Bloodsong

by Melvin Burgess

  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 on the nature of press 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 afterward.

  As Sara grew older, she developed fabulous ambitions. Janet had no doubt that Sara would follow her star and that she, Janet, 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 pretense, 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 behavior, 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 on an accent and speak it for days on end. She’d turn up on Monday morning in Irish, or Scots 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 Filippino 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 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 good-bye 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 she did feel fat—always, throughout her life, no matter how slim she really was. She was permanently several kilos overweight, no matter what her weight actually was, permanently on a diet that she was never able to stick to, and permanently disgusted with her own perceived weakness—in short, she felt permanently ugly. The briefest glance at any photograph would tell anyone else that none of this was true.

  At the same time that this incipient anorexia became apparent, her desire for cosmetic surgery developed as well. It would seem that both urges had the same psychological root. As, perhaps, did one other characteristic.

  It’s this: 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 spilled 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 round on crutches.

  These accidents have come under much suspicion. The suggestion is that Sara engineered them herself; in other words, that she was self-harming. 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, incurred just after she split up with Mark, that took her into the hospital where she first met Jonathon Heat.

  Melvin Burgess is justly regarded as the godfather of young adult fiction in the UK. Since winning the Carnegie Medal for Junk, the seminal teen drugs and love novel, he has produced a body of work both challenging and thrilling. His books have been adapted for stage, television, and cinema and are widely translated. Most recently Lady: My Life as a Bitch and Doing It have put him in the public eye, but Bloodtide is considered by many t
o be his masterpiece. Bloodsong, which stands as a bold and brilliant novel in its own right, is a worthy successor.

  Everybody gets to be supermodel gorgeous. What could be wrong with that?

  In this futuristic world, all children are born “uglies,” or freaks. But on their sixteenth birthdays they are given extreme makeovers and turned “pretty.” Then their whole lives change. . . .

  PRAISE FOR UGLIES:

  “An exciting series. . . . The awesome ending thrills with potential.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Ingenious . . . high-concept YA fiction that has wide appeal.”

  — Booklist

  “Highly readable with a convincing plot that incorporates futuristic technologies and a disturbing commentary on our current public policies. Fortunately, the cliff-hanger ending promises a sequel.”

  —School Library Journal

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON PULSE