If Only He'd Told Me

by Mia Marconi

  I told Brody that what he thought was burning was in fact salt drying on his skin. Once he’d finally relaxed I bought him an ice cream, but it took days to get him back into the sea.

  About a year after he came to live with us Brody began absconding from school on a weekly basis, so to keep him in the classroom a mentor shadowed him. But Brody was a clever opportunist, and whenever a chance arose to hop over the wall, out of the window or even over the roof, he went.

  School went from bad to worse. No matter how hard we all tried to work in partnership with ideas or incentives, nothing worked. It was frustrating because Brody was very bright, but he had poor concentration and low self-esteem, which he masked with aggression and chaos. A classroom was like a prison to him – he could not apply himself to any academic session for longer than three minutes and was unable to sit still for longer than ten minutes. After that, he would disrupt the class and be sent out – a cycle that would carry on for the whole of his school life.

  He had come from a chaotic household where domestic violence was a daily occurrence and the police were called regularly. The minute Brody could walk, that’s what he did – he left the house to escape.

  Brody adored sport, though – he was a sportsman through and through. He loved being outdoors, and I always thought he would have learned best in a farm setting. He needed somewhere to channel his energies. Having said that, we did go and stay on a farm one year but only stayed one night because Brody killed a chicken.

  By the end of Brody’s first year with us and the beginning of his second, home was just about manageable, although Brody was demanding and took up a lot of my time. Being in our settled household was alien to him. He had never experienced coming home from school to find a hot meal on the table, then sitting down with his family and sharing news of each other’s day. Brody only knew hostility, and his independence had developed quickly. It was a fight for survival in his household – who was going to find a pound coin to get a portion of chips? Who was going to go through Dad’s pockets while he lay unconscious in a drunken stupor and risk waking him up and being beaten with his belt? His mother was either dead drunk or, when she was sober, ineffectual because she was too terrified to make a decision independently – she had to get approval on every little move she made from Brody’s dad.

  As siblings they worked together to survive, although the older ones bullied the younger ones and a pecking order was in place from birth. Bullying was a way of life for Brody’s family, a skill that was handed down from father to son.

  To the outside world Brody was a small, angelic-looking child with olive skin and dark brown eyes. He was the picture of innocence, but his exterior gave no clue as to the real Brody, who was a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, dangerous and unpredictable.

  Once Brody started truanting, the honeymoon was definitely over and I then realised why Lottie had greeted my enthusiasm about him with caution.

  The main message Brody wanted to get across to me was that I was not, and never would be, his mother. If I showed any affection towards him at all he would freeze – rather like India had all those years ago – and when I tucked him into bed and kissed him goodnight on his forehead, he would tell me he hated me and my family.

  This didn’t mean much to me because for a very long time I saw Brody as a frightened little boy who was adjusting to my ever-changing family home. But in the back of my mind the ten-foot rebel with horns I’d first imagined was still lurking. To calm my fears, I often put my head round his door when he was sleeping to remind myself that he was just a little boy.

  I decided to give him plenty of slack because I know how difficult it is for foster children who have been moved continually to establish trust in anyone, but he caused me no end of anguish and there were many nights when I cried myself to sleep with frustration at how I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with him. The sad thing is, I’m sure he did the same; I’m sure he cried himself to sleep wanting to be at home with his family, or because he was unable to work out why he pushed away anyone who wanted to help him. He was stuck in a loop, a hamster on a wheel, and he was getting nowhere.

  I was working tirelessly to get inside Brody’s world, as his behaviour was becoming increasingly unsafe, unpredictable and irrational and I was desperate to find a way to understand what was going on with him. I needed to be able to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together before it was too late.

  After Brody had run out of school for the umpteenth time, the film Forrest Gump became my inspiration. In the film, Forrest, who is a simple soul with a low IQ and a passive view of the world, starts a marathon three-year jog, running from horrible feelings he doesn’t know how to deal with. He keeps on running until he sorts his head out and the feelings disappear.

  I got a roll of lining paper and unrolled about twelve feet of it, stuck it on the wall and drew a long road on it.

  ‘This is Forrest Gump’s road,’ I told Brody, who had watched and enjoyed the film with me.

  At one end I drew his school and at the other his home in the local council estate. I stood back and looked at my wobbly road and rickety school. I was no Picasso, but at least it was clear what they were supposed to be.

  ‘Brody.’ He looked sullen and nodded at me. ‘On the road from your school to your home, you must experience a lot of feelings. I’m going to cook dinner now, and when you are ready you can try to draw or write about those feelings on this map.’

  As I walked away, I could hear Brody draw in a big breath, and then he started muttering. After a year of looking after him I had learned many things, and number one on the list was not to react, so I continued walking and didn’t look back.

  After dinner, when Brody was calm and his work was finished, I took him back to the wall and his road map, which was now covered with his squiggly writing. By the school he had written: ‘I am happy when I run out of school, because I HATE doing anything anyone asks me to do.’ Then he’d drawn a smiley face. ‘I am happy running,’ he’d written. ‘I am happy to feel scared. I am happy no one can find me. I am happy when I get wobbly feelings in my stomach.’

