Sara’s Face

by Melvin Burgess

  As soon as she came to this conclusion, Bernadette was on her feet. If she was going to be kept prisoner – and God only knew what that meant – she wasn’t going to sit there and take it. Enough time had been wasted. She leapt up and began pounding on the door with her fist, shouting to be let out. The key turned, the door was opened and she ran out and into the corridor, only to bang into the big man waiting outside for her.

  ‘Mrs McNalty …’ he began.

  ‘What are you doing? Stand away – let me past!’ she yelled.

  The man looked wounded. ‘Mrs McNalty!’ he said. ‘Dr Kaye will see you presently …’

  ‘I have to go,’ she insisted, and tried to push her way through. But the man was standing in the way, and now he began to walk slowly towards her, gently ushering her back into the room with his broad chest.

  ‘Please, Mrs McNalty, I know you’ve been waiting a long time,’ he explained reasonably, pushing away.

  Bernadette kicked him very hard in the shin and then did something she had not done for nearly thirty years, when a young man proved too insistent outside a club in Brixton. She punched him in the balls.

  The man bent over with a gasp of pain.

  ‘Oooooh! Mrs McNalty!’ he groaned. But Bernadette was already on her way up the corridor. The man, bent over double, hobbled after her, calling plaintively. He sank to his knees and began fumbling in his pocket for his mobile phone.

  Bernadette is a large woman, not used to running, and by the time she reached the stairway going down she was gasping for air and had to pause, leaning against the banisters to catch her breath. Downstairs in the entrance hall groups of people were going to and fro, some of them loading various pieces of equipment into the elevators going down. Bernie stared in fascination as a couple of porters went past, one wheeling a trolley laden with oxygen bottles and the other with crates of surgical supplies.

  Across the floor, she saw Heat at the centre of a small group, shaking hands with someone. He’d spotted her already, and was eyeing her above the heads crowding around. In a panic, Bernadette leapt down the stairs as fast as she was able and made a bolt for the door, but by the time she got there he was already waiting for her.

  ‘Well, Bernie,’ he said to her in his mellifluous voice. ‘You’ve certainly stirred things up here, haven’t you? Not like you at all.’

  ‘Mr Heat.’ Bernie clutched her throat and tried to hang on to her dignity, which breathlessness and fear were stealing from her. ‘You had me locked in that room,’ she accused.

  ‘Dr Kaye … we both, really … felt it would be better. He’s in charge. Of course, you’re free to go if you want. Sara’s in a terrible state. I know, I know …’ He lifted his hands. ‘But the fact is, Bernie, she was so calm before you came, so happy, and now she’s in a dreadful state.’ He shook his head. ‘The operation will have to be postponed at the very least because of that alone, so you don’t need to worry about that.’

  ‘I think what you’re doing is an evil thing, Mr Heat, for all your fame and money, and for all your kindness, too,’ she said.

  ‘I understand, Bernie, but it’s very late in the day to decide that I’m a monster for something you agreed to yourself not so long ago.’

  Bernadette stared at him. She couldn’t even be bothered pointing out that she had never been happy with Sara’s operation. She had shown her hand. She found herself looking suspiciously over his shoulder at the medical equipment being loaded up.

  ‘Who are these people?’ she asked.

  Heat shrugged. ‘Deliveries. This sort of stuff doesn’t get here on the day, Bernie, you know that.’

  ‘So are you telling me, Mr Heat, that the operation is called off?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes.’ Heat shrugged. ‘Last I heard, anyway. They’re talking to her now.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible. I haven’t been allowed to see her, either.’

  ‘I’m her nurse.’

  Jonathon shook his head. ‘But you’re not,’ he replied, and that was the truth.

  Bernadette turned to go. Jonathon followed her to the door. On the steps she turned. You’ll tell me as soon as you know?’ she begged.

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ said Heat.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I can’t say when. But we’ll be in touch before anything goes ahead. The operation isn’t for another couple of weeks anyway.’

