Untitled Document

Cassie’s voice squeaked on the final word of that lyric, bringing the recording session to a grinding halt. Matthew and I groaned in frustration.

“Cassie, you messed up again!” Matthew complained, pulling out the pop-top of his drink bottle and splashing Cassie’s shirt with water. She squealed in surprise and dumped her glass of Fanta over Matthew’s head. I watched the scene with barely concealed amusement.

A warning from Mike, the studio technician, halted the in-studio shenanigans. “Cassie and Matt, would you please quit fooling around? That’s some delicate and expensive equipment you’re coming close to knocking over, and I really don’t think that either of your parents have the money to pay for any damage you might end up doing.”

“At least Taylor is behaving himself, that’s all I can say. Now come on, if you can get this song recorded then you’ll be able to go home early.”

The three of us – Matthew Shelton, Cassie Dale and I, Taylor Kennedy – play in a band we started little more than two years ago; our band’s name is Renegade, and at that precise moment we were recording yet another independent CD. We had some concerts lined up, and we planned to sell the CD at the shows. It’s a nice little enterprise, but we don’t intend on doing it professionally. It’s ‘just too much effort’, according to Cassie.

Mike started the backing track again, and the three of us started singing. And of course, we come to the bridge again and what happens? Cassie messes up again.

“All right, all right, stop right there,” Mike intoned. “Maybe you guys should try the song with Matt or Taylor on lead; it might eliminate the problem of Cassie squeaking on the bridge. We’ll do two more run throughs and then we’ll wind up for the day; Matt, you do the lead first, and Taylor, you do it second.”

Well, as it turned out I could sing the song, untitled as yet, better than Cassie and Matthew, which surprised me to be honest. We’d written the piece to be sung by Cassie, her being the soprano, which meant that it never would have sounded good when sung by Matthew anyway. It looked like having a feminine-sounding voice wasn’t so bad when it came to singing after all.

We got the vocal track laid down in no time after we reassigned the role of lead on the song. “So what are we gonna call it?” Cassie asked as we started packing up in readiness to go home for the day. “I have some ideas.”

I grabbed one of the lyric sheets that had been left behind on the microphone stand and skimmed the printed text. “I got it,” I said, my gaze resting on the first line of the chorus. “Dying To Be Alive.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good; for a Kennedy you sure have a good head on your shoulders,” Matthew said approvingly.

Cassie giggled. “So, we have a title for the song then?” Matthew and I nodded. “Awesome; we can work on Borderline tomorrow then.”

I checked my watch. “Uh oh, I’m late for dinner you guys; Mum wanted to talk to me, and she will have my head on a silver platter if I walk in the door any later than six.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said hurriedly as I shoved my music scores into my backpack and slung it over my shoulder, then raced out of the studio and bolted downstairs. Down three flights of stairs I hurtled without even so much as a break to catch my breath, emerging at last in the car park; I raced over to my car, unlocked it and wrenched the car door open. “I’m in deep shit, I’m in deep shit,” I muttered over and over as I got in and pulled the door closed behind me, did up my seatbelt and turned the key in the ignition; I slammed a tape into the cassette player as I reversed out of my car’s parking spot and drove out into the street.

I must have broken all land speed records driving home through the late afternoon traffic, because at approximately five to six I pulled up in the driveway of my house – it normally takes me half an hour to drive home from the studio, and it had taken me little more than fifteen minutes. Then again, knowing where the back roads are kinda helps a little.

“I’m home!” I yelled, dumping my bag in the inside foyer and kicking off my sneakers. “Hey, is anyone alive in there?”

Mum came walking down the hallway, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “How was recording?” she asked me.

I followed my mother through into the dining room and started to set the table; Mum went out into the backyard and called for my sisters and brother to go and get themselves cleaned up. “They’ve been playing in that pile of dirt in the yard all afternoon,” Mum told me.

“So why doesn’t Dad get rid of it?” I asked as I hopped up onto one of the bench stools and stole a carrot stick from the glass bowl that was set out.

“Well, you know your father, the king of procrastination…” Mum reached out and tousled my hair, then turned back to carving up the chicken.

“So, um…what exactly did you want to talk to me about?” I asked. “I mean, I practically broke the land speed record getting home.”

“Taylor Francis Kennedy, what have I told you about speeding? I can easily take your keys away from you, you know.”

“Watch your mouth.” Then Mum sighed. “Tay, honey, I’d rather you waited until at least after dinner; it’s something that your father and I both need to discuss with you.”

