Sara’s Face

by Melvin Burgess

  Heat and Kaye immediately recognised each other. Each had what the other wanted – Heat, fabulous amounts of money, a fascination with his own appearance and a willingness to experiment on his own person endlessly, while Kaye had the skills to perform the surgery and the vision of how things were going to be when the future came.

  In 1998, Kaye set up his own private clinic with funds provided by Heat, who became the subject – some might say the victim – of many of Kaye’s early experiments. And it has to be said that at first they were astonishingly successful. Kaye began by trying to reverse some of the problems with Heat’s previous surgery – scarring, muscle tone and so on – as well as removing many of the natural effects of age. The result a few months later was that Heat seemed to have lost twenty years. If there was a problem it was not that his face looked overworked; it was that it looked too young for the rest of him.

  Heat now relaunched his career as a performer – in a small way at first. But his plans were bigger than ever.

  As his confidence in Kaye grew, so did Heat’s ambition. He believed that Kaye was at the beginning of a revolution in facial surgery. People would soon be able to design faces for themselves almost as easily as they wore clothes. Mistakes would be rectified easily with no damage done.

  Kaye, it appears, encouraged him in this belief. In 2000, Heat built a surgery into the basement of his house in Cheshire, where he and Dr Kaye began a series of startling experiments that caused shock waves around the world.

  The first introduction to the world of Kaye’s new techniques, and Heat’s commitment to them, came with the release of Heat’s 2001 album, The Mark of the Beast, in which Heat appeared at first on video, then on stage with his face stretched out into a beastly snout, a doggish look, complete with hair and canines. His appearance on The Johnathan Ross Show, caused a sensation when Ross jumped up in the middle of the interview and tried to pull off Heat’s doggish facial hair, with the result that it proved to be completely real. Heat compounded the moment by jumping forward and snapping at Ross’s hand; the clash of his hard white teeth was heard right around the world.

  Heat maintained the illusion that his dog-face was real for years, but the reality was amazing enough. The dog hair on the sides of his face and chin was for real, as Ross had inadvertently revealed. Amazingly, so was the snout – but it was not a part of Heat. That is to say, not a permanent part. Kaye had removed the snout of a half-breed terrier and kept it alive with an artificial blood flow, until it was transplanted onto the front of Heat’s face. No one could see the star’s real mouth underneath it, and the nose, teeth and lips of the dog were obviously genuine. In fact, it was not a part of him at all, and clipped on round the back of the head, but no one knew that at the time. Dressed immaculately in a dark double-breasted pin-stripe, with a grey shirt and a big soft knot in his tie, Heat looked fabulously beastly. Women found it attractive; men copied it as best they could.

  Heat gloried in it. Sales rocketed.

  A number of other changes took place over the following years, in which Heat appeared as a cat and then as a demon, complete with horns and a forked tongue. No one was ever sure exactly how much trickery was involved, but a lot of the trickery itself was surgical. Kaye had taken surgery to places it had never been before. Looking young or beautiful or even normal was no longer the aim.

  And yet … As far back as 2002, there were rumours of things going wrong. The rumours reached a crescendo in the year 2003. Heat responded with a move that utterly confounded his critics by suddenly appearing as himself, looking exactly as you might expect his thirty-nine-year-old self to look, if only he had not been through so much surgery. For a while it really did seem that it was now possible, using Kaye’s techniques, to appear and reappear in the flesh, in whatever guise you wanted.

  Heat went on tour again and released a new album, As I Am. Looking back, we can see blemishes on Heat’s skin as far back as his first chat-show appearances to publicise the new tour and album. Stills taken during the tour illustrate the progress of the disintegration. In New York, there was heavy make-up on his face that close-ups reveal covered sticking plasters. In Los Angeles, hardly an inch of skin was showing under the make-up. In Moscow, his hairline slipped and it was obvious he was wearing a wig.

  In Sydney, he was wearing a half-mask. In Hong Kong, it was a full mask. By this time, the entire structure of his face had collapsed. The tour was abandoned before he even reached Europe.

