If Only He'd Told Me by Mia Marconi

Author:Mia Marconi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Unsurprisingly, Brody’s secondary-school transition did not go well. Aged just twelve, he began self-harming with pens and pencils that he would dig into his arms or legs. Then one day I took a phone call from the head teacher.

‘Brody has taken a knife from the canteen. He was seen in the toilets hiding it up his sleeve.’

‘I’ll come and get him,’ I said.

He had become aggressive and had threatened to kill himself. It was clearly a cry for help. After all, he could easily have stolen a knife from a shop during one of his unsanctioned excursions and slit his wrists somewhere secluded without anyone knowing, if that was really what he wanted to do. Brody was not a prisoner and he was not in a secure unit, and no one could monitor him twenty-four hours a day. It was easy for him to steal knives from school or from friends’ houses, and the best thing we could do was to reinforce the message that he didn’t need one. But it didn’t matter how many times I explained that he mustn’t take knives, his obsession with them continued.

I knew none of us was in danger, because it was clear that Brody was only concerned with harming himself, but still, his behaviour was extremely worrying. There was many a morning when I would find a knife under his pillow as I was making his bed. ‘It’s in case we get broken into and I get attacked during the night.’

It was only a matter of time before it all went wrong, and after he took a knife to school he was suspended. I reasoned that Brody was heading towards adolescence – more excuses – which I knew was a difficult time for any teenager, never mind if you had all the problems to deal with that Brody had, so I drove to the school to collect him. When we got home, I spoke to him about the dangers surrounding the whole incident. The school did its bit and identified someone for him to talk to when he wasn’t coping, but he didn’t bond with her and began threatening to kill himself more often.

I would sit for hours with Brody trying to get him to talk about suicide, but his usual response was to clam up. I learned it was a no-go area and played it down, waiting for him to discuss it with me. On a couple of occasions all he would say was that thinking about suicide and harming himself made him feel better. It was his private time and a time when he was in control. To us, it was a signpost that Brody was not settling and that we weren’t able to provide what he needed.

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