  I felt my gut knot up and was quite knocked back by these revelations. It was pretty significant that Brody had identified being scared as a happy feeling for him; shockingly, this was because it was such a familiar feeling.

  Brody had spent the first three years of his life being scared and running from the violence that was normal in his house. He had to get away from that enclosed environment, and being outside away from it all was safer than being inside amongst it. The wobbly feeling in his stomach was the excitement and the adrenalin. It was a rush he loved and he was as used to this feeling of terror as another child would be to feeling happy at their own birthday party. But the saddest thing of all was that feeling safe was alien to him and made him uncomfortable.

  Brody’s version of Forrest Gump’s road had given me a gloomy insight into the way his mind was working, and I am not afraid to admit what I saw scrawled on that wall frightened me.

  I discussed Brody’s road with Martin and we decided we didn’t want to give up on him. But Brody gave us a bumpy ride, more hellish than any roller-coaster, and each time something went wrong I made excuses for him. ‘Oh, he’s having a difficult time at school. Well, he hasn’t seen his parents for a few weeks.’ But pretty soon I was running out of excuses, and friends started to notice that my loyalty to my family and my desire to love a lost child was becoming a battle.

  The whole family were pretty dedicated when it came to helping Brody. Francesca was very close to him and often went cycling with him to try and help him understand that we all cared. Francesca was not the most tolerant of my children, so I was pleased to see this gentler side of her fiery nature. I had not witnessed her nurturing anyone so intensively before, not even her younger brother.

  Later, it occurred to me that even my children had been pulled into Brody’s web. He wanted 100 per cent attention 100 per cent of the time, and he had worked out how t
o get it.

  One thing I didn’t realise then was that by the time we reached the end of Brody’s rocky road my heart would be broken in two.

  Chapter Four

  Brody’s hatred towards me was developing from words to violence – he seemed to want to hurt me both physically and emotionally. The punches and kicks and the stones he threw all hurt, but nothing hurt as much as his hate.

  ‘I HATE HER!’ He would say it to anyone who would listen and I would feel the blood in my veins go cold. ‘I don’t want to live with you! I hate all of you!’ He would spit at us at dinner sometimes.

  A deathly silence would fall until someone awkwardly broke it with some inane comment. ‘Help me dress my Barbies,’ Ruby would pipe up, and everyone would scramble to leave the table.

  What had I done that was so bad? I had loved and cared for him, sat with him when he was in such a heightened state of anger and anxiety that he was smashing anything and everything he could get his hands on. I held him when his anger vanished and cuddled him to reassure him that everything would be okay. Some nights I sat with him constantly while he had vivid nightmares and held him tight, reassuring him he was safe. He accepted my cuddles then, but let me know he still hated me the minute he felt better. I collected him from school when the teachers could no longer tolerate him. I stuck by him unconditionally, no matter what, but nothing was ever good enough. I could not give Brody what he wanted, because he did not know what he wanted himself. Feeling safe was strange to him, and while most of us would breathe easy if someone made it clear they would stick by us no matter what, it made him feel uneasy. He already knew that he was at his happiest when he was afraid, and that must have been as scary to him as it was to me.

  So I became Brody’s enemy, fighting a battle where there could be no winners. He had decided he was never going to let me in, and I could not work out the code to his defence system.

  I refused to let it show but the hurt I felt inside was so crushing that at times I couldn’t breathe. It was like invisible hands tightening round my lungs, squeezing out every last molecule of air.

  I felt exhausted … physically and mentally exhausted. I became teary and withdrawn, and when I look back now I realise that, although I was an adult, I was frightened of Brody, because I was being bullied. I feel embarrassed recognising that fact, because I am a strong character and would not let a seven-foot, twenty-stone man bully me, and yet here I was being bullied by a child.

  I remember feeling judged at times – never by the school, because they themselves experienced the daily abuse, but others would say to me, ‘What a sweet little boy. Isn’t he well mannered?’ They would look at me with disbelief if ever I pointed out that he could be quite a handful.

  My job as a foster carer was to try and prepare this boy for a normal life in a normal family home, with the hope of breaking the destructive cycle – a legacy from the family he had come from. But Brody went out of his way to do the opposite of everything I asked him to do, and I grew tired of the constant battles. Eventually I realised that it was easier not to ask him to do anything. After a while, he cottoned on and began to realise that I wasn’t going to play his games and because of that I was, in fact, winning. This infuriated him and he began smashing up the house.

  I heard the horrific sounds of crashing and banging early one evening and rushed upstairs, thinking someone had had a terrible accident. The noise was coming from Brody’s room and as I opened the door I could see him in a rage, destroying everything he could get his hands on.

  ‘Stay in your rooms, kids!’ I shouted to the other children. And I stood there, in shock, powerless to do anything as he whipped through his room like a tornado.

  His bunk bed went first. He battered it with a chair until it was nothing more than matchwood on the floor. Then his wardrobe got the same treatment, then his ceiling light. I was just thankful he didn’t throw the chair through the window. When he’d finally finished he collapsed in an exhausted heap on the floor.

