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

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 growing fond of this crazy lady.

‘Rat poison. You consumed rat poison?’ I say.

‘Yes, rat poison and I drunk all this medication and I guess it was because all this happened to me at first.’

At which point she takes out her leopard-skin encased iPhone to show me pictures of herself before any of the plastic surgery. She does look wildly different. Mousey brown hair, an innocent, slightly freckled face, shy-looking, big eyes, but no big boobs. It’s a different person. But not necessarily a worse one.

‘Do you think that is me, the same person?’ she asks.

‘I would never in a million years think that was you,’ I say.

‘Do you want me to look like this?’ she continues, warming to her theme. Why am I accountable for her actions all of a sudden? Leave me out of this – I wasn’t there at the time! Sheyla has a dangerous habit of asking near strangers to lend credence to her drastic actions and life choices.

‘Well, I think, you know, you looked pretty in a different way then,’ I suggest.

‘I wasn’t happy. You know, if I was like this right now I would just break the mirror.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, not happy,’ she says.

At this point there is a rare flash of sincerity in Sheyla’s eyes. She means it. She seems to truly dislike her former self. It doesn’t take a great deal of psychological Cluedo to work out that the girl in the photograph was in a bad place, and one way to fix the problem was to change the way she looked and thus change her life. In a sense it’s using the surgeon’s knife to force life’s hand. This I suspect is the core hope at the heart of most plastic surgery patients. As I am to discover later, plastic surgery is rarely rational – this is one of the great myths about it.

The wind is blowing Sheyla’s bleached, crunchy, yellow doll’s hair. We get to the turning-point moment in her life. When she was twenty she met an Englishman who changed everything. Who was, you guessed it, a big boob fanatic. Ah, the smoking gun…

‘He saved my life,’ she begins, ‘because after that, I never ever tried to hurt myself, only love myself.’

‘Did he originally suggest that you get implants?’

‘No, he did not say that I need to, but he say he love big breast woman. If I have implants he will be happy because he loves huge breasts.’

Right…

‘Is he a big boob fanatic?’

‘Yeah. When I met him all his computer, magazine, full of porn stars like all these huge breast woman.’

What a lovely start to a relationship. ‘Hey mum, I’ve met this guy, he’s really nice – he’s got a job, he’s nice looking. And he has a massive collection of hardcore pornography featuring women with gargantuan breasts.’

She goes on. ‘He was lot fanatic. When I met him I didn’t know, I didn’t know Minka, I didn’t know Maxi Mound and then he introduced me all these woman, he say would you like to be like that and then I was thinking to myself yeah, that’s pretty.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t do it just to make him happy because that’s how it is in a relationship, you want to make your partner happy?’

‘No. I wanna make him happy and me happy because if he was happy I was happy. But I love my breasts because I’m not with him any more and I still love my breasts so it wasn’t really about him.’

‘So you think that having these operations, having big breasts has saved your life?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Saved my life. Because look at me how happy I am.’

Now, at this point I should say I have a rule of thumb – people who say ‘Look how happy I am’ aren’t happy. The revelation here is that, as with Minka, there is a man, a big boob fanatic, who has instigated this whole process. It’s impossible to imagine that Sheyla’s life would have played out like this if she hadn’t met this Englishman (what is it about Englishmen by the way? I’m not proud). Clearly he met her at a time when she was genuinely vulnerable and he was no doubt rather caring and loving and whatever he gave her emotionally hit the spot, and perhaps even saved her life. But his affection came with a price tag. ‘I like massive breasts…’ I’m imagining the conversation went. ‘…Here’s a phone number of a great plastic surgeon I know. Oh and by the way, I love you.’ No pressure then.

What’s curious though, and why I’m prepared to not judge this man too harshly is that clearly Sheyla has embraced the change her body has forced upon her. He has long since bitten the dust, but the legacy of his fetish lives on in this woman. She has taken the big boobs and run with them, so to speak. With Sheyla, there isn’t that sense of someone who foolishly tattooed the name of a lover onto their chin, only to discover they’ve run off with someone else. Rather, this crazy and in my view appalling intervention from the hand of the surgeon, caused Sheyla to restart her life. A reboot. With the reboobs. A reboob reboot. OK, that’s enough.

And so we are where we are. This is Sheyla’s life now and she doesn’t have a sense of imprisonment in her own body that Minka does. Minka’s boobs are a necessary evil. ‘It’s money. Money, power,’ as she told me over and over again. Sheyla needs the boobs. They are a life support system. The day she had her first op was the first day that she decided for the first time to like herself. So naturally one consequence, and this is the plastic surgery trap, is that to have that feeling, you’ll inevitably go back for more. Before we depart the beach, which is now lit only by the moon, and passing police cars, she calls her plastic surgeon on the phone. It’s a jovial chat. It’s like she’s talking to her hairdresser. She has decided she wants to have her procedure an hour earlier tomorrow. I’m shocked at the informal nature of the chat she’s having with this very important man.

I bid her farewell and she goes off for some beauty sleep, prior to having some beauty inflicted on her by a surgeon’s blade. I’m surprised to learn that neither her sister or indeed any of her family will be in attendance tomorrow. I return to Sheyla’s sister’s house for another sweet coffee, to find out why. Sadly barbeque boy isn’t there. He’s probably broiling meat and installing hooks in someone else’s house. I ask her how she feels about her baby sister’s plans. I feel I already know the answer.

‘I am really worried about not only me but the whole family is worried about it,’ she says. ‘Because it becomes an obsession, a huge obsession for her and we really don’t like that to become a health problem, and nowadays going to a surgery for her is just the same as going to have her nails done, so I really don’t like it. I don’t wanna be like partner with her, when something bad comes up, so I don’t go to the surgeries with her any more.’

This is a tragic revelation. To see how someone can hurt others so much, by hurting themselves. Sheyla is far from the only victim. And her sister is across all the issues Sheyla is oblivious to, or in denial of, namely the considerable risks attached to what she is doing.

‘It really seems to upset you what she is doing to herself,’ I say. ‘How hard is it for you to see this?’

‘It is very hard actually, it makes all of us very sad indeed. We all like, we get sad but there is nothing we can do, we get sad.’

Morning has broken and I’m feeling slightly emotionally hungover from the madness of the previous day. As I push bits of hotel breakfast around my plate, I mull over the irony that today is Sheyla’s ‘special day’, when really, special is the last word I’d use. Sometimes when I’m in these situations, I feel I should make some kind of intervention. Like maybe when I’m in the operating theatre, I should rugby tackle the anaesthetist to the floor prior to the op. It’s like those cameramen and women who film a zebra being stalked by a hungry lion. Don’t they sometimes want to put the camera down and shout ‘He’s behind you!’?

But above and beyond asking her countless times what the hell she’s thinking and saying ‘Don’t do this!’, I don’t feel I can go any further. No more so than I could do with my own sister. Ultimately she is a sovereign individual and she’s mistress of her own destiny. And if her own family can’t stop her, then what hope for me? Arriving at the swanky plastic surgery clinic where she is to be pumped up, I go up to meet Sheyla in her hospital bedroom. She’s dressed in a plain white bed gown – as dressed-down as you’ll ever see this woman. I kiss her on both cheeks and ask her how she’s feeling. She clearly hasn’t had much sleep and her face is puffy. I recall my chat with her sister the night before.

‘She is obviously quite upset about you know, your operations,’ I say.

‘I don’t listen to anyone except myself and I don’t like people try to change me. People who try to change me I just keep away, them away from me.’

‘Even the people who really care about you like your family?’ I ask.