  Under the mask, the wreckage was terrible. The skin had peeled off, the blood supply dried up, the nervous system gone haywire. Flesh had begun to die and to grow and to bleed without order. The muscles detached themselves from the bone and cartilage and sagged inside his skin -‘like a bag of butcher’s meat’, as one ex-staff member put it. Masses of scar tissue began to form at an accelerated rate and, within a few months, Heat began to look more like the elephant man than an international idol.

  Medical photographs leaked recently show Heat’s face in various stages of disintegration. They reveal a shocking record of science gone horribly wrong. The effect on Heat, a man who was used to personal beauty, a vain man, someone who had relied on his looks all his life, was devastating. He entered a deep depression, was suicidal and at times apparently psychotic. He tried at least four times to kill himself and on several occasions attacked those around him. It has been suggested that if it were not for his huge wealth and the power that goes with it he would long ago have been confined to a mental institution. As always, he survived; but not as he was. That was nothing new for Heat, who had changed himself so many times. But, this time, the change was more than he had bargained for.

  Kaye’s experiments had finally gone wrong as his critics had always claimed they would, but Heat had nowhere else to turn. He clung on to the hope that the old man – Kaye was over eighty by this time – could still pull off another miracle. He poured money into new experiments, growing skin and flesh in culture, transplanting the faces of dogs, pigs and monkeys from one to the other, even, it’s rumoured, from species to species, in an attempt to find a way of fixing what had gone wrong. Rumours abounded. There was something gothic and monstrous about this partnership – on the one hand Heat, who had taken beauty so far and at last destroyed it, and on the other the old man who had brought him to it, searching with his knife in the flesh of so many creatures, cutting and slicing, throwing away life after life down there under the mansion, in his attempts to undo his own work. Ambition and faith had taken both men to this; the first they could never surrender and the latter they did not dare to let go.

  Kaye proclaimed himself confident of success. His aim, apparently and astonishingly, was actually to grow a new face for his protégé. That was some years off, and, in the meantime, he was in contact with hospitals all over the world. He still nurtured his ambition to perform the first full-face transplant in history, but to find one that matched Heat’s genetic make-up wasn’t going to be easy.

  The world was certain that at last Heat’s fabulous career was at an end. It’s a measure of the man that from the ashes of his destruction, Heat managed not only to salvage something, but to create one of his most successful incarnations.

  Heat was nearly forty when he launched the now famous Night of the Mask Tour. Every paying customer got a free mask as they entered the stadia and concert halls. Heat later described the sensation of seeing sixty thousand people all wearing the same face – his – as a terrifying but formative experience.

  Over and over again, he had the cameras trained on the audience so they could see themselves while he made his famous statement: ‘In real life, you are the performers and I am the audience.’

  Dressing in the same way as Heat did had been a habit of his fans, both male and female, for years. The next day, the newspapers were full of the arresting image of all those people looking exactly the same as the man on stage – the same thin black trousers and short jacket, the same diagonally striped red-and-white T-shirt, and now, finally, the same
face. It was everyone’s opportunity to become Heat himself, for a night at least.

  The records outsold anything he had done before, and the mask caught on everywhere he went. Of course, at this point, no one had any idea just how terrible the damage under the artificial face really was. The masks sold in their millions all around the world – some costing just a few pounds, some hundreds, but all looking the same. They were deliberately devoid of emotion or expression and were, as one newspaper suggested, a kind of living death mask. It’s estimated that Heat made several million pounds from mask sales alone.

  As that first tour began with a series of gigs in Heat’s home town of Manchester, a few miles away, a teenage schoolgirl was looking in amazement at the rows of faces looking out at her from the newspapers. What made the whole experience so remarkable for Sara was that the mask so closely resembled her own face. For a while at least, she thought that Heat rmight have based the look directly on her. It was only later, when she saw earlier photos of him, that she realised he had based the face on an idealised version of what he had looked like years before. The fact was, she and the young Heat were so similar, they might have been twins.

