Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp Read online

  ODO HIRSCH was born in Australia where he studied medicine and worked as a doctor. He now lives in London. His books for children are favourites with young and old and have been translated into several languages.

  Praise for Odo Hirsch

  ‘Odo Hirsch’s books for children have a zany flavour and wide appeal.’ The Sunday Age

  ‘Irresistible!’ The Times, UK

  ‘Strange, delicate, delightful’ Philip Pullman, Guardian, UK

  ‘Those who love writing and performing plays will treasure Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman, as will many others who are willing to be entranced by magic in all it’s forms… [This story is] something out of the ordinary.’

  The Weekend Australian

  ‘Hazel Green is a memorable character, a child full of ingenuity and determination… Not to be missed!’

  Jo Goodman, Magpies

  ‘Bartlett and the Ice Voyage absolutely confirms Hirsch’s skills and presages an enduring career for him as a premier children’s novelist.’ Kevin Steinberger, Magpies

  Amelia Dee

  and the

  peacock lamp

  Odo Hirsch

  First published in 2007

  Copyright © Odo Hirsch, 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Hirsch, Odo.

  Amelia Dee and the peacock lamp.

  ISBN 9781741753011 (pbk.).

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Design By Committee

  Front cover illustration (peacock pattern) by Ali Durham

  Back cover illustrations by Elise Hirst (house) and Josh Durham (car)

  Set in 10.5pt/16 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by Mcphersons Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Amelia Dee lived in the green house on Marburg Street. Everyone in the area knew the green house. A plaque above the door said that it had been built by a man called Solomon J Wieszacker, and the date on the plaque was more than a hundred years old.

  Solomon J Wieszacker hadn’t built the green house with his own two hands, of course, but had paid people to build it for him. Money was no object for Solomon Weiszacker, who had made a fortune importing coffee and exporting coral. He had made a lot of money from red coral, in particular, and quite a lot from yellow coral. Purple coral, to Solomon Weiszacker’s surprise, didn’t bring in much money at all, and after a while he had stopped dealing in it.

  Solomon Weiszacker believed that Marburg Street was going to be a delightful boulevard at the centre of an exclusive suburb, lined with fashionable town houses and attractive shops. This was in the days when the city was growing in all directions, and Marburg Street itself was nothing more than a stretch of road running between empty fields. The city council had just started selling the land alongside it. So Solomon Weiszacker bought a plot about half a kilometre along the stretch of road that had just been laid, with fields on one side and fields on the other, and there he built his house.

  It was four storeys high, tall and narrow, as a townhouse should be. Since money was no object to Solomon Weiszacker, no expense was spared. The front of the house was ornamental and elegant. The top floor had a sculpture of a woman seated in a niche between two windows, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a sprig of coral in the other, looking down over the street. The walls at the sides of the house, however, were blank, without a single window or any decoration, because Solomon was sure that one day the land along Marburg Street would be so expensive that the town houses would stand literally wall to wall. Behind the house was a long garden that Solomon enclosed by building a fence to separate it from the fields all around.

  When the house was finished, Solomon Weiszacker put the plaque above the door and the entire front of the house, even the sculpted lady, was painted green, which was his favourite colour. But the side walls were left as bare, grey brick, because Solomon was certain that soon they would be obscured by the other tall, fashionable town houses that were sure to be built on either side.

  Things didn’t turn out quite as Solomon Weiszacker expected. For some reason, wealthy people went to live in other parts of the growing city, and the houses that sprang up along Marburg Street, instead of being tall and fashionable, were small and ordinary, only a single storey high. They had shops in the front and living areas in the back. Eventually they ran from one end of Marburg Street to the other, and the green house stood alone amongst them, rising four storeys up, like a tree that had been planted by mistake in the middle of a hedge, with the bare, windowless walls at the sides visible for all the world to see.

  After Solomon Weiszacker died, the green house was sold, and sold again, and one family after another lived in it. Each family left its mark, knocking down walls inside, or building them up, putting in cupboards and installing fittings, or taking them out, according to their needs. At some point the ground floor had been turned into a shop, with its own door and a big curved window on the street. But no matter what else was done to it, the front of the house was always painted green. Originally it had been a kind of sea green, but this was very faded by the time old Solomon Weiszacker died. Then it was olive green, and for a brief time it was lemon green, and then it was lime green, and there was even a period when it was emerald green. The general opinion in Marburg Street in those days was that emerald green was far too bright and preposterous for the old house of Solomon Weiszacker, and there was a general sense of relief when a new family moved in and repainted it a respectable myrtle green. Yet no one ever painted the front any colour but green, nor did anyone ever paint the bare brick walls at the side, or even seem to consider it.

