Cheryl: My Story (16 page)

‘Me, of course,’ he lied.

I was so upset with him I scribbled on a bit of paper: ‘To John, get yourself off this shit. You deserve more than this, Cheryl,’ and I shoved it in his hand.

Not only did I want to make absolutely sure he couldn’t sell my autograph to buy heroin, I hoped my words might push him in the right direction.

After my visit I thought about John all the way back to London, and about how different our lives had turned out.

‘There’s always hope,’ I told myself, thinking back to when my life was a mess, and how I had managed to turn it around. ‘Come on, John, it’s not too late.’

Deep down I think I knew I was kidding myself. I had come back from depression and bad relationships, not drug addiction. There was a world of difference, and I had already seen what happened to people who got hooked on heroin.

This was when I first realised how important it was to me that Ashley had been up to Newcastle, and seen where I was from. The press always made a big deal of the fact I might be singing in front of Prince Charles one minute and then drinking tea on a council estate the next. On the face of it I was living two separate lives, but I never felt like that inside. I was always just me, the same Cheryl I’d always been. I guess I felt like you had to know Newcastle to really know me, because being a Geordie is so much a part of my character and is so special to me. Now I felt that Ashley was part of my whole life.

It didn’t matter that sometimes
his
reality was so far removed from mine. Sometimes. For example, Ashley would come home with a new earring he’d paid £25,000 for and I’d say, ‘You’re jokin’, aren’t you?’ I was gradually earning more money, but even if I’d had it sitting in the bank there was no way I would ever have spent that sort of cash on one earring back then. Ashley would roll his eyes as if to say, ‘I can afford it, why not?’ but he didn’t argue with me, because he knew where I was coming from.

I remember seeing a pair of Christian Louboutins for £800 that I’d have loved to have owned, but back then I just couldn’t justify paying out that sort of money on a pair of shoes.

‘It’s just wrong,’ I’d say to Ashley.

When I started earning a lot more money I wished I could give my family things, but it wasn’t that simple. Geordies have so much pride they would
never
accept anything from me, and I’d have to get round it by giving them gifts for birthdays and at Christmas that they would not be able to refuse. I got my dad a car and my mam a new kitchen when the time felt right. I enjoyed spoiling them but it was never unnecessary or excessive.

Ashley, though, had been paid a huge salary for as long as he could remember, and he just didn’t have the same hang ups about spending large amounts of money as I did. One day I got home from work to find my car hoisted up on a lorry, having bigger wheels fitted. I’d treated myself to a Mercedes SLK sportscar when I felt I’d worked hard enough to have earned it, and I loved it.

‘What are you doing – pimpin’ me out?’ I laughed. I was happy with it the way it was, but I didn’t argue with him either.

I was touched Ashley had gone to so much trouble for me. I was ridiculously loved up, and in my eyes he could do no wrong.

7
‘Will you marry me?’

‘I’m exhausted,’ I said to Ashley. ‘I can’t wait to get on that beach.’

We were on the plane, flying to Dubai for our first proper holiday together. It was June 2005 and the past few months had been incredibly busy. For one thing, we’d both been working flat out. Arsenal had just beaten Manchester United in the FA Cup, and Ashley had scored one of the winning penalties. I didn’t see the game because I was on tour with the girls, playing at the NEC in Birmingham, but I’d told Ashley over and over again how proud I was of him. In return he told me how much he enjoyed seeing me on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo, which was the one gig he managed to get to.

‘I don’t know how you get up there and perform like that,’ Ashley said.

‘I don’t know how you step up to the penalty spot when winning the FA Cup depends on it,’ I told him.

We were like the mutual appreciation society and were so loved up, it was embarrassing. We could hardly keep our hands off each other either, and we spent the whole flight kissing and cuddling like a couple of over-excited teenagers.

The first Girls Aloud tour had far exceeded expectations. With two albums’ worth of material we were all really up for it, but as we’d never toured before we had no idea how we’d go down with the fans. We did our opening night at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham and the minute I stepped on the stage I knew the answer.

‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘This is why I wanted to do this job.’ I absolutely loved the vibe we felt from the audience; the fans were going crazy. It was amazing to see them singing our songs back to us, and they inspired us to put on the best performances we could, night after night as we toured the country. Demand for tickets was so high we had to put on extra dates, and in the end we played 22 dates throughout May.

We’d always end up crashed out in the tour bus feeling absolutely shattered, but buzzing so much we couldn’t sleep. Sarah would go out partying – she’d even go out and sing karaoke in a local pub when she’d just got off stage – but I usually ended up lying on my bed, drinking tea and gossiping with Kimberley. ‘The fishwives are out again,’ the other girls would laugh, but that’s what we were like. Kimberley and I would talk ten to the dozen about anything and everything.

When we played the Hammersmith Apollo I was completely blown away because the audience was so much closer to the stage than at any other venue. You could clearly see the fans’ faces and they knew every word to every song, even the album tracks. That was a real buzz.

When Ashley came to see that gig it was the cherry on the cake for me. As much as I loved being on the stage with the girls, that night I also couldn’t wait for the show to end so I could be with him and talk to him.

‘How do you dance like that?’ he said, which cracked me up.

‘Hard work,’ I laughed. ‘We don’t just get up on stage and make it up, you know.’

We’d been rehearsing for weeks on end, working really hard on the choreography. Sarah and Nadine hated it and often said, ‘It’s alright for you, Cheryl, you’ve got dance experience.’

‘I’ve not danced since I was 11!’ I’d tell them, but really I think all the dancing I did when I was growing up helped me a lot, and I always enjoyed that part of the job.

