Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp

by Odo Hirsch

  Later, after she had discovered the secrets that the metalwork of the lamp contained, Amelia sometimes imagined she was the only person in the whole world who knew them. Otherwise, she imagined, the secrets had gone to the grave with the lamp’s creator. And whether this was true or not, she was certainly the only person in the world who knew that she had almost died because of the lamp. Or that she had secretly begun to write stories because of it.

  Amelia’s discovery of the lamp’s secrets began soon after she started standing on the banister. One day, as she was turning the lamp, she thought she recognised a shape in the metalwork of the bottom. Then it was gone. She stopped turning the lamp and looked for it. Where? Suddenly she found it again. It was like a bird’s head. Quite small. There was its beak. Then its neck. She followed it. A body. Feathers, with circles, fronds. A huge fan of feathers. Suddenly Amelia realised what she was looking at. A peacock! She turned the lamp. There was another! In fact, the entire bottom of the lamp was made up of this pair of peacocks. Amelia discovered that what she had imagined to be a swirling, meaningless pattern, or maybe some kind of field of flowers, was actually a pair of magnificent, fanning peacock tails.

  After that, Amelia found there were things to discover everywhere. She would stand on the banister, turning the lamp, peering at the metalwork around the glass panels. At first you would discern nothing, even things that you had already discovered, and you would just see patterns, swirls. Then you would notice a shape, like a tiny clue, and you would follow it, and suddenly the picture would reveal itself. A clawed paw led to a tiger that prowled across the top of one of the glass faces. A curling tail led to a monkey, and then to another, and another, and suddenly you had found a whole string of monkeys tumbling and chasing each other around another one of the panels. There was a heron. A rhinoceros. Birds, animals, flowers, dolphins. And people. Tiny figures that looked like clowns, others that wore a strange, twisting kind of hat. And there were apparently little jokes included. One of the monkeys had a devilish human face. The heron was looking for a fish that was swimming just behind it. One of the hats was actually a snail. Tiny frogs and lizards poked their tongues out in the most unlikely places. Yet the most amazing thing – more amazing than any of the details in the metalwork – was that whoever had made the lamp, whoever had created these details, must have known that it would almost certainly hang too high for anyone to see them. And yet still the lampmaker had created them.

  Then, one day, Amelia found something else.

  She was standing on the banister, turning the lamp, when she noticed two tiny hinges, so cleverly incorporated in the metalwork that they were almost invisible. They were at the edge of one of the six glass panels, and at the other edge of the panel, she noticed, was a very narrow gap. Not a lock, or a lever, just the tiniest, thinnest gap. If you slid something into the gap, and pulled back, Amelia realised, the panel would swing open at the hinges. It was a door that opened into the lamp.

  But she would need both hands to do it, one to hold the lamp steady and the other to slide something into the gap. And if she used two hands, she wouldn’t be able to steady herself against the frame of her door while she stood on the banister. Yet there had to be a way to do it.

  She got a piece of rope. She waited until her mother was in her painting room, and her father was in his invention shed, and Mrs Ellis was out getting the groceries. She tied one end of the rope around her ankle and the other end around the banister. Then she climbed up on the banister, holding onto the door frame, and she pulled a little knife out of her pocket – the smallest and thinnest she had been able to find in the kitchen – and then, very slowly, she let go of the door frame.

  At that instant, as she balanced on the banister at the top of the stairwell, with one hand on the lamp and the other holding the knife, Amelia felt an amazing kind of lightness. It was as if she had left the earth behind. The world seemed to stop.

  Then she began to wobble. Suddenly the banister under her feet seemed slippery and round. Instinctively, she grabbed for the lamp with both hands, and as she did, she toppled. The knife plunged to the bottom of the stairs. And Amelia Dee dangled in the air above the stairwell, holding on to the bronze lamp.