  Amelia couldn’t remember living in any other house. Her parents had bought it when she was one, and very few people, if any, can remember anything from before they’re one, and Amelia Dee wasn’t one of them. The green house was far too large for a family with only a single child, of course, but Amelia’s mother, who was of an artistic temperament, had fallen in love with it. She had a room for her painting, and a room for her weaving, and a room in which to make her sculptures, most of which ended up in the long, narrow garden behind the house. At the back of the garden was a big shed, which was perfect for Amelia’s father, who was of an inventive temperament.

  There was a housekeeper, as well, whose name was Mrs Ellis. She didn’t live in the green house, but she almost might as well have, considering how much time she spent there. She did not only the housekeeping, but the shopping, the cooking, and everything else that Amelia’s mother and father were too busy to do. Which was just about everything. Mrs Ellis and Amelia’s mother frequently got into fierce arguments. When Amelia was smaller, she had been terrified that after one of these fights her mother might tell Mrs Ellis to go away and nev
er come back, or Mrs Ellis might decide not to come back even without being told, and then who would do everything that needed to be done? But as she got older, Amelia realised that nothing ever came of these fights, and she learned to ignore them, just as her father did.

  As a young man, Amelia’s father had made a fortune from a powder he had invented that made everyone sneeze, even when applied in only minute amounts. He hadn’t been trying to invent a powder to make people sneeze – which was hardly necessary, considering how often people sneeze by themselves – but that was what he had ended up doing. To the surprise of everyone, including Amelia’s father, the powder turned out to be incredibly irritating not only to human noses but to ants, cockroaches, earwigs, silverfish and members of the insect kingdom in general. A single sprinkling of the powder could clear an entire building. It was very fortunate there were so many ants, cockroaches, earwigs and silverfish to be got rid of, Amelia often thought, because she had no idea what her father would have done if he hadn’t made a fortune from his powder and had had to hold down a regular job for a living. As for inventing, he had never produced anything remotely as useful again. That didn’t stop him trying. The house was cluttered with contraptions and mechanisms that he had installed, removed, ‘improved’ and reinstalled, usually a number of times.

  Across the stairs, for instance, ran a series of almost invisible wires. They were the relic of an idea Amelia’s father had for stopping people getting hurt if they fell downstairs. The wires were connected to sensors, and if one of the sensors detected a heavy blow on a stair, as if someone was falling, big balloon-like bags were supposed to suddenly inflate from all over the place – under the stairs, beside the stairs, on the landings – to cushion the fall. There was nothing wrong with the theory, it was only the practice that created problems. The bags had an unfortunate habit of inflating without warning, and without the slightest blow being detected. The sight of twenty big orange balloons suddenly bursting out all over the stairs was enough to give anyone a fright, even Mrs Ellis, and make her drop the soup, or whatever else she was carrying. Not to mention the fourteen times – because Mrs Ellis counted – that a bag had simply blown up as she passed by and bowled her over. Or the fact that Amelia, who was younger then, had a habit of stamping on the stairs to make the bags inflate and then throwing herself into them. She just didn’t have a habit of admitting she had done it. Eventually Mrs Ellis demanded that Amelia’s father dismantle the system. No, he couldn’t ‘improve’ it, she insisted, he had ‘improved’ it enough! Either it went, or she did. He took out the balloons, but vowed that he would perfect the system, whatever Mrs Ellis said, and left the wires in readiness. But some other invention took his attention, as often happened, and then another, and another, and the perfection of this particular one had been left for later, together with so many other half-finished devices that needed completion. So the wires remained, and over time they had worked themselves loose and become a trap to trip people over, and the invention, which had been designed to keep people safe, had ended up doing exactly the opposite.

  Yet the most interesting thing in the house, for Amelia, had nothing to do with her father’s inventions. It was a large, exceptionally intricate metalwork lamp that hung at the top of the stairs. The lamp was one of the things that had been installed at some point and then left behind when one family moved out and another moved in, and no one could say where it had come from or when. It hung outside the door to Amelia’s room, which was on the top floor, just beyond the banister. Every time she went in or out of her room, Amelia passed it. No one else in the house knew the lamp as Amelia did. No one else knew the secrets that were contained within it, the extraordinary things that the lamp’s creator had hidden within the fine details of its metalwork.

  Amelia kept them to herself, or at most, she shared them with the one other person whom she knew would never utter a word of what she told her. That person was right outside her window. If Amelia leaned out, she could see the face of the sculpted lady with the coffee and the coral who sat at the top of the front of the house, not more than two metres away from her.

