She wrote. She wrote about the Shan and Shanna and the princes and princesses and the life of luxury they led in the room below the lamp. She wrote about the joy the lamp felt when the smallest princess gazed up at it with wonder, and when the big man called Ali El lifted her up and helped her find the peacocks and the monkeys and all the animals hidden in its panels. Then she wrote about the night when the princes and princesses ran away and a great crowd of people flooded into the palace, and when she wrote about that, she wrote as if she didn’t know what was happening at first, because the lamp wouldn’t have known, would it? It had never seen anything like that before, and it wouldn’t know that this was a revolution and that its life was going to change forever on that night. Then she wrote about the way someone brought a ladder and climbed up and cut her down, and how the mob pulled her this way and that, threatening to break her glass with its roughness.
Amelia paused again, and gazed at the lamp hanging outside her room. She felt sad. All the other lamps would have been cut down as well. She imagined the scene. All six of the lamps lay on the ground and the mob shouted around them.
‘Destroy them! If we can’t get the princes and princesses, this’ll have to do!
’ ‘Think of all the suffering those people caused us!
’ ‘Smash them up!
’ Left and right, the mob began destroying us. Wherever I looked, my brothers and sisters were being smashed. Their glass shattered. Their metal twisted and snapped. But I was saved. I don’t know why. I don’t know exactly how. All I remember is that suddenly someone had me in his arms, and he was running.
‘Take me back!’ I cried. ‘Let me die with the others!’ But he wouldn’t take me back. He ran and ran. Fire was starting in the palace. I saw others running, carrying things they had stolen. And then we were outside, in the dark. It was the first time I had been out of the palace since my maker brought me there so many years ago. But where was he now? I was alone, carried away by a strange person, and what would become of me? At that moment, I wished I had died in the palace with the others.
Amelia stopped. She could feel the anguish the lamp must have felt, alone, confused, fearful, torn without warning from the only home it had ever known, its brothers and sisters lying smashed and broken in the ruins of the smoking palace.
But the man who took me did not want me for himself. He only wanted to sell me to make money. If only he had sold me back to the man who had created me! But he took me to a man who bought and sold lamps. Ordinary lamps. He hung me in his shop. Me! The peacock lamp. A lamp of the palace! When the other lamps spoke, I ignored them. I was too proud to speak to them. Some of them teased me. ‘Where is your palace now?’ they said. I grew angry. ‘Where do you throw your light now?’ they said. But I threw no light. I was dark, hanging on a dark wall, in a small, dark shop. Every day was a torture. Each day was worse than the last. I wished I was dead. That was my only thought. Every hour, every minute, I wished that I had died in the palace with the others.
Eventually a man bought me. He hung me in his house. It was a poor place. The room of the palace in which I had hung was bigger than the whole house. His wife would put one little candle in me, just to see me glow, but she would soon snuff it out, because they didn’t have much money and couldn’t afford to waste candles. One little candle! The humiliation was almost more than I could bear. I didn’t look at what happened beneath me, I didn’t care what the man and his wife and their four little children thought when they looked up at me, didn’t care if they took pleasure from my glow. Still I had only one thought, to have died with the others in the palace. Then the man got sick, and couldn’t work, and his wife had no money, so she sold me back to the man who bought and sold lamps. ‘Back again?’ asked the others, and I was so angry and humiliated that I couldn’have spoken even if I had wanted to.
Amelia kept writing. From place to place the lamp was sold, and each time the house wasn’t good enough for it, too poor, too small, and the lamp hung in angry silence, wishing it was dead, until it was sold again. It never seemed to stay long in one place. Eventually someone bought it and took it across the sea, and the selling began once more. Finally it was brought to a big, green house, and was put up at the very top of the stairs. Even this place wasn’t good enough for it, a lamp that had hung in the Grand Palace at Ervahan. But here it stayed, for year after year, until almost fifty years had passed since that terrible night when the palace had been destroyed.
