Praise for Sara’s Face
‘Genuinely chilling … a smart satire on our image-obsessed culture’ Telegraph
‘Thrilling … it stays with you’ Guardian
‘Ingenious and chilling … the narrative gallop will have readers sitting up half the night to finish it’ Observer
‘Do not miss it’ Bookseller
‘Remarkable … startling’ Publishing News
Other books by Melvin Burgess
An Angel for May
The Baby and Fly Pie
Bloodsong
Bloodtide
Burning Issy
The Cry of the Wolf
Doing It
Junk
Lady: My Life as a Bitch
Nicholas Dane
For my daughter, Pearl
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Epub ISBN: 9781448188598
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ISBN 978 1 78344 488 5
Just about everyone knows the story of Jonathon Heat and Sara Carter. It’s common currency, revealed to us through a thousand newspaper headlines, magazine articles, news bulletins, TV shows and an endless commentary on the radio. Heat’s sheer celebrity is one factor that made the story of such universal interest. While he still had one, his was perhaps the most famous face on the planet. We’ve been hearing about him for years but the strange nature of his crimes and his terrible fate have made this particular story his most lasting legacy to us.
Sara is different. She comes down to us as a mystery, a figure without explanation. Her refusal or inability to speak has led to endless speculation about her, but the story of her hopes and dreams, and her role in the terrible way they were fulfilled, remain elusive. How much did she plan? Was she in control the whole time, or was she just the innocent victim of Heat and his surgeon, Wayland Kaye? It’s the purpose of this book to try to cast some light on the girl herself.
As someone used to trying to create an impression of truth, investigating actual truth has proved to be a tricky affair. Both Heat and Sara seem to have been master dissemblers themselves, with only very shaky ideas of who they really were or what they wanted to become. Heat, of course, is in prison. Sara’s fate is more open to speculation. Since her failure to come and give evidence in court, rumours have circulated widely; madness or death, or the terrible nature of her injuries, seem to be the most likely options, but, to this day, no one is really sure. I’m a novelist doing a journalist’s job, and my brief has been to get at what people thought and felt, and what their motivations were, as much as simply to describe the unfolding of events. What goes on in people’s hearts is a notoriously tricky thing to know. I’ve done my best to understand rather than speculate, but, frankly, I’ve been amazed at how little positive truth you come across after even the most thorough investigation. Everything that happens is filtered through opinion and memory, and of course by how much other people want you to know. No two people remember anything in exactly the same way. I’ve done my best to verify, everything before I came to write it. Most of all, I’ve done my best to be true to Sara.
I’ve been able to speak to almost all the people involved in the events that took place in Cheshire in 2005, except of course the two main protagonists. Even with all the contacts in my hand, Sara has proved to be incredibly elusive. She told so many different versions of what was going on to so many different people, it’s as if she has done her best to extinguish her real self in favour of her own legend. Perhaps that’s the nature of her tragedy. Like a religious figure or a character from myth, it’s nothing she ever said or did but her story itself that forces her on our attention and inspires our imagination. In that sense, she more than achieved her ambition of making fame itself a work of art.
There is one great asset I’ve been given access to, however – the video diary that Sara kept on and off over the years, including during her stay at Home Manor Farm. This may be the only chance we will ever have of hearing her speak directly to us again, so let’s start off with that right away. Here she is talking about her boyfriend, Mark, a few days before she went into the hospital where she first met Jonathon Heat.
(Sara is sitting in a chair looking off to the side of the camera, as if someone else is sitting there talking to her. But hers is the only voice we hear. In fact, she’s pretending to be interviewed for the TV. Occasionally she glances at the camera and examines something – she can probably see herself on a monitor. At other times, she forgets where she is and seems to be talking almost to herself. It’s as if she’s working out her own thoughts and feelings through this pretend interview.)
No, that’s not true. I did love him, I really did. I still do. But it has to work. Love isn’t the same as compatibility, I’ve had to learn that. It’s a hard lesson. You’d think love would be enough. Mark was too different from me. It had to stop.
(She pauses as if she’s being asked a question.)
Well, we seemed to get along so well, but in the end we’re actually perfect opposites. He thinks, like, the sensible people are the ones who have it sorted. Like they’re going to inherit the earth. (Laughs.) Like sensible is it. Anything you do that’s important, it has to be sensible, that’s Mark, whereas me, I want everything I do that’s important to be unexpected – just about ready to bend everything sideways.