Mum laughed. “Lord, no! Don’t you worry yourself; you just go get yourself cleaned up for dinner.”

My sisters Lila and Emma, and my brother Oliver, were in the bathroom washing their hands and faces. “I’d wash my feet too if I were you guys,” I said to them as I reached over Oliver to wash my hands. “Mum will go off her head at you if she sees how black your feet are.” Lila giggled as I picked her up and sat her on the vanity, then rinsed her little feet under the stream of cool water. “Emma, you next.”

The four of us went back downstairs to the dining room, sliding into our usual places at the table. “Mark, when are you going to get rid of the dirt pile in the yard?” Mum was asking Dad as she put the dinner plates on the table. “The kids were playing in it all afternoon and tracked mud all through the house.”

Dad eyed all four of us. “They look pretty clean to me,” he said with a slight smile.

“Well, Taylor was at the studio all day, and I did ask them to get themselves cleaned up.”

Dinner was over and done with fairly quickly; Mum and Dad sent my younger siblings upstairs as soon as the table had been cleared and the dishwasher loaded.

“Okay, spill; what did you want to talk to me about?” I asked; my heart was beating so fast it wasn’t funny. I really was nervous about this; what was so important that they needed to talk to me about it?

Mum and Dad looked at each other. “Tay, honey, there’s something that we haven’t been entirely truthful about.”

“I know you’ve grown up as a Kennedy, but…” Mum trailed off, looking at her hands.

I knew exactly where this was going. “Wait…you mean to tell me that I’m adopted? That you aren’t really my parents after all?”

“Don’t you dare, Mum.” I stood up so fast my chair tipped over backwards. “I don’t want to hear it. You and Dad…you lied to me my entire life. I’m never speaking to the two of you again.”

I stormed out of the dining room and upstairs to the bathroom, leaning on the vanity and staring at my reflection in the mirror.

Somehow, I should have known it. The rest of my family is dark – dark brown or black hair, brown eyes and olive complexion. Typically Mediterranean. And here I was – blonde hair, blue eyes, and skin so fair that I never tanned, I burned. “Recessive genes my left foot,” I muttered angrily as I stared at myself. They’d always passed off my obvious dissimilarity to the rest of my family as recessive genes, saying that Mum’s grandfather was blonde, or that Dad’s grandmother had blue eyes. It was all lies.

At that moment, there was nobody I hated more in the entire world than my so-called ‘parents’. I had been teased and ridiculed nearly my entire life for being the ‘black sheep’ in a family that was so obviously Italian (save for the surname), and now I knew why I had copped so much shit for it. I was adopted. And my parents had mentioned it so casually…I picked up a bottle of my mother’s perfume (the label read ‘Imari’; it was her favourite) and hesitated before hurling it at the mirror. The force of the impact shattered the bottle, splashing perfume everywhere, and cracked the mirror. A jagged piece of mirror glass fell out; I caught it before it landed in the sink and brought it down across my left wrist, digging the glass into my arm until it started bleeding. The pain that my act of mutilation caused stopped me in my tracks, my hand frozen in mid air, the ceiling light glinting off the piece of glass I held.

I looked down at my wrist and sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh shit,” I whispered. Christ it was starting to hurt. I let out a strangled cry and slid down the door of the linen cupboard, burying my face in my hands and ignoring the pain in my wrist.

I heard the bathroom door open, but I didn’t look up. “Mark, he’s bleeding,” came the voice of my mother; she had taken my left hand in her own. “Tay, honey, what did you do?”

“No I’m not,” I shot back. “You might’ve raised me, but you’re not my parents.”

I pulled myself to my feet, heedless of the blood dripping down the palm of my hand and off my fingertips. “Just leave me alone; you’re liars, and I hate you.”

I almost ran from the bathroom, into my room; I threw myself facedown on my bed and cried for the first time in years.

I attacked the strings of my guitar with such savagery that the E string snapped in half. Cursing, I threw my guitar at my closed bedroom door.

There came a quiet knock at my door just after I threw my guitar, and my mother stuck her head into my room. “Taylor?”

“I thought I told you I didn’t want to talk to you ever again,” I said, turning my back on her. “Don’t you understand plain English?”

“Tay, I know you’re bitter about this; believe me, I regret keeping the truth about your identity from you for so long. But please…your dad and I, we still love you. Would we have adopted you if we couldn’t love you?”

