Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp

by Odo Hirsch

  Because there was much that he could have said to Amelia. That already she had had an effect on his mistress, the Princess. That even the Princess Parvin Kha-Douri, who seemed outwardly so cold and severe, sometimes felt doubt. That she was at her most harsh with others when she doubted herself most deeply. And that he had never, in all the years he had spent with her, known her to be more harsh than in the days that had passed since she went into in the green house and saw the peacock lamp of her childhood hanging above the stairs.

  CHAPTER 16

  Amelia was angrier than she had ever been in her life. She sat in her room, almost trembling with rage. What right did the Princess have to treat her like that, to look at her as if she were no better than a dog? Not once, but twice. This was the second time! And why hadn’t she said anything in response? She hated herself for that. Why had she stood there, dumb, shocked, instead of fighting back? She didn’t know who she was angrier at, the Princess, or herself.

  Why had Mr Vishwanath introduced her to the Princess in the first place? Why did he agree to teach yoga to such a cold, cruel woman? Wasn’t he always saying he would rather have one true student than a hundred followers? He sent other people away but let the Princess keep coming. What kind of a true student was a person like that?

  Amelia didn’t know what to do, she was so angry and confused. If she didn’t do something, it felt as if something inside her was going to snap.

  She got up. She looked down at the street. There, directly below her, that was where it had happened. The car was still there. Right now, the Princess would be in the studio on the ground floor, in her green leotard, with one foot hooked around her neck, probably. Amelia thought of going down and bursting in and knocking her off her one foot while the other was still hooked there.

  A pigeon flew past. It looped up and landed on the head of the carved lady. It looked at Amelia. Its eye was red. It had an angry, aggressive look. Amelia watched it. The pigeon kept sitting there. Suddenly it took off and flapped away. Amelia could feel the wind from its wings as it went past.

  ‘How can you bear that?’ she demanded. ‘The way they come and sit on you? Don’t you hate it?’

  The carved lady kept staring down at the street with her pupil-less eyes. Her face looked blank, silly, weak. Perfectly unperturbed.

  ‘You should!’ said Amelia. What was wrong with the carved lady? She ought to hate the way the pigeons came and sat on her. They’d been doing it for a hundred years. She ought to be angry. She ought to be as angry as anything.

  Amelia looked down at the people on the street. She felt impatient with everyone. She could see the roofs of all the houses and shops on Marburg Street and of the houses in the streets beyond. You could see over everything from the top of the green house. If the Princess lived in Marburg Street, thought Amelia, this was certainly where she’d want to live. But even this wouldn’t be good enough for her. Nothing was good enough for her.

  Amelia wondered how she could ever have imagined there was some good, gentle part of the Princess waiting to be released. What an idiot she had been! It was Mr Vishwanath’s fault. He had put the idea in her head. Inside everyone, he had said, there is beauty. Wrong! Inside the Princess there was nothing but more of what there was on the outside. Self-importance and bitterness. Bitterness, especially bitterness.

  Amelia had never met anyone else as bitter. Not even close. Compare the Princess with Mr Chan, Kevin’s cousin, who had lost a leg in some kind of accident in the factory where he worked. Amelia couldn’t quite understand how Mr Chan could be Kevin’s cousin, because he was about fifty years old, but apparently he was, and ever since the accident he had had to walk with an artificial leg. The artificial leg had a brown shoe on its artificial foot, and Mr Chan couldn’t wear anything but brown shoes on his real foot so they’d match. He couldn’t work any more because of his accident. But he wasn’t bitter. In fact, he was one of the most cheerful people Amelia knew, always laughing. He grew vegetables in his backyard, but he didn’t call it his backyard, he called it his farm, and chuckled when he said it. His farm was about five metres long! And every little patch of vegetables – carrots, broccoli, whatever – wasn’t a patch, it was a field.

  Mr Chan wasn’t bitter, and he had more of a right to be bitter than the Princess. Surely it was worse to lose your leg than your palace.

