Cheryl: My Story (13 page)

I had to pay her £500 compensation and £3,000 prosecution costs, and I was ordered to do 120 hours of unpaid community service.

Afterwards it felt like I’d been subjected to two trials – one in court and one in the media. The tabloid ‘verdict’ on me was summed up in one very memorable headline that appeared the next day: ‘The Girl’s a Lout but she’s not a Racist’.

‘How do you feel?’ Sundraj asked me.

‘Shocked at how newspapers can print lies and get away with it. It’s terrifying, actually.’

‘You must be relieved, though?’

‘‘‘Relieved” is not a word I would use. I’ve still got to do the community service and it feels unjust – I just wish this whole thing would go away.’

I asked if I could do the community service in Newcastle, because I wanted to go home and get it over and done with, away from the press in London. When I look back through old diaries, I can see that in between the trial and completing my community service I was working flat out with the group, promoting our new single, ‘Jump’, every day. We performed it on
Top of the Pops
and went on stage at the National Music Awards, and when ‘Jump’ was chosen as part of the soundtrack for the movie
Love Actually
, all five of us walked the red carpet together at the film premiere in Leicester Square. Earlier the same night, Kimberley and I appeared on
The Frank Skinner Show
too. I would never have remembered any of those things if I hadn’t been reminded, and that says a lot about how the trial had affected me.

I’d suffered very badly with stress throughout the whole ordeal, and I was still suffering for a long time afterwards. I was traumatised, basically, and I’d lost weight because it made me feel physically sick to put something in my mouth.

‘I can’t stomach it,’ I said all the time, because that’s actually how it felt. I was so full of worry that I felt that I couldn’t fit anything else inside me. The stress took over everything. It should have been so memorable to walk the red carpet for the very first time, especially when we had the honour of being involved in the film in a small way, but it’s a blank in my mind.

Similarly, I have no recollection of being on
Frank Skinner
, although apparently all he wanted to talk about was the trial. I’ve always felt I had a bad memory attached to him, but I couldn’t have told you what it was without reminding myself of that interview.

I really couldn’t get over how ironic it was that I’d gone through my whole life with trouble
around
me, yet had never been involved with the police myself until I was at the happiest point in my life, celebrating having a record-breaking number one.

It was only once the trial was over that I began to think like that as I tried to make some kind of sense of it all, but it was really confusing. I found it impossible to take in how my life could go so far forwards and then backwards so quickly.

The community service actually wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be. In fact, it probably did me good to get away from all the madness in London and just be normal and feel more like myself again in Newcastle for a while.

I started off sanding down benches at a little football club, which wasn’t difficult, just boring. I’d seen my dad sand things down and paint them my whole life, and I just got on with it like he always did. I also worked in a Salvation Army charity shop in the city centre, making cups of tea and sorting out old bags of clothes in the back.

I was there for a month or so; certainly long enough to bond with the staff, because they cried when I left.

One day, when I was sanding down the benches, I got caught by a press photographer, while I was yawning.

‘Why would anyone want a picture of me yawning?’ I said to my mam.

We were in her kitchen, eating a Chinese from my favourite takeaway, the Kwok Pao, which was the one we’d used for as long as I could remember.

‘Well, I wouldn’t know, Cheryl. Seems odd to me,’ Mam said, and that was the end of the conversation. There was no analysis or soul searching about how my life or career was going. My mam just cleared away the dirty dishes and we watched
EastEnders
together.

‘How are all the girls?’ she asked. That was about the most probing question she put to me.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘They’ve all been great, actually.’

This was true, and my relationship with the rest of the girls was just about the best thing in my life at that time. We were all very different, and during our first year together we’d started to fall into particular roles.

Kimberley was the sensible one who was very good at business figures. She knew where every penny was going and she’d sign stuff off with the accountants for us and always knew if someone was being overpaid. On the advice of the label, we’d moved out of Westminster and into new two-bedroom apartments in a posh complex called Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London. I shared with Nicola, while Kimberley shared with Nadine and Sarah chose to live alone.

I’ve no idea how much the weekly rent was because Kimberley arranged for it to be paid before we got our wages, which was a smart move. During the first year we weren’t earning a fortune, but it was enough pocket money for a teenage girl to have. In the early months I actually used some of it to pay off the Provi man back home, as I owed him several hundred pounds. Once I’d cleared my debts I saved up and splashed out on a diamond cluster ring for myself. It cost £900 and was my absolute pride and joy.

In total contrast to Kimberley, Sarah was always the party girl, enjoying the lifestyle of a pop star and having fun being in the group. Sarah also liked being in the studio, and she was so enthusiastic about singing. Her character definitely added to the group, without a doubt. She sometimes told us she felt a bit left out, but whenever we said ‘Come and live with us then!’ she always refused. In fact she was the first one to move away from us, out of Princess Park.

Nicola is a very observant person and a very good listener, and even if she doesn’t agree with something she just takes it all in. It’s a special quality to have, but when it comes to music she’s very opinionated. I always sat up and listened whenever Nicola had something to say about the music, because it was always really useful and interesting, and it’s still like that to this day.

Nadine was the lead singer and would go into the studio before the rest of us and record the demos. We’d then all choose from the tracks she had recorded and work out who was singing what around her vocals.

Standing up for us as a band and fronting up to the label was usually my job. I was forever asking what the next single was going to be, and if I didn’t agree with the choice I told the bosses in no uncertain terms, ‘This is a load of crap. We’re not doing it!’

