Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird. Mark Dolan

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ talking.

      As we delve into this protein fest, Sheyla noticeably strains with her back.

      ‘Do you ever get a bad back?’ I ask.

      ‘Yeah my back pain. The pain is a lot. Before never hurt, but now they hurt. So when I go to a restaurant like now I just rest my boobs on the table.’

      I pull a face of surprise. ‘Really?’

      At which point there plays out one of those moments that I will take to my grave. Like shaking hands with the smallest man on Earth, or hugging someone called Dennis who has turned himself into a cat, it’s pretty amazing. I am watching a woman rest her breasts on the table in order to rest her back. It’s an utterly bizarre act of comedy, and practicality. And it raises the key themes so far in my encounter with Sheyla – hilarity, and a sense of – what the hell are you doing to yourself? There was a hardiness about Minka, a resolve that made her look like a pro when it came to carrying her accessories around. It’s just business. With Sheyla, the whole enterprise feels more impulsive and emotional and I’m not sure that she, or her back, will take the strain for long.

      After eating almost an entire farmyard’s worth of barbequed animal, it is time to hit the mall, and time for part two of the Sheyla show. She insists on bringing her make-up artist and close friend, a detail which indicates what this visit will entail, and she doesn’t disappoint. At the entrance to the mall a small crowd gather, taking pics and staring. After many minutes, we enter the shopping centre itself and Sheyla tends to her fame the way you are supposed to tend to a log fire – enjoy the heat when it’s roaring, and stoke it up a bit when it goes down. In those brief moments when nobody is taking an interest, Sheyla shrieks, giggles and if all that fails, wiggles her breasts.

      Let’s be clear about this – there’s no irony being deployed. No Babs Windsor tongue firmly in cheek, with a wink to the knowing audience. Sheyla is just simply wiggling her breasts so people will look at her. End of, as an indigenous Londoner would say. Look at me, I’m wiggling my breasts. Look! Wiggle wiggle wiggle! It goes without saying, it’s unedifying, but I guess this is what you do if you have no discernible skill and if fame is the game. Sheyla has made herself unique in a way nature failed to do. Paul McCartney was born with the power of melody, Picasso the power of the paintbrush and Shakespeare was good at plays. With no such obvious gifts, or the education or opportunities to realise any talents lying dormant in her, what’s a girl who wants to be a star to do?

      Amid the mostly positive public reaction to Sheyla’s arrival, there is a black sheep in the adoring family. A middle-aged woman utters some remark about her being ugly. This woman is in a group of one saying it, but isn’t there a silent majority, even the people snapping Sheyla on their mobiles, who also think that what she has become is ugly? Because let’s be honest – it is – isn’t it? The passing party-pooper is surely just the less deceived in this whole affair, and the more honest of her fellow shoppers. Sheyla’s reaction to the heckle is characteristically ebullient.

      ‘What do you think about that?’ I say. ‘She called you ugly. That’s not very nice is it?’

      ‘She is old, she is old, she is unfashionable.’ I’m chuckling at Sheyla’s brass. It’s a great line. Even if it doesn’t actually answer the question. I push the issue.

      ‘It’s got to hurt a little bit, hasn’t it?’

      She pushes her head back haughtily. ‘Just make me laugh,’ she says. Reaching for another, more on-message passer-by, she says, ‘Look, she say I am beautiful.’

      ‘Oh well, that’s better isn’t it,’ I say. ‘You love this, don’t you, you know, you are running after people and helping them with the camera and showing yourself off.’

      ‘Yes, you know, because I like the attention, it’s good for me.’

      Is attention really good for anyone? I personally think you’re damned if you don’t get it, but double damned if you do. This is a problem Sheyla seems to desperately want. She suddenly grabs my arm and frogmarches me to our next photo opportunity, at a swimwear shop. I’m beginning to eel somewhat compromised at this point. My interviewee is driving this whole thing. Should I be a bit worried, um, you know, journalistically? I have travelled many thousands of miles, I have a limited amount of time with my subject, and I need to understand why she has made these choices in her life. But this seems unlikely to happen because when I turn my back for three seconds, I discover she has squeezed into a bikini designed for a five-year-old and is dancing around inside the shop, declaring, ‘I like my boobies. And I love Dolly Part.’

      Any sense of control I might have goes out the window at this point. It is the Sheyla show, and I only have a walk-on part. I tell myself I’ll have to go with this, as the public Sheyla is an unstoppable hurricane of publicity and excitement. I will wait for the doors to close and the smile to drop before probing any more deeply. Until then I’ll have to just enjoy one of my top ten most insane visits to a shopping mall. And incongruously spot a pair of flipflops that would suit my wife.

      On the way out, I put it to Sheyla that the interest from the public is surely in her breasts and not actually her. Isn’t that a bit odd? I ask her.

      ‘Well,’ she says. ‘They love my personality. My personality is beautiful.’

      ‘But if your personality is so beautiful why do you need these?’ I point pointedly to her pointy breasts.

      ‘These is just a complement, just a complement,’ she explains. ‘These are my diamonds, my accessories.’

      At this point, Sheyla is distracted, like Tiger Woods at a waitress convention. She starts conversing with another insta-group of ‘fans’ and then comes to me with a summing up of their brief but intense discussion.

      ‘They say I have to go bigger!’

      ‘Oh really?’ I reply. ‘This is how you make big decisions is it?’

      The irony of this statement is missed on Sheyla and she carries on into the distance, tottering, jiggling and wiggling. This isn’t someone who does self-aware.

      Once the dust has settled, Sheyla and I break every health and safety rule in the book by going to have a sit down on the local beach. I want to get her away from the crowds and talk to the real Sheyla about how she became Sheyla with a capital S. The sun is beginning to set, and it coats us both in a warm yellow light. Sheyla looks even more tanned, I just look slightly jaundiced. Sheyla is tired – this suits her – at last she’s calm and somewhat manageable. Riding the crest of this wave, I actually ask her a question.

      ‘So how did you get to this point of all these operations and looking the way you do now?’

      ‘I came from a very, very poor family,’ she explains. ‘You know, after my dad died, my mum had eleven kids and she was sick, and she couldn’t take care of all of us and I wanted to kill myself. I took some rat medicine that will kill you, I drunk that.’

      Eh? Have you ever heard a sentence so packed with incident? This is a lot to take in. Only characters in soap operas talk like that don’t they? (e.g. ‘I had the abortion because Terry wasn’t the father who killed Norm who’s gone to Australia because he sold the shipyard to Uncle Phil who isn’t actually anyone’s uncle’). But this is how Sheyla talks. It’s very, very troubling stuff indeed, but the way she reels it off makes it feel like another performance. This time it’s ‘sad Sheyla’. Maybe I’m being too harsh. I give her the benefit of the doubt. Unhelpfully I’m СКАЧАТЬ