Cheryl: My Story (20 page)

I had never questioned sisterhood before. In my world, girls always stuck together. Now I was asking myself how one woman could do this to another, sleeping with
my
husband just because he’s a footballer, and then selling a sleazebag story to a tabloid?

It was sick. Could I believe what
she
was saying if she was capable of admitting this type of disgusting behaviour in a national newspaper?

‘You need to read this,’ I shouted to Ashley. ‘You need to get your arse down here, now.’

He came downstairs quietly but wouldn’t read it. ‘I’m not,’ he said, looking at the floor and shaking his head. He looked appalled and upset with himself.

‘You know what she’s saying, don’t you? You need to tell me if it’s true. I
have
to know the truth.’

‘I can’t remember,’ was all he said, and I really lost it when he said that, yet again. I was sick of hearing it. This was so serious, and he was just shaking his head and telling me he couldn’t remember? In other words, that he might have had sex with her but he might not?

‘It’s just not good enough, Ashley!’ I screamed. ‘Surely to God you remember something?’

My whole body was shaking and now my head was exploding. We had
everything
and now our trust had gone and we’d lost it all. That’s how it felt. It was such a waste of absolutely everything good that we ever had together.

‘I can’t, I just can’t remember …’

I totally lost it then, and I mean I totally lost the plot. I felt every emotion possible: confusion, sadness, physical pain, sickness and fury, like I’d never experienced. Before I knew it I was lashing out at Ashley in every way I possibly could.

I hit him in the face. I couldn’t help it. I was shaking him, kicking him, scratching his face, pushing and shoving him like I was a lunatic, and he just took it because it was obvious I’d gone crazy.

In fact, the more I pushed and provoked him, the more Ashley clammed up.

‘I hope you enjoyed it!’ I screamed. ‘I hope she was worth it! It’s the end of your marriage! You don’t understand what you’ve done. It’s f***ed!’

Ashley still said nothing, no matter what I did or said. After literally hours of me ranting and screaming and crying uncontrollably, I was too exhausted to carry on like that.

‘OK. Let’s be peaceful,’ I sobbed eventually, desperately hoping this might make Ashley open up.

‘I’ll be calm. Just talk to me. If you talk to me maybe we can work something out.’

‘Stop crying, babe, please. I don’t know what you want me to say. You’ve read what she said …’

‘Ashley, I need
you
to tell me what happened.’

‘But what can I say? I don’t know what to say.’

I sobbed and pleaded, but I still got nowhere at all. It was daylight by the time I became so completely drained that I eventually went to bed, leaving Ashley downstairs on the sofa.

There was no way I could sleep and I lay there thinking: ‘You stupid
bastard
! Even if you were too drunk to have sex and it never happened, how could you put me through
this
? And why didn’t you warn me this was all going to blow up? You must have known it was coming!’

The first person I phoned later that day was Hillary.

‘I’m calling to let you know I’m leaving Girls Aloud,’ I said. ‘I want out of this industry. I’ve had enough.’

It felt like being in the group made this situation a million times worse for me. Other woman who had been cheated on by their husband didn’t have to read about it in the newspaper. I did, because I was a pop star, and I just didn’t want to be famous any more.

I then called Kimberley and Nicola, and said the same thing.

‘I’m out of here,’ I said. Nobody knew what to say to me. I don’t think they could believe what was happening but they could tell I meant it wholeheartedly, and they were all devastated.

My mam was as shocked as everybody else, but she is so soft-hearted she still managed to think about how Ashley was feeling. She was staying with us at the time, and she told me she gave him a cuddle. Afterwards she said to me, ‘Everybody makes mistakes. Don’t forget, he’s also hurting.’

Ashley just couldn’t wait to run away to his football in the morning. He didn’t want to stay at home and face it, and when he went out to training I thought, ‘It’s OK for you, once you’re at the ground the paps can’t come near. All you have to do is get there, then you’re safe. What about me? You’ve fed me to the lions.’

I let Sundraj put out a statement a day or so later saying I didn’t believe Ashley had slept with the girl and that I wanted to save the marriage. Both were gut reactions that I felt once I’d had a bit more time to think. If the girl was willing to tell the nation she slept with a man who got up in the middle of having sex to vomit, what sort of a person was she? I certainly thought that someone selling their story to a newspaper was not the most trustworthy character and was capable of making things up.

The one thing she and Ashley were in agreement on was how drunk he was that night, and I knew that if he was that bad, he would not have been capable of having sex. That’s why I made the statement I did. The alternative was to throw my marriage away because of one drunken night that Ashley couldn’t even remember. I felt I couldn’t justify doing that, although I really wasn’t sure how or if I could come back from this. The statement was out there, but privately I was full of doubt and indecision about where to go from here.

I had to get out of the house, and a day or two later I went to Kimberley’s in the middle of the night. She was crying her eyes out when she saw me. I was still in shock, and when I say ‘in shock’ I really mean that I wasn’t in control of myself at all, and I needed medical help. I got Valium tablets off the doctor to calm me down, and I lay on Kimberley’s sofa but still couldn’t sleep a wink.

My memories are all muddled up, but I know that some time that week we had to do the videoshoot for our new single ‘Can’t Speak French’, and how I got through it I just don’t know. The doctor gave me a B-vitamin injection in my bum to perk me up, but it didn’t work, not at all.

‘Are you sure you can do this?’ Kimberley asked.

We were filming in a house in London and it was an all-night shoot. I hadn’t eaten or slept for two days, but I knew I had to keep going. There were so many other people involved, and this was
my
problem, not theirs.

‘Yes,’ I told Kimberley. ‘I’d rather be here than moping around the house.’