  The lamp swung out, taking her with it. The chains groaned. The lamp swung back, then out again, then back. Amelia saw the banister coming towards her and she lunged. Over the top she went. She landed on one knee with a thud.

  Her heart pounded. The lamp was still swinging. Amelia poked her nose between the banisters and looked down. The knife was a tiny glint of light at the bottom of the stairs.

  The rope was still around her ankle. Amelia reached for it and the knot unravelled in her hand. She realised what would have happened if she had lost her grip on the lamp, or if the chains had given way.

  Amelia didn’t tell anyone about the incident, not even Eugenie or Kevin. When people asked why she was limping, she said she’d tripped over. Even now, years later, no one knew she had swung from the lamp above the stairs, and what would have happened if the lamp hadn’t been strong enough to hold her.

  It was a scary experience. But an interesting one. Amelia imagined what might have resulted if she really had plunged to the bottom of the stairs, she and the lamp. For a start, Mrs Ellis would have found her there when she came in with the groceries. Amelia would have been dead, of course, and she imagined what everyone would have done. Tears. Grief. Accusations. ‘If only you had been watching her.’ ‘No, if only you had!’ Maybe she would come back as a ghost, as often happened in the horror books she loved reading. Maybe she would haunt the house. Maybe she would meet the ghost of old Solomon Weiszacker, who probably haunted the house as well. She wondered what kind of a ghost old Solomon Weiszacker would be. Probably a disappointed one, seeing as he had obviously made a big mistake about the kind of houses that were going to be built in Marburg Street. It didn’t take much to get Amelia’s imagination going, far less than this. Ideas always seemed to be popping up in her head about things that had happened or might have happened or should have happened, often of the most extraordinary nature.

  Most of the time, Amelia herself didn’t know where her ideas came from. Sometimes she turned them into stories. Everyone thought she was reading when she was in her room, and often she was reading, but not always. Sometimes she was writing.

  Amelia had whole drawers full of the stories she had written. Some of them went back years, and were in the big childish writing she had when she was smaller. She couldn’t remember exactly why she had started. Her mother, with her painting and her sculpting and her weaving, seemed to do everything else. Maybe that had something to do with it. Amelia couldn’t remember exactly when she had started, either, but it was after she swung on the lamp. She had never actually written down the story about how she had swung and crashed to the ground and was found by Mrs Ellis and met Solomon Weiszacker’s disappointed ghost, but it was vivid in her mind, every word of it. And it must have been shortly after this happened – or would have happened had the lamp not been strong enough to hold her – that she did start writing down her stories and putting them away in drawers, first in one drawer, then another, which were now full of the things she had written.

  Amelia always made sure the door of her room was closed when she was writing. She had never told anyone about the stories, apart from the sculpted lady outside her window, who knew all her secrets. Sometimes Amelia had a feeling that writing stories was a slightly silly thing to do, and other people would laugh if they knew. She wrote stories at school, of course, like everyone else, but they didn’t count because the teachers made everyone do it. All the kids were always laughing about a boy in Amelia’s class called Martin Martinez, who wrote stories in his spare time and brought them to school where he loved to read them out and was always trying to get them into the school magazine. Everyone said he thought he was some kind of a new Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare or something. Most of Martin Martinez’s stories had something to do with Ar
gentina, which was where his family came from. Privately, Amelia thought her stories were much better than the ones Martin Martinez wrote. And he was a terrible boaster, and didn’t seem to realise that the more he boasted about his stories, the more everyone laughed at him. Yet Amelia couldn’t help admiring him just a little, despite herself, for showing his stories to the world.