I used to scare him, I think. ‘You’ll get hurt,’ he used to say, but maybe what he really meant was, he’d get hurt. He used to talk about it as if it had already happened. I mean – as if he could sit down and work out the future with a pencil and paper. You don’t work out the future! The future works you out. To see the future you have to be able to prophesy, and it’s not the sensible ones who can do that – it’s the people who don’t know what on earth is going on, the ones who know absolutely nothing, who can see into the future and see ghosts and that. I’ve done it. I may talk about it one day. He wants to make sure he has enough pants packed for the journey through life. Well, I might not even be wearing any pants at all. You think I know fuck all, but I know fuck nothing – that’s me. I don’t know who I am, I don’t even know what I am. That’s how I can see into the future. That’s how sensible I am!
(She laughs, as delighted with her own words as if they had been spoken by someone else. She leans forward to the hidden monitor and fixes her hair, then leans back and sighs.)
Stick to the flesh, boy! I am the spirit.
He’s the flesh all right, though. He does my head in sometimes, I want him so much. That’s what I miss most. Being close. He’s someone you can get very close to.
(Sara looks down and fiddles with her shirt, frowning as if she’s forgotten where she is.)
We were lying on the sofa at his flat. We’d just been busy. Busy bees, we call it. I was lying there with a skirt on and just about nothing else and he had my T-shirt rolled up and he was sort of adoring my boobs. Boob adoration.
‘Gorgeous. Like puppies. Like warm little puppies with hot pink noses,’ he was saying, and he kept giving me goose flesh by breathing on them.
‘Well, make the most of them, they won’t be around much longer,’ I told him.
‘What do you mean, you’re not going to put them away, are you?’ he said. (Laughs.) He makes me laugh; I’ll forgive him anything for making me laugh. I miss that about him, too. Yeah! A boy has to make me laugh!
‘I’ve started saving up,’ I told him. He knew what I meant. I was serious. I wanted to tell him because he’s my boyfriend. He’s involved. I mean, he ought to be my soul mate or something, but that’s too much to ask from someone who’s only sensible.
I knew we were going to have a row about it.
‘You ought to be grateful I’ve got my clothes on – it’s such a mess underneath. Talk about cellulite. It’s revolting. This tit’s practically under my arm when I lie down. What good’s that on a photo shoot?’
‘They use tit tape for that,’ he told me.
‘Tit tape! I want to look like that naturally; anyone can use tit tape. And this one’s bigger than that one, they both point sideways when I stand up and anyway – mostly, they’re just too small and the wrong shape. They’ve got to go. I need new tits. I need a whole new body, actually. I get fatter when I’m dieting. I get fat just by breathing. I can turn air into fat. It’s a gift I have.’
(She giggles at her own words.)
You should have seen his face! Like I was taking away his favourite toy car or something.
‘You can’t do that! They’re mine,’ he said.
I said, ‘They’re just on loan, buddy, and don’t you forget it.’
He says they’re lovely, but he’s just saying that to be nice, I think. ‘How can anything be better?’ he says, but plenty of things are better than them. Too many things are better, that’s the problem.
Up until that point it was just fun, but then he started to get all serious on me. ‘You know what they do to you when you get that done?’ he said. ‘They cut you here, right round the nipple. They get it out on a stalk, man! They get your nipple on a stalk while they stitch bags inside your tits – it’s like torture. And then you know what? You lose feeling. They cut loads of nerves doing that and they never grow back. Sex will never be as good again.’
‘I don’t care,’ I told him. I mean, if you want to be a work of art, you have to suffer a bit. That’s all part of the package. But he pissed me off then, going on about blood and cutting and things. That’s not what I wanted to hear.
We used to argue a lot, about everything. It was fun at first, it was like a game; we’d make out that the other one was being weird. But then it got like I’m weird and he’s just pretending. Like it’s dawned on him that it’s not just a game. He says he loves me. Baby! I got no time for love. Christ, I’m seventeen – I’m just practising. Love, what’s that? I’m an obsessive, personally. Passion! He thinks he means so much to me. I don’t know.
So that thing about my tits, it went on to be a big row. I wanted to discuss with him what sort of op I was going to have. I wanted him to have some input, you know? I mean, your girlfriend wants to discuss her boobs with you, she actually wants to know what sort of tits you want her to have – she’s actually offering you a chance to help design the perfect tits and all you do is go on at her! What’s that about? What is he on? Who’s the weird one, you tell me? Doesn’t he know a good deal when it’s handed to him on a plate? I offer him a dream ticket and he starts telling me what I can and what I can’t do with my own tits?!