  Sara bought herself a mask that same day and began wearing it as often as she could get away with it. She dyed her blonde hair black and wore it in the loose ringlets Heat wore. She wore his clothes and imitated his walk and his accent. Like millions of other boys and girls the world over, she did everything she could to become Jonathon Heat. But, like all fashions, this new version of Jonathon Heat had its shelf life. The sales of masks declined; the third album, Who We Is, didn’t sell well. For the fourth or fifth time in his career, Heat was yesterday’s man. But for Sara the fascination with him had only just begun.

  Over the years there had been a good deal of ‘behaviour’ from Sara, as her mother referred to it. A lot of it was normal enough – tantrums, shouting and swearing, breaking things around the house – stuff not uncommon in people her age. But there were other things that might have indicated that Sara’s sense of identity was becoming shaky. At the time, they seemed bizarre, but not bizarre enough to indicate actual illness – more like exaggerated personality traits. Her use of accents is one example. The way she used masks is another.

  Sara had always been fond of masks. When she found one she liked, she would often wear it for days. Included in the list of masks she had worn as a girl were a witch mask from Halloween, a Guy Fawkes mask from 5th November, a Cherie Blair mask she had once kept on for two whole days, even in her sleep, and a number of animal masks she had had when she was little. When she got old enough to use make-up, she liked to apply it thickly, even though it wasn’t the fashion. In the years prior to the Heat mask, she developed a habit of doing self-portraits that bore little or no resemblance to herself. These portraits did not have any set of features that stuck. There might be a period of a few months when they all looked like the same person, but then they’d change, overnight. The pattern was repeated many times with other faces.

  Sara’s mother, Jessica, wasn’t particularly bothered by the mask at first. Sara wore the mask when she was out, but at home she rarely bothered with it. Sometimes she’d put it on when a friend came round – but then quite often the friend was wearing one as well. It was weird, but no weirder to her mother’s eyes than a lot of things girls do at that age – no weirder than a lot of things she used to do herself.

  But from school a different story began to emerge. Heat masks had been tolerated in the playground and at breaks but soon mask-wearing began to spread beyond Heat fans into the general population. There was a suspicion that they were being used by gangs to hide their identities when committing crimes. Newspapers began to carry shock stories; the street fashion of wearing hoodies over the mask began to spread to school; the school became alarmed and the masks were banned.

  There were some complaints. A few students tried to sneak them in, but it was all dealt with fairly easily – except for Sara. She seemed completely unable to comply with this simple instruction.

  Her teachers were alerted at once – it wasn’t like her at all. Ellen Simpson, her art teacher, said she hardly recognised her when she tried to get her to take it off.

  ‘She just said no. Then, when I insisted, she almost threw a fit,’ she recalled. Sara was normally a well-behaved girl – talkative and often overexcited, but thoughtful and keen to do well. She loved imagery of all kinds and could get very excited over artwork, and she had a good relationship with her teacher. Now, suddenly, her behaviour was so disruptive that Ellen had to take her out into the corridor to try to calm her down.

  ‘It was hopeless,’ she said. ‘Eventually she just stormed off. I had to report her to her head of year.’

  Things went from bad to worse, with neither Sara nor the school prepared to back down. For the first time in her life, Sara was missing lessons. She tried to come back with her face bare and then put the mask on in school, hiding it with her arm during lessons – she obviously didn’t want to miss school but simply could not bear to have her face exposed. At home, once the letters began to arrive and the problem was out in the open, Sara took to wearing the mask indoors all the time as well. Suddenly, she would not be seen without it. She wore it in bed. She wore it watching TV or reading. She wore it when she was eating, lifting it up to tuck mouthfuls of food underneath. She even took to bathing and sleeping in it. It was round about this time that her mother heard her shouting abuse in her room. When she ran up to investigate, Sara was there alone and claimed she’d had the radio on loud, but eventually Jessica got to the bottom of it. Her daughter was shouting abuse at the mirror.