  The lamp was always giving Amelia ideas, and not only about what would happen if she plunged to her death and came back as a ghost. She often wondered where the lamp came from. From its size alone it was obvious that it must have been intended to hang in a very large room, and from its beauty that it must have been designed for a place of great elegance and luxury. Amelia’s favourite story about the lamp was that it had once hung in a faraway palace, long before the days when there was electricity, and there had been oil burning inside it, and every evening a servant would come with a ladder and open the little door and replenish the oil in the lamp. Naturally, there was a princess in the story, and the light hung in her room. The princess loved a handsome young man, who was a gardener, or sometimes he was a guardsman, or sometimes he was a metalworker, but in the story he was never a prince, and her parents, the king and the queen – whose name was sometimes Eugenie, especially if Amelia was thinking of the story on a day when Eugenie Edelstein had been particularly pompous – wouldn’t let her marry him. They sent the handsome young man away. The princess became very sad, and wouldn’t eat, and refused to leave her room. And as a protest, she refused to allow the lamp to be lit. So the door to the lamp, which had been opened every evening, remained closed, as the princess pined for her lover.

  Then the story had different endings. Amelia had never written them down, but they were all in her head. Sometimes the king and queen relented, and they allowed the handsome young man to come back, and the princess and the young man were married, and the lamp was lit again every night. That was quite a soppy ending, almost a fairy tale, and Amelia felt guilty for even thinking of it. But sometimes that really was the ending she preferred, when she was in a soppy mood. Other times, the king and queen forced the princess to marry a horrible, nasty prince, and they became king and queen in their turn, and grew old, and eventually the nasty husband died, and the princess was left, although now she was a lonely old queen, and one day an old man arrived at the palace, and it was the handsome young man who had been driven away so many years before, and even though it was so many years since they had seen each other, and they had both grown old, they recognised each other at once, and as they kissed, the lamp, which still had a little oil left from all those years before, burst into light once more, but as soon as they had kissed, they died in each other’s arms, and the light sputtered out forever. But that was still fairly soppy, although at least they both died. Sometimes, when they kissed, they became young again, and they lived happily ever after, which was even soppier. So sometimes, the handsome man wasn’t allowed back, and the princess didn’t marry a nasty prince, but pined away in her room, and died of sadness, and the lamp never glowed again. And sometimes, after she had died, the ghost of the princess came back, and the animals on the lamp sprang to life as phantom beasts, vicious, bloodthirsty, and would obey nobody but the ghost-princess, who had no sadness now, but demanded vengeance. There was no end of bloodcurdling things that could be done in that big palace when the ghost-princess came back in the night with her phantom tigers and monkeys and rhinoceroses and other beasts – much more scary and bloodcurdling than anything Amelia ever read in her horror books – and sometimes Amelia had to stop imagining them before she frightened herself so much that she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  Funnily enough, after a while, Amelia had found that she was glad she hadn’t succeeded in opening the lamp, but had only swung on it. It seemed that there must have been a reason for it. Amelia was sure she had never written any of her stories down before that day. It was as if swinging on the lamp, and almost falling to her death, was the thing that had made her start. And yet if she had opened the door, she felt, none of the stories that she wrote would ever have taken shape. It was as if the lamp contained the stories – not only the ones about itself, but all the other ones that came into Amelia’s mind – and Amelia only had to look at it to delve into the endless store of ideas that were locked up inside it. But if she had managed to open the door that day, all the ideas would have flown away.

  It would sound ridiculous to anyone else if she had to explain it, she knew, but to Amelia it seemed that somehow the lamp was deeply connected to the fact that she loved to write, or maybe was even responsible for it, and if the lamp was ever taken away from her, she imagined that she might never write another story again.

  But Amelia didn’t imagine that the most amazing stories don’t necessarily start in a faraway palace, like the ones she made up about the lamp – or that if they do, they don’t necessarily end there. She didn’t suspect that the most extraordinary tales can end up in the most ordinary places, where you’d least expect them. Like Mr Vishwanath’s studio on the ground floor of the green house that Solomon Weiszacker built. Or that they can come into your life without you even realising that it’s happening, in the shape of something you’ve seen hundreds of times before, like a big cream-coloured car, for instance, coming down the street.

