Sara shot up. In a few months, she grew over thirty centimetres. Her figure, which seemed to have been holding puberty at bay so far, suddenly bloomed. After a brief spell of acne her face healed in a few weeks into the clearest skin, without a blemish and so finely grained that not a pore was visible to the naked eye. Her flawless skin was one of the things that attracted the attention of Jonathon Heat, who had always had an open complexion.
At the same time she developed a scent all of her own.
‘I noticed it on her one day,’ said Janet, ‘and I asked her what she was wearing.’
‘Can you smell it, too?’ she asked. ‘It’s not anything. I didn’t even wash this morning.’
They were both astonished by this trick of nature and went to lock themselves in the toilet so they could smell the skin on her arms, her legs, on her back and shoulders, and verify that it was her skin all over. It was true. She smelt all over of salted almonds and musk.
‘She never had to wear deodorant, after a shower,’ said Janet, shaking her head in amazement. ‘I never came across anything like it. Her own perfume! She used to say she was fed up with it, she’d like to smell of something else, but, really, she was very proud to be her own perfume. They could have made a fortune if they ever put it in a bottle.’
As a result of her height and her looks, Sara suddenly began to attract a great deal of attention from boys, which she suffered with a kind of bemused tolerance, always keeping them at arm’s length. Later, when her face was known across the world, the newspapers tried to make out that she slept with a great many of those boys. Janet always maintained that it wasn’t true.
‘She wasn’t like that at all. In fact, she used to have this joke about how she was going to be the last virgin on earth, because she was still holding out when all the rest of us were already at it. But I suppose it’s her own fault. She liked it that people thought that about her. I had to promise not to tell anyone she was a virgin, although, actually, she was very proud and wanted only to do it with someone special.’
‘It’d be bad for my image if people knew,’ she said. In fact, Sara was a virgin right up until she met Mark, a little after her seventeenth birthday, and, as far as Janet’s aware, she never slept with anyone else.
When the sexual attention got out of hand, Sara put a stop to it in a way that won a great deal of disapproval from her classmates. It happened like this.
It had started as a game of chase years before at primary school. The old story – the boys chase the girls and rough them up or put their hands under their clothes. The game had died down at high school, when people didn’t know each other so well, but a small group of boys and girls had started it up again sometime in Year 8. They were good friends, all five of them, and spent time together out of school as well as in it. The three boys would pounce on one of the girls, drag her into the boys’ cloakroom and have a quick grope with much shrieking and howls of laughter.
The girls enjoyed it as much as the boys, but there’s a fine line between rough play and bullying, and another again between bullying and sexual assault. It wasn’t quite childish any more and it wasn’t just chase. Once or twice, the boys tried it on someone else and just about got away with it. Their fatal mistake was trying it with Sara. Sara was friendly with these boys – not close, just friendly. She was the most desirable girl in the school and it’s a sign that more than fun or curiosity was involved that they tried it on with her. One day, as they were walking with her past the cloakrooms, they pounced, dragged her off out of sight and rummaged inside her clothes.
Janet was standing outside with another girl when it happened. She stood and listened to the boys grunting with laughter and Sara’s shrieks of indignity, her heart beating furiously. It wasn’t Sara she was worried about. The boys were going places they weren’t welcome but she was in no danger – it wasn’t real violence.
‘They didn’t ought to be doing that,’ said the girl next to her. Janet remembers thinking how right she was.
It was over in a few seconds. The boys came running out, giggling and smirking, and Sara came staggering after them, tucking her shirt in. She walked up to Janet, whipped out her mobile phone and dialled. She stared straight at them as she spoke.
‘Police.’
The corridor, which had been abuzz a moment before, suddenly froze.
‘I’ve just been sexually assaulted in the boys’ toilets at Stanford High School by a group of three boys. My name’s Sara Carter; I have the boys here. I’m with some friends so it’s safe. There are witnesses. Please send a squad car round as soon as possible.’
She stabbed the phone and started another dial-up.
‘It was just a laugh,’ said one of them.
‘You can’t do that,’ said another.
‘She wasn’t even dialling,’ said the third.
She didn’t answer them. ‘Hello. Can I have the news desk? My name is Sara Carter and I’ve just been sexually assaulted at Stanford High School. The police are on their way. Three boys. Yes. I’m only thirteen years old.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Barry. They were all looking really scared.
‘It’s a game, right?’ said Joey.
Then she rang the Head. He was in a meeting at the time, so she spoke to his secretary. ‘Tell him to get his arse over here, the boys’ toilets near the maths block. This is Sara Carter and I’ve just been molested by some pupils from this school. The police and the press are already on their way.’
She turned off her phone and stared at the boys.
‘Watch me,’ she said. She crumpled up her face and began to cry.
‘Oh my God,’ said Barry Jones. By the time the Head came running down the corridor with members of staff around him like a herd of rhinos, they knew it was real.
‘It’s them,’ said Sara. ‘They nearly raped me,’ she said – which wasn’t true. ‘They touched me,’ she said, which was. Then she burst into tears. Above the shouting and cries of complaint, they could hear the squad car howling in through the school gates.
