Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp (3 page)

Amelia couldn’t see the point of all the work that went into the sculptures if they were just going to be put in the garden. Whenever her father had finished positioning a new sculpture there, he always said it didn’t matter whether anyone saw it, all that mattered was that her mother had expressed herself. But Amelia wasn’t so sure. She didn’t really believe that could be all that mattered, even for her mother. Amelia didn’t think her mother was very brave, hiding her sculptures in the garden where no one would see them.

‘Why do you think she keeps making them?’ murmured Amelia, as much to herself as Mr Vishwanath.

Mr Vishwanath glanced at Amelia with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile. Or perhaps it was. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said.

Amelia shook her head. Mr Vishwanath watched her for a moment longer, and then gazed at the sculptures again.

CHAPTER 3

Amelia’s best friend was Eugenie Edelstein, and her other best friend was Kevin Chan. Eugenie was a lot harder on Mr Vishwanath than Kevin.

‘It’s his own fault if he won’t advertise,’ said Eugenie. ‘How many students does he have?’

‘A few,’ said Amelia, feeling as if she had to defend Mr Vishwanath.

‘A few? There’s the old lady who comes with the driver in the big car, that’s the only one I can think of, and who knows what she really does there?’

There were all kinds of rumours about what the lady really did when she went into Mr Vishwanath’s studio. Few people believed she could possibly be going there simply to do yoga. Kids who thought the place was some kind of a front, and Mr Vishwanath must be a spy master or a crime boss, thought the mysterious woman’s appearance was proof of their theory. She must be someone who carried messages for Mr Vishwanath, or brought him instructions, or delivered money, or something else, and her driver was some kind of bodyguard. Others objected that she was too old to be a crime messenger or a money deliverer. Exactly, said the kids who thought she was. That was the whole point. Who would suspect an old lady like that? She was perfect for the job, whatever it actually was.

Amelia murmured something about other students coming, lots of other students.

‘Well, if he really wants more students, and he won’t even put up a sign,’ declared Eugenie, ‘he has no one to blame but himself.’

‘Is he blaming anyone?’ asked Kevin.

Amelia shook her head.

‘I was speaking figuratively,’ said Eugenie, in a rather pompous tone. Eugenie had a tendency to pomposity. Her mother, who had a tendency to pomposity as well, and loved everything French, had named her after some long-dead French empress, and told Eugenie that she should never forget it. Whatever that was supposed to mean. Eugenie’s outbursts of pomposity made Amelia and Kevin laugh. When they laughed, Eugenie just became even more pompous.

They laughed.

Eugenie put her nose in the air. ‘If one can’t speak figuratively, I hardly know why one bothers,’ she muttered to herself.

Amelia and Kevin glanced at each other and grinned.

Eugenie walked along with her nose even further in the air. One day, thought Amelia, she’d be walking along like that and she’d trip over something.

‘I don’t think advertising is Mr Vishwanath’s problem,’ said Kevin. ‘In fact, I’ve heard he knocks students back.’ Kevin looked at Amelia meaningfully, as if to remind her again of the rumours that Mr Vishwanath wasn’t running a yoga studio at all behind the sheet in his window, but something altogether more mysterious and sinister, and that the old lady was somehow involved in it.

‘So have I,’ said Eugenie, lowering her nose and looking at Amelia in exactly the same insinuating way.

Amelia stopped. ‘How do you know?’

‘Everyone knows,’ replied Eugenie. ‘My mother has a friend whose sister’s niece had a second cousin who wanted to learn yoga from Mr Vishwanath, and when she went—’ ‘Wait a minute,’ said Kevin, ‘can you just run through that again to make sure we’ve got it? Your mother’s friend’s sister . . .’

‘
When
she went to Mr Vishwanath,’ said Eugenie sternly, throwing a disapproving glance at Kevin, ‘he told her to go to the Fitness Fanatics gym and learn yoga there.’

‘Why?’ asked Amelia.

‘I have no idea,’ replied Eugenie. ‘She was quite insulted.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She went to Fitness Fanatics. She said she can learn just as much at Fitness Fanatics. The people are nicer, and they don’t tell her to go away. She said she doesn’t need any old Mr Vishwanath to tell her what to do.’

Kevin laughed.

‘What’s funny about that?’ demanded Eugenie.

‘Well, she said she didn’t need Mr Vishwanath to tell her what to do, and then she did exactly what Mr Vishwanath told her . . .’ Kevin stopped. There wasn’t the slightest sign on Eugenie’s face that she saw the irony. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he murmured.

Eugenie turned back to Amelia. ‘In her opinion, Mr Vishwanath is too big for his boots.’