  ‘At least you can still walk after you’ve lost your palace,’ muttered Amelia. ‘At least you can wear any shoe you like, and it doesn’t have to be brown!’

  Amelia looked at the carved lady to see what she had to say to that. But the carved lady looked back at her blankly, as if she wouldn’t even know how to begin. Amelia rolled her eyes. ‘Put a pigeon on your head!’ she said, and she turned away from the window.

  She threw herself down in her chair. Her pen was on the desk in front of her. She hadn’t written a thing since the Princess told her how stupid her story was.

  She picked up the pen now, absent-mindedly, still fuming.

  Bitter, she thought. Bitter bitter bitter.

  She grabbed a piece of paper. She wrote.

  The Bitter Princess

  She looked at the words. Impulsively, she put her pen to the paper again.

  There was once a princess who was extremely bitter. She wasn’t a young, beautiful princess, like you read about in fairy tales, she was old and wrinkled. This wasn’t because of a spell that some horrible witch had cast on her, like you would find in a fairy tale. It was because of a spell she had cast on herself.

  That was right. A spell she had cast on herself! It was her own fault she was bitter. It was her own fault she couldn’t think about anything but the things she had lost.

  It wasn’t an old-fashioned magic spell like the kind you would find in a fairy tale. It was a modern kind of spell, and it meant the Princess could only think of everything she had lost. Every day, that’s what she thought about, everything she had lost. She never thought about all the things she still had.

  Amelia paused. She was starting to get interested in the story now, where it would go, how it would develop. How had the spell come to be cast? After all, why would anyone cast a spell over herself? Amelia thought about it. Maybe it had happened without her knowing.

  The spell was cast when the Princess was only a little girl. One night, very late, when she was asleep in her grand palace, her servant came running in and woke her up. There was an angry crowd outside, and they only had minutes to escape.

  And? Amelia considered. What now? Maybe, if you were a certain age, if were woken at a certain time, when the moon was full and the night was black, then you would be bitter for the rest of your life. Maybe in everyone’s life there was one particular moment like that, and if you happened to be woken at that moment – and it happened very rarely, because the chances were low – then you would be bitter for as long as you lived. And maybe the opposite was true as well, there was a moment which would make you cheerful for the rest of your life, like Mr Chan, even if terrible things happened to you.

  Now, it just so happened that at the moment the Princess was woken the moon was full and the night was black. There is a moment like this in everybody’s life. Most of us sleep through it, and wake up safely the next morning. But if you are woken up at that exact moment, as the Princess was that night when the crowd had come to burn the palace

  Amelia stopped. This was wrong. If that was how the spell was cast, it wasn’t the Princess’s fault. She could never stop being bitter, because she happened to be woken up at the wrong moment, and once that happened, she was doomed. But the Princess had to have some control if it was going to be her own fault. She had to be the one who cast the spell on herself – maybe not intentionally, but she still had to be the one who cast it.

  Amelia scratched out the last lines, everything she had written since she wrote that the princess had only minutes to escape. She thought. How would a person cast a spell on herself unintentionally, yet still be responsible for it? Maybe . . . maybe becaus
e of what she was like. Could that be it? Because of something about her, or the way she behaved. Because she was so awful, or thoughtless, or disobedient, or spoiled, and wouldn’t listen to anybody else.

  Amelia nodded. Now she had it.

  All around there was noise, and shouting, and the Princess, who was hardly awake, didn’t know what was happening. The servant picked her up and carried her away. ‘Don’t look!’ said the servant, and he held her close, risking his own life to save her. But the Princess squirmed and wriggled and managed to peek over his shoulder. ‘Don’t look!’ cried the servant again, ‘these are things you must not see.’ But the Princess shouted back at him, ‘Don’t tell me what to do! You’re just a servant! ’ She was a thoughtless girl, and very uppity, and she thought she was better than all her servants, and she never thanked them when they did things for her. She was spoiled, even for a princess, and never did anything her servants said, always thinking she knew better. And it was the same on this night, and she didn’t even care that the poor servant was risking his life to save her. She wriggled and squirmed in his arms until she could see again. Every time the servant told her to look away, she shouted back, and every time he tried to press her close, she squirmed and screamed until she could see. And in her eyes, the palace burned. The flames rose high into the darkness of the night, destroying all the things the Princess had and all the other things she would have had. She wouldn’take her eyes off it, not for a second, even though the servant kept telling her to. That was how the spell was cast. From that night on, she could only think about the things she had lost when the palace burned. And she had only herself to blame, because if she had only done as she was told for once in her life, if she hadn’t been so thoughtless and disobedient, it never would have happened.

