Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp by Odo Hirsch Page A

was too long or too short.
    She tried to read. She had finished the killer hamster story and was halfway through a new book, a crime story. But Amelia had worked out who the murderer was after about two chapters, and she hadn’t been able to resist checking the end of the book to see whether she was right – which she was – so there wasn’t much point continuing, even if she had been able to concentrate. Which she couldn’t, not this morning, anyway. She read the same page about five times and kept having to go back to the start.
    Amelia looked down. The car stood by the kerb. She glanced at the carved, eyeless lady that Solomon Wieszacker had put at the top of the house. A pigeon was perched on her head. The pigeon gazed at Amelia, and then cocked its head, as pigeons do, still gazing at her. There were some crumbs on Amelia’s desk from a biscuit she had eaten. She picked up the crumbs and put them out on the window ledge and took a step back. The pigeon looked at the crumbs, then at Amelia, then at the crumbs, and suddenly flapped across. It gobbled them quickly and flew off.
    Banging came from the sculpture room. Amelia’s mother had hardly come out for days now, which was a sure sign that a new phase was starting, and she was extremely short-tempered when she did come out, which was an even surer one. But it could take weeks, sometimes months, of trial and error when a new phase was starting, before Amelia’s mother actually worked out what the sculptures of the phase were going to be. And in that time there was inevitably an awful lot of banging, and shouting, and even smashing inside the sculpture room.
    Amelia listened to the banging. Suddenly she felt as if she couldn’t spend even another minute waiting up here. She’d burst!
    In the kitchen, Mrs Ellis was stirring a pot. She looked up and saw Amelia standing in the doorway.
    ‘What are you up to now?’ said Mrs Ellis.
    ‘Nothing,’ replied Amelia.
    Mrs Ellis looked as if she didn’t quite believe her. ‘What are those pages you’re holding?’
    Amelia put her hand behind her back. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
    Mrs Ellis raised an eyebrow. She dipped a little finger in the pot and tasted it quickly. Then she added more salt. ‘Nothing means something,’ she muttered to herself. ‘That’s what I always say, young lady.’ She looked up to see what Amelia would reply to that, but the doorway was empty.
    Outside, Amelia sat on the chair near the back door of Mr Vishwanath’s studio. She looked at the thin white sculptures in the grass. They would have to be moved soon if her mother was starting a new phase. Her father would stack them down the back of the garden with the globular sculptures and the angular sculptures and the twisted sculptures and the other sculptures from all of her mother’s previous phases. He had invented a statue-moving-and-stacking machine especially for the purpose, which looked like a small trolley on wheels with a little winch to lift each statue on and off. He was very proud of this invention, which was one of the few that did what it was supposed to do. At least most of the time.
    One day, thought Amelia, there wouldn’t be room down the back of the garden to stack all the old sculptures. Not if her mother kept going from one phase into another so frequently and refused to let any of them be taken out of the garden.
    Amelia thought about what she was going to say to the Princess. The awful anxiety she felt when she imagined actually facing up to the old lady hadn’t gone away, and she had tried not to think about it. Now that the moment was so close, she almost wanted to run away and hide. She tried to imagine what she would say at the start. She could just say hello. That seemed a bit bare. Eugenie had said she would have to say Your Highness. After every sentence. ‘Hello, Your Highness.’ Maybe she would start with ‘Good Morning, Your Highness’. That’s what Eugenie would say, probably, and she would do one of