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

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СКАЧАТЬ language should be allowed anywhere near the paint itself. I don’t think this is unreasonable.

      And speaking of paint, these placards for Sheyla lack the whiff of authenticity. And as there are lingering, emotional hugs all round with her ‘fans’, it starts to look more like a reunion of family and friends, than the arrival home of a Jordan-like icon. Even the most rabidly ambitious starlet doesn’t kiss fans on eight different parts of their face. Interrupting the adulation for a second, I ask, ‘So Sheyla, how do they know that you are here?’

      ‘Ah well, like, obviously, I talk with the local news about what’s going to—’

      ‘You give them a little tip off?’

      ‘Yeah’, she says.

      Oh, well that answers that. I’m used, in these journeys, to dealing with people who are as evasive as they are unique. Not Sheyla. It seems it’s not just her tights that are transparent. We leave the media scrum (5 per cent local media, 95 per cent uncles and aunties), we jump into a waiting taxi and head to her sister’s place, where I’ve been promised a Brazilian barbeque, which sounds like a violent variation on the Brazilian wax, but which I’m hoping is a meal. Villa Bella is a seaside town not in the mould of what you’d expect from the Brazilian coastline. Not a particularly eye-catching beach, no soft drinks concessions, no sun umbrellas, no six-pack-clad dudes working out on the sand and no local girls showing off their legendary South American derrieres. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of beachfront entertainment either – it seems to be one of those seaside towns which is more town than seaside. It’s Hove to Brighton’s Copacabana.

      We drive through a nexus of fairly rundown streets, featuring motor parts shops and local eateries that would take some personal courage to enter; the drooling Rottweiler at the entrance being the most welcoming member of staff. The town is ramshackle, scruffy and a bit untidy, but it has a certain ugly duckling charm. And with young kids happily playing football on the street – no doubt preparing to thrash England at the 2030 World Cup – and with mums hanging their washing on lines while exchanging the latest gossip, this place does feel like a community and there’s a warmth in not only the temperature. We reach her sister’s house. It is a tired-looking, small, white building, accessed via a narrow iron door and up a flight of stairs. The myriad gates, spikes and bars on the windows in this town betray the darker side of Brazilian life.

      Sheyla rings the doorbell. Her sister answers and greets her with a hug. She and Sheyla are very alike, but she looks altogether more real and sensible. Siblings are often a useful way of gauging just how much plastic surgery someone has had, as they are by definition a control in the experiment – a walking ‘before’ photograph. Her sister’s softly weathered face suggests that all her time is taken up with a job, being a mother and being a wife. A glance at Sheyla’s face doesn’t tell you anything, because like the rest of her, it isn’t hers. These are two siblings that have demonstrably taken different paths in life.

      I’m invited to sit and enjoy a coffee from a flask. I’m told the coffee is a fine-ground variety of Brazil’s finest, boiled and left to settle, after which sugar is added. Flying across the Americas and changing various time zones has left my head feeling like it left my body weeks ago, so the coffee is a welcome elixir. I needn’t have bothered – Sheyla is a walking stimulant. We’ve been in the house for five minutes and she strides back into the living room, wearing a different, dazzling outfit. I am to learn that she changes outfits more often than Beyonce at an awards ceremony. She is clutching a variety of medicinal-looking empty plastic sacks and tubes. These are her implants. The secrets of her success, the tools of her trade. And they look nearly as awful inside someone as out. She has saline implants – essentially salt-water-filled plastic bags. There is a little valve in each implant which a tube is inserted into, through which the solution can be squeezed, allowing you to inflate to a degree you are comfortable with. Sheyla is comfortable with an uncomfortable amount. Currently her breasts contain 4000 centilitres of fluid per breast. But this isn’t enough, apparently.

      ‘So if you have these implants filled up to the brim, how big will that make you per breast?’ I ask.

      Sheyla, matter of fact, says, ‘I will be 5,500 per breast.’

      ‘Will that make you the holder of the title, the number one biggest implants in the world?’

      ‘Yeah, if I fill 5,500 each one that will make me the large implants in the world.’

      ‘Really? Number one?’

      ‘Number one of the whole entire world,’ she says, like a wide-eyed contestant in a beauty pageant. Her English is pretty good, but not perfect and has some idiosyncrasies, including making her sound quite childlike.

      ‘And how would that make you feel to be number one?’

      ‘Yeah I always wanna be remembered so every time the people remember about breast implants, they got to remember of me.’

      ‘Is that important to you, that you go down in history, that you will have a legacy?’

      ‘Yeah. I did this for my ego, to be happy, to be remember, so that in only a little bit more time, I will be ready to stop. But I wanna keep my size for at least a year or two, because I want to have fun with that, I wanna have a lot of fun with my breasts,’ she declares bouncily.

      I’m not sure what it means exactly. But it’s illustrative of the fact that Sheyla comes across as implicitly comical, and speaks, I think unintentionally, in comical sound-bites. At regular intervals, she refers to her adoration of Dolly Parton, which seems appropriate, as there is obviously something quite bouncy, comical and not entirely real about our Dolly either. But because of her heavy Brazilian accent she tends to chop the ends off quite a few words, and regularly announces, often with a tear in her eye, ‘I just love Dolly Part. I want to be Dolly Part. Dolly Part is so beautiful and I want to be her.’

      ‘So you are going to be a world record breaker for a year or two, make a bit of money?’ I ask.

      ‘Yeah.’

      This is an unconvincing response. She is clearly not lacking business nous but something tells me fame is the bigger prize. Though somewhat manufactured, her airport arrival felt like the kind of thing she lives for. Already I have the sense that while Minka’s large breasts were solely about making money and indulging her husband sexually, Sheyla’s breasts seem to be about her, and the persona she’s constructed. We move upstairs for the long-promised barbeque. We eat on the top floor which has a roof and a floor, but no outer walls. Quite a feat of engineering, though not intentional I think. It looks like a part of the house which hubby hasn’t had enough bank holidays to complete, much to his wife’s chagrin. Every man has a bit of his home he hasn’t finished. It’s worn by all of us as a badge of pride. This man’s unfinished bit is an entire storey of the building – more power to his elbow.

      The open nature of this top floor provides a vantage point over the whole city, which is bigger from on high that it looks in the back of a Fiat Punto taxi. The barbeque delivers. It’s decidedly un-British – not a burnt Taste The Difference sausage in sight. Just soft, sumptuous meat that would have the most ardent vegetarians reconsidering their position. A variety of just bloody enough lamb and beef, alongside some freshly broiled ham expertly grilled by a family friend. He has the air of someone who is inexplicably always there, even though there isn’t really a reason for him to be there, rather like a badly written sitcom character. There were a flurry of Seventies sitcoms that seemed to feature a policeman sitting at the table, drinking tea. For no apparent reason. But this particular gentleman at Sheyla’s sister’s place is a bone fide alpha male and he strikes me as someone it would be nice to have around, СКАЧАТЬ