  Amelia looked back over what she had written. Perfect. Now, where was the story going next? Her teacher was always saying you had to plan your stories before you started writing, but Amelia rarely did that. Not for the stories she wrote for herself, anyway. She liked to see where they went by themselves. That was the thing Amelia loved most about writing. You never knew what ideas or characters were going to come out, and if you were lucky, you found that something very clever, or funny, or scary, had appeared. So it must have been inside you all along, but you wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t written the story in the first place, or if you had tried to plan it too carefully before you started. But that did mean sometimes you got a bit stuck. Especially when it came to the ending. Endings could be tricky when you hadn’t planned anything about your story.

  But not this time. Amelia soon knew what to write next, and the story ran on. She covered both sides of the first page, and went on to a second, then a third. The Princess was older now. She was in a new country. She met new people. Some of them wanted to be her friends, but she rejected them, thinking of the friends she might have had if she hadn’t been forced to flee her home. When she had grown up, a handsome, clever man wanted to marry her, but she refused, thinking of the princes who might have wanted to marry her had her parents still ruled her country. An hour later, Amelia had covered almost a dozen pages. The Princess was old, lonely and unhappy, and her only companion was the ancient servant who had woken her on that fateful night. Finally, her servant died, and a month later, the Princess died as well, utterly alone, utterly forgotten, with only her bitterness to keep her company at the end. And when they found her body locked in her room, years later, it was just a skeleton, and no one had any idea who she had been.

  Amelia put down her pen.

  She glanced over the story, flipping through the pages. In many ways, it was a horrible story, more horrible than the so-called horror stories she liked to read. It wasn’t exactly bloodcurdling, there were no vampires or murderers or bloodstained knives. And it wasn’t about something an evil person does to other people, which is what most horror stories were about. It was about something evil a person does to herself. But that, Amelia realised, was what made it all the more horrible.

  Good, she thought.

  CHAPTER 17

  The story lay in the drawer in Amelia’s desk, together with other stories she had written. But it wasn’t the same as the other stories. There was something strange about it. Amelia didn’t look at the story after she had put it away, not even once, didn’t even dare to open the drawer. Yet she could feel it there, almost as if it was a living, breathing thing, almost as if it needed to be heard and couldn’t be locked away in a dark drawer and forgotten. Almost as if it was waiting to get out.

  Amelia didn’t know what to do with it. Sometimes she wanted to grab the story out of the drawer and tear it up, and sometimes she wanted to thrust it at the Princess and make her read it. Yet somehow Amelia couldn’t bring herself to do either.

  And in the meantime, every few days, the cream-coloured car came up Marburg Street and stopped in front of the green house. The Princess got out and went into Mr Vishwanath’s studio for her yoga lesson, just as she always had. The story continued to lie in the drawer, waiting to come out, and there was no time that Amelia was more strongly conscious of it than when she saw the cream-coloured car pulling up in the street under her window.

  Other strange things were happening. As time passed, Eugenie talked about her meeting with the Princess in a way that didn’t match what had actually occurred. At first she told people she had met a princess, because she wanted people to know. She didn’t say what this ‘meeting’ consisted of. Then she began to say the Princess had smiled at her, and then she began to say the Princess had said ‘Good afternoon’ to her, and then she began to say that the Princess had talked to her, and in the end she was describing a whole conversation between herself and the Princess that had never taken place. At least, Amelia couldn’t remember it taking place. Neither could Kevin. Eugenie was lying.

  ‘I’m not lying!’ retorted Eugenie, after Amelia had heard her describe the latest version of the meeting to someone else.