  ‘Will you ring me tonight? Let me know how things are going?’

  Heat sighed impatiently. ‘OK. I’ll ring you tonight,’ he agreed. He shook his head, obviously deeply saddened by Bernadette’s sudden lack of trust.

  It wasn’t OK, but it was the best she was going to get. Heat nodded goodbye, Bernadette nodded back and made her way down the steps. When she got to the bottom, she looked back up to the ageing rock star. He was looking down to her, his chin forward, his scrawny, masked head looking more reptilian than ever as he peered down. She knew him well enough to tell that his lips – what was left of them – were drawn out in a grin that she supposed he hoped was a comforting smile, but the effect was that he looked more like a snake about to strike. What horrible secrets were going on behind those sunglasses? she wondered. What lives had those long pale fingers ruined?

  Bernadette had never had such thoughts about her employer before, and now they took her completely by surprise. She had no idea where they came from. She staggered down the last few steps to the tarmac and walked unsteadily round to the car park behind the house, where she kept her vehicle. She had been more forward than she had ever been in her life, and now she felt utterly shattered. All she wanted was a hot bath, a bite to eat and her bed.

  That afternoon, Sara spent several hours completely on her own – an unusual event during her time at Heat’s house, perhaps the only time she had been alone for such a long period during her entire stay. As far as we know, no one disturbed her from one o’clock until almost four, when Jonathon Heat came in to discuss Bernadette’s story with her. How she spent that time and what was going through her mind, we have no way of knowing.

  Heat, according to his own testimony, told her that Houseland and Kaye were going to interview her to reassess if the operation should go forward or not. He stayed with her for over an hour, then left her while Kaye came in to interview her. Kaye himself was furious at this development so late in the day. Bernadette, in his opinion, had turned the whole carefully planned operation into a farce.

  ‘She’s a liability,’ he told Heat, when they met to discuss what was happening earlier in the day. ‘She’s only here because you’re overly sentimental. She’s in the way.’

  Kaye spent nearly two hours with Sara that day, some of the time with Dr Houseland, some of the time on his own, making tests and interviewing her. When he came out, he met up with Heat again to deliver his opinion.

  ‘Sara was desperate for the operation to go ahead,’ Heat reported some months later in court.

  His testimony that day was confused – not surprising considering the condition he was in. In general, we have very little information as to what exactly Kaye’s thoughts were, as regards Sara. Our main source of information is a brief report he prepared on the case early on, while Sara was still in hospital. The report is incomplete, but it does give some idea of how his mind was working at the time. His theories, as ever, were unusual to say the least.

  Kaye appears to have seen Sara as a girl trapped behind her own face. Her dissatisfaction with her appearance was so profound, he believed, that she suffered from a permanent sense of self-alienation from her own body. Her anorexia was one aspect of this, her self-harming another. He describes her sense of identity as being so troubled that she only ever behaved as herself by impersonating herself. To Sara, her voice, her manner, even her appearance, were not her own.

  He seems to believe that the operation he was planning, in which she would be involved in choosing her own looks, her own body, was her only chance of having a normal lif
e.

  Those were Dr Kaye’s thoughts on the eve of Sara coming to stay at Home Manor Farm. There’s no reason to think that they had changed in the interval. We do know that after extensive tests he arrived at the clear conclusion that cancelling or postponing the operation was the worst thing he could do to her. According to Heat, Kaye told him that the fuss Bernadette was making was having a detrimental effect on her, and he was concerned that it might push her into another episode of self-harm – possibly a very serious one. In the light of this, he decided to bring the operation forward to that very night. At the same time, he insisted that Bernadette be expelled from the house.

  Heat agreed to both demands.

  The Last Day

  The strain of the past few weeks had left Mark in a state of feverish anxiety. Sometimes he was struck with a terrible certainly that Sara was right, that this was the house of a monster – that they should be running away, not creeping around the ogre’s den in the middle of the night. To discover his dark secrets is a sentence of death.

