Toni Le Busque's stories.

I went to the Focus 12 Charity Art Auction last night in Soho and I left disturbed by a piece of the art.
It wasn’t the 10 foot high canvas of a goth girl doing a piss, intriguingly titled Goth Pissing that disturbed me.
Nor the fact that some celebrities got in a mini-bidding war for a print of a cow I had coloured in called Cow Shitting (I’m not going to name the celebrities, because that’s naming celebrities that get in bidding wars over my art and that’s simply vulgar).
What disturbed me was the picture above, a black and white photograph of a fat girl, title Dairy Queen.
I was downstairs when my girlfriend bought it and when I came back up, her and some friends were giggling about it.
She had originally wanted to buy a colour photo of a woman’s hand extending through a semi-closed car window, a lit cigarette between her fingers.
There wouldn’t have been the same laughter had she bought that.
There was laughter because she’d bought a photograph of a very fat girl.
A very fat girl working in a place that peddles fat-inducing foodstuff-a Dairy Queen.
The thing that disturbed me was her smile.
She looks genuinely happy to be having her photo taken.
Fat and jolly and happy.
Just like fat people should be.
But what was the photographer’s motive?
Was it irony?
I imagined the Dairy Queen eating her lunch alone at school being bullied shitless, and then going home to a family of fattsters, and here, finally during another boring shift shovelling sludge into cones, was someone being nice and asking to take her photo.

Earlier in the day my friend Louisa had told me she’d been in the street when she heard a woman say to a man seated near her- ‘Would you look at the state of that,’ and point at me.
‘What a disgrace,’ said the woman to the man.
‘It’s disgusting,’ said the man.
“Yeh,’ said the woman, ‘look all up and down her legs,’
‘Excuse me,’ said Louisa, ‘That’s my friend you’re talking about.
‘Oh,’ said the woman, ‘it’s just my opinion, but it’s disgusting, look at the state of it.’
Louisa looked the woman up and down and said, ‘Well, just look at the state of you, then.’
Louisa watched while the woman blushed and walked off.

There are many things about me that others could find laughable, ridiculous or disgusting.
And I think I was disturbed knowing how painful it is to have others poke and prod at our most obvious feature and turn those into a wound-
Fatty
Four eyes
Zit face
Fucking ginger
Black bastard
Filthy faggot
Quite simply, I felt sad for the Dairy Queen.
I hoped she was happy.
I hoped she had a good life.
When Louisa told me about that woman who said my tattooed arms and legs were disgusting, I didn’t even reeeeaally mind.
Like they say, don’t judge a book by its cover

Unless it’s 50 Shades of Gray.