  The sculptor who created the lady had given her no eyes, but only blank surfaces between her eyelids. You couldn’t tell this from the street, but you could see it when you were this close to her. In a way, it made Amelia sad to think that all the time the lady had been sitting there she had been blind. It would have made it so much easier for her to pass the time – and she had been there more than a hundred years, which is a lot of time to pass – if she could at least have watched what was happening in Marburg Street. But then Amelia would imagine that the lady, even though she was blind, had some other, mysterious way of knowing what was happening below her, a way that was more powerful than merely seeing, and that everything was stored up in her memory. Sometimes Amelia imagined the stories the sculpted lady could have told, if only she could have spoken, about all the things that had happened in Marburg Street since the day Solomon J Wieszacker put up the plaque above the door on the ground floor. Sometimes, when Amelia leaned out of the window and looked down at the street, she would murmur something to the lady about what was happening down there, almost as if she expected to hear the lady’s opinion in response. And sometimes she imagined that she could tell what the lady was thinking by the expression she saw in her face – a hint of amusement, a cloud of concern – even though she knew that the lady’s features were carved in stone.

  When Amelia looked straight down, she could see the bulge of the curved window at the front of the shop on the ground floor. But if you went down to the street, you couldn’t see anything through the glass. For years, and certainly for as long as Amelia could remember, a kind of big white sheet had hung behind the window, obscuring the view of whatever might be happening inside.

  And the only clue that anything, in fact, might be happening in there was a small handwritten sign taped inside the glass. The sign had been there for years as well, and the tape that held it was yellow with age.

  In faded red letters, very neatly written, was a name.

  LK Vishwanath.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 1 0

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 2

  There were all kinds of rumours about Mr Vishwanath and what he was up to behind the sheet in the ground-floor window of the green house on Marburg Street. According to some people, he was a kind of a dervish, and went into trances standing on one leg and not eating for months at a time. Or he was some kind of crime boss, according to others, with a secret communications network and a room stashed full of money, but the police could never prove anything against him. And those were only some of the rumours. Most of Amelia’s friends were quite frightened of him. He rarely came out of his shop, and some of Amelia’s friends had never seen him at all. They were the most frightened of the lot. Amelia, on the other hand, saw him often, not in the street at the front of the house, but in the garden behind it.

  She would look out the window of her mother’s weaving room on the third floor, and Mr Vishwanath would be in the garden, amongst the sculptures in the grass, wearing nothing but a piece of shiny clothing that was like a kind of big blue nappy. He would be standing on one leg, with the other foot wrapped around his neck, or kneeling with his back arched and the top of his head touching the ground behind him, or holding some other pose that Amelia couldn’t have held if her life depended on it. She knew, be
cause sometimes she tried. She would twist herself into the shape he had assumed, or start to, but she always ended up keeling over on the floor of the weaving room before she managed to get her foot anywhere near around the back of her neck, or the top of her head on the ground, or whatever Mr Vishwanath seemed to be doing with such ease in the garden below her. When she got herself up again and looked out, Mr Vishwanath would still be there, holding the pose perfectly, as still and as steady as one of the sculptures around him, with his eyes closed and the dark skin of his tall, thin body gleaming in the sunlight.

  The truth was that Mr Vishwanath was a master of yoga. The room behind the sheet on the ground floor was the studio where he taught, and he lived in the back part of the shop behind it.

  Amelia had no idea how old Mr Vishwanath was. He had perfectly white hair, which should have meant he was very old, yet there was barely a wrinkle on his face, which should have meant he was somewhat younger. Sometimes, when he wasn’t practising yoga and he wasn’t teaching, he would come out in a faded red shirt and a pair of old trousers, and sit in a chair that he had put under the verandah at the back of the house. It was an old, battered chair, and tufts of stuffing poked out from tears in the upholstery. Mr Vishwanath liked to sit there on warm days, for hours, sometimes, just looking at the garden, with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile, yet seemed to have some kind of deep contentment in it. Once Amelia decided to see what was so special about sitting there and staring at the garden, and she sat down under the verandah, beside him. Mr Vishwanath didn’t seem to mind. Then Amelia brought down a chair and put it next to Mr Vishwanath’s chair, and sometimes, when she saw him there, she would come and sit there as well. Not for hours, but for a while. There was something peaceful about sitting there with Mr Vishwanath. You could smell the sweet scent of the oil he put on before he practised his yoga. He didn’t expect you to talk, and you could just sit beside him and think your own thoughts – which is an unusual thing to be able to do, if you stop to consider it, when you’re with somebody else. But if she wanted to talk, she could, and Mr Vishwanath didn’t stop her. He just didn’t necessarily reply, and if he did, you didn’t know when he was going to do it. It might be ten minutes after you’d said whatever he was replying to, and you’d almost forgotten you’d said it.