And all hell broke loose. The school, the press, the police, everything. The drama was played out in full public view, like so much of her life to come. The boys were arrested as the press cameras flashed; the Head granted a desperate interview while the police overacted for the film crew. The story, as Sara had realised at once, was a beauty. It hit the local TV news that evening and was all over the papers the next day. Gang of teenage boys attempt rape of girl, 13, in school toilets. Fabulous!
Sara split the school neatly in half. Some thought the boys had it coming – they’d practically committed assault. Others thought she was using the situation. The papers were all over the place; the school was obviously a pit of sexual perversity and abuse, as if that sort of thing and worse had been going on for ages and no one had done anything about it. It was an object lesson in the way the press can make any old nonsense sound like truth.
Gradually, however, the hysteria died down; a consensus emerged. The boys were simply very immature. They needed to be taught a lesson, but a court case wasn’t really it. Pressure built up on Sara. A number of people tried to get her to drop charges, including Teresa Dickinson, one of the original two girls who were friends with the boys.
‘They were just mucking around, you know that,’ she said.
‘I turned a bunch of potential rapists into decent citizens, that’s all I know,’ replied Sara. ‘No one gets to touch me unless I want them to – so tell that to your friends. And I’ve got plenty more where that came from.’
In the end, though, she did drop the charges. There was talk of expulsion, but the boys got away with a suspension for the rest of the term. Just as Sara said, they never did anything like that again. And they weren’t the only ones. The school did actually have a problem – not quite as abusive as the press made out, but there was bullying going on. It was big against little, strong against weak, the tough against the delicate in that place, and had been for ages. The staff had turned a blind eye
to a lot of it – some of them joined in – but now, with the world’s eyes on them and their mistakes and failings reported in a suspicious press, they did something about it. They had no choice. Unfair she had been, maybe, but Sara put an end to a lot of tears and fears by her action.
That was her. Whatever she did, she did it full on and only started thinking about it afterwards.
As Sara grew older, she developed fabulous ambitions. Janet had no doubt that she would follow her star and that she could never go with her to such distant places. But although the two girls were developing in different directions, they somehow never grew apart. Right up to the end, they loved one another like sisters.
Sara had been taking lessons at the Stagecoach performance school for years, but by the age of twelve she was already saying that she was going to become famous for being herself rather than for any skills she might cultivate. At the same time, the question of exactly who she was became an issue. As a child, Sara had always enjoyed games of pretence, role plays, that sort of thing. But as she got older, instead of dropping them as most people do, she incorporated them more and more into her daily behaviour, to the point where it became difficult to separate what was real from what was make-believe.
It began with accents. She’d pick up an accent and speak it for days on end. She’d turn up on Monday morning in Irish, or Brummy or with a faint Japanese accent, and that was her for the week. But it was more than that; the voices developed lives of their own. They became new people. Often, they would have completely different tastes from Sara herself. Janet recalls characters who loved things Sara always hated, like red meat stewed in red wine, scraps with her fish and chips or T-shirts that hung down to her hips.
Janet found it bewildering. Sometimes she didn’t like the new girls, but mostly she fell head over heels in love with them, just as she had with Sara herself. Then – pop! – she’d wake up one morning and they’d be gone. It used to spook her out.
Once, Sara was a Filipino girl for three weeks nonstop. Her name was Maria and she was twenty years old. She’d joined a marriage club back in the Philippines to find a Western husband and her parents had got her to marry an older man who’d brought her back to live in England. Now, she had to get a job and send back money and support the whole family, but she wanted to get some education first. Her husband was forty-five years old, and because he was a big cheese in the civil service he was able to pull a few strings. That’s how her passport said she was a fifteen-year-old English girl who was entitled to a free education instead of a twenty-year-old Filipino girl who wasn’t. Maria was having to pretend all the time that she was English. She swore Janet to secrecy. She was prepared to do anything to get an education and look after her family. She said her husband was really kinky, hinting mysteriously at any number of weird sexual things she had to do without ever specifying them. She told Janet and her other friends that they were never to go with an older man because they were all pervs. But they all thought, because Maria was so innocent, it was probably something actually really rather normal, but no one ever liked to ask.
Maria stayed for three weeks and then disappeared, like all the others before and after her. Janet was mortified. She swore that while she was being Maria, Sara actually started to look Filipino.
‘She had Filipino eyes, I swear it,’ said Janet. ‘It killed me. I really missed her. I couldn’t believe I was so upset but that’s how I felt. I made her do Maria one more time so she could say goodbye to me – I couldn’t bear it that she’d just gone. We even worked out a happy ending for her, where she left her husband and found a lovely Filipino boy who took her away to live in America and really respected her.’
As well as becoming other people, Sara, at the age of fourteen, began to have visions. Ghosts, apparitions, voices. She never said much about that, even to Janet, and Janet was never sure how real they were, either. Sara once claimed that she had seen Maria walking around her bedroom packing up her clothes.
‘Freaky!’ said Janet. ‘What was that about? Seeing your own inventions as ghosts after you’ve just killed them off!’
