Page 1 of Tainted Love
Prologue
ELIAS
FROM A YOUNG age, I learned music can conjure up vivid memories and trigger intense recollections from years past. It is both a blessing and a curse.
My earliest memory of music is from when I’m about three years old. I’m sitting on my dad’s shoulders at a music festival and my twin sister, Olivia, sits opposite me on Mum’s shoulders while some indie punk rock band played on stage. The four of us are wearing matching smiles as we swayed along in time to the melody.
My early childhood is littered with several versions of this memory. Mum and Dad were only sixteen when they had us. Both were heavily into the music festival scene, they didn’t let having kids stop them, and rather than leave us at home with a baby-sitter, they brought us along. Having kids young didn’t stop them from enjoying life. Music was always part of my soul and receiving my first hand-me-down Fender for my fifth birthday was one of my happiest memories.
But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Not long after mine and Oli’s thirteenth birthday, Dad withdrew. He’d take off for weeks at a time, leaving us to help Mum with Athena. Oursister was cute at three, but she had a handful of medical issues that made her a fussy toddler.
One of my darkest memories is sitting on the bathroom floor in our shitty little apartment in Footscray, my clothes covered in water and blood as I clung to the towels wrapped around Mum’s wrists. I will never be able to hear the tune of ‘Everybody Hurts’by REM without thinking of it playing on repeat after Dad left for the last time without a trace.
Fourteen. It was the end of our innocence.
I’m still haunted by nightmares—hearing Oli’s terrified voice scream down the phone ‘We need an ambulance’; Athena’s cries from her crib as I beg Mum not to leave us–they still haunt me in the darkest hours.
Music provides a vehicle which allows people to retrieve all those memories. It can increase our dopamine and oxytocin, even control our mood. The music we listen to can become our identity. It is the soundtrack to our lives.
It allows me to keep the demons at bay. Stop them from consuming and destroying me, the way they tried to take her. I’m a fighter. Though I may be damaged beyond repair, I will never let the beasts take me before my time.
Chapter 1
Elias
“THANK YOU, BYRON Bay!” I shout into the microphone, as the roar of the crowd floods through my veins. My smile widens as I look out over the mass of screaming people, calling out our names and reaching for us. This feeling never gets old.
I pull my guitar strap over my head as I jog off the stage. My bandmate and childhood friend, Asher Cohen, grips the back of my neck and leans his sweaty forehead against mine. Massive grins cover both our faces as we celebrate another great show.
As I pass my instrument off to one of the roadies, our drummer and the wildest member of Forever Summer, Killian Walsh sneaks up behind me and squeezes my arse. “Who’s ready to get fucked up?”
I turn and slap him on the shoulder with a smirk. “You know it, bro.”
The Byron Bay Music Festival is the last show of our summer festival tour along the East Coast of Australia and to say I’m not looking forward to heading back to Melbourne is an understatement. I was born for this–playing my music infront of packed festivals. The pubs and clubs back home aren’t cutting it anymore.
I’m ready to take Forever Summer to the next level, which includes building up our social media presence, landing a manager, and booking more tours. We currently have fifty-eight thousand followers, thanks to a series of social media content Oli posted a couple of months ago. Apart from a few festival photos, we haven’t posted a lot since she took off a couple of months ago.
I grab a towel and wipe the sweat off my brow. My ears are still ringing, and my heart races from the adrenaline of the crowd singing my lyrics back to me. There’s no feeling like it, even no drug hits that same high. And I should know, I’ve tried most of them as I attempted to block out the memories of my childhood.
If it weren’t for Asher and Kill, I would’ve become another statistic. But my mates held on and refused to let the darkness take me. Forever Summer started as three mates jamming together in Kill’s garage. It became more when I returned from foster care, where I was placed after what happened with Mum. Now sixteen, my mates didn’t know what to do with the stranger I’d become. But music kept me alive, and it was all that mattered to them.
A lot of our earlier music is haunting and raw. It’s a reflection of who I was in my late teens, but over time it changed. Music is my therapy, and while I’ve accepted I’ll probably be fucked up forever, it helped to purge some of the demons from my past.
Our keyboardist, who is the quietest member of our band, jolts me from my thoughts with a hand on my shoulder. I look up at Wyatt in a daze, and he gives me a tight smile as he passes over my phone. He must have collected it along with the rest of our stuff off the side of themain stage.
As I glance at the screen, my mood plummets, and my smile drops from my face. Thirty calls from Athena.
Asher yells my name and I hold up my finger, letting him know I’ll be a second. I move behind the stage and hit redial. A knot of dread forms in my stomach as I wait for the call to connect.
“Eli!” My twelve-year-old sister is as bubbly as ever, unfortunately it does little to ease my anxiety. “How did the show go?”
“Good, Attie. It was great. What’s going on? Are you alright? Mum? Oli? Talk to me.” I’m holding my jaw tight, and I work on releasing it.
“Oh, everything is amazing,” she giggles—fucking giggles— and I wonder if she’s drunk, though I know I got up to a lot worse at her age. “Better than amazing, even.”
“Seriously Attie, what the hell is going on? Have you been drinking? Where’s Mum?” I blow out an exasperated breath.
Athena bursts into another round of giggles and I’m ready to hang up on her. She may be ten years younger than me, but ever since I left Melbourne three months ago for the tour with the band, she’s been acting like a freaking teenager on crack. If she’s been in the liquor cabinet, I’ll murder her.