Ashley didn’t have much of a clue about all the preparation that went on behind the scenes. He’d been too busy playing football while I’d been living and breathing this tour, but to be fair, I knew very little about what went on behind the gates at Highbury. Practically all I knew was that he trained really hard every morning, and that the club liked girlfriends and wives to be kept well away from the players before matches, because that was the bit that affected me. Ashley always got whisked off to a hotel before an away game, which I didn’t enjoy but had to accept as part of his job.

I also knew that Ashley had had a problem at work recently, though I didn’t know all the details. He’d got into a lot of trouble for talking to Chelsea about a possible move, which the media was calling the ‘tapping-up’ scandal. Ashley didn’t say much about it to me, but I knew he’d been fined £100,000 for talking to a rival club without Arsenal knowing, and I knew that he’d got very stressed about it.

Perhaps another reason I can’t remember much about the case is that I had a far more distressing event to deal with in my own life around that time. At the beginning of April, just one week after I’d seen John Courtney in Newcastle, he died from a heroin overdose. He was found dead in his uncle’s flat, curled up on a dirty, stained carpet, the syringe he used to inject the last lethal dose next to his hand.

I know exactly how he looked, because his mam decided to release a picture to the local press, showing him lying there dead. She hoped it would shock others into giving up drugs. When I saw it, I was on the tour bus and I just froze. I’d been talking to him literally the week before, and his death was so disturbing and so unnecessary.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I cried to his mam on the phone as soon as I heard the news. ‘I’m devastated.’

She told me he’d put the note I wrote to him on the wall next to his bed, but he hadn’t found the strength to take my advice. I sent flowers, but I couldn’t go to the funeral. It was all too much to take in. John was the only boy in a family of six sisters. He was 21 years old, and just as with Lee Dac, I knew that seeing John’s grieving mother would be too painful to bear.

I tried to be strong and lent my support to the local paper, the
Evening Chronicle
, when it began a ‘War on Drugs’ campaign because of John, but inside I felt anything but strong. I couldn’t sleep properly for a long time afterwards, and sometimes I’d cry into my pillow whenever I thought about him.

‘Will you be alright, babe?’ Ashley had asked me, knowing how devastated I was, and that I had the tour to cope with.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There are four other girls out there depending on me and the show must go on.’

That’s exactly what I did. I put on a show, because that’s what we were all there to do.

It’s hardly surprising that Ashley and I were desperate to get away on holiday, and it felt so good to be finally flying to Dubai, just the two of us, leaving everything behind. Dubai was quite a new holiday destination at the time, and I was fascinated by it from the moment we landed. We stayed at the Burj Al Arab, one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. It’s shaped like a huge, tall sail, which totally amazed me. I’d travelled around a bit with the girls but I was certainly not what you would call cultured, and Ashley was just as daft. He’d been all over the world with Arsenal, but he hadn’t actually experienced different cultures. It was always just airport, hotel, play the match and then fly home.

‘Do we have to cover up?’ we said to each other in surprise on the first morning. We were walking through the extremely lavish hotel reception, both in shorts. All the other guests had their legs covered, and there were several woman completely shrouded from head to toe. Ashley and I looked at each other as the penny slowly dropped. ‘We’re in a Muslim country …’ he said. ‘Oh, yeh, I guess you’re not meant to walk around like this in here …’ I replied. ‘We’d better get to the beach, fast.’

Ashley had forgotten his swimming trunks, and so we quickly went and bought him a pair from a local shop before heading to the beach. The best ones we could find were green with white camels all over them. They were absolutely awful but we just laughed. ‘At least nobody’s gonna see us,’ Ashley said.

I had my hair scraped up in a clip and, despite all the dancing on the tour, I wasn’t in the best shape.

‘Look at the state of us, we’re like Wayne and Waynetta,’ I joked. To cap it all I got bitten on the big toe by a crab as soon as we got on the sand, which set me off screaming and making a huge spectacle of myself.

Later that day we got a phone call from back home.

‘You’re in
The Sun
and, er, you look terrible!’ a friend told us.

I was dumbfounded.

‘The paparazzi must have been in boats in the sea! Can you believe it? We’re in Dubai, for God’s sake!’

‘I think we need to get me some better trunks,’ Ashley said.

‘I think we need to not go on that beach again,’ I replied.

I was properly freaked out, and so the following day we decided to get away from the beach and go to a nearby desert, where you could do lots of activities like archery, or race around the sand dunes in jeeps. That was such a boy thing and Ashley loved it, but I didn’t enjoy it at all and just couldn’t see the fun in getting flung around like that in the blazing heat.

There was a sandstorm too, and I was only happy when we finally got back to the hotel and put the TV on. Michael Jackson’s child-molesting trial was coming to a close, and I remember sitting there crying with relief every time another ‘not guilty’ verdict came in.

Ashley seemed a bit distracted when I tried to talk to him about it, and at one point in the evening he disappeared into the bathroom for ages, looking twitchy and guarding his rucksack as if his life depended on it.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘Fine, babe. Do you fancy going on a camel ride? I know you like animals, you’ll love it.’

I agreed because I thought Ashley was worried I wasn’t having a good time, and a day or two later we headed back into the desert. I’d never seen a camel in my life before, let alone ridden one, and I was nervous. It didn’t help that Ashley looked really tense, but as the guide helped us both up onto the camel’s back I really tried to keep my cool, because there were about 10 other people on the same excursion and I didn’t want to make a fuss.

‘The camel’s moaning and screaming!’ I whispered to Ashley the second the poor animal tried to get to its feet.

‘It’s miserable! I feel cruel!’

I felt really uncomfortable, not only because of the camel’s moaning but also because of the blistering heat.

‘I’m not enjoying this, babe. Aren’t
you
worried about the camels? Their nostrils must really hurt. Don’t you think it’s cruel, them dragging us big lumps around in this heat? I’m telling you, when we climbed on I definitely heard the camel groan in pain …’