood up and pushed her chair in.

"Miss Parker, don't you dare leave this room... Having browsed the school records, I have decided that I would like to pay a visit to your house, tonight, to talk one-to-one with your mother. Would that be permitted?"

"Yes miss," said Helen rhetorically. She then stopped in her tracks and lifted her head and let her jaw flop open. "Oh... No!" she cried. "You can't! You can't!"

"Why on earth not, child?" Mrs Longhall exclaimed, obviously taken aback by Helen's extrovertly hostile reaction. "My goodness, you act as though your mother doesn't exist!"

Helen blinked, and for a fraction of a moment she found herself standing beneath the pitch-dark doorway of the cellar, waiting patiently with the neatly arranged flies on the silver serving tray, and shivering violently, and listening acutely for splinters of movement. Then, she was back again, caught (like a fly) in the unbreakable, interrogating gaze of her English teacher.

Helen's mother existed, alright. In fact, one could say that Helen's mother carried out a considerably more fruitful existence than most average mothers. Helen had her doubts, however, that Mrs Longhall would appreciate knowing about this particular parents existence, for surely her teacher, no matter how rock-faced and boldly spoken, would vibrate at the knees before a woman of Mother's awesome... Shall we say, peculiarity.

But Mrs Longhall was not to be so easily convinced. "Alright, that's it, I'll be round at seven," she decided, nodding.

"But miss-"

"But miss nothing!" Her bronze- rimmed glasses were swiftly stabbed back into place. "As a teacher concerned about the progress and welfare of an obviously troubled and malnourished pupil, I absolutely insist, Miss Parker. Seven o'clock it will be, on the dot."

It was the first time somebody had knocked on the door of Helen's cottage for two and a half years. Helen was finalising the appearance of Mother's tea at the time, and she panicked a little, and rushed to cover up the twitching giant fly, and clapped her hands clean, and secured the tie in her hair, and straightened her dress, and made sure the cellar was locked.

When she finally answered the door she did so wearing her enchanting, homework-promising grin, and permitted Mrs Longhall (who was dressed in a spectacular soil-coloured gown and had her hair suspended in a big black bun) to step gingerly inside. And so, that evening, the largest of the two rooms in Helen's cottage was graced with the elegant presence of a rather subdued and pallid-faced Mrs Longhall, and filled with the delicate tinkling of rusty spoons against chipped tea cups.

As they sat opposite each other over the table in the draughty, wallpaperless livingroom, sipping their drinks, the teacher and her shy, rather embarrassed pupil exchanged only the most feeble of pleasantries; smiles were unsettled and white-lipped and eye contact was as frequent as that of two perfectly-matched lovers on their first date. It was perhaps the silence of the building that hindered their ability to communicate, for between the walls of Helen's cottage there lingered not the sounds of a perpetually droning television or the random melodies of a radio, but only the sea-shore hush of the haunted refridgerator and the distant whistle of the wind.

"Miss Parker... Helen, I mean," Mrs Longhall winced. "You do not like yourself very much, do you?"

Helen shrugged, flicking some old, hard crumbs across the table. She squashed one. "Don't know miss."

"You should, you know," The teacher reached out and touched Helen's chin. Her fingers were warm and soft and Helen ceased playing with the crumbs and closed her eyes and lifted her head, like a kitten desirous for affection. She exhaled in long, love- starved gasps. "Oh... God my child," Mrs Longhall leaned across the table. Helen snapped out of her hypnotic state and catapulted away.

"No miss," she coughed and spluttered. "No... I don't... Want..."

"I'm sorry,"

"I just don't... I feel..."

"It's alright, Helen. It's alright. I'm sorry."

They shared another worryingly fragile silence.

"Helen, May I ask what your mother's condition is called, exactly?" Helen looked at her teacher, intensely confused. She picked her cup of tea up off the table and held it tightly to her chest. "Condition," she muttered. "I'm not... Sure... Miss..."

"Oh come on now, Helen," Mrs Longhall swung her legs out from under the table. "This has gone far enough. You are in a terrible state. I insist on speaking to your mother right away."

"But she's asleep!" pleaded Helen.

"Then I shall softly blow on her face until she awakens."

"But miss, you can't!"

"Helen you are driving me around the bend." The girl splashed her cup down, ploughed up off her seat and skidded to the doorless opening that divided this room from the other. She spread her arms and legs out in a star-shape.

"You'd better go, miss."

Mrs Longhall was flabbergasted. "God's lips, Helen, what are you hiding?"

"Mother doesn't like visitors, miss. She's... She's very nervous. She might have a heart... Attack."

"A heart attack?" Mrs Longhall's eyebrows nearly found their way into the great bulb of her hair. "Helen Parker I can only conclude that you are, as I indeed suspected at the beginning of term, lying through your teeth where your parent is concerned and living in this... This..." She stood up and darted her head from left to right, indicating the battered books and clothes like a crow spying on bits of bread. "This incredible shambles on your own!" she concluded, loudly.

That was when the floorboards rumbled and the cuttlery rattled and several piles of precariously balanced books collapsed like minature skyscrapers. Helen clung to the door frame. Mrs Longhall was propelled back into the dining chair, where she pulled her feet up off the ground like a toddler on the edge of a jacuzzi. "What's going on!" she bellowed.

The destructive racket lasted for no less than fifteen seconds, after which the cups on the table sat still and the floorboards lay dead beneath the dust. It was as though the house had been built directly over the top of an underground railway tunnel, and a train had just rocketted through.

