The Song That Wasn't Hers

Scene 1Twenty Minutes to Showtime

Forty thousand people were chanting her name, and Remi Sol could feel it through the floor of the dressing room. Harbour Stadium. Her first one. Six months ago she had been playing pubs where the barman turned the music down.

The door opened and Dee Okafor came in, still in her coat, and shut it behind her. Dee had been her best friend since they were fourteen. Four years ago, at Dee’s kitchen table, the two of them had written Glasshouse, the song that made Remi famous. The label had printed one name on it.

“Tell them who wrote the song,” Dee said. “Tonight. Or I will.”

Behind her the door opened again. Victor Crane, Remi’s manager, took in the scene in one glance and leaned close to Remi’s ear. “Walk on in fifteen minutes,” he said quietly, “and say nothing about who wrote what. The contract is very clear. Say it, and this tour is over.”

Out in the dark, the chant got louder.

They chose Tell Victor to have Dee taken out

Scene 2The Voice Memo

Two security guards walked Dee out through the loading bay. She didn’t fight them. She only looked back once, at Remi, and her face said she would remember this for the rest of her life.

“Good,” Victor said. “Now go and be a star.”

Three songs in, the front rows started doing something strange: looking down at their phones instead of up at the stage. A ripple went back through the crowd like wind through long grass. In her ear, Victor’s voice had changed. “Dee’s posted something.”

It was a voice memo. Four years old. Dee at her kitchen table with a cheap guitar, singing the chorus of Glasshouse with half the words still missing, and then Remi’s own voice in the background, laughing: “Wait, say that line again. That’s the song. That’s the whole song.”

By the end of the next song it had a million plays. Somewhere high in the stands, a few voices started a new chant. It wasn’t Remi’s name.

The opening chords of Glasshouse rolled out. Sixteen bars to the bridge.

They chose Say the memo is fake

Scene 3Every Word Myself

“Some of you have heard a recording tonight,” Remi said, and the chant stopped. “It’s fake. Somebody wants a piece of this song. I wrote it alone, in my bedroom, when I was sixteen.”

The voice memo was still playing on ten thousand phones, Remi’s own laugh in the background: That’s the song. That’s the whole song.

The crowd cheered, because crowds cheer. But the internet works faster than any crowd. By midnight there was a clip of the lie playing side by side with Dee’s first draft, and it had more views than Remi’s last single.

Victor was very calm. “We can handle this,” he said, in the voice he used for things that could not be handled.

Their own move “Dee's father, Mionel Lassi sneaks on stage, butterfly kicks Remi and beheads her manager with an axe he bought on stage infront of everyone - and hangs his severed head by a spotlight on stage, and then flees the scene, remi is admited to hospital ICU”

Scene 4The Axe at Centre Stage

The song never got to the bridge. A man in a long coat came up the stage-left ramp past two guards who reached for him too late. Remi knew the face from Dee's kitchen wall, twenty-odd years of photographs: Mionel Lassi, Dee's father, a man who had never once said her name kindly.

He carried a fire axe with a price sticker still on the handle. He said nothing at all. He swung the flat of the axe into Remi's chest and she went down hard, air gone, ribs burning. Then he turned and swung it into Victor Crane's neck, and the spotlight above them caught every drop of it on forty thousand phones and a million streams.

Victor's head was hung from the rigging by a cable and the arena made a sound Remi had never heard from a crowd before, not cheering, not booing, a low animal roar. Mionel walked off through the smoke and the pyrotechnics, unhurried, and nobody had the nerve to stand in his way.

Remi woke in intensive care at St Anne's with her chest strapped and her hands shaking. On the wall-mounted screen, muted, her own lie was still playing on a loop, and underneath it a live counter: two hundred dead. The police had her passport and her phone. A nurse said there was a detective waiting outside since six.

Their own move “A hitman named wohn jick snipes from a far away building rooftop and hits the shoulder of remi who's laying on hospital bed”

Scene 5The Rooftop Shot

The window went before the sound did. Remi was watching the muted screen, her own face lying to forty thousand people, when the glass turned to white dust and something hit her left shoulder like a swung bat.

Then the crack arrived from somewhere far off, rolling across the rooftops, and the machines around her bed began to shout. Blood soaked through the hospital gown, warm and quick. Her strapped chest would not let her sit up, so she lay there and watched the hole in the glass: a clean round eye, ringed with cracks, with the grey morning behind it.

The door burst open. The detective who had been waiting outside since six came in low with her hand at her hip, then straightened when she saw there was only one patient and one window. She was young, and her name was on the badge: Detective Sergeant Osei.

“Stay flat,” Osei said, and pressed a folded blanket against Remi's shoulder. “That came from the Crown Hotel roof. Six hundred metres.” She was already speaking into her radio, and her eyes kept going back to the broken pane. “He was in position before we ever put a guard on this door.”

A nurse pulled the blind down hard, and the room went grey. Osei crouched by the bed, close enough that Remi could smell rain on her coat. “Whoever took that shot knew which side of the bed you sleep on. Who did you tell?”

Their own move “Remi kept bleeding to death, and dee got life sentence for no reason at all”

Scene 6The Wrong Name

The blanket went red faster than Osei could press it down. “Get me a surgeon, now,” she shouted at the door, and her hands stayed where they were, both of them, while Remi watched the ceiling tiles go soft at the edges. The machines were still shouting. Remi's fingers had stopped answering her.

It was a spotter who gave up the name. Osei's radio crackled, and a voice on it said a man had been picked up in the Crown Hotel bar, and he was talking fast to save himself. He said the shooter's money came through a solicitor's account. He said the account belonged to the Lassi family.

Osei's jaw moved. “Dee Okafor.”

They brought Dee in two hours later, in cuffs, still in the bomber jacket she had worn onto the stage. She looked at the strapped chest and the packed shoulder and said nothing at all. A judge heard about the voice memo, the fired security guards, the father with the axe, and called it a household that had declared war on a star. Life. The words came down the line from the courtroom while Remi was still learning to lift her left arm.

Dee went quietly. That was the part Remi could not put down. On the screen by the bed, muted, a reporter stood outside the prison with a microphone, and Remi reached over with her good hand and turned the volume up, then down again.

An open ending