I said that of ‘Love Machine’, actually, which looking back is quite embarrassing as it became one of our best-selling singles. It’s hardly surprising I became known as the ‘gobby one’ of the group, but I wasn’t outspoken for the sake of it, I just did it when I thought I needed to fight our corner.

We’d never had any media training and Louis Walsh was nowhere to be seen in terms of managing us, so if anybody said anything bad about us I just used to say exactly what was on my mind. I remember a few years down the line Lily Allen said something bitchy about Nicola and Sarah, and I wasn’t having it. Stuff like that bugged the shit out of me and I had a massive go at her, publicly. It was the same with Ulrika Jonsson and Charlotte Church, who both criticised me in years to come. I didn’t ask for their opinion and I would never have wanted to start a public spat, but I retaliated because it’s in my character to protect myself and the people I care about.

Within the group, though, we honestly never had any bust ups, apart from one morning when Nadine was literally three hours late getting in the car and we all completely lost it.

‘You’re taking the p***!’ we all shouted at her. ‘You’ve been getting later and later every day and we can’t be sitting around waiting for you like this!’ I think she had just overslept, and she was very apologetic and never did it again.

It was a miracle we didn’t fall out more often. In the first couple of years the five of us were practically only apart to sleep because the workload was that intense. We’d eat together and chill out together, often watching
Friends
on TV in each others’ flats or going out. We loved to go to clubs in London and we’d drink disgusting bubble-gum shots that were sky blue. I was always the worst drinker, never able to keep up with the others.

‘How come you can all drink for fun and I can’t?’ I’d complain the next day when I had a banging headache and the rest of the girls were all completely fine. I’d get horribly drunk after just a couple of glasses of wine or vodkas and Red Bull, while the other girls would just be buzzing and having a good time. Even Sarah, being the party animal of the group, never got into some of the states I did. Once I actually got refused
into
a club because I was so drunk. ‘I’m mortified,’ I said to Nicola the next morning. I even had to get her to tell me exactly what had happened, because I couldn’t remember half of it.

All the other girls had boyfriends, some more serious than others, but I was never in a relationship in those early years. I had my share of dates, but nothing serious. I think I was just too scared to let anybody in after what I’d gone through before, and the pain both Dave and Jason had caused me in my teens had not been forgotten, not yet.

‘You can use the main bathroom and I’ll have the bedroom with the en-suite,’ I said to Nicola on the day we moved in to Princess Park Manor. She used to put on so much fake tan and it was always absolutely everywhere, and I just couldn’t be doing with sharing a bathroom with her.

The apartment was very swanky and it was hard to believe we actually lived there. It was all newly painted with wood flooring and clean lines. There was a balcony off the living room and an absolutely massive TV. The first time we saw it we laughed our heads off. ‘Look at the state of us!’ we giggled.

The complex had been built around an old Victorian mental hospital that had been converted into loads of luxury apartments, set in acres of parkland. Security guards manned the gates and inside there were tennis courts, a pool and a gym that had been built in an old converted church.

Despite all the luxury, Nicola and I hadn’t learned much since our days in the
Popstars
house and we still managed to live like students. ‘Shall I make us a bacon butty?’ was about the extent of Nicola’s cooking skills, and she’d put the rashers in the microwave. We left sweet wrappers on the floor, pizza boxes all over the kitchen worktops and our bedrooms were always a complete tip with clothes, shoes, make-up and cans of hairspray strewn everywhere.

We turned it into a flea-pit at first, to be honest. We were still so young and, with working such long hours all the time, we found it almost impossible to take care of ourselves
and
an apartment properly.

‘Have you worked out how to use the washing machine yet?’ my mam asked a few weeks after we moved in.

‘Er, funny you should say that, Mam. I was going to ask you to show us when you came down.’ Sometimes we would literally have no clean clothes to put on unless my mother came down and did the washing for us.

The only improvement I made to my lifestyle was that I did start to exercise and think about my diet a bit more, and one day I read an article in a magazine about Jennifer Aniston doing the Atkins Diet.

‘That sounds good,’ I said to Nicola, who didn’t pay much attention, as she never had to worry about dieting.

‘She looks amazing on
Friends
. I’m going to get the book.’

For the first time in my life I began to educate myself about the different food groups, and I started to eat meat, eggs, bacon and cheese and avoid fruit, veg and carbohydrates. The weight started to fall off, and over the next few months I actually lost 16 pounds.

At the same time I was working out on the treadmill in the gym because I didn’t have a clue how to use any of the other equipment. Kimberley would come with me and we’d just run for as long as we could, watching how many calories we burned.

The label had obviously noticed that a bit of exercise wouldn’t do us any harm, and they got us a personal trainer, who ran a boot camp for us in a gym near our recording studios in Kent. It was down in a little village called Westerham, and the studios were in the home of our music producer, Brian Higgins, who ran the record production company Xenomania and was responsible for all of Girls Aloud’s music.

Louis was out of the picture completely by now, although on paper he was still our manager. I think in those first two years we probably had two phone calls from him, so we were on a huge learning curve, trying to be across every nook and cranny of the business and do the best we could with absolutely no experience whatsoever and very little help.

‘We’re putting you in a cage,’ I remember being told when we made our very first video, for ‘Sound of the Underground’.

‘Wow!’ I said. ‘Sounds amazing!’

I was so grateful to have got into the band and to be doing what I’d always wanted to do that if they’d said, ‘Go out and do it for free’, I’d have done so willingly.