  CHAPTER 5

  Amelia saw the car from her window. It moved slowly along the street towards her. As it drew near to the green house the car veered gently towards the kerb, like a big stately ship coming into port, and then it came to a stop, directly in front of the sheet-covered window on the ground floor.

  Amelia put down the book she had been reading and looked at the pavement below her. She knew what was about to happen next. It was always the same. Out of the front seat would get the driver, a small man in a blue suit. He would put a blue cap carefully on his head, and then he would go around the car to the passenger door and open it, and out would get the old lady, wearing a long fur coat that came right down to her ankles, whatever the weather.

  The man went around the car and opened the door for the lady.

  ‘Now he’ll have to run after her,’ murmured Amelia to the sculpted lady with the coffee and the coral outside her window. When the old lady got out of the car, she never said a word to the driver, but always walked straight past him, and the man would close the car door and run so he could get to the door of Mr Vishwanath’s studio and open it before she got there. ‘See?’ murmured Amelia, as the driver scurried to the door.

  The lady went inside. The man went back to the car, took off his cap, got back into the driver’s seat, closed the door and waited. He would wait there like that, Amelia knew, for an hour. Then he would get out, put on his cap, walk around the car, open the passenger door and stand beside it, and invariably, a minute or so later, the old lady would come out of the green house, walk past him without a word and get into the car again.

  From this height, the cream-coloured car looked very grand. But Amelia had seen it up close, on the street. It was old, the paintwork had lost its gleam, and the leather of the seats was cracked. The driver’s uniform, which looked so smart from a distance, was worn and frayed, and the stitching on his cap was coming loose. The man himself was old and hunched, with thinning silver hair, and looked as if he should have retired long ago. Amelia felt sorry for him. He would sit in the car, without saying a word or even seeming to look at anything in particular, as people went past him. Even if a bunch of kids jumped around outside his window and made faces at him, as they sometimes did, he didn’t respond, didn’t do anything, until it was time to get out and open the door for the lady again.

  Amelia had seen the old lady up close as well, a few times, when she happened to be outside as the old lady was arriving or leaving. The old lady was tall, quite thin, with knobbly fingers and lots of rings. Amelia wondered whether the lady could get the rings off over the knobbles in her fingers, and if not, how long the rings had been there. The lady’s hair, which was pulled tightly back, was almos
t white, but her eyebrows were black. And she always had a very severe, hawk-like expression on her face, and she always looked straight ahead, as if nothing to either side of her was worthy of attention, not even her driver as he opened the car door. In short, Amelia didn’t think she looked like a particularly nice person, and she wondered why Mr Vishwanath, who seemed to be so picky about his yoga students, wanted to teach her.

  Assuming she really was a yoga student, of course.

  Amelia knew that all the rumours about Mr Vishwanath being a spy or a crime boss were nonsense, so she knew the rumours about the lady being his accomplice were nonsense as well. But Amelia found it hard to believe the lady came to learn yoga. Once she had asked Mr Vishwanath what the lady really did when she came to his studio, but he hadn’t said anything, or even acknowledged her question. Yet the lady looked too old for yoga, and she always came in a fur coat, which was the last thing she would have needed. And her expression was always so harsh, with none of the peace, none of the contentment, that showed so strongly in Mr Vishwanath’s face. Maybe she was an old friend of Mr Vishwanath, or a relative, and went there to visit him. If so, Amelia didn’t think much of her. She didn’t think much of the way the old lady left the small man sitting in the car when she went inside. She was probably having tea and cake with Mr Vishwanath, enjoying herself, while the man in the car had nothing. And she never brought anything out to him. That was another thing that made Amelia dislike her.

  ‘What do you think she’s doing in there?’ murmured Amelia, still gazing at the street, although a couple of minutes must have passed since the old lady had disappeared into Mr Vishwanath’s studio and the driver had gone back to the car. She gazed for a moment longer, then glanced at the sculpted lady outside her window, who stared down with her sightless eyes.