While we were doing the shoot I heard that the girl Ashley was meant to have slept with had responded to my statement and called me ‘ridiculous’ for believing he couldn’t remember what had happened. I didn’t read it, but I was told the gist of it. It baffled me why anyone would want to be at the centre of such a sordid story, but here she was again, prolonging my pain and rubbing salt into an already open wound.

‘What is wrong with these people?’ I thought.

There was a lot worse to come. The next day the girl claimed that she’d feared she was pregnant after her night with Ashley, and that his agent tried to pay for an abortion. I didn’t believe her pregnancy claim for one second, but it did seem like the kind of offer Ashley’s agent might make. I knew it was exactly how he would have reacted in the circumstances. The agent’s job was to look after my husband, and if Ashley genuinely couldn’t remember what had happened that night, the agent had no choice but to consider the claims might be true and try to protect his client.

It hurt like hell when I thought about the agent’s involvement. I’d known him for years, and not only that, I’d been out to dinner with him and Ashley in the last few weeks, when all this abortion business must have been going on. It was beyond hideous to think I’d sat there, with Ashley, making conversation with a man who knew our marriage was under threat like this.

The pregnancy claim made me distrust the girl’s story even more, but I didn’t know what to do next. I was so hurt and confused. When I’d said my vows to Ashley on our wedding day I meant them, but how could we possibly recover from this?

After the videoshoot, I festered on Kimberley’s settee for days and days, barely moving. Kimberley’s boyfriend Justin helped take care of me, and was really supportive. Ashley didn’t know where I was but I thought the very least he deserved was the silent treatment.

Over the next few days I heard that two more girls had come forward to say they’d had sex with Ashley. I didn’t read the stories, but I knew one was saying it happened when Ashley and I were courting, and another said she slept with him a few months after our wedding.

‘Why would they come forward now?’ I asked myself. ‘They must be making it up, trying to cash in while Ashley’s vulnerable.’

I desperately wanted the stories to be lies and I told myself they had to be made up, but the truth was I didn’t know what to believe. I just wanted to run away and hide, and I asked Kimberley and Nicola if they’d come away with me, on a holiday somewhere far away.

‘Just go,’ Justin told Kimberley straight away. ‘Don’t think twice.’ Nicola said, ‘I’m coming, wherever you want me to come.’ I don’t think she even consulted her boyfriend, because she replied to my text in a matter of seconds.

I picked up the phone to Ashley and told him, ‘Guess what? Me, Kimberley and Nicola are going away and I’ll send you the bill.’ He didn’t argue; in fact I don’t think he even spoke more than two words to me.

I booked us a villa at a private resort in Thailand, and as soon as our flight took off, I had this overwhelming feeling of ‘f*** the world’. I could have fallen out of the sky from the plane and I was certain nothing would have been as painful as what I was feeling inside.

It was now about two weeks after the initial allegations had come out and, looking back, I was completely out of my head on tranquilisers. As soon as we got to the villa I crashed out in my room for two full days. I literally closed the blinds and I was gone.

‘Is there any coffee?’ I asked the girls when I finally emerged into the light.

We laugh our heads off about that now, because Kimberley and Nicola say it was exactly like the scene in the first
Sex and the City
movie, but the funniest thing is that the film hadn’t even been made yet.

I hired a boat even though I hate sailing, but my attitude was that nothing was important any more, and I didn’t even care if I was eaten by a shark. ‘Nothing matters,’ I thought. ‘My career
certainly
doesn’t matter. All I care about is my friends and my family. The rest of it can go to f***. Girls Aloud can go. I don’t care about
any
of it.’

Kimberley, Nicola and I drank cocktails, went to dinner and laughed about some of the funny moments we’d had together.

‘Remember when we used to do the university gigs in the early days, and the students chucked beer at us?’ Kimberley said. ‘I can’t believe that really happened.’

‘What about when Cheryl’s costume ripped all up the bum on the “No Good Advice” video?’ Nicola laughed. ‘Oh my God, that was so funny. The outfit looked like it was made of tin foil and you had silver gaffer tape holding it together!’

‘Wardrobe malfunctions must be my thing,’ I replied, reminding the girls about a more recent disaster, when I’d gone out to dinner in a pair of lace trousers and ended up getting stuck to the table, as someone had put chewing gum underneath the table top. ‘How embarrassing was that? They literally had to get a hair dryer to melt the chewing gum and get me out of my seat without ripping the trousers!’

We’d sit on the harbour with bits of bread between our toes, dangling our feet in the water to feed the fish and waving to the friendly fishermen in their little boats.

I felt like I’d escaped the world for once. One morning, I came out of my room and saw three arses sticking in the air on the balcony of our villa.

‘What the f*** are you doing?’ I said loudly. For a minute I thought my tranquilisers were making me hallucinate, but then Nicola and Kimberley started hushing me.

‘Shhh! It’s yoga,’ Kimberley whispered. Their instructor calmly continued the class while I cracked up laughing.

It definitely helped to be away with the girls, in the sunshine, surrounded by beautiful beaches. My heart was racing all the time, though, and I had a constant, physical pain in my chest. I didn’t feel like eating much, and I was smoking more than normal, to the point where the girls would say: ‘Cheryl, you’ve just put one out.’

One night I went out onto the balcony and spoke to a friend back home. I’d had a few drinks and started pouring my heart out, saying I couldn’t care less what was in the tabloids. ‘I’m not a victim,’ I said. ‘I don’t want sympathy.’

As I spoke I heard a rustle in the bushes beneath our balcony, and when I looked down there were two men standing there, looking straight at me. I screamed in fright and they ran off. The next day we heard that someone had checked into the villa next door and then left without paying. Sundraj was on the phone soon afterwards.

‘I know you’re trying to get away from it all and you don’t want to know what’s in the tabloids, but I need to warn you there are journalists out there.’