There are one or two other characteristics of Sara’s that must be mentioned here, since they have an important bearing on what happened later on. One is Sara’s reputed anorexia. Anorexia is a word much bandied about these days, in an age where thinness and beauty are more or less the same thing. Sara was never a lollipop-girl, never in any danger of starving herself to death, but was permanently on a diet she was never able to stick to – in short, she felt fat and ugly. The briefest glance at any photograph would tell anyone else that none of this was true.
And another thing: Sara had accidents. That would come as a surprise to many people who knew her, since she had tremendous grace and precision in her movements. People describe her as moving like a dancer just when making a cup of tea or leaning across to listen to someone speak. But she had accidents – not with things, but with herself. She spilt hot drinks down her front on several occasions, and had to be treated for burns. By the time she was seventeen, she had broken her arms and legs no less than four times, each time by falling down the stairs. Another time, she dropped a brick on her foot the day before she was due to enter the final of a dance competition, and spent the next two months in a cast, hobbling around on crutches.
These accidents have come under much suspicion. The suggestion is that Sara engineered them herself, in other words, that she self-harmed. It is a charge that she always denied, but, as many people have pointed out, Sara saying that something was true or false doesn’t always mean much at all.
It was one such accident, just after she split up from Mark, that took her into the hospital where she first met Jonathon Heat.
A Brief History of Jonathon Heat
Jonathon Heat is a man whose fame has many roots – as a multi-platinum-selling pop idol, as a creative artist, an art collector, a billionaire charity worker, as a human chameleon, fashion victim and, finally, as a heartless criminal, one of the monsters of our time. He has taken on so many forms, some beautiful, some bizarre, as his early good looks succumbed under endless rounds of surgery to a series of increasingly mask-like and beastly faces. But none of the many images we’ve had of him has been as striking as the recent ones from inside Strangeways Prison, taken when fellow inmates tore his protective mask off – the bared, mirthless grin of the death’s-head, the bleeding skull, the terrifying spectacle of a man with no face.
The phenomenal global success of his early music – ‘The Heat is On’, ‘Burning Heat’, ‘Endure the Heat’ and so on – was followed by a lull that looked like the end of his career. At that point, Heat might have been no different from a handful of unusually successful chart-toppers. But within a year he returned with a dramatic reinvention of his music, his image and himself. The boy-band jeans and T-shirt were swapped for a skin-tight black suit and bootlace tie; the round, wistful face and blue eyes exchanged for a long chin, an arched nose and patchy black stubble. Most remarkably, gone were the chubby legs and meaty bum, replaced by long, razor-thin shins and an electric dance style that seemed to turn him into rubber. Heat’s ability to reinvent himself encompassed not only his clothes, but his looks; not only his songs, but his voice; not only the way he moved, but even, apparently, his physical shape.
And the new look was not just skin deep: Heat changed his life along with his image. The following years saw a series of transformations that were personal as well as theatrical – his lifestyle, his relationships and even his sexuality changed over and over again, until change itself became his image. His second form was even more successful than the first; the third almost as successful as the second. After that, however, Heat’s success began to wane. His older fans preferred the music they had first fallen in love with, his new morphs attracted fewer and fewer listeners. Newer styles and younger faces overtook him. Heat’s star had made him as fabulous as a unicorn, as famous as Christ, but finally, at the age of thirty-one, even he was becoming a thing of the past.
Heat turned his attention to other things – his art collection, his own experiments in film and graphics, his charity work abroad and at home. For a few years, he hardly appeared as a performer at all. But the surgery that had been the cornerstone of his transformations continued. At this point, most of the procedures Heat had done were performed in London’s Warehouse Clinic, and for a long time he seemed perfectly happy with the service they offered – fiddling with his nose and chin, sculpting his cheeks and forehead, tucking in his creases and lifting the flab – the usual sort of thing.
Things changed in his early thirties, when an outbreak of flu badly affected the staff at the Warehouse and, for a short period, they employed the services of the controversial surgeon Dr Wayland Kaye.
In his thirties and forties, Kaye had been a rapidly rising star in the field of cosmetic surgery, pioneering new techniques and doing research into tissue transplants across blood types, across body types, even, in the end, across species. For a while he had been a fashionable target for funding from all directions, but as his theories grew more and more outlandish and his claims increasingly extravagant, the money for research began to dry up. Kaye, by all accounts, felt betrayed and reacted badly; there were a number of very ugly scenes, some of them in public. As time passed, Kaye became increasingly willing to put even his more bizarre ideas into practice without the data or research to back them up – and, it was hinted, without the necessary legislation allowing him to go ahead. Prosecutions were in the pipeline, but nothing was ever proved. But his skill remained unquestioned, which is why, after a suitable period, clinics still occasionally brought him in for emergencies.
Kaye’s ideas were wide-ranging, from simple surgical techniques for flesh sculpture, to drugs that would promote healing, prevent scarring and even apparently help flesh grow into the desired shape. They included the use of artificial skin, skin grown from other species and finally to that holy grail of cosmetic surgery, the full face transplant. It was, by all accounts, Dr Kaye’s ambition to be the first man to carry one out successfully.