  ‘Eugenie,’ said Amelia, ‘the Princess never asked you to come for tea.’

  ‘Of course she did. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No, I don’t remember,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Well, you’ve forgotten,’ said Eugenie.

  ‘Eugenie, I haven’t forgotten. She never said such a thing. If she did, why haven’t you been to tea with her?’

  ‘She said she’d let me know when she was available.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t she let you know?’

  Eugenie laughed, as if that was the simplest question in the world. ‘She’s busy. She’s a princess! It’ll probably be a year until she has time.’

  ‘Eugenie, the Princess never said that to you. None of it. You know she didn’t.’

  ‘Of course she did. She said: “It was lovely to meet you, Mademoiselle Eugenie, and you must come and take tea. I’ll let you know when it’s convenient.”’

  Amelia stared at Eugenie. The words had come out so easily, so confidently, it would be easy to believe that the Princess really had said them. And Eugenie was looking at Amelia so openly, so unashamedly, it was hard to believe she was consciously lying. So hard to believe, in fact, that Amelia found herself asking Kevin whether the version that Eugenie was telling – or something like it, at least – hadn’t actually happened.

  Kevin looked at Amelia incredulously.

  ‘You don’t think . . .’ Amelia frowned. ‘We couldn’t have missed it, could we? The Princess couldn’t have said those things to Eugenie while we weren’t looking?’

  Kevin rolled his eyes. ‘Amelia, even if the Princess wanted to talk to her, she couldn’t have. Eugenie didn’t stop curtsying. Even when we went inside she kept curtsying. She’s lying, Amelia. You know Eugenie. She’ll say anything to make herself seem important.’

  But Eugenie wasn’t lying, that was what Amelia began to understand. Not in the sense of someone who says something false while consciously knowing it’s untrue. Somehow, Eugenie had actually come to believe what she was saying. Amelia realised
that Eugenie genuinely no longer knew what was reality and what was her imagination. Or to put it another way, Eugenie’s imagination had become her reality. So strongly did she wish that the Princess had said those things to her, she had come to believe the Princess actually had said them. Eugenie had created a kind of myth of what had happened that day, and now she was turning that myth into the truth.

  And Kevin, in a way, was doing the same thing. Eugenie hadn’t kept curtsying when they went inside, Amelia was sure of it. Wasn’t she?

  Amelia found this very strange, and perplexing. And interesting. Who was to say Eugenie was wrong? Only Amelia and Kevin had been there with her throughout the entire encounter. And if Amelia or Kevin were to tell a different version, why should anyone believe them rather than Eugenie? After all, Amelia had found herself wondering whether Eugenie wasn’t right, so convincing and genuine did she seem. Amelia found it quite extraordinary, the way a myth that someone created could make you doubt what you yourself knew to be true. But how did you know it was true? And if Eugenie could do it, how often must other, cleverer people do it? It made Amelia wonder about a lot of things. About the things she learned in history, for example. How could she be sure any of it was true, and that one part or another wasn’t just some kind of myth that someone had invented and which everyone had started to believe, blotting out the memory of what had really happened? Especially where one side were winners, for example, and the other side were losers, and only the winners got to tell their side of the story.

  Amelia glanced out the window at the carved lady. Suddenly Amelia felt as if she were floating, completely disconnected, and everything around her was just a kind of illusion. Nothing was certain. How did she know the world itself even existed and wasn’t just something inside her own imagination? Maybe she was asleep, and this whole life she thought she was living was just a dream. And the dreams she had at night, they were dreams within a dream. So nothing really existed, not the carved lady she could supposedly see outside her window, nor the lamp at the top of the stairs outside her room, nor the green house that contained the stairs, nor the people who lived in the house, her mother or her father or Mrs Ellis or Mr Vishwanath or she, Amelia Dee. Although Amelia must exist, because everything was inside her imagination. But who could tell who Amelia really was? Maybe a boy called Edward. Or an old lady called Phyllis. Or a snail with an exceptionally active mind.