Cheryl: My Story

Cheryl: My Story Cheryl Cheryl Number One Sunday Times Best Seller.For the first time Cheryl tells her full story, her way. Revealing the truth behind the headlines, this is the only official autobiography, giving the fans the true story they’ve been waiting for. Includes exclusive, personal photos.The nation’s sweetheart, Cheryl has achieved unrivalled success with Girls Aloud, as a solo artist, a judge on the X Factor, a fashion icon and as the face of L’Oreal. However, the path to fame is rarely easy and for Cheryl it has been a colourful journey.From happy but humble beginnings growing up on a tough Newcastle estate, Cheryl saw firsthand the damage that drugs and alcohol can do. But this feisty Geordie never gave up on her dreams of being on stage.With success came a level of fame no one could prepare for. As Cheryl’s career went from strength to strength her personal heartache was played out in the national media. From her divorce to her battles with malaria, Cheryl's every move was captured by paparazzi. There was nowhere for Cheryl to hide. However, a true fighter, Cheryl emerged from every challenge stronger.Now it’s Cheryl’s turn to set the record straight. In this heartfelt account, she opens up about all of the incredible ups and downs of her life. Told with searing honesty this is Cheryl as you’ve never seen her before. Cheryl MY STORY Epigraph (#ulink_f9d7429c-fe23-5179-b284-d46195a0553f) Keep Calm and Soldier On. Contents Title Page (#ua6aa9dbe-1cdb-5d2b-bf6a-19e74ccb68a1) Epigraph (#ulink_da0edae9-b624-57f8-87f5-bf3d7f3cc972) Acknowledgements (#ulink_58c81dd5-0513-5888-9779-f3ebfda17bb3) Prologue (#ulink_dd536f10-54b6-55da-b044-6a2fdf154e40) 1. ‘Follow your dreams, Cheryl’ (#ulink_1f0f1e0f-e60a-5988-a262-1cf4567ba4ce) 2. ‘You need to get your head out of the clouds’ (#ulink_2ee880fc-fc01-5c1b-af04-68286776f4ef) 3. ‘Open up now or we’ll take your kneecaps off’ (#ulink_48d18707-0aa7-5edc-a8f0-0fea86af84fd) 4. ‘I’m so proud of you I could pop’ (#ulink_e42c69a6-b3a9-5294-bd36-eda80348589b) 5. ‘You’re arresting me?’ (#litres_trial_promo) 6. ‘Ashley treats me like a princess’ (#litres_trial_promo) 7. ‘Will you marry me?’ (#litres_trial_promo) 8. ‘You’ve come a long way, Cheryl!’ (#litres_trial_promo) 9. ‘Something happened … but I don’t know what’ (#litres_trial_promo) 10. ‘Everyone loves you. You’re a star. Well done!’ (#litres_trial_promo) 11. ‘I just want to be a wife’ (#litres_trial_promo) 12. ‘Unfortunately, you’re going to be number one next week’ (#litres_trial_promo) 13. ‘Even if it kills me, I want to know it all’ (#litres_trial_promo) 14. ‘I’m divorcing you’ (#litres_trial_promo) 15. ‘Yes! This is what I live for’ (#litres_trial_promo) 16. ‘You’re tryin’ to kill me!’ (#litres_trial_promo) 17. ‘Do they not think I’m a human being?’ (#litres_trial_promo) 18. ‘Cheryl, I know you’re laughing but this is really bad’ (#litres_trial_promo) 19. ‘Get me into my music again!’ (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Picture credits (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher Acknowledgements (#ulink_4e4a8169-9962-596c-9ea8-143eeb58d389) Rachel Murphy – thank you for helping me write this. We’ve had laughter and tears, and I’m THRILLED with the result! Ha ha. Carole Tonkinson, Victoria McGeown, Anna Gibson, Georgina Atsiaris, Steve Boggs and everyone at HarperCollins – thank you all so much for making this such an easy and enjoyable process. Solomon Parker, Eugenie Furniss and Claudia Webb at WMA – thank you for giving me this opportunity and starting me off on the right path. Richard Bray and Ailish McKenna at Bray & Krais. Rankin. Seth, Sundraj, Lily and Garry – thank you! Thank you to my team, my loved ones and all the amazing people I have in my life – and lastly to all the arseholes who have crossed my path and made it so colourful!!! Prologue (#ulink_7db28a46-ccb2-5859-9c60-6142bb17b3a4) ‘Can I have your autograph and a picture?’ I was totally stunned. Was this person really here, asking me to sign my name and pose for a photo? ‘Well … can I?’ The woman was staring at me hopefully, holding a camera up and pushing a bit of paper towards me. ‘No, absolutely not,’ I stuttered. I was flabbergasted. Disgusted, actually. This wasn’t a fan at a Girls Aloud concert or someone waiting outside the X Factor studios. The woman was a cleaner at the London Clinic where I was being treated for malaria. I’d literally nearly died just days before, and now I was lying in bed looking and feeling so weak and ill, and trying to get my head around what the hell had happened to me. The cleaner stuffed the camera in her apron pocket and looked quite put out, as if I’d turned down a perfectly reasonable request. Derek was horrified, and he leapt up and showed her the door. He’s one of the most kind and sensitive and gentlemanly men I have ever met, but I swear from the look in his eyes he wanted to kill that woman. I stared at Derek in disbelief. How had my personal life got so tangled up with my job and my fame that other people no longer treated me like a human being? ‘Am I going to die?’ I’d asked a nurse on my first day in intensive care. There was a pause before she told me plainly: ‘There’s a possibility.’ Her words didn’t shock me. I was so exhausted that I actually felt relieved. ‘If I am dying, just hurry up and make it happen,’ I thought. ‘I’m too tired. For God’s sake, make this end.’ I spent four days in intensive care at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and was now out of danger, but I was still very ill. My body felt incredibly weak and I’d been drifting in and out of sleep and consciousness for days. My head was heavy and foggy and it was so uncomfortable even just to lie down. ‘I’ve survived,’ I thought in the moments after the cleaner was shown out of the room. ‘But what’s happened to me? Who am I?’ Being in hospital is hell. All you can do is lie there and think. I couldn’t walk. I was stuck in bed with machines bleeping all around me, trying to make sense of how and why I was here, and what my life had become. My life was crazy, and it had been that way for a long time. The way the cleaner treated me was just the latest proof of how mad it was. She didn’t stop to think that I was a living, breathing woman who had been at death’s door. I’d been asked for pictures at inappropriate moments many times before, but this one topped the lot in terms of cheek and weirdness. I shut my eyes and thought back to earlier that day, when I’d been taken for a lung scan. I was dressed in a hospital gown and I had filthy hair that was so greasy it looked like I was wearing a cap with long pieces of hair sticking out from under it. I hadn’t showered or been out of bed for a week and my face was yellow with jaundice, but in that moment I didn’t care. It was just amazing to be on the move instead of lying in bed, attached to tubes and machines. As I was wheeled down the corridor I could feel the air blowing through all the hair that wasn’t stuck to my head. I honestly felt like a girl in a shampoo advert, wafting my hair about in the breeze. All of a sudden a little girl pointed at me excitedly. ‘I swear that’s Cheryl Cole!’ Her words changed my mood in a heartbeat. As soon as she spoke I didn’t feel free any more. I felt exposed and extremely uncomfortable. ‘Take me back to me room, please,’ I immediately said to the nurse. I was so taken aback that I’d been recognised, in here. The hospital should have been a haven for me, but it wasn’t. I didn’t even look like me, yet the girl still recognised me and she must have been poorly too. I felt mortified. I had no privacy, absolutely nowhere to hide. That’s how I felt. In hindsight I can see the funny side of that story and I don’t blame the young girl for reacting the way she did. I was in a very dark place then, though, and I just couldn’t see any light at all. When the cleaner asked for my autograph and a picture not long afterwards, it was like a light going on. I had grown up wanting to be a pop star, but I had never anticipated this level of fame. Nobody could have prepared me for this. I’d followed my childhood dream and I’d achieved it, and so much more. I should have been happy, but I felt like my life was not my own at all, on any level, not even when I was recovering from a serious illness. It was out of my control, and as I lay in my hospital bed I could see that I had to make changes, or I would end up going completely crazy. It’s more than two years since I had malaria, and now I feel sure I had it for a reason. It’s almost as if it was God’s way of forcing me to stop and get off the rollercoaster ride my life had become. It made me take a good look at myself, and that is what I have done. It’s only very recently that I’ve felt strong enough to talk about what’s gone on in my life, and to start to put things in perspective. I actually feel grateful for everything that’s happened, the good and the bad, because my life has been amazingly colourful and eventful. Incredible, in fact. Now I finally feel ready, and strong enough, to open up my heart and tell you all about it. 1 ‘Follow your dreams, Cheryl’ (#ulink_d0e51bca-7e11-506e-8de0-7690189c27b3) If anyone had asked me to describe my life when I was a little girl growing up in Newcastle, this is what I would have told them: I’m seven. We live in a massive house in Byker. Little Garry sleeps in with me mam and dad, I share a room with our Gillian and Andrew, and we all have bunks. Joe, who’s our big brother, has a room all to himself. He’s a big teenager, seven years older than me, and so I hardly ever see him. One Christmas, me and Gillian definitely seen Santa though, and at Halloween we definitely seen a witch. I like magical things, and the Chronicles of Narnia is one of me favourite TV programmes. Me dad plays the keyboard and is always sayin’ to me: ‘Go on, Cheryl, I’ll play something and you make up the words.’ Me Nana made a tape of me when I was three. She wrote on it: ‘Little Cheryl Singing’ – and I was so proud. Top of the Pops is always on the TV and I tell me dad: ‘I’m gonna be on there when I’m bigger!’ ‘Cheryl, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘You’ll need to get a proper job when you get big!’ He works really hard as a painter and decorator and me mam stays home and looks after all us kids. She tells me, ‘Follow your dreams, Cheryl. Do what your heart tells you.’ Me mam’s very soft and gentle but she tells me I’m too soft! ‘That guy’s just punched him senseless!’ I heard me dad say one night when he was watching a boxing match on the telly. I cried all night long, thinking to meself, ‘When’s that poor man gonna get his sense back?’ ‘Honest to God, Cheryl, you need to toughen up,’ me mam said. Gillian’s four years older and Andrew is three years older than me. Everyone says they’re like two peas in a pod, so close in age they’re like twins. I was four when our Garry was born and he’s the baby of the family. Me, Gillian and Andrew like playing fish and chip shops in the back garden. We use big dock leaves for the fish, me dad’s white paint is the batter and the long grass is the chips. Andrew’s always telling us daft stories that can’t be true and making us laugh. Me and Gillian make up dance routines and pretend we’re in Grease or Dirty Dancing, but Gillian’s a proper tomboy. She went to disco dancing classes once but didn’t like them at all. I absolutely love dancing. I do it all; ballet, modern, jazz and ballroom after school, and on the weekend. I’ve done it since I was three and I’ve been in shows and pantos and all that. ‘Show us your dancing, Cheryl,’ everyone always says, and so I do, all the time. I love it. When I look back on my childhood through adult eyes I feel very grateful to my mam and dad for giving me such happy memories, especially as I know now that it wasn’t easy for them. The ‘massive’ house I remember was in fact a really tiny, box-like council house that must have been really cramped with seven of us under the one roof. There wasn’t a lot of money, but as a little girl I never remember feeling poor. I always had Barbie dolls to play with and didn’t care that they were second-hand and out of fashion, and I always got presents I treasured at Christmas, like the one year when I got a sweet shop with little jars you could fill up. I absolutely loved it. For our tea we ate food like beans on toast, corned beef hash or grilled Spam. A Chinese takeaway was a treat because we couldn’t afford it, but we were no different from anybody else on our estate. Mam would buy us things from catalogues and save up to pay the bill at the end of the month. I remember the end of August was always a nightmare because my mother had to get everyone kitted out with new uniforms and pencil cases, all at the same time. I could feel the tension in the house, but we always got through it. Sometimes we wore hand-me-down clothes, but that was completely normal. Neighbours and relatives passed things on; that’s what everybody did. Pride is a massive thing for Geordies and Mam made sure that, one way or another, we always looked presentable and we never went without. I’ve had to ask my mam to fill me in on some of the details about my really early years, especially with all my dancing, as I was too young to remember a lot of it. I also thought it might be nice to give my mam, Joan, the chance to tell this part of the story herself, and this is what she told me when I started writing my book. What Mam remembers … One of me friends told me there was a local bonny baby competition and that I should enter you because you were such a pretty baby. You really were a pretty baby, with very dark hair and lots of it. I happened to walk past Boots one day in the local shopping centre and saw the competition advertised. I thought, ‘why not?’, took you in for a picture and then forgot all about it … until I found out you’d won it. Family and friends encouraged me to enter you into other similar things. You won every time and eventually, through winning competitions, a model agency approached us and asked if they could take you on. ‘Why not?’ I thought again. When you were about three years old one of me friends said, ‘Let’s take the kids to disco dancin’.’ She told me there was a class on opposite the Walker Gate metro station, run by a lady called Noreen Campbell. ‘Why not?’ I found meself saying yet again. You loved dancin’ at home. The boys did things like karate and trampolining but I tried to give you all a chance to do things I thought you’d enjoy, and I knew this was more your thing. When we got there Noreen told us we’d been mistaken. She didn’t teach disco – this was a ballet, tap and ballroom class. You had a go and loved it, and from that very first day Noreen started telling me you were really good at all types of dancing. ‘She’s got real talent, something special,’ she told me. You couldn’t get enough of it, and as soon as you were old enough Noreen entered you for dancing competitions, which you always won. After that she put you up for auditions for pantomimes, theatre shows – everything. You were Molly in a production of Annie when you were about six, at the Tyne Theatre, and at the same time the model agency was putting you up for all sorts of fashion shows in shopping centres, or for catalogue work and adverts. I was asked if Garry could go on the books of the model agency too as he was always with us, and the pair of you appeared in a British Gas TV advert together. You did one for the local electricity board and a big furniture store, too. As long as you were happy I took you along and let you do whatever was on offer, and you always loved it, posing very naturally and even suggesting different poses for the camera, which made us all laugh. Stage school was another thing you did for a time. I’ve always been of the opinion that in life you have to give anything a go and whenever another new thing was suggested I’d always let you try it to see if you liked it. You won a ‘Star of the Future’ competition and a ‘Little Miss and Mister’ contest run by the Evening Chronicle, and you were always very proud of yourself when you appeared in the paper. Any prize money you got from winning competitions, or fees from modelling, all went back into costumes or whatever else you needed, so you kept yourself going. Your brothers and sister didn’t mind me taking you places all the time. They loved what you did and were forever asking you to show them and their friends your latest dance routine or pictures. When you were about eight or nine we were encouraged to try out another ballet school run by a lady called Margaret Waite, who had a really good reputation. It was Margaret who suggested you should try out for the Royal Ballet’s summer school, and I know you remember all about that. All I’ll say is that I was happy for you to do it, and I was happy for you to give up the ballet. ‘What do you want, Cheryl?’ I would always ask, because you knew your own mind from a very young age. You had a lot of confidence as well whenever you were performing. I don’t know where it came from, especially because at home you were very soft and terribly sensitive. Our first house at Cresswell Street in Byker was always like an RSPCA rescue centre because you’d bring home pigeons with broken wings or stray cats that usually turned out to not be strays at all. Sometimes they just rubbed up against your leg in the street and you brought them home, feeling sorry for them and trying to adopt them. You worried yourself far too much about everything and everybody else, all the time. I remember telling you, right from when you were a very small girl: ‘Life is tough, Cheryl. You need to toughen up.’ My mam is right. Of all my dancing experiences I do remember the whole Royal Ballet episode clearly. Margaret Waite was a really amazing dancer who’d had a brilliant career with the Royal Ballet herself before she set up her school in Whitley Bay. It was about fifteen miles from where we lived and twenty-odd stops away on the metro, but it was the place to go if you were really into ballet. Margot Fonteyn was my heroine and I couldn’t get enough of my ballet classes. I did every competition going and always managed to win. ‘You’re excelling,’ Margaret told me one day. ‘At nine you’re a bit too young, but I want you to apply to the Royal Ballet summer school. It’s extremely hard to get in but I think you’re good enough.’ I told my mam, who took me along for the audition somewhere in Newcastle. Mam didn’t ask any questions, and I don’t think I fully understood what I was applying for. I just put on my favourite tutu, did my best on the day, then went home to play. One of my favourite games at that time was to pretend I was running a beauty salon. I’d convince Gillian I was really good at doing make-up and then I’d put mascara and blusher on her. Sometimes I’d even persuade my little cousins – the boys included – to let me put eye shadow on them, or lipstick. I’d also tell them all kinds of tales, like the time I convinced one of my really young cousins that the Incredible Hulk lived round the corner. When my mother found out what I was up to she went mad. Dad was always much stricter than my mam, and I knew I had to behave myself much better when he was in the house. One day I remember my dad looking very serious, and I wondered if I was in trouble about something, but I didn’t know what. ‘Me and your mam need to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Sit yourself down, Cheryl.’ He took a deep breath and said: ‘You’ve been offered a place at the Royal Ballet …’ My heart leaped in my chest, but before I could jump up and cheer Mam interrupted. ‘We’re really proud of you, Cheryl. You’ve done really well and we know you’d love to go. But the thing is …’ Dad finished the sentence, and my heart sank like a stone. ‘We can’t afford to send you. I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s such a lot of money and we just haven’t got it …’ I ran up to my room and cried, hugging my pillow. It had no cover on it and a jagged line of red stitching down one side where I’d sewn it back together really badly, probably after whacking Gillian or Andrew with it in a fight. I always held onto that old pillow whenever I got upset about something, and this felt like the worst thing ever. Mam appeared at the door. ‘Cheryl, we’ll see what we can do. Things are never as bad as they seem. You’ve got Gimme 5 again next week. Put your chin up.’ Gimme 5 was a Tyne Tees kids TV programme I’d appeared on a couple of times with a bunch of kids from the dance school. I tap-danced with Jenny Powell once and hit her in the face by accident, and another time I showed off my ballroom dancing skills, doing the rumba. ‘Get her back on!’ I heard one of the television people say. ‘She’s hilarious!’ I think this was because when I was ballroom dancing I really got into it and pulled all these crazy faces. I can see now how funny I must have looked because I was only nine years old yet I was trying to look all sensual and sexy, like I thought ballroom dancers should. I didn’t even realise I was doing it at the time. I just really felt the music like that, and being on the TV felt normal to me, so I just let myself go. I can remember going round some of the local old peoples’ homes with the dance school too, and the pensioners would howl laughing when I pulled those faces. I loved it. It encouraged me, because I felt like I was really entertaining them. ‘You’ll never guess what, Cheryl,’ my mam said one day, ages after my dad had delivered the bad news. ‘We’ve managed to find all the money after all. You can go to the Royal Ballet!’ I screamed in excitement and gave our dog Monty a big hug. Monty was a long-haired Dachshund who hated every one of us kids but was obsessed with my mother. He wriggled away from me as fast as he could, as usual, but for once I didn’t care. I grinned at my mam and said thank you over and over again. This meant I’d be going down to London for a whole week in the summer holidays, to be taught by some of the best ballet teachers in the world. I knew my mam and dad had been pulling out all the stops but I hadn’t wanted to get my hopes up. I found out later they’d done a newspaper story to help raise the money they needed. I think the whole thing cost about ?500 but they’d been at least ?200 short. The paper sponsored me, and I ended up doing a photoshoot and a story to say thanks to everyone who’d helped. It was August 1993 by now and I’d turned ten in the June. I’d never been to London before. In fact, I had not set foot out of the North East. We never had a holiday and all my life had taken place in Newcastle. I thought the whole of the country must be the same as it was on our estate, and I assumed everyone spoke like me because I didn’t know any different. ‘Gals, I will teach you all how to cut an orange into neat segments so you can eat it nicely,’ one of the prim and proper ladies at the ballet school told us on the first day. She had a very tight bun in her hair and didn’t look like she’d ever cracked a proper smile in her life. That’s my first memory of being there. Mam had dropped me off with a tiny little suitcase and I was staying for a week all by myself, at this posh place called White Lodge, in Richmond Park. We’d been given salad and fruit for lunch on the first day, which put me off right away. ‘I want chips and beans,’ I thought when I saw the lettuce leaves and oranges. I wasn’t even used to the word ‘lunch’. As far as I was concerned you ate your dinner in the middle of the day and had your tea at night. What’s more, when you ate an orange you peeled it with your fingers and the peel would magically disappear when you left it on the table or dropped it on the floor. I caught other girls giving me sideways glances whenever I spoke. Nobody sounded like me, and I felt out of place. They were all very well put together too, in clothes that were actual makes, while mine were from C&A or the Littlewoods catalogue. ‘Cheryl Tweedy, please step forward.’ We were in a grand hall, and I was being asked to show off a little routine. I could sense the other girls giving me funny looks and it put me right off because I was used to being super comfortable and completely fitting in, whatever I did. ‘What?’ I said when the teacher said something I didn’t quite hear. ‘Pardon,’ she corrected snootily. ‘We always say “pardon” not “what”, don’t we, gals?’ I thought to myself, ‘That’s funny, none of me teachers at school ever tell me that.’ We slept in a big dormitory and I hated it. I just wanted to go home and climb into my bunk bed. Even if Andrew was there fighting with me or trying to dangle me off the top bunk like he sometimes did for a laugh, I would have felt much happier than I did here. I wrote a letter home and said, ‘Tell Monty I miss him.’ Really, I missed everything and everyone back home but I didn’t want anyone worrying about me. I missed the noise and the chaos in our house, I missed bumping into my aunties and uncles and cousins who all lived two minutes away from our house, and on Sunday I really, really missed having a roast dinner at my Nana’s, knowing everyone else would be there as usual. Sometimes it was bedlam, but I still would have swapped places in a flash. One time Andrew and Gillian got caught smoking behind my Nana’s settee. They’d taken her ashtray and lit the old cigarette ends. My dad saw the smoke coming from behind the settee and went crazy. Gillian and Andrew were only small at the time so it must have been quite a few years before, but memories like that came back to me as I lay in my bed in the dormitory, feeling a million miles away from home. I thought about my school as well. I went to St Lawrence’s Roman Catholic Primary, even though we weren’t Catholics. It was just down the road from our house and had a very good reputation; that’s why Mam and Dad sent us there. I loved it, and I’d even asked Mam if I could take my Holy Communion like the other girls because I wanted to wear the white dress and gloves. ‘You can decide your own religion when you’re old enough,’ Mam told me. Our head teacher was a nun and I felt peaceful in that school, and like I belonged. I had a go at playing the cello, the clarinet and the flute. It was fun and easy and not strict. Mam would walk us to school every morning and I remember one day she suddenly made us stop in the street. ‘Look! There’s a hedgehog stuck down there!’ I peered down and saw this huge hedgehog completely wedged at the bottom of an open manhole. Mam made us run home and fetch a bucket and spade and rubber gloves, which we used to rescue it. We then took the hedgehog to the park to set it free. We were late for school but my mam explained what had happened and we didn’t get into trouble. Joe was the one who usually got into trouble, not the rest of us. There’d often be a knock on the door and a neighbour would be standing there fuming and telling my mam: ‘Your son’s bashed my son.’ He was just like many of the other teenagers in the neighbourhood and Mam would wallop Joe when he misbehaved, even though she is only four-foot ten. I couldn’t remember a time when my big brother wasn’t taller than her, in fact. Mam was pretty strong for her size and we all got smacked by my mother when we were naughty, usually on the back of the legs. It always stung like mad and I remember we’d threaten to phone ChildLine whenever that happened, though we were never serious. My dad would be more likely to shout when things went wrong, like the time when Joe broke his leg after getting drunk and falling down an open drain. Dad exploded and shouted really loudly, and I had to put my hands over my ears. It was chaos a lot of the time, but it was home, and it was all I knew. Lying in this neat and quiet dormitory, surrounded by girls who wore Alice bands and spoke like the Queen, made it seem like Newcastle was in another world, or even another universe. On my last day at the Royal Ballet my mam came to watch the farewell presentation. I was that happy to see her sitting there amongst all the other mothers that I couldn’t help waving and grinning at her. All the rest of the girls stood like little statues, as we’d been told to do, but I was so excited I just couldn’t help myself. Even when Mam tried shaking her head and mouthing at me nervously to stop, I carried on. ‘How could they all stand there like that?’ I asked her later that day, when we were finally heading home. I’d skipped out of the gates as fast as I could, absolutely delighted to be getting out of that stuffy place. ‘It’s called etiquette,’ Mam said. ‘Pardon?’ I replied, not for the first time that day. I could see that word was annoying my mam but I couldn’t help using it, because it had been drummed into me all week. ‘Cheryl, if you pardon me once more I swear I’ll knock your block off,’ Mam replied. She wasn’t joking, either, but I was so happy to be back with my mam. It had felt like I’d been away forever, and I just wanted to get back to everything I knew and loved. ‘I want to give up ballet,’ I announced just a few days later, when I was eating a packet of crisps at home in front of the telly. ‘It’s not fun any more.’ ‘That’s fine, Cheryl,’ Mam said. ‘If you don’t like it you don’t have to do it. That’s the end of it.’ I didn’t give up dancing altogether. I still did some other classes, but not as regularly, and definitely not as passionately. I was in my last year of primary school by now, and so it was inevitable that my life was changing in other ways too. I was about to leave St Lawrence’s and go to Walker School. I was growing up, and it was a little bit daunting, but exciting too. There was also another big change about to happen in my life, although this was one I definitely didn’t see coming. I was eleven years old; I can remember the day it happened like it was yesterday. ‘Tell me the truth! What the hell is happening? What’s going on?’ It was Andrew, and he’d burst in the front door in a terrible rage. I’d never, ever seen him in such a state and he started ranting and raving at my mam and dad. They both looked really worried and my heart started beating super fast in my chest. ‘I’ll explain it,’ Mam said. Her eyes looked sad and she had deep frown lines in her forehead. Dad had gone all quiet, which panicked me, as normally he’d have gone mad at Andrew for shouting and screaming like that. The atmosphere felt much more chaotic than I’d ever known. It was like a big bomb had gone off. I didn’t know how or why, but it felt like another bomb was going to explode any moment. ‘Is Dad my real dad?’ Andrew screamed in my mam’s face. I swear the clock stopped for a second when he said that. ‘I want to know the truth – all of it!’ Andrew was shaking now, and shouting that someone had told him in the street that my dad wasn’t his real dad. He’d asked my aunty if it was true. ‘How do you know?’ my aunty had said. ‘You’d better ask your mam!’ Andrew was going so berserk that he looked like a crazy person, but however mad he looked, this was sounding horribly realistic. I was listening to every word, trying to make some sense of it all, but I wasn’t sure what the truth was, or why this was happening. Gillian was in the room, and she was going mental now too. ‘Sit down, everyone,’ my mam said eventually. ‘Will everyone calm down and sit down, please!’ We all sat round the kitchen table: me, Mam, Dad, Gillian and Andrew. My dad looked absolutely shell-shocked, I was sitting there panicking so much I wanted to be sick and Gillian and Andrew were still shouting and just going into meltdown. ‘Be quiet and let me tell you,’ Mam said, shushing Gillian and Andrew. At last there was silence, total silence, and Mam spoke softly. ‘I was 21 when we met, me and your dad.’ Mam nodded towards my dad, to make it clear she was talking about him. ‘I already had Joe, and you two.’ She looked at Gillian and Andrew now, but not at me. My brother’s and sister’s eyes were on stalks, bulging out of their heads. ‘I was married to your dad, to your real dad,’ she told them. ‘But we broke up not long after we had you both. Andrew was only a baby. Your dad, Garry, was very young when I met him. He was 17. And he took me on, with three kids. Then we had Cheryl and Garry together.’ Mam took a deep breath and we all just stared at her. I think it took us all a few minutes to take in what she had said. What she was telling us was that Joe, Gillian and Andrew were only my half siblings. ‘Is that what you mean?’ I asked her once I finally felt able to speak. ‘Gillian and Andrew aren’t my real brother and sister? They have a different dad to me and Garry?’ Gillian and Andrew were asking loads of questions too, shouting and stomping around the room. I don’t know where Garry was, but he was only seven at the time so was too young to hear all this anyway. ‘Our Cheryl and our Garry are only our half brother and half sister?’ Gillian screeched. ‘Is that what you’re telling us, after all these years?’ ‘Yes,’ Mam said, in a quiet but firm voice. My dad had lost all the colour from his face. ‘When did you and Mam get married?’ I asked him. ‘Actually,’ he replied, looking anxiously at my mam. ‘We’re not married.’ I think it was the first time he had spoken. I was stunned into silence again, but Andrew was shouting and getting more and more angry. ‘How come we’re all called Tweedy then?’ ‘Well, your mam just uses my name, so we’re all the same.’ ‘The same?’ Gillian screamed. ‘I don’t think so!’ I can remember a lot of sadness, falling right down on us like it came out of the ceiling and just surrounded the whole family. Andrew and Gillian’s faces were filled with confusion; devastation, in fact. They were asking more and more questions and shouting and screaming a lot, at each other and at my mam and dad. I was just staring at my dad and thinking, ‘How could you know all these years and say nothing? How can this possibly be?’ I don’t think anyone got an explanation as to why this secret had been kept for so long; at least I certainly don’t remember hearing one. Garry doesn’t remember any of this chaos at all, and Joe wasn’t there either. When I thought about it later, I wondered if Joe already knew, or had at least suspected something. I mean, I eventually worked out that my dad would have been about 13 when Joe was born, as my dad was four years younger than my mam. Maybe Joe had worked things out for himself already. At this point Joe was 18 and my dad was 32. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember Joe being a part of that day. Maybe he just didn’t need to hear this. ‘I’m going and I’m never coming back,’ Gillian yelled. She slammed the front door so hard I was afraid the glass in the windows would break, and I started to cry. Gillian had gone from being my sister to my half sister to not being there at all in the space of about 30 minutes. The police came knocking on the door later that day and I remember seeing nothing but anxiety etched on my mam and dad’s faces for a very long time. Gillian didn’t come home that night or the night after that and soon the days became weeks. I felt sick with worry every day, from the minute I opened my eyes in the morning until I eventually fell asleep, exhausted, hours and hours after getting into bed and staring at Gillian’s empty bunk bed each night. Joe was out looking for her every day and night, going crazy. He used to fight with Gillian a lot and they had some terrible arguments in their time, but if anyone or anything outside the family threatened her he was on it, straight away. He was combing the streets, doing all he could to track her down. He always had that same super-protective attitude towards all of us. Joe eventually found Gillian after six weeks of sheer hell at home. She’d been staying with a friend and I heard she had taken drugs, trying to block out what had happened. Joe literally barged into the friend’s house, got hold of Gillian like his arms were a straitjacket and carried her home, kicking and screaming. ‘I’ve met my real dad,’ I heard Gillian tell my mam. ‘I’m gonna keep in touch with him.’ He was called Tony and lived not far from us in Newcastle but Mam had not kept in touch with him after they got divorced, which was about 13 or 14 years earlier. I don’t know how she found him, but Gillian had marched right up to his front door and hammered on it until a woman answered. ‘Is Tony there?’ ‘Who’s asking?’ ‘His daughter. Who are you?’ ‘His wife. You’d better come in.’ Gillian was 15 years old when she did that – maybe the worst age possible for something like this to have happened. It must have been a terrible ordeal for her, but she waited for Tony to get home from work and met him that same day. It turned out he was a tattoo artist, which fascinated us all when we found that out, because Joe had always been very artistic and amazing at drawing cartoons. We’d often said: ‘I wonder where he gets that from?’ and now we knew. ‘You’ll have to meet my dad,’ Gillian told me. ‘You won’t believe it. He looks exactly like our Andrew.’ ‘So … do you like him?’ ‘I think I will.’ I didn’t know what to say or how to react. It was a hell of a lot to take in. I’d suffered major anxiety when Gillian was missing and now I began to worry constantly about everything, every day. Andrew started running away a lot too, and whenever the police knocked on the door I’d panic, imagining all kinds. I was aware that Andrew had started sniffing glue, though I couldn’t tell you exactly when his habit started, or whether it was already a problem before the bomb went off in the family. All I know is that I’d lie in bed waiting for him to come home, not being able to sleep until I knew he was safely back in the house. I’d look out of the window, watching for him coming up the street, sometimes right through until five or six o’clock in the morning. When it was time for school I could never get up. ‘Are you awake, Cheryl?’ Mam would shout. ‘Yes, but I’m just resting my eyes,’ I always replied. I was late and tired all the time. One night, Andrew had been out with no key and so he smashed a window to get back in. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and I listened as a huge row kicked off between him and my dad. I didn’t care about the shouting; I was just glad Andrew was home, even though the whole house started to stink of glue once he was inside. The fumes rose up the stairs and hung in the air, and to this day I still feel sick at the smell of glue. ‘Get to bed, go on with you!’ Mam would shout, and I’d lie there wide awake and on red alert for a long time after the house fell quiet. This wasn’t the first time Andrew had been in trouble. He was done for thieving when he was 13, which was a year or so before all this kicked off with my mam and dad, but to be honest I don’t really remember that being a big hoo-hah. The bizzies, as we usually called the police, were always knocking on doors all over our estate. If someone got arrested or even sent to prison the neighbours were more inclined to sympathise and ask if there was anything they could do to help the family, rather than to judge or look down their noses at you. It was practically an everyday occurrence, which must be why Andrew’s early problems with the police really didn’t stick in my mind. ‘Who’s that now?’ I remember my mam snapping whenever the police hammered on the door. ‘Can’t you tell?’ I always thought, because to my ears the ‘bizzie knock’ was instantly recognisable. It always made my nerves tense and my stomach sink as I wondered what would happen next. Andrew became more and more volatile and unpredictable after he found out about his real dad, and before long he was completely unrecognisable as my funny brother who used to tell silly, exaggerated stories and make us all laugh. ‘I got struck by lightning,’ he told us once, when he came home soaking wet in a rainstorm at the age of about 10. ‘Really, Andrew?’ we all asked. ‘Really,’ he replied with wide, serious eyes. I remember we all laughed our heads off because he actually thought we would believe him, but that Andrew just seemed to vanish from our family, almost overnight. My mam and dad split up not long after the family history had been laid bare. My dad had an affair and my mam tried to take him back, but they couldn’t make it work any more. I was still only 11 years old and that’s about all I knew. Mam went absolutely crazy for what felt like a long, long time, understandably so with all the trauma she had gone through. She was still only in her mid-thirties but the stress of bringing up five kids on her own, with the police banging at the door all the time, must have been very hard to cope with. It was around this time when I first noticed my mam starting to become what you might call ‘spiritual’. She was always floating round the house being unbelievably calm when all hell was breaking loose, saying stuff like: ‘things happen for a reason’ and ‘live one day at a time, that’s all anyone can do’. Even if there was absolute hell going on in the house, with Andrew off his head on glue, ranting and raving, she’d stay incredibly calm. Mam’s got lots of sisters and sometimes I’d hear her saying to one of my aunties, ‘Eee, there’s no good telling the kids what to do or they just want to do it more, don’t they? What can you do but hope they’ll grow out of it?’ When Andrew was 15 he stabbed someone in a fight. This guy had punched Gillian in the face in a pub and so he stabbed him. That’s what Gillian told me when she eventually came home, crying and in a terrible state, and without my brand-spanking-new trainers she’d borrowed from me that night. ‘Sorry about your trainers, Cheryl,’ she sobbed. ‘When will I get them back?’ I moaned, telling her I wished I hadn’t lent them to her because I wanted to wear them that weekend. ‘The police took them away for forensics. They got splattered with blood. Could be six months.’ ‘What? They’ll be out of fashion by then. Anyway, as if I’d want them, after they’ve had blood on them.’ I was 12 years old and by now I was well used to Andrew being arrested regularly for thieving and stealing cars. That meant the seriousness of what he had done this time round didn’t hit me at all until I saw the rest of the family just crumbling in front of me. Everyone was in pieces and it was so painful to see. Mam cried a lot. People were talking about sentences and prison, and I was lying awake yet again, worrying myself sick. ‘We’ll go and visit him as much as we can,’ my mam said after the court case. ‘He’ll not serve the full sentence years, I’m sure.’ I hoped not. My brother had been sentenced to six years and was being locked up in a young offenders’ institution to start with as he was too young for an adult prison. I’d be 18 by the time he was released, so I felt like part of my childhood was taken away that day too. By now Joe had left home and me, my mam, Gillian and Garry had moved into a three-storey house in Langhorn Close, Heaton, which was not far from our old family home in Byker. Once a week I’d pop over and see my dad. I’d either get a bus over to his new house, which wasn’t far away, or I’d see him at my Nana’s. There was never any formal arrangement in place or anything like that; I was old enough to see him whenever I wanted to. Whatever my mam thought of my dad after their split, she never tried to poison our minds against him and I don’t really remember my relationship with my dad changing that much; he just didn’t live with us like he used to. ‘Want to listen to some Level 42?’ he’d ask, just as he used to when he lived with us. It was my relationship with my mam that changed more, probably because she altered so much in herself. Without Dad there, I think me and Mam started to become closer, like friends as well as mother and daughter, and it’s more or less stayed that way ever since. *** Throughout all this upheaval I carried on dancing every week. Whatever was going on in the rest of my life I always smiled when I was performing. It wasn’t my way of escaping the bad things that happened at home or anything as deep as that; dancing was just a part of my life I really enjoyed, while the family problems were something I accepted and got on with, because I had no choice and that was the way it was. ‘There’s a panto coming up, I’m gonna audition,’ I said to my mam one day. ‘That’s nice. We’ll go and see Andrew after.’ I’d go on my own to shows and auditions now, taking buses or getting lifts from other parents, because Mam couldn’t drive and we never had a car. Sometimes I’d still be in a sparkly costume when we visited Andrew in the young offenders’ institution. It was like a kind of foster home, with a lounge and a place you could play pool, but I knew Andrew was locked in his bedroom at night, which was a horrible thought. ‘Tell Andrew about your next show,’ Mam would say. She never seemed to get upset, blame Andrew or ask him why he had committed crimes, and we’d just talk about normal stuff, as if we were sitting in the kitchen at home like we used to. ‘It’s a panto but I haven’t got the part yet. I’ve made up my own dance routine, though, and I’ve done a tape of the music for the audition.’ ‘What have you picked, Cheryl?’ Andrew asked. ‘“No Limit”, from 2 Unlimited. I got it off one of them “Best of” tapes my dad got me for Christmas. You know the one: “No, no, no, no, no, no, there’s no limit!”’ I sang the words a bit too loudly, which made everyone smile. Then we said our goodbyes and went home to have chips and egg for our tea. With Andrew inside, life seemed a lot more simple, and once I got used to the idea of him being away, I was glad I didn’t have to worry about what he was getting up to or what time he would come home. ‘Good luck, Cheryl,’ Andrew said, and I told him I didn’t need luck. ‘Thanks,’ I shrugged. ‘If I don’t get this one I’ll get another one.’ My belief that I was going to succeed as a performer was the one constant in my life. It was not a question of ‘if’ I was going to make it, just ‘when’. 2 ‘You need to get your head out of the clouds’ (#ulink_aee120de-3b76-5fdc-830e-2188a3913822) ‘Cheryl Tweedy,’ the teacher called out at afternoon registration. ‘Yes, Sir. Here, Sir,’ I replied. ‘Oh, and by the way I was late this morning. Sorry, Sir.’ The teacher rolled his eyes as if to say ‘not again’ before giving me a late mark for the morning, even though I had not even been there, and then marking me in for the afternoon. After registration I walked straight out the back doors of Walker School at the first opportunity, as cool as you like, wagging off for the afternoon with my best friend Kelly, who’d pulled the same trick. ‘Can you believe he fell for that again!’ we both cackled before pegging it down the road. Kelly was as feisty as hell and I loved being with her. Usually we went back to her house because her mam and dad both worked, but if we heard someone come in the house we’d run out the back door and go and sit on the train tracks at the bottom of her street, or hang around Walker graveyard. God knows why we went to the cemetery; it seemed quite cool at the time and nobody would ever see us there. I had no interest in being educated. My life took place outside the school gates, not inside them. I was always more focused on getting the next dancing part than wasting time working out why x equalled a plus b or whatever my teacher was on about. ‘Cheryl Tweedy, you will amount to nothing!’ the maths teacher exploded one day. I was chewing gum and rehearsing my dance moves in my head. The audition for the Christmas panto I’d made my ‘No Limit’ music tape for was tonight, and all I wanted to do was get out of school and practise. ‘Amount to nothing?’ I thought cheekily. ‘Just you wait and see. I’ll show you!’ I couldn’t have cared less what any of my teachers thought of me, because I knew for a fact I was going to make my living by performing. Nothing and nobody was going to stand in my way. It’s just as well I had that attitude, because at break time I went to find the music tape I’d left in my locker and found it had been stolen. I was really annoyed because I’d gone to all the trouble of making the cassette myself, and there was no time to make another one. ‘What will you do?’ the man at my audition asked later that day, looking worried for me. His name was Drew Falconer and he’d come into the dance school to watch a few of us. ‘Don’t worry, I’m gonna sing the song meself,’ I said. Then I just started singing and dancing in front of him, giving it my all. ‘The poor guy must have thought I was mental,’ I laughed to our Gillian that night. ‘He sat there lookin’ at me gobsmacked while I was bustin’ these moves and singin’!’ I was offered a part in the panto the very next day, but my excitement was short-lived because it turned out they couldn’t fill the other places and the show had to be cancelled. ‘There’ll be another one, Cheryl,’ Mam said. ‘I know,’ I replied. I was disappointed but I wasn’t too bothered. I didn’t ever feel I had to chase my dream, because I firmly believed I’d make it happen one day, when the time was right. It wasn’t about being famous or rich, I just wanted to dance and sing and entertain people, because it’s what I loved to do. It was that simple, that clear. I remember explaining all this to Dolly one day, who was an old lady who lived across the road from us. Dolly had six kids and lots of grandkids and I’d known her and her family all my life. After I started at Walker School I’d begun to spend a lot of time with her, partly because she didn’t care if I wagged off school and her flat was another place to go to during the day, if I wasn’t with Kelly. ‘Eee, Cheryl, it’s lovely to see you,’ Dolly would say every time I knocked on her door, even if it was clearly during school hours and I was in my uniform. ‘Come in, and stay with us for a bit of company.’ Being with Dolly was far more interesting than being at school. She told me stories about the war and I was absolutely fascinated by her. She didn’t have a tooth in her head and her language was shocking, but also very funny to listen to because she couldn’t pronounce an ‘f’ through her gums. ‘Who’s that knocking on the buckin’ door!’ she’d shout whenever someone came to her flat. I soon learned why she reacted like that, as it was often the police asking questions about one of the colourful characters in Dolly’s large family. ‘You haven’t got a warrant!’ she’d shout, knowing all the spiel. ‘You can’t come in here!’ Whenever a woman came in from social services or the home help service, Dolly always made a point of telling them proudly that I was her granddaughter. ‘Hi darlin’,’ she always greeted each helper warmly. ‘Do you want to put the kettle on an’ we’ll ’ave a nice cup of tea? This is me lovely granddaughter, Cheryl. She’s going to be a pop star, you know.’ Whenever the visitor was out of earshot Dolly’s smile would fall from her face and she’d whisper to me behind her hand: ‘Watch that one, she’ll be all nice to me face but she’ll be dippin’ in me purse when me back’s turned.’ I found out many years later that when my back was turned Dolly would often say, ‘Cheryl? She’ll never be a buckin’ pop star!’ That was typical Dolly, and I don’t mind at all, not now. I’d push Dolly in her wheelchair to the shops along the Shields Road, which was the big main road separating our estate from Walker, or I’d go out and pay her rent or get her some teabags and milk if she needed me to. Dolly would forget all about cups of tea when the helpers weren’t around, mind you. She liked vodka and Irn-Bru, and even when I was just 12 or 13 years old she’d be trying to give me tumblers of the stuff. I’d take a swig just to keep her happy even though I didn’t like the taste at all, but sometimes I’d go home feeling drunk and dizzy at 5pm. Her daughter lived in the flat upstairs and if there was any noise Dolly would take a broom and bash the ceiling like a mad woman, making dents in the paintwork and shouting, ‘Keep the buckin’ noise down!’ I’d often stay the night at Dolly’s, and my mam was quite happy with that. She knew Dolly well and she always knew where I was, so she didn’t mind. It wasn’t out of the ordinary where we lived to be in and out of each others’ homes like that. Besides, Mam had her hands full being a single mother, especially with Garry still at primary school, and she was always happy to let me come and go as I pleased. One afternoon Mam told me there was a little festival on, just two minutes down the road. ‘Let’s take our Garry,’ she said. ‘There’s hook a duck, toffee apples and all that. Shall we go and have a look?’ As soon as we got there I saw someone I recognised. ‘Mother,’ I hissed. ‘That’s that guy that auditioned me for the panto.’ ‘Never!’ Mam said. The man started walking towards us, smiling. ‘It’s Cheryl, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m Drew Falconer,’ he told my mam, shaking her hand enthusiastically. ‘We were very impressed by Cheryl’s audition. It was a real shame the panto never went ahead. Your daughter is very talented. I reckon she has it in her to be a pop star.’ I couldn’t believe it when I heard that because it was absolutely amazing to hear someone as important as him confirming what I already felt in my heart. It turned out that Drew ran a local talent management company and was always looking for young acts to bring on. He put up-and-coming singers on the stage at Metroland, which was like a big indoor theme park within the Metrocentre shopping complex in Gateshead. ‘What d’you think?’ my mam said when he left us with his card, asking us to get in touch to discuss giving Metroland a try. ‘As long as I can still do me dancing as well as singing, I’ll do it,’ I said. Even though I’d been telling people for ages I was going to be a pop star, dancing was still the biggest thing in my life; the singing just came along with it. ‘You’re a weirdo,’ Kelly said when I told her I was going to meet Drew to listen to music and plan some stage routines the following week. ‘What d’you wanna do that for?’ ‘Why not? It’s brilliant,’ I told her. ‘I love all this.’ I don’t think any of my friends really understood how passionate I was about music and dancing, or how I could be so convinced that was where my future lay. My dad was the worst, forever repeating what he’d said to me for years. ‘Cheryl, sweetheart, you need to concentrate on getting a proper job. You need to get your head out of the clouds.’ ‘No, Dad, being a pop star is a proper job. I’m going to be on Top of the Pops one day and I’ll be number one. Watch.’ None of my mates took the mickey or anything like that. I was never bullied or picked on for doing something different, but neither was I ever one of the in-crowd, or the ‘it’ girls as we called them. I was somewhere in the middle, and I liked it like that. I had just a few close friends, and when I wasn’t singing or dancing I spent my time either with Dolly, hanging around with Kelly, or messing around with another good mate of mine, Lindsey, who was a year older than me and lived up the road. Lindsey was always up for a laugh, and it was around this time that she suggested we should sneak out one night and go camping with some of the boys we knew on the estate. I readily agreed, but I was just 13 and I knew my mam wouldn’t let me go out camping at night with boys. ‘We need a plan,’ I said. ‘You tell your mam you’re staying at mine, and we’ll sneak out when my mam’s asleep.’ Why I didn’t just say I was staying at Dolly’s I don’t know, but I suppose Lindsey had to say she was staying at mine so her parents would let her out. When the big night came, Lindsey and I pretended to go to sleep in my bedroom, but underneath our quilts we were fully clothed, waiting to make our escape at 2am. Meanwhile, the group of boys we’d arranged to meet were in my back garden waiting for us. Lindsey and I peeped out of my bedroom window and saw them mucking about. One of them, Lee Dac, was doing Mr Motivator aerobics routines to keep warm, because it was the middle of winter. The other boys joined in and they were all flexing their muscles and posing. We thought it was hysterical, but we buttoned our lips and scrambled back into bed when we heard footsteps on the landing outside. ‘It’s me mother!’ Lindsey and I were trying not to snigger under our quilts, but the boys gave the game away because they’d started chucking clumps of mud at my bedroom window to get our attention. My mam must have heard them from her bedroom, and she stormed in and went berserk, pulling back my quilt and smacking me so hard that she nearly took my head off my shoulders. I literally saw stars, and I couldn’t believe it because my mam normally flounced around the house like a little fairy, being super gentle and soft. She’d given me a clip round the ear plenty of times before, or a smack on the legs when I was naughty, but nothing as bad as this. I’d never seen her lose it like this, ever. I was so shocked, and really annoyed that our camping adventure was over before it began. We couldn’t sleep and Lindsay and I stayed awake for ages, whispering to each other. ‘Have you kissed anybody yet?’ she asked me. ‘John Courtney,’ I confessed. My first kiss had happened quite recently in fact, in the back alley one afternoon after school. Me and John just liked each other and so we had a kiss, that was all. I was at that age when I was starting to get interested in boys, but it was all very innocent. I was a typical teenager, giggling like a little girl with my friends one minute and wanting to be all grown up with the boys the next. All of our family was close with John’s and I really liked him because he was very cheeky and always smiling. He was also a really good footballer. People said he had the potential to play for Newcastle one day. He trained hard and was ambitious, which I admired. I know it can’t have been true, but at the time it felt like me and him were the only two around our area who knew where we wanted to go. I never said that to any of my friends, of course, but that’s how it felt, especially now I was working at Metroland ‘I’ve got you a gig, Cheryl,’ Drew told me one day. ‘I think you’re ready for it.’ I’d done lots of rehearsals with him by now and I’d been on the stage plenty of times at Metroland. I honestly can’t remember much about my early performances there, but I think that’s because it really didn’t feel like a big deal to me. I must have been only 12 the first time I took the microphone, but right from the start I always felt very comfortable on the stage. It felt just like an extension of all my dance shows, except I happened to be singing as well. I think my experience of ballroom dancing, as well as ballet, helped. When I was younger I’d had a regular ballroom partner for a few years called James Richardson. We won loads of competitions and made the finals of the National Championships in Blackpool. The pair of us also appeared on Gimme 5 together and on Michael Barrymore’s My Kind of People, which at the time was a really popular TV show. We went our separate ways when I suddenly got taller than James, but it had all been good experience for me, and it meant Metroland just felt like the next step in my career. The audience would typically be made up of families on a day out, or other kids who’d been dropped off while their mam went shopping. I never felt under pressure because the atmosphere was always friendly and people always clapped and cheered. ‘What’s the gig?’ I asked Drew confidently. ‘You’re doing the warm up for Damage,’ he replied, which made my heart skip a beat. ‘Bring it on! Wait till I tell me sister!’ Damage was a really well-known boy band. To me they were proper, famous pop stars, but I wasn’t fazed at all. I felt ready, and I was really excited. When my big moment came I wore high-top trainers and baggy trousers with a little crop top, trying to look all cool and R&B like the boys. I remember my heart was pounding when I ran off the stage after completing a few well-rehearsed numbers, but my biggest memory from that time is being invited along to watch Damage perform on the Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party, which was a TV show filmed at the Metro Arena. This was a programme I’d watched for years, dreaming of being on it one day. I remember standing in that arena literally open-mouthed, feeling within touching distance of making my dream come true. ‘Wow! This is it!’ I thought. ‘This is what I want to do.’ From that point on I started performing regular gigs at Metroland. It was on the other side of the River Tyne to where we lived and took me 40 minutes to get there on the bus but I always did it willingly, every time. I just loved being on that stage. I felt alive. It’s where I felt like me. By contrast, when I was wearing my school trousers with their little pleats down the front, blue shirt, black blazer and striped Walker School tie I felt completely disinterested and out of place. My tie had a red stripe in it, showing I was in Walker House. ‘Red for danger’ the teachers probably thought, because I was nothing but trouble. ‘Cheryl Tweedy, you have brought shame on this school,’ my head teacher told me one day, after hauling me angrily into his office. I knew what this was about. A boy had spat at me on the bus, and so I’d sworn at him. That’s how I was brought up. If someone attacked a Tweedy, we were taught to defend ourselves. Right from when I was a small girl Joe and Andrew used to say to me: ‘Come on, Cheryl, if you don’t hit back you’ll get chinned.’ ‘But I’m a ballerina!’ I’d say. ‘Well, what are you going to do – pirouette them to death?’ My brothers would then hold up a couple of cushions and tell me to punch each one in turn. ‘Come on, Cheryl, left, right, left, right!’ I’d reluctantly hit the cushions as my brothers drummed it into me to always stand up for myself. ‘It wasn’t me that started it,’ I complained now to the head teacher, rolling my eyes insolently. ‘Take that chewing gum out of your mouth this instant! There was an old lady on that bus who has complained to the school, and she has identified you from a picture line-up.’ I was suspended for two weeks, which was the second time I’d had that punishment. On the previous occasion I’d been caught fighting, again when I was trying to stand up for myself. My dad never found out about the suspensions because he would have gone mental. Mam just said: ‘When will you learn, Cheryl?’ and sent me to go and tidy my bedroom, which was always a complete tip with crisp packets all over the floor. I spent the fortnight’s suspension mostly with Kelly. She wagged off and we went and stood outside the newsagent until we spotted someone who we thought looked like a ‘cool’ adult and wouldn’t mind buying us some cigarettes. ‘Excuse me, can you buy us 10 Lambert & Butler?’ we asked if we were feeling flush and had some of our ?1.50 weekly pocket money left. Otherwise we asked a likely looking adult to buy us a ‘single’, which usually meant we got a Regal cigarette. I smoked from about the age of 13, because everybody did. It was like with the vodka and Irn-Bru Dolly gave me. I didn’t really want the booze or the ‘tabs’, as we called cigarettes, but I knew that despite the scrapes I got into at school, most people saw me as a Goody Two-shoes because of my singing and dancing, and I didn’t want to stand out any more. For the same reason, it wasn’t long before I smoked weed too. Everybody did it and I gave in to peer pressure at a party in someone’s house one weekend. ‘Go on, Cheryl, it won’t kill you,’ one of the lads said, and so I puffed on a joint. I didn’t particularly like it, but after that I started smoking more and more. Loads, in fact. It didn’t seem to affect me that much; it just made me feel a bit more relaxed, like nicotine did. It did have one big advantage over cigarettes though: weed was a lot easier to get hold of because you didn’t have to ask an adult to go into the corner shop for you. It was always readily available on the street and that’s why I smoked so much of it. Other drugs were a different matter. I knew stuff like speed and Ecstasy and even cocaine were available on the street, but I was scared of all those drugs. I’d seen some of the older boys in local gangs looking completely out of control, off their heads on God knows what. Andrew’s glue-sniffing had freaked me out too, and I hated to see anyone with that crazed look in their eyes. My dad was fiercely anti-drugs, and so was Drew. They both drummed it into me to avoid drugs and I listened. I didn’t think they meant weed because everyone smoked weed, and it didn’t worry me because it didn’t make people lose control like all the other stuff did. Once I was well established at Metroland Drew started to encourage me to think about recording music as well as performing, and he began fixing up some studio sessions, both in Newcastle and down in London. I just went along with whatever he suggested. I was keen to learn, and going to London seemed like the right move if I wanted to make it as big as a band like Damage. ‘You hated it down there when you went to the Royal Ballet,’ my mam said. ‘I was only 10 years old!’ I replied. ‘It’s different now. I’m 14. I’m ready for it.’ She sent Gillian with me the first time I went to London, and a few times after that. We travelled in a tiny Mini Metro that only did about 60mph. A friend of Drew’s drove, and it felt like it took us about 20 hours to get down south. When I was there I did a ‘showcase’ for different record labels and met the ‘development team’ of a ‘management company’ called Brilliant. ‘What the hell does all that mean?’ Gillian asked. ‘I don’t have a clue,’ I replied. ‘I’ll just do me singin’ and then we’ll go home.’ It was always like that. It probably sounded quite glamorous to my mates back home but to me it wasn’t much different to going into the studio in Newcastle. I’d be asked to have a go at different tracks, and I knew I was one of lots of other teenagers who were looking for a break and doing exactly the same as me. We would usually travel there and back in a day, and I remember once the car got broken into when we stopped on the North Circular to go and get a McDonald’s on the way home. Gillian’s quilt was stolen along with a few of her bits and pieces, but the worst thing was that the whole back window was smashed out, and we had to drive all the way back to Newcastle with a plastic bag taped over the gap where the window should have been. The rustling noise did our heads in all the way home. It was freezing cold and we clung to each other for the whole journey, trying to keep warm. ‘Why is there always some kind of drama with you, Cheryl?’ Gillian moaned. ‘With me?’ I replied indignantly. ‘It’s not my fault we get into these types of pickles, is it?’ Not long after that trip I decided to dye my hair blonde. I loved Destiny’s Child and I wanted to be Beyonc?. ‘Blonde hair looks brilliant on her,’ I said to Gillian. ‘I’m sure it’ll work for me too. It’ll look good with me dark skin.’ Gillian didn’t try to stop me, even though I had form when it came to experimenting with this type of thing. One time I decided to wax my sister’s top lip by melting some candle wax, sticking it on her ‘tash’ and then ripping it off quickly when it hardened. Once that was done I dabbed the red-raw skin with lemon juice. God only knows what I was thinking. Gillian had a massive red rash for ages afterwards and Mam went crazy with me. I did the same to myself and to one of my cousins’ eyebrows once too, with the same disastrous results. Anyhow, I took myself off to a local hairdresser’s one day, where they put coconut bleach on my head for about eight hours. I sat there patiently, thinking it would all be so worth it, but I was absolutely mortified when they’d finished. I didn’t look anything like Beyonc?. Instead, to use Dolly’s phrase, I looked more like a ‘buckin’ Belisha Beacon’. I cried and cried, and Dolly’s daughter was so angry she took me back to the shop. ‘Cheryl, you look ridiculous!’ she said. ‘You should get a refund!’ Red-faced, I trailed back to the hairdressers with her, only to be sent away with the offer of a free conditioning treatment I didn’t even want. ‘If they think I’m stepping foot in there again they’ve got another thing coming,’ I sobbed. Before long Drew introduced me to Ricky, a musician friend of his down in London. Ricky had heard me sing, and he and his wife took quite a shine to me and said I could stay with them whenever I wanted to. Sometimes I did, or sometimes Gillian and I stayed in a ?19-a-night hotel with just a bed and a sink, but at least it meant I didn’t have to go up and down to Newcastle in one day if I had the opportunity of some studio time at Brilliant. I began writing songs with Ricky and I just loved it. I’d go down to London during every school holiday and sometimes at the weekends, getting a lift or taking the train to King’s Cross. I wasn’t being paid and I had never signed anything with Drew; I was just trying to get as much experience under my belt as I could. Brilliant eventually became the hugely successful 19 Management company, but back then it was only a small outfit, which was perfect for a teenager like me taking my first steps in the music industry. ‘You know what, Mam?’ I said one day. ‘Every time I get past Stevenage when I go down south I get a warm, tingling feeling in me body. It’s like I belong in London. It’s where I’m gonna be. And the funny thing is, the closer I get to home on the way back, the less I can breathe.’ Mam howled laughing, which was quite irritating seeing as she was supposed to be the spiritual one. I really did feel drawn to London, though. Everything looked twinkly down there. I can clearly remember the first time I saw Piccadilly Circus. ‘What is this?’ I thought, standing there looking at the giant advertising hoardings and flashy neon signs. Everything was sparkling, all around me. I’d been brought up to be streetwise and my dad in particular had always tried to keep my feet on the ground. But in London I couldn’t help dreaming big dreams. I was going to be a pop star. It was absolutely what I was going to do. I was 15 now, and my school days were very nearly over, thank God. ‘You need to try hard, Cheryl,’ my dad would say. ‘Get some exams under your belt and then you can get to college.’ ‘Dad, you don’t need GCSEs to have a number one record, and that’s how I’m going to make my living.’ While I was in my last couple of terms at school I got myself a job in the local caf?, JJs on Heaton Road. I wanted to earn money for clothes, as well as for my trips to London. I loved United Colours of Benetton at the time, and to afford clothes like that I’d started taking out loans with the ‘Provi’ man. He was always on the estate, the ‘Man from the Provident’, lending money out. I borrowed ?200 from him the first time, which I had to pay back in weekly instalments, with interest, of course. The caf? was perfect for me. It was only down the road from our house and I could work part-time, which meant I could earn a bit of money but still concentrate on my music. Right from the start I enjoyed chatting to the customers and making teas and coffees and all-day breakfasts. The owner, Nupi, was a lovely old Asian guy who’d led an amazing life. I was always attracted to people who had stories to tell, and we really hit it off. ‘Two teas, please, Smiler,’ Nupi said to me on the very first day, and the nickname stuck. I have to be honest here; a lot of the time I was smiling about something else that was going on in my life, rather than at the joy of frying bacon and making tea. I had a boyfriend, who I kept secret from just about everyone. I have never spoken about him before, but he was actually my first proper boyfriend, and he affected my teens in a massive way. Dave lived locally and I’d seen him around the estate for years before we started dating. I bumped into him in the street one day on the way home and I swear that something literally went ‘boom’ between us. I hadn’t seen him for a while and I had never fancied him before, but I fell for him in a big way, right there and then. I’d never experienced anything like it in my life before. He was absolutely gorgeous looking, and I could tell by the way he looked at me that he fancied me too. ‘Are you going to let me take you out for dinner?’ he asked after we’d done a bit of flirty catching up. The question took me completely by surprise. I’d never been taken out to dinner before. I knew Dave was quite a bit older than me and I felt very flattered. I’d kissed a couple of other boys since my very first kiss with John Courtney, and I’d been out with one or two other boys for a week or so here and there, but nothing serious. I’m sure I blushed, and I excitedly agreed to let Dave take me out. ‘How old are you?’ I asked on our first date. ‘24.’ I gulped. ‘Don’t worry,’ Dave smiled. ‘I will take good care of you.’ We were in a fancy restaurant and I felt incredibly grown up. Dave really knew how to treat a girl, or so I thought. After that he took me out for lots of candlelit dinners and he regularly bought me flowers, CDs, teddy bears – you name it. I fell for him in a huge way, and I mean huge. I didn’t tell a soul at first, because I was only 15 and still at school, and I knew my dad and Joe would go absolutely mad about Dave’s age. It was easy to meet in secret anyhow. Everyone was used to me going to Metroland on my own for hours on end, or to the local recording studios. It meant I didn’t have to lie or even sneak around when really I was going out with Dave. ‘Would you like to learn to drive?’ he said one night when he picked me up near school in his car. ‘I’m too young. How can I?’ ‘I know where we can go. Hop in.’ He took me to an empty car park in town, and that’s where I had my first driving lessons. It was so exciting. I’d still be in my school uniform, but I felt like a proper grown-up woman, madly in love for the very first time. It was a really amazing feeling. ‘Go on, have a smoke,’ Gillian said one day, passing me a joint. She was 19 and had left home by now and moved into a flat of her own, but she was in the kitchen of our house at Langhorn Close, smoking weed, with my mam standing right beside her. Mam knew Gillian smoked weed and just let her get on with it, saying: ‘You’re old enough to make your own decisions.’ But I was four years younger, and I would never have dreamed of smoking in front of my mam. I started shaking my head and looking at Gillian as if to say, ‘Are you mad?’ ‘Go on,’ my sister said cheekily. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t smoke it, Cheryl. I know you do.’ I was mortified, but Mam just looked at me and said very calmly, ‘If you’re going to do it, Cheryl, I’d rather know, and I’d rather you did it here.’ Gillian passed me the joint and I had a smoke. I didn’t enjoy it and I was furious with Gillian, but at least we all knew where we stood. I think my mam’s open-minded reaction that day helped me confide in her about my relationship with Dave, not too long afterwards. I was relieved when she didn’t seem too bothered about his age and was only concerned that he was treating me well. ‘He’s amazing,’ I reassured her. ‘He can’t do enough for me. We’re so happy together.’ It wasn’t long before Dave and I became intimate, and I wanted to take precautions. I confided in my mam again and she listened patiently and agreed to take me to the GP for the Pill. ‘I’m not one of those girls who sleeps around,’ I told her. ‘I’d never have a one-night stand.’ ‘I know that, Cheryl. I’m glad you’re being sensible.’ I was telling the absolute truth. I had always been ridiculously protective and respectful of myself, to the point where I’d been accused of being a prude many times. ‘We really love each other, Mam,’ I said. ‘He’s just the best.’ ‘As long as you’re happy and safe, Cheryl, that’s what matters.’ Dave and I were together for about 12 months, and he became the centre of my world. I lived and breathed for him, to the point where even my singing and dancing took a back seat. I’d write lyrics in my bedroom and I always had music playing, always. I couldn’t imagine a world without music, and R&B and soul were my favourites. I still loved pop music, especially anything by Destiny’s Child, but I’d been drifting away from Metroland for months now, and I’d also stopped going down to London. ‘What are you doing about your singing?’ Joe asked when I left school in the summer of 1999 and turned 16 a few weeks later, at the end of June. ‘Don’t you give it up! You need to sort your life out.’ I’d tell him not to worry. ‘I’m working more days in the caf? and it’ll happen when the time is right.’ ‘No, you need to make it happen,’ he’d argue. ‘I will … when the time is right.’ Working in the caf? did leave me less time for my singing and dancing, but the real reason I wasn’t pursuing my career was Dave. Thankfully, nobody else questioned me like Joe did. I think other people in the family just assumed things had changed in my life because I’d left school. There was also plenty going on in the family to take the focus away from me. For one thing, we’d just found out that Gillian was pregnant. She had a really strong relationship with her partner and everyone was very excited that there was going to be a new baby in the family. Mam was very pleased. It’s always been the done thing where I grew up to have your kids young, and it wasn’t unusual to become a grandmother in your late thirties or early forties. ‘Eee, I can’t wait,’ Mam told everyone who would listen. ‘A new bairn in the family. What could be better?’ ‘Will you be with me for the birth?’ Gillian asked me the minute her pregnancy was confirmed. ‘Of course I will!’ I replied, although I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for. We were both staring at the pregnancy test, and we worked out her baby was due in January 2000. ‘Oh my God, you might have the first Millennium baby!’ I shrieked, promising to hold Gillian’s hand every step of the way. The other big distraction for the family was Andrew. He was in Durham Prison now, having been moved there as soon as he was old enough to leave the young offenders’ institution. Garry and I went with Mam for prison visits sometimes. I always found the trips upsetting, even though the routine was soon so familiar it quickly became commonplace. ‘I’ve brought all your favourites from the machine,’ Mam would say, passing Andrew some Pot Noodles, fruit jellies and hot chocolate drinks. You had to put all your belongings in a locker before you went into the visitors’ room, but my mam would always make sure she had plenty of change in her purse for the vending machines once we got inside. Nobody talked about what Andrew had done. He would tell us about the canteen food or the latest fight he’d seen in the corridor and Mam would go ‘poor you’. It was always like that. ‘How’s the singing and dancing, Cheryl?’ Andrew usually asked me. ‘Fine. Just not doing so much now I’m in the caf? more.’ We’d shuffle out when the bell went, promising we’d be back soon. ‘Bye, pet,’ Mam would smile. It was the same smile she used when she said goodbye to me at the Royal Ballet all those years ago, or when she waved our Garry off on a school trip. She treated us all exactly the same, no matter what any of us did. ‘I’ve done something really stupid,’ one of my friends told me one day. She’d come into the caf? for a cup of tea and some sympathy. ‘It can’t be that bad. Tell me what you’ve done.’ She was in a terrible state and I sat down beside her and held her hand as she struggled to get the words out. ‘I had a one-night stand last night with someone …’ she sobbed. I gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Don’t cry. Do you want to tell me who with?’ She took a deep breath and said, ‘You know that Dave, the one who lives …’ Nothing could have prepared me for that. It literally took the breath out of me and I felt I was going to suffocate. Never, ever, could I have imagined Dave would have cheated on me, let alone with someone he knew to be my friend. We’d been dating for 12 months and he meant the whole world to me. I was madly in love with him and I thought he loved me too. I don’t remember my friend finishing her sentence but I heard enough to be left in absolutely no doubt she was talking about my boyfriend. My heart sank into my shoes and I started panicking like mad. I just couldn’t believe my ears. Nobody beside my mam knew I was dating Dave. My friend didn’t have a clue, and I certainly wasn’t going to enlighten her now. It was all far too much to deal with. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to get back to work,’ I gasped. I felt the colour fall out of my face and I ran into the kitchen, thinking I was going to choke or be physically sick. I don’t know how I struggled through to the end of my shift, but I did, smiling at the customers and chatting away as best I could. Afterwards I ran home, locked myself in my bedroom and cried my eyes out for hours and hours. I was heartbroken, absolutely devastated. They say the first cut is the deepest and they’re not wrong, or at least that’s how it felt at the time. I couldn’t imagine feeling a worse pain than this. It was like an actual physical stab to my heart. I eventually went round to Dave’s and went crazy, and I mean crazy. ‘It’s not true. She’s making it up,’ he said pathetically, but I knew it was him who was the liar. My friend was so ashamed of what she’d done and wished it wasn’t true. By contrast Dave had good reason to lie, and his deceit was written all over his face. I felt so disgusted and insulted that he had the cheek to deny it to my face after behaving like that behind my back. ‘I was so proud of you,’ I shouted. ‘I was so proud of us! I had a ridiculous amount of pride in our relationship. It was so good! You’ve ripped me heart out!’ The betrayal was just unbearable. I didn’t know how I was going to cope with it, and the truth is I didn’t. The next morning I got up late, moped around the house and smoked weed before I’d even eaten anything. It sounds so disgusting now, but that’s what I did. I literally turned into a depressed teenager overnight. At first I couldn’t bear to tell my mam what Dave had done to me because I knew it would have devastated her too. Instead, I bottled everything up, smoking more and more weed every day. I managed to drag myself into the caf? on the three or four days a week I worked and I somehow put on a brave face for the customers, but it was never easy. I remember having a row with Nupi once that must have been really bad, because he fired me on the spot even though we were close friends by then. I got another job in a pizza place, but after two weeks I was in a terrible state and Joe demanded to know what was going on. ‘I have to clean out this big dough machine,’ I cried. ‘And the owner is horrible. He keeps making suggestive remarks to me.’ Joe went crazy, threatened the guy and told me I was never stepping foot in the place again. When Nupi found out about the trouble he gave me a job in a new caf? he’d opened on the Quayside. ‘Thank you, Nupi, you’re a real friend,’ I told him, but inside I was dying, wondering how I was going to hold the job down when I felt so bad. All of those events are quite blurred in my head because, looking back, I had sunk into a very deep depression. I began having panic attacks, gasping for breath and feeling my heart racing for no reason. I was skinny to begin with but now I had absolutely no appetite, and my weight dipped to less than six stone. I was incredibly anxious all the time, to the point where it felt like my heart was beating so fast it was eating me up inside. I ate crisps and junk food to survive, but stopped having proper meals. I didn’t have a clue about healthy eating and couldn’t have told you the difference between protein and carbohydrate, so I had no idea how bad this was for my health. As the weeks went by I also became quite reclusive. If I didn’t have to go out to work I’d stay in the house in my pyjamas all day. Then I’d start feeling frightened and paranoid about ever going out again. I think I was a bit agoraphobic, because when I did step out of the house I felt really vulnerable, like something really bad was going to happen to me. Needless to say, my singing career was put completely on the back burner. I didn’t even have the will to sing in my bedroom or write the odd lyric, let alone think about getting back up on a stage. ‘I’m takin’ you to the doctor’s,’ Mam said one day. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ I think a few months had gone by, and I didn’t argue. The GP took one look at me and said flatly: ‘She’s depressed.’ I was given a prescription for beta-blockers and was told I was actually suffering from clinical depression. Apparently there was a history of it in the family. ‘The pills will slow your heart rate,’ I remember the doctor saying. ‘Good,’ I thought. ‘I’m sick of it beating so fast.’ The tablets were bright blue, but were not the magic cure I’d hoped for. From the very first day I hated taking them because they made me feel dizzy and sickly, and at night when the rest of the world got quiet my brain became super noisy and loud. ‘What’s the point of life?’ I’d think to myself. I was too much of a wimp to think about actually ending it all, but for a long time the thought wasn’t far away. ‘Pick your chin up,’ Joe would say to me if he came round and saw me still not dressed in the middle of the day – but some days I was too low to care what anybody thought of me, even my big brother. Sometimes I’d go round to the neighbours’ house, still in my pyjamas, and play with their dog, Oscar. I must have looked a total mess but I didn’t care about anything, least of all what I looked like. ‘You need to snap out of this,’ Joe would tell me, but I just didn’t know how. Joe had got himself a good job at the Nissan factory and his life was sorted, but I knew he’d had some problems in the past. He of all people was somebody I should have listened to, but I don’t think I was ready or capable of doing anything other than wallowing in my depression. ‘I wish I could snap out of it but I can’t,’ I’d think to myself, but I never said that to Joe. My dad was kept in the dark about a lot of this. ‘Cheryl, you’re looking a bit thin, sweetheart, are you eating enough?’ he would ask, but I never told him the half of it. He’d have gone mad if he’d known I was taking pills, and so I kept it from him. ‘It’ll pass,’ Mam said many times, but I didn’t believe her. Other relatives who knew I’d split up with my boyfriend, though they’d never met him, would say things like: ‘Never mind, Cheryl, that’s puppy love for you,’ or, ‘You’ll be seein’ someone else before you know it.’ I just couldn’t visualise myself with anybody else, and those sort of comments made me feel so alone, because it felt like nobody understood what I’d lost and the pain I was going through. It took at least six months for me to even begin to pick myself up and start seeing my friends again, but even then I was a shell of myself and it took me a few more months before I’d agree to do normal teenage stuff, like going out for a drink or to parties. One night I got talked into going to a house party on the other side of the estate, which I really wasn’t sure about. ‘I don’t want to be here,’ I thought as soon as I walked in the door. There was a guy sitting in the living room called Jason Mack, who was quite a bit older than me and ran a second-hand furniture shop on the corner of the street. I’d seen him around since I was about 10 years old, and I knew there had been a fire at his shop a few months earlier. ‘What happened?’ I asked him, just for something to say. My confidence was low, and I definitely wasn’t in a party mood. ‘I split up with my girlfriend and she tried to burn the shop down,’ Jason said. ‘My God, I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve had a horrible time too. I split up with my boyfriend not that long ago.’ We shared sob stories, smoked some weed and just chilled out together. I felt a connection to Jason, and that night I saw him as an equal for the first time, rather than the much older person I’d always viewed him as. I fancied him, actually. He had blond hair, blue eyes and nice teeth, and he told me he was 27. I was still only 16, but after my experience with Dave I definitely didn’t feel like an inexperienced young teenager, far from it. At the end of the night Jason gave me a kiss and I felt a spark of life inside me for the first time in nine months, which was the length of time I’d been on my own after Dave. ‘Do you fancy going out tomorrow, just the two of us?’ Jason asked. ‘Why not?’ I replied. I actually smiled and felt excited, and when I went to bed that night the noises in my brain weren’t quite as loud, because I’d cleared a little bit of space in my head to think nice thoughts about Jason. Maybe my life was about to become happier. I felt like it was, and I surprised myself by actually feeling ready to be happy again. 3 ‘Open up now or we’ll take your kneecaps off’ (#ulink_3b315b3f-8fa3-56f4-8674-8129fd70489a) ‘I want Tweety Pie on me bum with “Warren” underneath,’ I told Tony as I lay face down on the couch in his tattoo parlour. Gillian had had the baby, a gorgeous little boy, and her dad Tony was buzzing, like everybody else in the family. I went through the whole labour by my sister’s side, though I can’t have been any use at all. I was still only 16 and didn’t have a clue about birth or babies. ‘Try this position,’ I said at one point, showing Gillian a poster on the wall. ‘That’s telling us what NOT to do, Cheryl,’ she yelled in agony and frustration. When Warren was born it was the most mind-blowing, beautiful moment ever. It completely and utterly took my breath away and I felt incredibly close to my sister, and my new nephew. ‘I’ll help you look after him,’ I volunteered straight away. I just wanted to squeeze Warren and never let him go, he was that adorable. We all wanted a tattoo to celebrate the new arrival. Tony had done my first tattoo, the tribal one on my lower back, and I wanted him to have the honour of doing this one too. He was so proud to be a granddad, and by the time it was my turn he’d spent all day inking the word ‘Warren’ onto the arms and backsides of about half a dozen relatives. I’d got to know Tony quite well over the past five years or so, since the big bomb went off in the family and we found out about him. Once the initial shock had subsided, I went round to meet him and was absolutely gobsmacked. ‘He looks like our Andrew. He even walks like our Andrew!’ I said. ‘I can’t get over it!’ Right from that first day I viewed Tony more like another brother, rather than seeing him as Joe, Gillian and Andrew’s real dad. I showed my new tattoo off proudly to Jason. We’d been seeing each other for a little while, and I was really into him. ‘I’m so happy with it,’ I told him. ‘You look it,’ he said, smiling and giving me a kiss. By now I’d stopped taking the beta-blockers but I wasn’t completely better because I was still having panic attacks from time to time. I just couldn’t seem to shake them off, but whenever I was with Jason I felt happy. He’d take me for dinner or to the pictures. Other times we’d order takeaway pizzas or buy loads of sweets and crisps from the corner shop and sit in watching Corrie together at my mam’s. I was really enjoying working at the caf? on the Quayside, and I’d try out my cooking skills on Jason and make him scrambled eggs with melted cheese on top, or sausage and bacon sandwiches. I liked to spoil him, and on my days off I’d take the food into his shop at lunchtime. Gillian was working in the caf? now too, and I looked after Warren for her on my days off. I’d learnt how to feed and change him and I absolutely loved him. ‘I want lots of children,’ I thought to myself. ‘And I want to have my kids young.’ Gillian was only 21, but that was seen as the perfect age to start your family, and I definitely wanted to start early too. ‘How’s the songwriting going?’ Jason asked me from time to time. He knew all about the singing and dancing I’d done over the years, and how I’d let everything slip after my last relationship. I’d started writing a few lyrics again but I didn’t have a plan about where I was going from there. I was just happy to be back on my feet after Dave, and I’d tell Jason, ‘It’s good. I love it,’ and we’d leave it at that. Jason’s furniture business was thriving. He was doing a lot of house clearances as well as running the second-hand shop, and he had a good reputation in the trade. Locally, he was viewed as someone who was making a success of his life. My family didn’t like the fact Jason was 11 years older than me, but if anyone said anything I always reassured them I was fine. ‘I’ve got an old head on me shoulders,’ I’d say. ‘Jason understands me.’ They could see how much better I was, and they left me alone. Andrew came out of prison around this time, which was another positive thing in my life. He’d served four years and I assumed being locked up would have taught him a lesson and that he would put his criminal past behind him. He’d been inside for most of his teenage years, and I hoped he’d start a great, new life. My relationship with Jason progressed really quickly, and when I was 17 we moved into a flat together just over the road from my mam’s. It was that close, in fact, you could see into the kitchen from her front window. All Jason and I had to begin with was a second-hand kettle from his shop and a tiny black-and-white TV with a piece of wire sticking out the top, which you had to twist around to stop the picture from fuzzing. There was one bedroom and a bathroom you couldn’t turn around in, but it was ours. ‘What’s for tea tonight?’ Jason would ask when he went out to work in the morning, because he knew I liked to cook for him and was enjoying being a little homemaker. ‘I’m makin’ us chops with gravy and veg,’ I’d say excitedly. I was feeling stronger all the time, and I was looking a lot better and gaining a bit of weight. ‘Can’t wait,’ he’d wink. A look from him would make my heart jump. I felt alive, like a normal teenager. I was finally through the darkness. One night I arranged to meet Jason at a friend’s flat not far from ours. We were all going to just chill out together, that’s what I thought. I took a bit of money in case we wanted to get a takeaway and I was looking forward to a relaxing evening, but when I walked in the flat my heart nearly stopped. Jason was standing there in front of me, but he looked like a total stranger. His jaw was swinging everywhere, he was talking absolute rubbish and his eyes looked black instead of blue, because his pupils were so big. ‘What’s he taken?’ I screamed. Jason was swaying in front of me with a crazed, aggressive look on his face and I started panicking like mad. ‘Tell me what he’s taken! Jason, what have you taken?’ I knew he hadn’t got like this by smoking weed, but I knew nothing about the type of drugs that did this to you. ‘Cocaine,’ his mate confessed. ‘He did cocaine.’ I got Jason home eventually but I didn’t sleep a wink all night. When he finally came down and took control of himself again I begged him, ‘Please don’t ever do this again. It was so horrible to see you in that state.’ ‘I won’t. I’ll never touch it again,’ he promised. ‘I don’t know what possessed me.’ I hated drugs with an absolute passion. Anything other than weed frightened me to death, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to get high like that, or into a state where they were out of control and frightening the people who cared about them. ‘I’m so sorry, Cheryl,’ Jason said, when I told him exactly how I felt. ‘The last thing I would ever want to do is scare you.’ Not very long after that night I bumped into my old friend Lee Dac. He was one of the boys who had been in my back garden doing the Mr Motivator routine the night my mam found Lindsey and I fully clothed in our beds, planning to sneak out and go camping. I saw Lee standing outside the metro station and he told me brightly that he was going to see Andrew at a party in two days’ time. ‘That’s good to hear,’ I said, thinking it was just like old times, with my brother back in the neighbourhood. ‘Hope you enjoy yourselves.’ ‘Thanks, Cheryl. You take care of yourself.’ Just four days after that encounter I was talking to another old friend, a girl I’d grown up with, when her sister ran over to us in a panic and said, ‘Have you heard about Lee?’ We both looked at her sister blankly and I felt my pulse quicken. ‘No, what’s happened?’ I asked. ‘He’s been found dead. Suspected overdose.’ The words hit me like bricks and I could feel my legs buckle. Lee had always been in and out of my life, ever since I was about 10 or 11 years old. He was one of the lads everybody knew and I was just so shocked. I started shaking and feeling sick as my friend’s sister went on to say he had taken heroin. ‘It just shut his whole system down, just like that,’ she said. My friend collapsed, sobbing hysterically, and that was a shock in itself because she was a super-confident person, the type we called an ‘it’ girl. I’d never seen her lose her composure before, ever, and I started crying and trembling and thinking about how I’d seen Lee alive and well, just a few days before. It didn’t seem possible. The news spread like wildfire, and Andrew came round to see me in a terrible state. ‘I’m gonna kill the drug dealers,’ he ranted. ‘How can this happen? I saw him two days ago! We had a laugh together. I saw him at a party. It was just like old times and he was absolutely fine. This is just insane! Someone’s gonna pay for this!’ Andrew asked me if I’d go with him to the funeral parlour to say goodbye to Lee, and I agreed even though I didn’t want to. As soon as we got there I really wished I hadn’t gone. I was totally unprepared for what I was about to see, and the hideous memory of that day has stayed with me ever since. Lee was lying in his coffin wearing his best shirt and smelling of his favourite aftershave. The smell was so powerful it made him seem alive, and I wanted to speak to him but knew I couldn’t. He still had the spots on his face he’d had the few days before when I’d seen him at the metro station. ‘What have you done?’ Andrew screamed at Lee. ‘What have you done?’ It was just so painful and heartbreaking. Lee was like a waxwork of himself and I just couldn’t take it in that he was not breathing and I would never talk to him or see him again. I didn’t feel strong enough to go to the funeral because I knew Lee’s mother was in a terrible state and I couldn’t bear to see her grieving so badly, so I stayed at home and cried all day long. Jason wiped away my tears. He was as shocked and gutted as the rest of us. ‘What is this drug?’ I cried. Heroin seemed to have just come out of nowhere. I’d heard of people taking speed and Ecstasy on our estate and I knew about cocaine because of Jason, but in my mind heroin was some obscure rock-and-roll drug from the Seventies that had no place on our estate at all. What was it doing here, killing my friend? Lee’s death sent shockwaves around the whole of Newcastle. It was the first case anybody really knew of, or at least that’s how I remember it. You’d have thought such a disturbing death of a teenage boy would have shocked people into running a mile from heroin – that’s certainly how it made me feel – but no, it wasn’t like that at all. Unbelievably, my other friend was so cut up about Lee’s death she lost it completely and started taking heroin herself. I knew users said it gave you the most amazing feeling, but I’d also learned by now that you could get hooked after taking heroin just once, and then if you didn’t carry on smoking or injecting the drug it would make you feel very ill. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said over and over again to Jason. ‘I just don’t get it. Is this really happening?’ Not long after Lee’s death a girl I went to Walker School with also died from a heroin overdose. Then another friend of mine, Kerry, who’d been in the year above me at school, started taking it with her boyfriend. She was killed after going round to her drug dealer’s flat armed with a knife. A fight broke out and Kerry was stabbed in the main artery in her neck and bled to death. Other friends of mine went to see her in the funeral parlour and told me she had a patch on her neck, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head for the longest time either. ‘It’s like an epidemic,’ I cried to Jason. ‘Like this evil presence has just landed here and started killing all my friends.’ It felt like heroin divided the estate overnight after Lee’s death. You were either on it or you weren’t, but most people went to it. According to the papers a lot of them were trying to escape from the pressures of unemployment and living in what was, at the time, one of the most deprived areas in the country. That was the explanation, but I didn’t understand it at all. Heroin was cheap compared to cocaine, yet people were thieving to pay for their habit and ending up in prison. It was a hideous vicious circle of self-destruction. ‘Why?’ I kept saying, each time I heard of another neighbour or old friend using it. ‘Can’t people see it’s ruining lives?’ I just didn’t get it at all, but it seemed that people who kept away from it like me were a rarity. My world was shrinking, because I was outside the dark circle, and the dark circle was growing bigger all the time. My friend who I was with when I found out about Lee went into total meltdown and became a full-blown junkie. I remember walking into her flat one day unannounced, and she jumped up and shoved something under the settee. It was silver foil and I just screamed at her: ‘You’re smoking heroin. I think you’re an absolute disgrace!’ She told me it made her feel good, gave her an escape. I just couldn’t comprehend it. She was someone I’d known since the age of seven. She’d always been the one who was popular and had nice clothes. I’d looked up to her for years, and now she was crumbling in front of me. I thanked God I had Jason, because the rest of my world was disappearing so fast. ‘I’ll bring you some dinner into the shop,’ I said to him one day. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I can just grab something.’ ‘I know, but I want to.’ I was on a day off and I didn’t have anything else to do. So many of my friends were now on drugs I hardly saw anybody else outside of my family, and Dolly. I didn’t even look after Warren any more because Gillian had decided she was missing out on seeing him grow up and had given up working at the caf?. At lunchtime I walked into Jason’s shop with a bacon sandwich, expecting his face to light up when he saw me. He didn’t notice me come in because he was searching through the Yellow Pages, but my heart stopped when I looked at him. Jason had a roll of silver foil behind his ear, wedged there like a cigarette. It was the same silver foil I’d seen my friend trying to hide in her flat, and I knew exactly what it was used for. To complete the picture there was a known heroin addict sitting in the corner of the shop. ‘What the hell are you doing!’ I screamed, charging over to Jason and slapping him across the face as hard as I could. I must have knocked him into the middle of next week I hit him that hard, and then I pegged it down the street with tears streaming down my cheeks. ‘Come back! I can explain everything! It’s not what you think! Jason chased after me, screaming and shouting and swearing blind he wasn’t on heroin. ‘Look at me,’ he said when he caught up with me outside my mam’s house. ‘Do I look like I’m on heroin? You’ve got it all wrong, Cheryl.’ He certainly didn’t look out of control, not like he had done when he took cocaine. His pupils weren’t huge and he wasn’t being aggressive or talking rubbish. ‘What about the silver foil and that smackhead in the shop?’ ‘The foil belongs to him, and you’re right, I shouldn’t have him in the shop. But honest to God, I’m not on it, Cheryl. What do you take me for? I swear to you, I’m not taking heroin.’ ‘Look me in the eye and say that again,’ I said to him, and he did, over and over again. ‘I swear I’m not on heroin. You have to believe me. I’m not like that. I’m not stupid. I’ve seen what it does to people. I only smoke weed. Come on, Cheryl, don’t do this.’ I was too young and na?ve to realise it at the time, but Jason was an extremely good liar. In the months to come he would pull every trick in the book to disappear and take drugs, always coming up with a more elaborate excuse. Sometimes he’d pick a fight with me about absolutely nothing, and then go missing for four days because of what I’d said or done. Whenever he did one of his disappearing acts I’d be beside myself with worry, not knowing where the hell he was or even if he was alive or dead. We didn’t have mobile phones, and I literally had to sit tight and wait for him to come back. I’d get so worried I could barely sleep or eat, and I’d survive on cups of tea and the odd McDonald’s. ‘Have you calmed down now?’ he’d ask when he finally came home, pretending he’d had to get away from me because we’d had a row. ‘Where have you been?’ I’d cry. ‘For God’s sake, Cheryl! Why are you starting on me again?’ It was like that all the time. I should have just walked away, but I’d already had one bad relationship and I wanted to believe this one was different. I was determined not to let it fail, however much Jason pushed me. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time it was almost like the worse it got, the more I fought to make it work. For instance, one night Jason and I stayed the night at my mam’s house and when we got into bed he suddenly started kicking the blankets off, really violently. Then I noticed his nipples were unnaturally hard, like plastic, and he had these absolutely massive goosebumps over his whole body. I didn’t know what was happening but I was sure his behaviour had to be linked to hard drugs. I should have just kicked him out and ended the relationship there and then, but instead we had another massive fight that ended up with my mam phoning Jason’s brother to come to the house to help. ‘I’m sure he’s using heroin,’ I told his brother. ‘She’s crazy,’ Jason replied, though he was shivering and sweating and twitching now. ‘I only smoke weed. She’s been depressed. She’s a nutcase. She’s been on pills. Don’t listen to her. I’m going home.’ He messed with my head so much I didn’t know what to believe, even though I look back now and think it was so obvious he was cold turkeying that night, as he hadn’t had his fix of heroin and was experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Another time, I got back to the flat to find I was locked out and Jason wouldn’t let me in. I took off my shoe and put the window through, because I was desperate to get inside and stop him taking drugs. Jason picked up a shard of the broken glass, and when I ran back to my mam’s screaming he followed me with it. I was terrified. My mam was in the bath, and she got out when she heard my screams. ‘I was bringing this to show you what she’s done,’ Jason said to my mam, waving the glass in front of her. ‘I don’t know why she’s behaving like this. She’s crackers.’ Even when I walked into our flat in broad daylight one time and found two guys sitting on our bed, trying to hide a big roll of foil under their feet, Jason denied he was on heroin. I went crazy, clonking all three of them over the head with the foil roll before hitting out at Jason with my fists. We’d had plenty of fights before but, although I’d slapped him in the shop, that was the first time I’d actually punched him. I shocked myself. I didn’t even know who I was any more. I just didn’t recognise myself. ‘You’ve got users in my flat,’ I screamed. ‘You’ve told me lie after lie after lie and now you’re rubbin’ me face in it!’ Jason threw me out of the flat. This relationship was killing me, but still something inside made me determined to keep fighting for him. I’d seen so many people turn their backs on addicts, and I just believed I had it in me to be able to get us both out of this dark, dingy hole we’d sunk into. ‘Cheryl! What just happened?’ It was Dolly’s daughter, and she couldn’t believe she’d just seen Jason behaving aggressively towards me, or that I was even in a situation like this. ‘Cheryl, what’s going on?’ she said. Dolly’s daughter knew me as a skinny little thing who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, not someone who would be fighting with her boyfriend in the street. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about me. It’s nothing serious.’ I was too proud to tell any of my friends what was really going on, and nobody knew how bad things really were or how aggressive and unpredictable Jason’s behaviour could be. Not long after that incident, Jason’s drug-taking took me to a whole new level of terror. ‘Open up now or we’ll take your kneecaps off!’ It was the middle of the night when I woke up to hear that threat being growled through the walls. I thought I was having a nightmare at first because it sounded like something out of a scary film, but when I sat bolt upright in bed I knew it was very real. There were two men hammering on the door of our flat, and I started shaking from head to foot and asking Jason what the hell was happening. ‘Keep quiet,’ Jason hissed. ‘They’ll think we’re not in.’ The banging and shouting went on for ages and the walls of the flat were so thin I could feel our whole bedroom shaking. I was so scared I could hardly breathe, and I wanted to throw up. ‘How come we’ve got crazy men knockin’ on the door, threatening to hurt you, if you’re not involved in drugs?’ I said when I eventually got my breath back, after the men gave up and went away. ‘How the hell do I know? They must have got the wrong address.’ The lies were pathetic, but Jason was very clever. By now I had seen him many times with his head hanging and no pupils in his eyes, which is what heroin does, but I had still never caught him actually smoking it. Whenever he’d been wasted like that he’d always tell me I was crazy to think he was on heroin. ‘I’ve had a few joints,’ he’d say. ‘Just chill out. What’s wrong with you?’ I’d stopped smoking weed myself by now because I didn’t know if it was making me paranoid or not, and I knew I had to be normal so I could work out what the hell the truth was with Jason. One morning, not long after the crazy men had been to the door, I woke up with a very clear head and had an incredibly powerful feeling that I was about to find the proof I needed, to show Jason I was not mad, and that he was the one who had the problem. ‘Check his pockets.’ That’s what I thought as soon as I opened my eyes. I’m not like that and I have never snooped on anybody in my life, but I felt such a strong instinct that I just had to do it. Jason had gone to work and his jacket was right there in front of me. The coast was clear but I was still shaking with nerves, because I almost knew what I was going to find before I looked. Inside Jason’s pocket I found a yellow plastic capsule from the inside of a chocolate Kinder egg, and in the middle of it were loads of wraps of heroin. Seeing the drugs with my own two eyes changed everything, in a heartbeat. I wasn’t going to give Jason the opportunity to lie his way out of this. That would have been just too insulting, even by his standards. I wanted to flush the heroin down the toilet but I didn’t want to be responsible for Jason getting kneecapped by the dealers, so I opened the wraps and sprinkled the drugs all over our bed. Then I wrote Jason a Dear John, spilling my heart out onto two sides of A4 paper: ‘It’s over. I’ve lost sight of my dreams. I have to get out of this dark hole. I’m killing myself with worry.’ That’s what it was like. I left it there and went to my mam’s in floods of tears. Jason flipped when he got back. He came round to my mam’s like a mad person, fighting with me and screaming, telling me I was crackers and paranoid, but I said to my mam, ‘This is it, it’s over.’ She came with me to the flat to help me get my stuff. One of the only things I owned besides my clothes was a set of jars for the tea, coffee and sugar. I’d loved buying them, enjoying setting up my first flat, but now I started emptying the contents all over the kitchen worktop. I thought I had to empty the jars before I could take them away; that’s how distraught and disturbed I was. Jason appeared at the door as I was tipping the sugar out, and he charged straight over to me, looking exactly like he was going to kiss me. I had no time to react before his lips were on mine, but he didn’t kiss me – he bit my mouth, hard. I had a scar on my lip from an old dog bite, and I felt it rip open. ‘Mam!’ I cried out as soon as I managed to pull away from him and draw breath. ‘He just bit me face!’ ‘She’s cracked in the head,’ Jason said, looking my mam straight in the eye. ‘Don’t believe her. She’s mad.’ Jason didn’t realise it, but my mam had been on her way into the kitchen just as he bit me, and she’d seen everything. She was looking at me in absolute horror. Blood was seeping out of my lip now and there was no denying what had gone on, yet Jason carried on looking at my mam very calmly and continued to repeat his defence. ‘She’s mad. She’s making it up.’ It was the first time anybody had fully witnessed just how badly Jason treated me, twisting the truth and trying to make me question myself like that. ‘I’m getting you out of here right now, Cheryl,’ Mam said, bundling me and my belongings out of the flat as quickly as she could. She was so shocked by what she’d seen, and she couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. When I got back to my mam’s the sense of relief was overwhelming and immediate. Without realising it, I’d been very alone for a long time when I was living with Jason. Mam cuddled me and told me things would get better. It was the best feeling ever and as I cried in her arms I realised that I felt relieved to be rid of Jason – not just for myself, but for my whole family too. He’d driven a wedge between me and my family and had been a burden to everyone, although I couldn’t see that until he was finally out of my life. It had been my eighteenth birthday about six months earlier, and I thought about how a big group of us had gone out to a local Chinese restaurant. I really wanted it to be a special evening. I pretended it was, but I knew that Jason was out of his head the whole time. None of the family said anything but, as I looked back now with my eyes wide open, I could see their faces in a whole new light. They were all looking at Jason as if to say: ‘Are you for real?’ A weight had been lifted from all of our shoulders now. That’s how it felt, very powerfully. Joe was on my case straight away. He’d met his wife by this time and his life was all mapped out, which made him act the big brother even more forcefully than usual. ‘What are you gonna do with your life?’ he’d ask me every time I saw him. ‘You’re not doin’ anything with your singin’. Why not? You need to sort yourself out, Cheryl, because nobody else is gonna do it for you.’ I knew he was right, but I also knew I had to get myself strong again first, both physically and mentally. My heart ached for ages, and I just needed some time for the pain to heal. ‘I’m gonna do it, Joe, don’t worry. I’m gonna make it.’ I firmly believed this, even though I’d slipped so much further away from my dream than I ever had before. ‘I’ll get my dream back on track,’ I promised. 4 ‘I’m so proud of you I could pop’ (#ulink_06dcb15b-ba49-5c1c-a295-41513bd3575e) ‘I’ve seen this advert on TV for a show called Popstars: The Rivals,’ I said to our Garry one day. ‘I’m thinkin’ of applyin’.’ ‘I thought you hated all that,’ he said, looking at me as if I’d gone crazy. Garry had a point. When the shows Popstars and Pop Idol had been on in recent years I’d always said I’d never go down that route. ‘I’d rather do it by meself,’ I remember saying cockily, several times. This was a new show, though, and the idea really appealed to me. Popstars: The Rivals was going to create one girl band and one boy band which would compete against each other in the race for the Christmas number one. ‘How cool would that be?’ I said to Garry. ‘Imagine being in a girl band and hanging out with a group of girls all the time. I’d love it. If that ad comes on again, write the number down for me …’ Spookily, at that very second the advert flashed up on the telly. Garry and I looked at each other and screamed in surprise as we scrabbled for a pen and he wrote the number down. I phoned up straight away and asked for an application form, hardly able to believe this had all happened in the space of a few minutes. ‘How weird was that?’ I said to my mam afterwards. ‘It must have been meant to be, Cheryl. Good luck.’ ‘Thanks, Mam. Don’t tell anyone else I’m applyin’, will ya?’ It was about four or five months since my split from Jason and I was in a much better place. Even so, if this didn’t work out, I’d rather keep it to myself. I didn’t want anybody worrying about me all over again. A few weeks after leaving Jason I had started contacting old friends I’d slowly cut myself off from when I was with him. One friend, a girl from Liverpool, had asked if I fancied a waitressing job on the Tuxedo Princess, which was a floating nightclub on the Tyne. It was only about six weeks after the split when she asked me and I was still a shell of my former self, totally lacking in confidence and all skinny and washed out. I didn’t even have my job in the caf? any more, because Jason had got me in such a state towards the end of our relationship that I couldn’t even cope with that. ‘Surely you don’t want to give me a job?’ was my reaction. ‘I’m proud of you for getting out of that relationship,’ my Scouse friend said. ‘I believe in you.’ She needed someone to serve shots of cocktails like ‘sex on the beach’ on the boat two nights a week, and after a bit of persuasion I agreed to give it a go. Right from the first night I could feel that it was doing me good to have to do my hair and put on a dress, and it was amazing how easy I found it to socialise again. Meeting people who were normal and pleasant and out to have fun on the boat was just so refreshing, and each time I went to work I smiled and enjoyed myself. ‘I can see the future again,’ I thought. That’s exactly how I was feeling in August 2002, when I received a letter inviting me to the London auditions of Popstars: The Rivals. In my application form I’d explained all about my performances at Metroland and my recording experience, and I’d attached a little passport-sized picture I’d had done in a photo booth in the shopping centre. I was quietly optimistic when I sent it off because even though I’d done nothing with my singing for a good couple of years, I had a very strong gut feeling that the audition would go well. The feeling I had was so powerful I swear it was almost spiritual, but I was determined to be very level-headed about it too, and not let my intuition rule my head. ‘I’ll just do me best,’ I told myself as I prepared to travel down to London a week or so later. ‘That’s all I can do. There’s nothing to lose.’ I got a loan from the Provi man for ?100 and took myself off to River Island, where I bought some little shoes with heels, a pair of brown trousers with a pleat down the front, a flowery top and a choker with a cross on it. As I packed I practised the song I’d chosen to sing. I was heavily into R&B and soul music, but I knew because of the title of the show I needed to sing a pure pop song, and so I chose S Club 7’s ‘Have You Ever’, because it was the pop-iest thing I knew. ‘If you don’t get in, you can just come home.’ That’s what I was thinking to myself as I got on the train to London. I was 19 years old. I was all by myself and my heart and head were full of nervous excitement the whole journey. When I arrived at King’s Cross I felt the old familiar tingle in my bones that I first experienced four or five years earlier on my trips to London. It was that exciting feeling that I was in this twinkly, sparkly place, where I felt sure my future lay. It was like a sixth sense; I can’t explain it any other way. This was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. That’s how I felt as I made my way to a little hotel near Wembley Stadium, close to where the auditions were being held. I was on my own, and my future was completely in my hands. Nobody was there to help me, but then again nobody was there to drag me down, either. This was all up to me, and on top of all my other emotions I felt proud of myself for being there, for pursuing what I loved. I could so easily have curled up into a ball in Newcastle, but I hadn’t, and I felt good about myself. I can barely remember singing my song to the producers, which was the first hurdle I had to face, because I was that nervous. I will never forget coming face to face with the three judges though: Louis Walsh, Pete Waterman and Geri Halliwell. I knew Louis managed Westlife and Boyzone and had been a judge on the Irish version of Popstars the year before, but that was about it. I also knew that Pete Waterman was one of the famous Stock Aitken Waterman music producers and had also been a Pop Idol judge. The person I was most daunted by, though, was Geri Halliwell, because she was so famous. I’d listened to the Spice Girls when I was growing up and had really liked them, and to be stood in front of Ginger Spice herself was really intimidating. ‘Breathe,’ I told myself as I took centre stage, wearing a badge with my identification number: L786. ‘And don’t forget to smile.’ I think I only sang for about half a minute before the judges stopped me, and Louis said, ‘I wanna put her through.’ ‘You have the most beautiful eyes and skin I think I’ve ever seen in my life,’ Pete Waterman said, which took me completely by surprise. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a compliment like that and it gave me a real boost. Then all three judges started saying things to me at once, asking if I was sure I wanted to be a pop star, and if I realised how much hard work it would be. Geri told me it wasn’t glamorous, and Louis said: ‘It’s early mornings, late nights and lots of bullshit.’ I told them I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else, which was the honest truth. As I walked out of the room shaking, smiling and thanking them all, it felt surreal. I’d got through to the next round, and it had all happened in one crazy minute! My head was spinning and spinning. It was just so exciting. I phoned my mam straight away to tell her the good news. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell our Garry. I’m just cooking his tea.’ There was no hoo-hah, but I think that was a good thing. I needed to keep my feet on the ground and focus on the next stage of the competition. There was a whole week of singing and dancing auditions to get through next, with the aim of selecting 10 girls and 10 boys who would battle it out for a place in the boy band and the girl band. Looking back, that entire week is quite a blur in my head as I was a complete emotional wreck. I spent the whole time either on my own in my hotel room thinking about what I had to do next, or giving it my all in front of the judges. There was nothing else in my life, because nothing else mattered. When Louis told me I’d made the last 15 I couldn’t stop crying, but it was Geri who delivered the really big news, travelling up to Newcastle to tell me I’d got into the final 10 and would be competing in the finals, live on TV. Geri didn’t tell me quite as plainly as that, of course. As I would have to learn myself in years to come, it makes better television if you string out the moment when the big decision is revealed. It’s something I hated then and I still hate now, but Geri played the game brilliantly. I remember sitting in my mam’s front room listening to Geri rambling on and on for what felt like an age. I really couldn’t make head nor tail of what she was on about, and I felt absolutely terrified. ‘You’re in!’ she said eventually, to which I replied, ‘You shouldn’t do that. That was really horrible. You shouldn’t be allowed to do things like that to people.’ I was so excited and wanted to tell everybody, but the news had to be kept secret until all the auditions and heats we’d gone through so far had been shown on television. In the meantime, I had to move down to London to share a house with the other girl finalists and prepare for the live shows. Just as I was packing my bags, the phone rang and I ran downstairs to answer it. It was Dolly’s daughter, and my immediate thought was that I wished I could tell her and her mam my good news before I left Newcastle. ‘I’m sorry Cheryl, it’s not good news.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Me mam’s died. It was the emphysema. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.’ I think I just stood there, gasping for air. Dolly had been like a grandmother to me, and her death devastated me all the more as I hadn’t been able to share my news with her before she passed away. I immediately wondered if I should still go down to London. ‘When’s the funeral?’ I whispered, although straight away I knew that I wouldn’t want to go. Funerals made me think of Lee Dac lying in his coffin, and I absolutely hated them with a passion. I also thought of the deaths of two of my own grandparents. My mam’s dad had died of drink when I was 14, and I never met my other grandfather. He died of a heart attack after playing a game of football, and actually collapsed in my father’s arms, when my dad was only 17. The first time I heard that story I sobbed my heart out, thinking how terrible that must have been for my dad, coping with that at such a young age. I imagined him crying, and ever since that day I’ve never been able to bear seeing grown men cry. I definitely didn’t want to go to this funeral, but I desperately didn’t want to let Dolly down either. ‘Next week, not sure which day yet,’ came the reply. I felt panicky. I had no idea what my schedule was the following week. I cried my eyes out when I came off the phone, but when I eventually dried my tears I had a very clear thought in my head. ‘What would Dolly want me to do?’ ‘Get on the buckin’ train, Cheryl,’ I heard Dolly’s voice say, and so that is what I did. I was told later that I was named as one of Dolly’s granddaughters at her funeral, which was very moving. Looking back, I think Dolly’s passing made me more determined than ever to succeed, not just for myself, but to make the people who loved me proud. In what felt like the blink of an eye, I now found myself living in a huge mansion worth millions of pounds in Weybridge, Surrey, along with nine other girls, including Nadine Coyle and Sarah Harding and, eventually, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh. The house absolutely amazed me. I’d never even stayed in a nice hotel before, let alone a place like this. Everything was shiny and luxurious and there was even a swimming pool, which made it seem even more grand. ‘This is just mad!’ Nicola said when she moved in a little while after me. I clicked with Nicola straight away. I’ve always liked Scousers because they tend to have the same mentality and sense of humour as Geordies, and I soon found out that Nicola was from a similar background to me too. We laughed our heads off about how different this house was to what we were used to back home in Newcastle and Liverpool. Nicola was very striking and I thought her long red hair was absolutely stunning, but she was painfully shy and right from the start I felt very protective towards her. She was only 16 and I wanted to take care of her, like she was my little sister. Nicola had actually been sent home from the competition earlier on but was given a second chance after another girl decided to pull out at the last minute. I would have found that very stressful, but despite the set-back and her shyness, Nicola actually had an amazing amount of self-confidence, because she knew she was a good singer. ‘I know I’ll get through,’ she’d say every week. Deep down, I also had plenty of self-belief, but that didn’t stop me suffering badly with nerves. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let the nerves ruin your chances, not now you’ve come this far,’ I told myself over and over. I also had the attitude: ‘If I don’t make it this time, I’ll still get there,’ which was a great leveller for me. I was enjoying myself like I never had before, which helped a lot too. It was summertime, the sun was shining and I was spending my days practising my singing, making friends with girls who were all chasing the same dream, and all in such amazing surroundings. Even if I didn’t make the band, I knew I would never regret this time. ‘What will you do if you don’t get through?’ Nicola asked. ‘Learn from the experience,’ I said confidently. That’s honestly what I thought, and when those words came out of my mouth I knew that just getting this far in the process had done wonders for my self-esteem. ‘Your skin’s amazing,’ was the very first thing I’d ever said to Kimberley, when we’d met in the earlier stages of the competition. I had walked up to her, completely out of the blue, and said that to her because I was just so fascinated by how beautiful she looked. Kimberley had looked at me deadpan, muttered ‘thanks’, and said something about using a certain foundation cream. At the time the only make-up I wore was eyeliner and a bit of mascara and lip-liner, and I felt embarrassed and wondered if Kimberley thought I was a weirdo. She had been given a second chance too, after another girl who’d originally made the final 10 left because she was pregnant. I was absolutely delighted when I heard Kimberley was returning, because once we started to get to know each other at the auditions we really hit it off and had promised to keep in touch, come what may. When she was initially voted off I’d felt devastated. ‘Look, Kimberley,’ I said very seriously. ‘If I don’t make it either, you and me will make a group together.’ She’d agreed, and so when she was brought back into the competition we already had a bond, and I loved having her in the house. I liked the fact that Kimberley was a very down-to-earth person – a typical Yorkshire lass – and I noticed we’d both go ‘wow!’ at the same things. We did that quite a lot whenever Sarah was around, actually, because Sarah stood out. She has such a big personality and I’d never met anyone quite like her. She was very loud and you couldn’t miss her, but despite that I felt I hadn’t got to know her through the auditions at all. Sarah was another Northerner, having grown up in Stockport, but it felt like we were from completely different worlds. In the house she was the one who was always doing crazy things like wrapping her whole body in clingfilm before she went to bed, saying it was a good way to detoxify. She’d done a beauty course and was always giving us tips, but to me all this stuff was new and really unusual. I knew more about Nadine than any of the other girls to begin with because I’d actually seen her on TV. Nadine had won a place in Irish Popstars the year before, but was disqualified when she was found to be too young. It had been a bit of a scandal because she had said she was 18 when she wasn’t, but Nadine was really quiet and sweet and it was hard to believe she was the same person who’d caused such a drama. ‘Hi Nadine, it’s nice to meet you,’ I said when I first met her at the auditions. ‘I remember you from Irish Popstars.’ She seemed quite shy but right from the start, I don’t think anybody doubted that Nadine would make it through to the band, because her voice was just so good. ‘Who wants me to make some chicken and rice?’ one of the other contestants in the house asked one night. This was Javine Hylton, and she loved to cook. ‘Yes please!’ the rest of us chorused. I didn’t have a clue how to cook anything fancy like that and nor did Nicola or our roommate Aimee, so we were always grateful for Javine’s chicken and rice. It was really good, and I ate so much of it I noticeably started to put on weight for the first time in years. We had several weeks in the house together before the live shows started, during which time we were encouraged to have singing lessons. ‘Use your chest voice, Cheryl,’ the teacher said to me one day. ‘What’s me “chest voice”?’ I replied. I’d never had a singing lesson in my life and I didn’t know what she was on about. ‘Well, how do you breathe when you are singing?’ ‘I just do, with me lungs.’ Nicola and I retreated to our room afterwards and collapsed in a fit of giggles. Nicola painted my nails and I taught her how to put on eyeliner. Day by day our bedroom got messier and messier, until eventually you could barely see the carpet for all the clothes and shoes, hairbrushes and towels strewn all over the floor. One morning a really awful pair of trainers arrived at the house. I don’t know where they came from or who they were for, as I don’t remember us having stylists or anything like that in those days, but I was full of mischief and I saw the opportunity for a joke. I took the trainers to each girl’s room in turn and told them very seriously, ‘These have been sent for you. Davina McCall says you have to try them on now and then wear them for your first performance.’ Their faces fell but they dutifully tried on the trainers, not wanting to go against the wishes of Davina, who was the host of the show. When they eventually found out it was a wind up each girl had a fit and then cracked up laughing. That’s what it was like all the time in the house. It was full of fun, like being on a daft girls’ holiday. I phoned my mam most days and she would always tell me if there had been a mention of anything to do with Popstars in the papers. There were bits of tittle-tattle all the time, with stories of the girls sneaking out of the house to party with the boys and silly things like that. I never took much notice because I wasn’t involved, but one day my mam phoned me up to warn me there was going to be a story all about me, and it didn’t sound good. ‘Cheryl, I think someone’s done one of them kiss-and-tells on ya.’ My mind went into overdrive. Only the day before I’d spoken to my dad, and he’d told me, ‘I’m so proud of you I could pop.’ Now my mind was going crazy. I was wondering what had been written about me, and what my family was about to read. Mam didn’t know what was in the story yet, explaining that she’d just taken a phone call at home from a reporter trying to get her to make a comment, and she thought she’d better let me know. I panicked and worried about every single boy I’d ever kissed, until I actually got to read the article the next day. I was totally stunned to discover it was a completely fabricated kiss-and-tell from a guy who used to come in Nupi’s caf?, who I didn’t even remember talking to. This was my first experience of being the focus of a made-up tabloid story and I just couldn’t believe a newspaper could print such rubbish and get away with it, but they did. It was so weird and frustrating to find myself in that situation. I felt incredibly uncomfortable; the feeling was like nothing I’d ever experienced in my life before. I had to phone my dad and tell him the guy had made it all up, and warn him not to read the paper, which was just horrible, especially so soon after he had told me how proud he was of me. Not surprisingly, my heart stopped when my mam phoned me again a few weeks later to tell me there was going to be another story on me in the papers. ‘Oh my God, what next?’ I asked. I was still rattled by the last one, and I wasn’t sure I could take another. The live shows were in full swing now and even though I wasn’t afraid of being kicked off, I was suffering badly with anxiety each time I had to step up to the mic. My nerves used to completely consume my body, in fact. Even if I sang perfectly it felt to me like they were trying to take the breath out of my body on every note. ‘Just tell me, mother. Nothing can be as bad as the last story.’ ‘It’s not like that, Cheryl,’ my mam said. ‘Some of your friends have hung a banner over the Tyne Bridge. It’s huge and it says “Vote For Cheryl Tweedy”. They had to get special permission from the council.’ I burst out laughing, as much with relief as pleasure. That was pretty special. Geordies are so proud of their own, and it gave me a real boost. I was doing really well in the competition and getting voted through each time. I can’t remember any of the comments now, but I know the girls competed against each other every fortnight, alternating weekly with the boys. Each time I’d think, ‘Am I really still here?’ Being on the television didn’t faze me, but the whole idea that I was being judged was horrible, because I wasn’t used to being in that position when I was singing. I found it very hard when some of the friends I’d made started to be voted off, and it was absolutely terrible when my roommate Aimee went. I genuinely wished I could go in her place, because I was older and felt I could cope with the rejection better. My mam and sister came to the final show and were cheering like mad in the audience, but practically the only thing I can remember in amongst all the tension and excitement is Davina standing up to announce which five of us, out of the six remaining girls, had made it into the band. ‘The first member of the band is …’ I could almost hear my heart beating. ‘Cheryl!’ I jumped out of my seat, looking more like a Newcastle fan when the team had just scored than a pop singer, and the memory of it still makes me cringe. Davina had to make me sit down and I perched on a stool in disbelief, shaking and trembling as first Nicola, then Kimberley and finally Nadine and Sarah took their seats next to me. Javine was the sixth girl who hadn’t made it, and I was absolutely gutted for her. The rest of us just started screaming at each other, and we kept on screaming for what felt like the whole night. I remember going up to the bar and being pulled from pillar to post by so many people wanting to congratulate us. Then it was straight to a London hotel, because we still had the competition with the boys to go through, and the record label wanted us to start work the very next morning. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for literally the whole night. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I had adrenalin pumping through my veins so fast I thought I was going to go bang. I was absolutely euphoric. My life was changed. I felt it, very strongly, as I lay there in the dark. My life was going to be different now. I was a member of Girls Aloud, as the band had been named. And I just knew that we were going to absolutely smash the boys when it came to the battle for the Christmas number one, which was our next challenge. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/cheryl/cheryl-my-story/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.