When Mrs Longhall asked Helen why her
mother always failed to attend
Parents' Evening, Helen stifled a
sharp giggle behind her hand. "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.