  Such thoughts terrified him, not so much for fear of his and Sara’s lives, but because the rest of the time he found the whole nightmarish vision so incredible and unbelievable. How had things gone so far? Why had he allowed himself to be drawn into a world of madness against his own good sense? They were within a couple of weeks of the operation, Sara was obviously unwilling or unfit to go ahead with it – but here they still were, with foolish deeds to accomplish before she would set herself free.

  Whenever he tried to talk to her about it, he came away with promises in his hand, but never for today. Now, at last, today had come.

  It was all set. Mark had hung on to Woods’s key long enough to get a copy made, so the first door presented no problem. They had arranged to meet in her room at half past midnight and go down through the house together and make their final attempt to open the second door, or at least to see behind it. That done, they would flee.

  Then, at eight o’clock, Sara rang. Things had changed; their plans had to be brought forward. She wanted him to pick her up at ten.

  That was appalling. At half past midnight, the house would be more or less asleep; at ten, anyone could be around in the corridors – Woods or one of his men on security patrol, or Heat himself, who often wandered the house late at night when he couldn’t sleep.

  He texted her … ‘Can’t be done.’

  She texted back. ‘Must be!!!!!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘!!!!!’

  ‘It’s too busy.’

  ‘We have to. Mark, please.’

  So he felt he had no choice.

  It was a very different matter sneaking through a house that was still wide awake than through a sleeping one. Then, you just had to be quiet; now, you never knew what was round the next corner. Mark felt like a child sneaking out on a night-time naughtiness, afraid of being caught and sent to bed. But this was something else. What would happen if they were caught? Sacked? Told off? Murdered? Surely not the last. But his heart beat as if it knew something he didn’t.

  He found his way in through a window and picked his way slowly up to Sara’s room, freezing the cameras one at a time, hiding behind each corner, listening. Twice he had to duck into a doorway when people came along, and on the second floor, where Sara slept, he was nearly caught by Tom Woods and a couple of his men, doing the rounds. They appeared suddenly at the end of a corridor he had just entered. Mark had to dash into a room with no time to check it, and found himself staring into the lens of camera watching behind the door. He turned his back to it, found it and froze it, but it was too late. He had been seen. If anyone was watching it right now, the alert would be out – the observer would be phoning Woods that very second, and he could expect the door to open any moment now.

  He waited, not daring to breathe. Woods and his men approached – and passed. Someone in the control room had not been paying attention. But they would check as soon as they found Sara gone, and they would know. Heat would prosecute, without doubt.

  But that was a trouble for another day. After a suitable pause, Mark crept out and carried on his way, stopping and starting like a mouse in a fox’s den, until he arrived outside Sara’s door. He knocked two quick, two slow, their secret signal, and went in.

  He found Sara sitting at her dressing table, looking at herself in the mirror. He was surprised that she didn’t leap up. She seemed rather subdued to him. She turned round to smile when he came in.

  She got up. There was a bag by her feet. ‘Now we go – we better hurry,’ she said, dashing his faint hopes that she would change her mind.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t we stick to the original plan?’

  ‘Can’t explain, we just have to go. I just want to be out of here by midnight. OK?’

  He paused and then nodded. Anything was OK so long as she got out.

  ‘Is that yours?’ He glanced down at the bag in her hand in surprise. It was so small. Heat had bought her so much stuff – some weeks he had taken her out shopping almost every day. She used to say it was like things suddenly became free. It made them both laugh, the amount of stuff she owned these days, but she loved some of it and she’d been worrying about what to take and what not to. But now here she was with this little bag that just about held a toothbrush and few bits and pieces.

  Sara shrugged. ‘Things happen.’ She paused. ‘Things happen, and it makes you realise.’ She gestured around the room with its opulence. ‘It’s all just … sweeties. Sweeties and shit. And you know what? This is shit, too.’ She pulled at the skin on her face. ‘It’s what’s in here that counts.’ Sara held her hand over her heart, the spirit inside her, as if she was a treasure chest and real jewels shone within.