  ‘The next time I crept upstairs to listen. “Who’s that girl? Who’s that girl? Get her out of here,” she was shouting – at her own reflection! It made my hair stand on end.’

  It was at this point that Jessica made an appointment with a psychiatrist. Sara was just fifteen years old. She was unable to go to school and spent most of her days mooching around the house in her mask on her own while her mother went to work. It was during this period that most of the accidents happened. Still, things got better fairly quickly. She was attending school again a few months later, although she was doing very little work and was being a great annoyance to her teachers. She’d missed a sizeable chunk of the GCSE course and obviously had no intention of catching up. As she said to one teacher, ‘The only bits of paper I want in my hand are recording contracts.’ As soon as she left school she got a part-time job and spent the rest of her time supposedly practising her dancing and singing – although in fact, according to her mother, she spent most of it lying in bed. By the time she met Mark, some eighteen months after she first got into trouble at school, she was hardly wearing the mask at all.

  I’ve mentioned Sara’s accidents before. There were several over the years, starting when she was twelve, when she spilt scalding tea down her front, reaching a crescendo during her obsessive mask-wearing and fading away in her sixteenth year. By the time she was seventeen, like the masks, the accidents seemed to be a thing of the past. Then came the most bizarre one of all.

  Sara was ironing her clothes and somehow managed to get her feet entangled in the flex. She tripped and fell onto the ironing board, which twisted round under her weight. Sara somehow got her arms stuck in between the legs and the board, stopping her from protecting her face as she fell. She struck her head on the bookcase as she went down, temporarily stunning her. She landed face down with the hot iron pressed firmly against her left cheek.

  How long she lay like that no one can tell, since she was on her own, but it was long enough to brand her face with an indelible mark, a red triangle rising from her jaw line and pointing to the middle of her brow. She came to with the smell of burning flesh in her nostrils. Her mother came rushing up the stairs to the sound of her screams and found her staring in the mirror, the iron in one hand, the board in a tangle on the floor and clothes everywhere.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ exclaimed Sara, as he
r mother rushed to hold her. ‘I can get it fixed at the same time as my nose.’

  The accident, as Sara herself pointed out, was hardly credible. Certainly neither her mother nor her psychiatrist believed her story, although Sara insisted it was the bald truth right to the end.

  The doctors calculated that the iron must have been pressed against her face for a good five seconds or more for the heat to have penetrated so deeply. There was much they could do with creams and other treatments, but, surgery apart, Sara was scarred for life.

  As a result of this, Sara was sent to hospital for a few days, ‘under observation’. Whether this was to watch her burns, or for fear that she might hurt herself more, the information protection act forbids us from finding out. It was there, in wards of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, despite objections from the nursing staff, that she started to wear her Heat mask again. And it was there, too, that Jonathon Heat came into her life. It was like a dream come true for Sara. We all have dreams; we all hope they’ll come true for us, but they rarely do. For Sara, tragically, this one did.

  Sara – 7 April 2005

  (Sara is in a toilet, presumably in the hospital. She’s propped her camera up and she’s sitting on the toilet, speaking in an excited whisper. She’s wearing a mask, covering her face down to her nose and both cheeks, hiding her face. The mask is one of those popularised by the rock star Jonathon Heat. Her eyes are as bright as jewels shining through the mask.)

  Imagine, right, you’re lying in hospital and the sister comes in and says someone wants to see you, so you say who and she says … Jonathon Heat! Can you imagine that? Ridiculous. I mean, what? But you know he does this thing visiting hospitals and ill people, all that – that charitable stuff. But here – with me! Everyone else was saying they thought she was having us on, but I knew at once. I knew. I felt it right here, in between my ribs. That’s where premonition hurts you, on this spot. You get a twinge there, a ghost, or something like it, is coming close. You think things. I was actually thinking it just a few minutes before; I was thinking, Here I am feeling completely miserable, I’ve really fucked up yet again, but wouldn’t it be fantastic if some mega-rich superstar walked in to visit me and made all my dreams come true? It happens. It has to happen to someone; it can happen to me.