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.