  I sat next to him and silently helped him clear up the mess.

  This destructive act did not go unpunished. Anything he broke I didn’t replace, so his bed became a mattress on the floor, and his ceiling light was a bare bulb. Anything he broke belonging to someone else, I stopped his pocket money until he had paid for it.

  Controlling Brody became impossible, though; it didn’t matter what tactics I used. I was an experienced foster carer and I was close to throwing in the towel. I was constantly reminding myself that he was the child and I was the adult, but even peeping in to see him sleeping was beginning to lose its power.

  Brody was definitely a product of his background and there was a part of him that was just like his father. His mum had been emotionally and physically abused by his dad, and Brody was beginning to imitate his father’s behaviour towards me. He would be very rude to me in public and at home. Physical and verbal abuse came in waves and I learned to deal with it.

  He told me I was a fucking bitch and to fuck off if I asked him to clean his bedroom. He would throw things at me if I asked him to do his homework, and at bedtime he would often throw punches. I began to look like a battered wife and my friends began to worry.

  I became Brody’s punch bag. I had been kicked and sworn at before and, looking back, it had almost become acceptable to me. I can only assume this is one reason why many women stay in abusive relationships, because the violence just doesn’t seem unusual any more. I knew Brody was copying his dad’s behaviour, but it did not make it acceptable.

  Brody idolised his father – in the way people do idolise those they’re scared of because they don’t want to be on the wrong side of them – and talked about him as though he was his hero. His mother, on the other hand, was insignificant to him. He had no time for her and showed no affection towards her at all.

  It was no surprise that he had a fantastic relationship with Martin and responded to him in a completely different way to how he did to me. Brody admired his father, whom he believed was a powerful man, and he respected Martin in his role as father and head of the household. He wanted to be the perfect son to Martin and in the process was becoming a cuckoo in the nest. ‘Take me to football, Martin; take me to cricket, Martin; take me to tennis, Martin.’ It was subtle but brutal, and inch by inch Alfie was being pushed out.

  Because Brody was so loud, so great at sports, so energetic and so eager to please Martin, and because positive behaviour was obviously something we wanted to encourage, we didn’t notice that our Alfie had become second best at everything. Alfie became subdued and uncomfortable in Brody’s presence. They had been best friends, as close as brothers, so I didn’t consider anything was wrong with their relationship. Brothers go through good patches and bad patches, love and hate, so I thought this was the most likely scenario. That’s what always happened with Francesca and Ruby anyway. They fell out all the time but always made it up in the end. I was making excuses again, but I genuinely didn’t see the whole thing turning sour.

  The saying that the squeakiest wheel gets oiled first is so true, and Brody knew how to dominate a room full of people. He had watched his dad do exactly the same.

  I am perfectly aware of sibling rivalry – I have my own siblings either side of me – but this was different somehow. It was calculated and manipulative. Brody aimed to please, I have no doubt, but being from a large sibling group himself he had learned the art of control and domination and, without me spotting it, he was beginning to dominate Alfie. Before long, I began to notice that when Brody was in full swing people-pleasing, he would often do it when Alfie was near. ‘You are such a great help,’ someone would say to Brody, and he would grin and catch Alfie’s eye.

  Because I had seen so much potential in Brody I really wanted to help him change, because underneath it all I knew there was a really decent boy waiting to emerge and I was determined to do whatever I could to help him break out of his cocoon. All my training as a foster carer was geared towards trying to fix things for th
ese children who had had such unlucky starts in life, and although I realised that Brody was a challenge I wanted to rise to it.

  The truth was – as unlikely as it seemed to all the adults responsible for his wellbeing and care – Brody wanted to go home. He could not understand why he was not living with his mum and dad, and everything he did was geared towards getting home.

  Foster children often idealise their parents and begin to blame everyone around them for their failings. I thought it was time we began talking about them honestly. His memories of home were happy ones, and I had to remind him that they were not true.

  ‘What about that time your dad beat you with a belt and the school found out because you couldn’t sit down?’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘What about all the times your dad beat up your mum and the police were called?’

  ‘She deserved it because she was too drunk to make our tea.’

  I reminded him of the number of police reports, the complaints from school and neighbours, but it had no effect. To Brody, this was normality. We were the abnormal ones.

  Brody did open up on occasions. He once said, ‘Mia, it’s wrong to hit people, isn’t it? Martin doesn’t hit you, does he? Men shouldn’t hit, should they?’ He would have light-bulb moments where he realised his family life wasn’t right. But before you knew it, he was back to playing the big man. For some children accepting your parents are incapable of acting like decent parents is too difficult. He had learned early on never to show any weakness, never to cry, and opening up to me made him feel too vulnerable. He needed to hang onto those rules and if he didn’t he was being disloyal to his family. That loyalty was like a tattoo – it would take something as powerful as a laser to remove it.

  My house became more and more uncomfortable as Brody realised that happy family life was a million miles from what he was used to. We were like some kind of exotic tribe to him and it was great to visit, but he wanted to be back with his own people.