  Mark gave her a crooked smile. ‘This is all shit,’ he said, waving his hand around the room. ‘But you – you’re never shit.’

  They stood and looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. Then Sara looked away.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said. She made for the door, then turned again.

  ‘Have you got it?’ she asked.

  Mark lifted up the camera with the little attachment he’d made. Sara smiled, reached up to kiss his lips and walked to the door. She waited while Mark checked with his Palm Pilot. He nodded. She opened the door and they stepped outside.

  They made it down to the service area, then along the sloping corridor that led to the locked door. As they walked, Mark noticed how Sara kept looking over her shoulder and checking her watch. Several times he asked her what was wrong, but she shook her head impatiently. He assumed it was the ghost and didn’t think to ask if there was anything he needed to know.

  They turned the corner into the final corridor. Again, she turned her head to look behind her.

  ‘Is someone coming?’ he asked, but she shook her head and headed off down the slope towards the locked door at a trot. Mark followed on.

  As they got close Sara started doing it again – reacting to things he couldn’t see. She made little jumps and starts, gasped, turned her head suddenly as if to look at something or moved to one side to let someone past who wasn’t there. Mark found this whole performance unnerving, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He felt like a blind man walking among wild beasts that only she could see.

  Mark opened the first door with the copied key, then he got down at once on his knees, taking out his little video camera, trying to put the attachment on quickly and fumbling instead. Sara stood behind him, looking back down the corridor, jumping and twitching as unseen images and sounds assailed her. At last, he fitted the attachment, turned on the camera and slid it under the door. Despite Sara’s certainty that there was something dark and dangerous behind the door, despite his own pounding heart, he was sure that he was going to see another empty room, just floor and walls hiding nothing, holding nothing in, holding no one prisoner. But, still, his heart told another tale. With Sara, you never knew. And, if she was right, then Heat, with all his nice manners and gentle wa
ys, wasn’t just someone to be despised. If she was right, he was a serial murderer.

  If looks could kill. And perhaps his did.

  There was a moment while the camera adjusted, then the display screen brightened. Sara bent down and rested her chin on Mark’s shoulder to get a better look.

  The flexible lens had gone under the door, but at an angle; it illuminated a view along the skirting boards, but, even so, they could see at once that this room was far bigger than any of the others they had looked in. Mark fiddled about with the lens. It twisted, flicking up and down on the floor and casting quick glances at the rest of the room. He caught a glimpse of machinery, digital displays and lit-up dials. Metal, an object of some sort, something on wheels. Machinery. Then the view stabilised.

  There was a drip standing next to a bed in a corner – that was what was on wheels. The machines were medical monitors. Sara let out a little groan.

  ‘So, it’s true,’ she whispered. Mark twisted round to look up at her. True? Did this prove her theories? In a flash he suddenly believed that it was true, that this was the place where Kaye stole the faces off the girls who had been here before them, before he murdered them quietly and medically in their beds and disposed of their bodies God knows how. But in the next second he realised that this room proved nothing of the kind. He had seen no bodies, no evidence of foul play. Everyone knew that Heat had an operating theatre in the house. This must be it.

  But it felt bad. Were the bodies of dead, faceless girls and boys heaped up somewhere just out of sight?

  ‘It’s the operating theatre,’ he said, and Sara gave him an odd, disbelieving glance that he simply could not interpret. Frantically he began twisting the lens this way and that, trying to find more – something that would finally disprove or prove for certain Sara’s suspicions. Then, two things happened. From the corridor behind them came the sound of feet on the tiles; a group of people was approaching. Mark and Sara both squealed with surprise and stood up. At the same second a light was turned on in the room behind them; they could see the line of it under the door, lighting up the floor and their own feet. Someone was inside.