Helen detached herself from the doorway and wandered across the room, sucking her index finger. Mrs Longhall gawped at her, crystal ball-eyed and wheezing like the fridge.

"She's hungry," murmoured the child.

The door of the cellar opened with a grating squeal and banged against the adjacent wall.

"Your mother sleeps down here?" inquired Mrs Longhall, now wearing her mauve silk gloves to protect her fingers from the deadly dust.

"She lives down here," said Helen, holding up a towel-draped silver tray. "This is her supper." A thin black leg flopped out from under the material and hung down over the edge of the tray like a rubber windscreen wiper. "Oh, they never die," said Helen, tucking it back in, hurriedly. She glanced at her teacher and tried to smile before shuffling bravely into the undiluted darkness.

"But Helen, wait! How on earth will you see?" Mrs Longhall hissed into the gloom. Her words came back to her, hauntingly. "Helen, are you there? Where've you gone? Helen?"

The nervous teacher followed her pupil and found herself stepping onto the top rise of a very narrow and thinly illuminated stone staircase that appeared to corkscrew deep beneath the house. The cellar door - desperate, it seemed, to push her in - closed behind her with a solid boom that sent crumbs of cement bouncing and clattering down the greyish-green walls.

"Helen?"

"Shhh."

"Helen, thank goodness!" Overwhelmed with relief to hear the child's voice, Mrs Longhall blindly hobbled down a dozen stairs, skimming her gloves on the greasy brickwork. "Please, wait, wait, wait for me," she panted. "Oh God... It's so foul down here... Helen, where are you? Where-" She bumped into something.

"Ouch! Please miss, don't talk," Helen snickered, right beside her. "Mother can sense voices in the air."

"Sense voi-"

"Shhh."

Treading in unison, they progressed down the staircase, breathing in short gasps and keeping their heads pointed up towards the roof, where faint cracks of light glimmered like the smiles of angels.

"Helen I know this isn't-"

"Shhh! Please miss."

Mrs Longhall uttered an apology in the tinest of voices, and then followed with: "Helen I know this is hardly the time to be giving you a lecture about boys, but I couldn't help but notice your interest today in a certain... Mr Harvest."

"So what." said Helen flatly. Neil was no longer a part of her dreams - he was a cold and ignorant pen-thief. She hadn't even thought about him until this very moment. "You could do far better than Neil Harvest, Helen, far better," Mrs Longhall elaborated. She sounded really out of breath, now, and scared too. `That's why she's talking so much,' Helen thought. `People talk endlessly when they're frightened.' "Neil Harvest and that menace Christopher Nightingale are upto no good whatsoever. If I were you I'd... Oh my... Goodness..."

Ahead of them, the stairs were coming to an end, and beyond them, the cellar appeared to open up into a gigantic hallway that ran so far back its entire length was kept secret by the darkness.

"Helen... What... How... I don't believe..."

As she emerged from the shelter of the staircase, Mrs Longhall found herself wanting to fall to her knees with amazement. The pure brick walls of this stupendous chamber soared up at either side of her like filthy, frozen waterfalls, copperish grey with what she assumed was a thick coating of dust, and surely higher than some of the buildings in the town centre. As she took a few cautious steps further into the passageway, hoping that her legs would not fail to function, she truly felt like Moses, standing before the division of the Red Sea - only in the heart of the night, and beneath a cloudless, starless void.

"Mother's here," said Helen with more than a hint of distress in her voice. That was when the teacher realised that she had walked a considerably long way out into the gaping tunnel, leaving Helen alone (and looking like a trainee waitress) at the foot of the stairs.

"Your mother is here?"

"Miss don't move! Don't move!" Helen shrieked, her voice firing like a like a cannon ball into the depths of the cavern.

"Helen what...!"

"Just stay still! She's seen you! She's seen you miss!"

Mrs Longhall's legs finally gave in; she collapsed like a chimney into a swirling heap on the rock hard ground, as though she'd been shot at point- blank, and then simply remained in that position, whisking her head from left to right. Helen thought she looked like a big bird protecting its egg and wanted to laugh, but she couldn't. She had never laughed down here.

"Up on the wall! She's there, miss!" Helen pointed uselessly, knowing all too well that Mother was a master of camourflage.

A delicate trickling sound, like running water, caused Mrs Longhall's frantic head-shaking to ease a little; now, she scanned the walls as intensely as she did her own register at the beginning of a fresh school day (in fact, Helen could almost see her teacher's finger reaching out and ticking off the bricks, one at a time - nothing on that one, nothing on that one, nothing on that...)

Mother rushed down the wall by thirty feet; Mrs Longhall jerked. The teacher had seen her this time, Lord in heaven yes, she'd seen her, and once was enough. She scrambled onto her feet, producing a noise like a wounded calf, and began to stagger for the opening of the staircase. Helen dropped the silver tray, launching a metallic blast the ping-ponged down the walls, and held her arms out and began to wail as her teacher hitched up her dress and ran, faster and faster until she was nearly galloping. A black blur against the brickwork mosaic, Mother shot down the remaining twenty feet of the wall and came tearing up behind the sprinting teacher with an icy crackle.

"Miss run miss please miss just run!"

Mrs Longhall, using an athletic strength that would have made even the PE teacher bow down with astonishment, made it to the foot of the stairs with a triumphant squeal and disappeared into the darkness with all the force and power of a train going into a tunnel.

Thunderstruck by her teacher's escape, Helen spun into the staircase, merely seconds before Mother's razor- sharp legs and huge, glistening jaws tore bricks out of the side of the opening.