Sitting
there thinking about all of this, he had a sudden twinge of pain in
his spine.
Heavens, how his back hurt.
Damn that dance routine.
The single did, as Robert predicted, roll straight into Hitsville,
and there it stayed, sitting pretty at the top of the charts for a
good three weeks, thanks to Mozart’s tireless promotion campaign,
one that forced him to take a few days off, due to exhaustion. But
Mozart wasn’t happy with this success; for a start, most of
his fans from Class Idol had accused him of selling out, saying that
the Mozart they’d voted for would never have stooped so low
as to record a pop single and then make a video where he had to cavort
with a bunch of barely-dressed glamour models. His fiancée
Constanze had stopped returning his calls since that video was aired,
but if the worst came to the worst, he had a bit of a crush of her
elder sister Aloysia, anyway. His former Idol fans were probably right,
but he won a few of them over by appearing on a live debate show with
them and playing them a few bars of his newest work.
By and large, he trusted the fans that cared enough to have an opinion.
It was his management that he had a problem with.
Every day brought a new Mozart-based franchise from them; one day
his face adorned bubblegum wrappers, the next day labels on soft drink
bottles. The money was rolling in, and to be fair, it wasn’t
like they were fleecing him out of it, keeping it all to themselves;
he was doing very well from it all, financially. Where he wasn’t
doing so well from it was in his own mind and soul – in those
places, he cared only about making the music that he lived for.
He walked into the studio one Thursday morning planning to tell Robert
all of this, but when he got there, he received the biggest shock
of his life – a man dressed just like him but with a totally
different facial structure was sitting at his piano, pretending to
play. Seeing the look of confusion on Mozart’s face, Robert
ran over to him, put an arm around his shoulders, and led him over
to the stranger.
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‘Wolfgang, hey, good morning, meet Tom Hulce! He’s playing
you in the movie of your life!’ Then he pointed to a pile
of pages on the piano, a pile that Mozart recognised as a first
draft manuscript. ‘Filmed from this story of your life that
we’ve just had written for you!’
‘Robert, you can’t be serious. This man doesn’t
look anything like me!’
Robert shrugged. ‘Special FX can work wonders these days.
Besides, he draws good box office.’
In a daze, Mozart ran through the building, and in every single
room he found, people were working on his career without ever asking
for input from him. The writers behind the single were writing him
an album and were probably the people behind that biography sitting
on the piano upstairs, the PR people were working out who he should
be dating (Constanze just wasn’t famous enough, sadly), and
deep in the editing rooms, the makers of Class Idol were putting
together a DVD compiling all of his best bits.
He wanted out. But a cursory look at his contract, signed only a
few moments after his win, with the lights still blazing and the
massive audience still cheering, told Mozart all that he needed
to know; he’d signed away his life, given them the rights
to do as they pleased with him, to market him however they desired.
Dejected, he sunk to the floor and did the one thing he knew he
was still free to do:
He wept.
Judging Comment
There are all kinds of bravery.
There is the bravery of the man, like Alex in Alyson Hilbourne’s
story, who tackles violent people without stopping to think of the
danger they might be in. Then there is the bravery that someone like
Alex’s wife, Ellie, will need to rebuild her life after being
widowed. Alyson’s story deals with both these kinds of bravery.
And her story is well structured. The opening arouses our interest
because, for some reason, the narrator has experienced the knock on
the door in the middle of the night: the policeman’s knock.
But this time it is not a policeman, it is Jackie who runs the pub
where Alex was killed. And Jackie is used as the catalyst to allow
Ellie, the narrator, to unfold her story. The description of Ellie’s
grief being mixed with anger is well handled and believable, but eventually
she is able to articulate what she really feels: that Alex was the
kind of man who made a difference.
Having reached this point, the hopefulness and optimism of a new life
provides an appropriate ending. And a good ending should be ‘appropriate’:
it doesn’t always need to have a twist or to be terribly clever,
but it does need to wrap up the story. It needs to be appropriate.
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