One day the people moved from the green house, but I was left behind, and a new family came. They had a little baby girl. More years passed and she grew older. She was very inquisitive and she would stare at me from the other side of the banister. I didn’t know what she wanted. I didn’t care. She stared and stared. One day the girl . . .
Amelia stopped. She turned around and gazed past the open door at the lamp, at the banister below it, remembering that day. She didn’t know whether she should tell about what happened next. She didn’t know who was going to see this story, or if anyone ever would. And she could always say she had just made it up, and it didn’t really happen. Still, she didn’t know whether she should say it. Yet she felt she
had
to. The funny thing was, she felt that everything she was writing was the truth, the absolute truth, even though she was making almost all of it up, and if she left out this one thing, this one thing that had actually happened, it would be the only lie in the whole story. And if there was even one lie in the story, the story itself would be worth nothing.
She picked up her pen and continued.
One day the girl tied a rope around her leg and got up on the banister. She put out her hands and grabbed me! Suddenly she jumped off the banister and she was swinging. She swung and swung. Ahhhhhhh! She wanted to kill me. Why? Did she hate me? What had I ever done to her? I could feel my chains straining. They were going to come loose, and I was going to fall all the way down and crash to pieces. She was going to be saved by her rope, and I was going to die. Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhh! Then she jumped off, and somehow I was still there. I hadn’t fallen! I was alive!
At that moment, I realised something. I wanted to live! All these years, I wished that I had died with the others in the palace. I must have made that wish millions of times. I thought my life was worse than death. But it wasn’t. When I was faced with death, I wanted to live.
The girl didn’t swing on me again. The next time I saw her staring at me, I stared back at her. I could see she enjoyed looking at me. I felt something I hadn’t felt since those happy days in the palace all those years ago. So much time had passed that I didn’t recognise what the feeling was. But it was familiar, it was good. I had felt it before, I knew that.
And then an even stranger thing happened. One day, the girl brought an old woman to see me. At first I saw her far below, looking up at me from the bottom of the stairs. Then she came all the way up, and she stopped on the other side of the banister. She stared and stared. I stared back. There was something familiar about her, something I knew. And then I had the shock of my life. That face . . . it was the Princess! The little Princess who had played beneath me in the palace all those years ago, who had looked up at me, who had run her tiny fingers over my panels in the arms of Ali El, who had giggled, who had laughed. The Princess I had last seen looking back at me as she was carried away on that terrible night when the mob came.
But she had changed so much! Not only that she was old, but she was bitter. The kind of person who would walk straight past a girl curtsying on the pavement and not even give her a glance. Was this really the laughing little girl who once had looked up at me with wonder, filling me with delight? She stared at me, and I stared back. And suddenly, I understood. I had become just like her! I had been angry and bitter. In house after house, I had refused to look down, thinking I was too good to be there, thinking the people who took pleasure in me weren’t important enough for me to notice. I had become as bitter as the Princess. The bitterness was a poison, and I had poisoned myself.
Suddenly I recognised the feeling I had after the girl swung on me, when I saw her staring at me. It was joy. The joy of giving pleasure to others.
The Princess went away. I was sad for her, but not sorry to see her go. She wasn’t the girl I knew all those years before in the palace, she had changed into someone else. But I had spent enough time poisoning my life. Who could tell when the chains holding me might break and I might smash to pieces? From now on, I would take joy from the pleasure I gave. It didn’t matter whether the people who looked at me were princes or paupers. All that mattered was that they enjoyed my glow. I’m a lamp. I was made to give pleasure, I was made to give light. I would never forget that again.
For the first time in fifty-nine years, I was happy.
And a funny thing happened. As soon as I realised that, people started doing things. The lady who lived in the house started doing sculptures of me, although she called them interpretations – which was just as well, because they didn’look very much like me. The man who lived in the house started making strange inventions with light, or trying to, anyway. And another man created a special yoga pose, which was probably the most useful thing of the lot.