Amelia had never seen Mr Vishwanath in boots. He wore slippers when he sat in his chair under the back verandah, and sandals if he left the house to go shopping, whatever the weather. And he didn’t wear any kind of shoes when he stood on one foot amongst the sculptures in the back garden and put his other foot behind his neck.

They went into the Sticky Sunday ice-cream shop. Kevin got a double scoop of Starfruit and Pistachio. Amelia got Blueberry Ripple and Peaches ’n’ Cream. Eugenie spent ten minutes examining every flavour and then got a small serve of plain frozen yoghurt. They sat down on the stools along the wall.

‘That’s very peculiar,’ murmured Amelia, as she licked the Blueberry Ripple.

‘No it’s not,’ snapped Eugenie. ‘I can have frozen yoghurt if I like.’

‘No,’ said Amelia. ‘I mean what you were saying about Mr Vishwanath. She glanced at Kevin. ‘You’re saying you’ve heard he knocks people back as well?’

Kevin nodded.

Amelia frowned. She turned her ice-cream cone and thoughtfully licked the Peaches ’n’ Cream. This was the first she had heard of Mr Vishwanath sending people away. It didn’t sound like something he would do. He never sent her away when she came down to sit with him under the verandah, and she wasn’t even a yoga student. Yet according to both Eugenie and Kevin, that was what he did, and everyone knew it.
And
he wouldn’t advertise. This was no good. Amelia turned the cone again, still thinking. This was no good at all.

Mr Vishwanath chuckled when Amelia told him what Eugenie had said about the lady who came to learn yoga. He chuckled even more when Amelia told him she had gone to Fitness Fanatics.

‘She says she can learn just as much there as she could learn from you, Mr Vishwanath!’

Mr Vishwanath didn’t reply.

‘The people are nicer, and they don’t tell her to go away.’

‘I didn’t tell her to go away,’ said Mr Vishwanath.

‘What did you tell her?’

Mr Vishwanath sighed. ‘I told her she might be happier at Fitness Fanatics.’

‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’ said Amelia.

Mr Vishwanath shook his head. ‘No, Amelia. It isn’t the same thing at all.’

Amelia frowned. It was almost the same thing. And even if it wasn’t, it certainly wasn’t a way of making the lady feel welcome.

‘Anyway,’ said Mr Vishwanath. ‘She’s happy at Fitness Fanatics, isn’t she?’

Amelia shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Well?’ said Mr Vishwanath, and he looked at Amelia for a moment longer, then turned to gaze at the thin white sculptures in the garden.

Amelia stole a glance at him. The expression on Mr Vishwanath’s face was perfectly calm, as if he wasn’t disturbed by anything, and least of all by the lady who had gone to Fitness Fanatics. But he was never going to get any more students if he kept doing things like that. He’d have only that one old lady who turned up in her cream-coloured car, presuming she really was a yoga student and not something else altogether.

‘Eugenie Edelstein says you send lots of people away,’ said Amelia.

Mr Vishwanath didn’t reply.

‘Kevin Chan said so as well. They can’t both be wrong.’

Amelia waited for Mr Vishwanath to say something. ‘Is that true, Mr Vishwanath?’ she asked eventually. There was silence.

‘I would rather have one true student than a hundred followers,’ said Mr Vishwanath softly.

‘What does that mean, Mr Vishwanath?’ said Amelia.

Mr Vishwanath didn’t reply.

Amelia jumped up in frustration. She felt like kicking over all the sculptures in the garden with their thin white faces and their thin white necks.

Instead, she went inside. In the kitchen, Mrs Ellis was mixing something in a bowl. Amelia went straight past her and up the stairs.

CHAPTER 4

Amelia had been fascinated by the lamp at the top of the stairs from the moment she had been old enough to be fascinated by anything. From the bottom of the stairwell, four storeys below, the lamp didn’t look so big, and it was only when you were at the top that you realised how large it really was. It hung from the ceiling by three chains. The middle of the lamp had six sides, in each of which was clasped a glass panel, and the cone-shaped top and bottom were fashioned entirely out of bronze. The metalwork flowed with intricate patterns and there were hundreds of tiny spaces out of which the light filtered in a wonderful, stippled, hazy glow. Even when she was small, Amelia would stare at the lamp, certain there must be something to find in the apparently endless, swirling patterns of bronze. But it was only when she realised there was a way to get closer to the lamp that she discovered what it was.

The way Amelia found to get closer was to get up on the banister, just at the point where it ended at the wall, holding onto the door frame of her room with one hand to steady herself. From here, she could see the lamp a lot better, and even reach out and touch it. She was quite small when she worked out how to do this, but not so small that she didn’t know that if her parents saw her standing on the banister, reaching out and turning the lamp, they’d think she was going to fall over the edge. So she never did it when they could see her. But she did it.

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.