She ignored this. “Taylor, your father and I love you so much; why else would we have travelled thousands of kilometres to bring you home with us? We wanted a child of our own so much, but we weren’t sure we were ready for one yet. So we decided to adopt instead, and out of all the kids we could have adopted, we chose you. I think that’s proof enough of our love for you; we could have adopted any kid, but you were the one that we brought home to Australia with us.” She sat down beside me and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “How about this – do you want us to help you find your family? You’re legally old enough to look for them.”

I thought about this for a little while. Then I nodded. “Okay,” I said quietly.

“Come on, let’s get that cut fixed up.” Mum extended a hand to me, which I took, allowing her to lead me into the bathroom. She took a box of cotton balls out of the bathroom cupboard and found a bottle of Dettol; she filled the sink with warm water and splashed in a fifth of the bottle’s contents, then soaked a cotton ball in the water and started cleaning up my wrist. She wrapped a bandage around it when she was done, securing the end with a safety pin. “There we go…”

“Tay, you had every right to. You’ve been kept in the dark your whole life; I’d be angry as hell if I were in that position. We should have been open with you from the beginning, and I apologise for that.”

I swished the fingers of my right hand through the water in the sink. “I’m still sorry.” I looked up and stared at my reflection in the now cracked glass, my face broken into fragments. “And…and I’m sorry I broke your perfume bottle.”

“So, let me get this straight.” Cassie picked off a chunk of pineapple from her piece of Hawaiian pizza and popped it in her mouth. “You, Taylor Kennedy, are adopted.”

I nodded mutely, playing with my own piece of pepperoni pizza. In reality, I was still very much coming to terms with the fact that I was adopted. Now when I looked at Oliver, Emma and Lila, I didn’t see my younger brothers and sisters. I saw three kids who were as much related to me as my Year 7 English teacher was. My real family was somewhere out there, I just didn’t know where. I had so many questions jostling for prominence in my head that I didn’t know which one to ask first. What was my real mother’s name? Where did she live? How many brothers and/or sisters did I have? Did I look anything like my mother? But I guess the question I most wanted to know the answer to was one only she could answer. Why did she give me up for adoption in the first place? And who knew if I’d ever get to ask her why.

“And your parents only just told you last night?” Matthew asked, sitting down next to me with a piece of plain cheese pizza in hand.

“Oh yeah.” I nodded. “I went ballistic. I threw a bottle of my mother’s favourite perfume at the bathroom mirror and slit my left wrist with one of the pieces of the mirror.” I held up my left hand. “They lied to me all of my life; I’m not about to forgive them yet. I don’t know if I ever will.”

We got working on Borderline after our lunch break; it was a song that Cassie had penned in one of her work lunch breaks, and we’d worked out the music for it a couple of weeks ago. It was another of those nearing completion pieces – it had the instrumental part recorded, but no vocal track as yet.

As we worked on the song, I kept thinking back to the row I’d had with my parents the night before, how I was bordering on sanity and going insane. It was one of the few songs we’d ever recorded that I could relate to in some way. And in a rare instance, it only took a couple of takes to get it right – normally it took up to six takes, and sometimes it even took up to twenty. The twenty take sessions usually dragged far into the night, with no guarantee of making it home before three the next morning.

“Hey, do you guys wanna go out tonight?” Cassie asked as we finished Borderline and got ready to work on one of my pieces, one I’d written both the words and music of the night before – after I’d calmed down considerably and replaced the E string on my guitar, I went out onto the second floor balcony of the house and stared out at the stars for at least an hour before writing a piece I’d titled Home. It was slower and a good deal more melancholy and bitter than the pieces I normally wrote, but it had reflected my feelings at the time. It had only taken me three quarters of an hour to write.

“Yeah, I’d like to; I wouldn’t mind a night out on the town,” Matthew replied. “Tay? What do you think? Want to go out tonight, just the three of us?”

Right at that moment, a night out with my friends sounded like just the thing to pull me out of the rut I’d dug myself into. I nodded. “Sounds great.”

“Well, how about we work on the instrumental of Home now, and we’ll get the vocals done tomorrow,” Cassie suggested; Matthew and I shrugged, and we got down to work.

“Mum, Dad, it’s Taylor,” I said after the answering machine finished its spiel. “Just letting you know that I’m going out with Matthew and Cassie tonight, so don’t save me any dinner okay? I don’t know exactly when I’ll be home, but I’ll call again when we’re about to leave. I’ll see ya.” I hung up and shoved my phone into the back pocket of my jeans, then turned to Cassie and Matthew. “So, we going or what?”