But the Princess . . . Well, the Princess, I don’t know what became of her. I never saw her again. I wish she could have seen me one more time, now that I was happy. I wish I could have told her what I had finally understood. No one can make you bitter but yourself. I don’t know if she could have changed, but if I had been able to tell her that, at least I would have hoped that she could.
But I never got the chance. So I suppose she stayed angry and bitter until the day she died.
It was late when Amelia finished. The time had flown by. She looked at her clock. Time for dinner. Later than time for dinner! Amelia ran downstairs.
Mrs Ellis shook her head as Amelia dashed past the kitchen. ‘Just like the parents,’ she muttered to herself. ‘And I thought
she
was the sensible one!’
Amelia stopped in the doorway to the dining room. Her mother and father were already eating. That was odd. Why hadn’t they called her? They always called her. If she wasn’t downstairs, one of them, at least, always came up to get her. If the other was sculpting, or inventing, they would join later.
‘Reading again?’ asked Amelia’s father.
Amelia nodded.
‘It must have been a very good book,’ said Amelia’s mother.
Amelia nodded again. She sat down.
‘We didn’t want to disturb you,’ said Amelia’s father, ‘considering how good the book must have been.’
That had never stopped them before. This was really weird. What was going on?
Mrs Ellis came in with Amelia’s soup. ‘Reading . . . reading . . .’ she muttered, putting the bowl down in front of Amelia. She shook her head disapprovingly, and headed back to the kitchen, still muttering to herself.
Amelia took a mouthful of her soup. Potato and cranberry, one of Mrs Ellis’ personal recipes. She glanced at her parents. They both quickly looked away, as if they had been watching her. They couldn’t know what she had been doing, could they? They couldn’t have sneaked up and secretly opened her door—
Amelia could hardly breathe. The door! She had left it open to see the lamp. She
never
left her door open when she was writing.
She looked at her parents again. Again, they quickly looked away.
Amelia took another spoonful of soup. But she could barely bring herself to swallow. They knew.
She put down her spoon. ‘I wasn’t reading,’ she said quietly.
‘Really?’ said her father. ‘What were you doing?’
Amelia took a deep breath. ‘Writing.’ She stared at her soup, at the thick, pink liquid, frowning hard. ‘I’ve been writing a story.’
‘Well,’ said Amelia’s father, ‘I suppose it’s nice to try something new.’
‘No. Sometimes . . .’ Amelia could hardly bring out the words. But how long was she going to keep covering things up? At least her mother put her sculptures in the garden. At least her father installed his inventions, no matter how useless they were. ‘Sometimes I like to write stories,’ she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper.
‘So this isn’t the first?’
Amelia shook her head.
‘Well, imagine that! Angeline, did you hear what Amelia just said?’
‘I did, Armand,’ said Amelia’s mother. ‘I heard exactly what she said.’
Amelia frowned ever harder.
‘Amelia?’
Amelia looked at her mother.
‘Are we going to see this excellent story, Amelia?’
‘It’s just a story,’ muttered Amelia.
‘I would love to see it.’
Amelia didn’t say anything for a moment. She glanced at her father, then back at her mother. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘Mind?’ said her mother.
‘A Dee has to do something!’ exclaimed Amelia’s father. ‘Invent, sculpt, write. Something!’
‘And an Arbuckle, too, Armando,’ Amelia’s mother reminded him.
‘We were starting to get worried,’ said Amelia’s father.
‘Only slightly,’ said her mother.
Amelia stared at them in disbelief. ‘So you don’t think it’s . . . silly?’
Amelia’s mother and father glanced at each other, and then they both looked back at Amelia questioningly, as if they had no idea what Amelia could possibly mean.
Amelia felt an enormous sense of surprise. And confusion. And relief. And more confusion.
‘Well?’ said Amelia’s father. ‘Are we going to read this story?’
Amelia frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you tell us what it’s called?’
Amelia shook her head. ‘I don’t know that, either.’
‘Perfect!’ said Amelia’s father. ‘Just like me. When I invented my insect powder, I thought it was for sneezes.’
Amelia didn’t say anything to that.