(She grabs hold of them with both hands. She looks outraged.)
My own tits! So that was it. I’d had enough. Tenancy over. Pack your bags and go. It really hurt me, but what else could I do? I hurt myself sometimes. He was heartbroken, too, at least that’s how he made out. Just another week, give me a chance, it was just a joke, he said. But it had been going on too long. Every time I talked about my ambitions he’d get jealous and try to talk some sense into me. Well, that’s just about abuse to someone like me, having someone force sense down your throat.
I miss him, I do miss him. But, let’s face it, I gave him another chance. There he was – begging for another week, just one more week, give us one last chance, so I let him have it and then, guess what? I never see him again! I tell him OK and he leaves me! What’s that about?
(She swallows back her tears and gets angry instead.)
Like it was him that couldn’t be bothered! That’s so mean. And now I expect he’s sitting somewhere waiting for me to get back in touch. I expect he’s breaking his heart for me, but fuck him. He humiliated me. No one treats me like that and gets away with it. If I never see him again, it’ll be too soon.
So that’s why I wrote a song for him that I’m going to sing for you tonight, about what a shit he was to me, so the whole world’s gonna know what he’s like.
(She produces a guitar from behind her chair and sings.)
Mark Gleeson is a big shit,
Mark Gleeson is a big shit,
Mark Gleeson is a big shit, fuck him.
His telephone number is 0161 352 7980.
Ring him up and tell him what a shit he is.
He broke my heart,
He broke my heart and made me cry.
(Cries.)
But I’ll get over it. I’m going to be famous. (Wiping away her tears.) I made up my mind about it, there’s no point in trying to talk me out of it. Art on legs, Mark used to say, but that’s not what I mean. People say I’m good-looking like that, but there’s loads of girls prettier than me, or sexier than me or whatever. That’s not the point. Anyone can be pretty these days. Anyone can have nice tits and a pretty face. Talent – that’s not it, either. Anyone can have talent. They train you up, they work on your voice. If it’s no good they change it in the studio. The world’s full of talent. Talent’s cheap.
It’s like, when people look at you and think, Oh, she’s smaller than in real life, because, see, actually, you’re not real life. It’s when people start talking to you in the street or on the bus because they think they know you, but they’ve never even met you, or like you’ve got some secret that they want to know but they never can. Like you’re a blessing. There’s something about you that inspires them to be more than themselves. That’s it. That’s what I want to be. Just like that.
Some people want to be famous so everyone knows who they are. They don’t get it. It’s not about who knows you or who you are. It’s about being more than who you are. It’s not what you do – it’s what you make other people do. I mean, I’m famous even when no one’s looking. I’m famous even before I’m famous. I want it so when people look at me they think things they’ve never thought before – they think things they never even knew they were capable of thinking. It’s art. You look at it, and maybe it annoys the hell out of you because you can never understand it. Maybe there’s nothing to understand, but it’s fascinating anyway. And all the time, right on the edge of your mind, there’s thoughts lurking like wild animals, and feelings you never felt. You can’t work them out, you don’t know if it’s monsters or angels and you’re frightened of understanding because they might just burst out and change your whole life. Your whole life! Yeah. That’s me. Your whole life!
Mark used to say I’m a wannabe, but I say, I’m a gonnabe. That’s the difference.
I know. I’m arrogant. But it’s true what I say, I can’t help it. It’s in my bones. And he could have been there with me. Now look at him. He just got left behind.
(She stares into the camera with a frightened expression. Then she catches sight of her expression and raises a hand to the lens.)
Cut.
(She wipes away her tears and turns off the camera.)
Sara seems to have been a very popular girl while she was at primary school and stayed that way for the first couple of years at high school. After that, her popularity wavered. Some people thought she was just plain weird, others that her behaviour was put on for effect. Either way, she was too strong a taste for many of her contemporaries, but those who did love her loved her dearly and were loved in return. Even when she rose beyond them, she never forgot who her friends were, or what friendship meant to her.
Sara and Janet Calley met each other in their first year at high school and that was it – they were friends for life. For a couple of years they did everything together: ran around the corridors giggling at the same jokes, read the same books, sometimes even wore the same clothes. Anyone who saw them would have thought of them as two peas in a pod, but Janet already knew that Sara was altogether different. When in Year 9 Sara suddenly turned into a different person, she wasn’t in the least bit surprised.
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.
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.