“So, where are we going and what are we doing?” Cassie asked as we left the building. “I wanna get a tattoo.”

Cassie stuck her tongue out at him. “We should all get one,” she said. “Like, I don’t know…the word ‘together’ in Chinese or something like that. Make it actually mean something. Something that represents us. Dale, Kennedy, Shelton.”

We walked out to our respective cars. “Okay, we meet outside of Celtic Dragon in Newtown, then we go have dinner and check out a movie,” Cassie said, the three of us having agreed on how to spend our night out. “See you guys there.”

“Renegade is gonna rock da house!” Matthew hollered, his head sticking out of the driver’s side window of his car. Laughing, I gunned the engine of my car and shot out into the street after him, heading toward the bright lights of Sydney.

“Taylor, don’t you even deny it; you were so close to crying like a fucking baby.”

Cassie giggled as she sipped her strawberry daiquiri, wincing as she moved her left shoulder just a little too far. We’d gotten our tattoos right after we’d met up outside of Celtic Dragon; it was a tattoo studio in Newtown. Each of us had gotten one tattoo to identify us with the band, and another of our own choosing. The ‘band’ tattoo was the Southern Cross; our ‘personal’ tattoos were an angel (Cassie), a redback spider (Matthew) and the Star of David (me). I’d also gotten my eyebrow pierced.

“I was not!” I protested. “I’ve had tattoos done before you know; I’m used to it.”

“Four,” I replied with a smirk. “A dragon on my lower back, an ankh on my left shoulder, a shooting star on my right wrist” I detached my watch, which I normally wore on my left wrist, and displayed the shooting star I’d had tattooed soon after my eighteenth birthday “and a shark on my chest. The two we each got today make six.” I put my watch back on and picked up my chocolate Mudslide. “I can take pain; I slashed my wrist yesterday, remember? Tattoos are nothing. Neither is one measly little piercing.” I flicked my eyebrow piercing with a fingernail.

“I’m glad you think so,” Cassie groused. “Every time I get a tattoo I’m in agony for days.”

“Now? Three, maybe four. Five, even. I lost count. But every single tattoo I get, for days afterward it hurts like nothing else. That’s why I limit myself to one every three months.” She checked the time on her watch. “Hey, that movie’s starting soon; what were we seeing again?”

“The Scorpion King,” Matthew answered as he dug his wallet from his pocket to pay for our dinner and drinks. “The next session at the Dendy is at seven-thirty, and it’s a quarter to right now. Come on, we’re gonna be late.”

Laughing, smiling and playfully insulting one another, we left the bar and headed towards our final destination for the evening.

I closed the heavy wooden front door behind me and deadlocked it; the house was dark and silent, the walls lit every so often by a wash of pale light from passing cars (most of which had the headlights on high beam). It was just after eleven-thirty. I toed my shoes off, leaving them underneath the coat rack in the foyer, and padded quietly upstairs to my room.

I flicked on my ceiling light and hung my corduroy jacket up on the hook on the back of my bedroom door. Turning around, I saw that an A4-sized envelope had been placed squarely on my bedspread, with a note written on a piece of my mother’s writing paper, in my mother’s flowing cursive script, placed on top of the envelope; why she would leave it for me, I didn’t know. I sat down on my bed, picking up the note and the envelope and lying back against my pillows. The note was fairly simple in its wording.

So…my mother had had my records in her possession all along, without even telling me.

I tentatively reached for the envelope and slit it open, pulling out three sheets of paper – my original and amended birth certificates, and the record of my adoption. Frowning slightly, I read over the papers.

My name at birth had been Jordan Taylor Lawyer, and I’d been born on March 14 1983 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. And my mother’s name – Diana Lawyer. As I read further, I picked up on the most likely reason for my adoption – there was no name in the space designated for my father’s name, whoever he was.

I set that one aside and picked up the third sheet of paper, ignoring the second one (my amended birth certificate); I knew exactly what it said, I had my own copy of it from when I’d gotten my learner’s permit. This…this was the official record of my adoption. I read through it slowly, taking in every last detail.

There was a lot more after that, but that was basically all I was really interested in.

I stifled a yawn; I couldn’t risk staying up late, being that I had work the next day, and another recording session after my shift. I slipped the papers back into their envelope and tossed it onto my desk, then turned my light off and slipped beneath my bedspread, falling asleep within minutes.