Broken Light by Joanne Harris

Author:Joanne Harris [Harris, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

TRACK 7:

Little Plastic Castle

But who hath seen her wave her hand?

Or at the casement seen her stand?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’

1

Extract from Class of ’92, by Kate Hemsworth (published by LifeStory Press, 2023)

Trauma is a curious thing. It doesn’t always feel violent. It can even pass you by almost without registering, except for that taint it leaves in the air, a pollution you don’t even notice. What happened with Adam Price was like that. It lingered like the aftershock of a half-remembered dream, then vanished, along with the memory of everything that we had shared, so that by the time I started at Mulberry House, I’d forgotten all about Adam Price, and the things that had seemed so important to me when Bernie and I were seven.

My father was concerned that I was growing up too quickly. But I couldn’t grow up quickly enough: all I wanted was to be just like the adults around me. Adulthood meant security – rules – a world in which everything made sense, stories weren’t real, games were just games, and children were safe from monsters.

A school report from my third-year English teacher, Mrs Platt, reads: Katie is hard-working and conscientious, but she lacks imagination.

It was an understandable mistake. I was an avid reader, but of non-fiction and real-life narratives. I no longer had any patience with tales of the supernatural. I liked the kind of literature that teaches us about real-world events, and history, and relationships. I enjoyed theatre and drama; but I favoured Julius Caesar over A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the historical over the occult. Adam Price had broken me somehow from the inside, and it took a second trauma, thirteen years later, for me to even remember how.

But what I’d seen in Adam Price went far beyond just trauma. It was like stepping into a house in which every room had the radio on, all tuned to different stations and cranked up to head-splitting volume. The result was a kind of dreadful white noise filled with angry voices; a discotheque of hate and abuse, and guilt, and shame, and fear, and self-loathing. And there were monsters in there, too, more frightening than any story. Monsters with human faces, and dreadful, inhuman appetites.

I had no words for what I found; but I knew as soon as I entered his space that this was a violation. I wasn’t meant to see this, I knew. I’d overridden Adam’s consent. And I sensed how hard he had tried to hide the damage, the darkness within him. He felt it too, which was why he reacted as violently as he did, grabbing me by the hair and shoving me onto the ground, shouting, Stop it! Stop it! even though, as far as any witnesses knew, he was the one attacking me.

By the time Mrs White intervened, I’d forgotten most of the details. All I remembered was guilt and shame, and the sense that I was bad inside. I didn’t want to discuss it. I didn’t even want to think about it.

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