Cheryl: My Story (31 page)

Until this point I’d only read the initial story about the sex texts, supposedly sent to an English glamour model. I hadn’t known what to believe, but this was very different. This girl, whose face I was staring at, was saying she had sex with my husband. And, even though I hadn’t read all the stories in between, it was clear from this one that she wasn’t the first to claim to have slept with Ashley.

There was another horrible truth I was facing too. This girl wasn’t saying that Ashley was so blind drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. That’s what had allowed me to forgive him in 2008, but he clearly knew what he was up to this time. ‘High-spirited’ was the phrase used to describe him in the article.

‘High-spirited? Are you absolutely joking after what I’ve been through?’ I shouted as I read the story. ‘I’m out of here! That is IT. It’s over.’

That photograph was the decider. I was getting divorced now, and that was final. Even for Ashley to allow that girl to sit on his knee like that at a time when he was meant to be on best behaviour was disrespectful, and I wasn’t going to be disrespected any more. It was time to press the button.

‘F*** you!’ I shouted at Ashley’s face in the picture.

Derek was still there with me, which was awkward.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked. He had a look on his face that said: ‘This is kind of crazy.’

‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘In fact do you know what? I’m more than fine, because now I
know
. I can stop torturing myself and just deal with the decision.’

The relief I felt as I said that was huge, but from that moment on it felt like I was buckled into a rollercoaster ride that was mixing up my emotions whichever way I turned. I was sobbing uncontrollably one minute, laughing hysterically the next, and seething with anger and aching with pain all at the same time.

I didn’t want to speak to Ashley at all, but he called me a day or two later. When I saw his name flash up on my phone I thought twice about taking the call, but I did pick up.

‘Cheryl, the house has been broken into,’ he flapped. ‘I was lying in bed and the next thing was, there was this man crawling towards me in a balaclava. I whacked him with one of my crutches. It was terrifying …’

‘You know what, you deal with it,’ I told him, and switched my phone off.

I couldn’t bear to speak to him, and I thought it was just a pathetic attempt to get me home. I texted my mam and said, ‘You’ll never guess what, Ashley’s saying the house has been broken into. As if that’s going to get me running back.’

‘You know what, it has,’ Mam said. ‘I’m here.’

It turned out that the burglar had seen pictures of me leaving Heathrow without my wedding ring on and must have assumed Ashley was playing football, because Chelsea had a fixture. The crackpot had not taken into account Ashley’s broken ankle, thought there’d be nobody at home and had tried to rob my jewellery. Apparently Ashley screamed like a girl as he clonked the guy with his crutch, which I could just imagine him doing after his performance with the lizard on our honeymoon, not to mention that cat that broke into his flat.

‘Wow!’ I thought, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

I was in LA for 10 days, and my emotions were all over the place the whole time. Derek was brilliant. In the short time I’d known him I’d been bowled over by the spontaneous, free-spirited way he lives his life. ‘I’m just snowboarding in Utah,’ he’d said one time I called. Another time it was: ‘I’m partying in Miami. Mary J. Blige is here – do you want to talk to her? She’s really cool and I’m going to teach her how to tango …’

Now he was taking me out for coffee or to the cinema, trying to keep my spirits up, and one night he asked me out to dinner.

‘We can’t go for dinner, they’ll say we’re dating,’ I said.

‘What are you talking about?’ he laughed. ‘It’s just
dinner
.’

Even though Derek has family in the UK and had lived in England for 10 years as a child, he is from Utah and there are some parts of British life he just doesn’t get. The tabloid press is, or should I say
was
, one of them.

He is very famous in America because of
Dancing with the Stars
, but he was only used to receiving happy, positive publicity because that’s largely what the public wants over there. Derek simply didn’t understand why anyone would want to photograph me walking into a restaurant to have a quiet dinner with a friend, especially when my life was in such a mess.

‘It’s just not news,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I don’t get it.’

‘Trust me, it would be. It’s not worth it.’

In the end Derek decided to just turn up at my hotel, bringing with him his friend’s Yorkshire terrier, as he knew I was missing Buster and Coco like mad.

‘I’ve brought you some doggy love,’ he said.

I’d been crying but I started smiling, and I thought it was really sweet and thoughtful of him. Derek was like a breath of fresh air. He had no preconceived ideas of me. I wasn’t a famous person to him; I’d just come into his life through a video, that was all. He told me about himself, and the fact he was brought up as a Mormon, and I felt I could trust him and talk to him about anything, because he just was so dignified and well mannered and easy to be with. I was used to being surrounded by girls, but I was now starting to get very mistrustful of women, which is probably another reason I confided in Derek.

‘I’m questioning the sisterhood,’ I told him. ‘I’m a girls’ girl, always have been. I would never sleep with someone’s husband knowing they were a married man. I don’t understand those girls, those hangers on who sleep with someone just because of what they do or how famous they are, or how much money they have. What about the sisterhood?’

Derek let me ramble on, and he moved the conversation on to lighter, brighter things whenever I got too tearful and distressed.

I hadn’t wanted to talk to Nicola and Kimberley, or anybody else I was close to, because I felt they’d already been there for me once in this situation, and it was embarrassing to be in it again.

Derek was a new ear, and he was the perfect person to speak to. It was like he was a little angel, sent to help me through this testing time. I looked at him and honestly half expected to see a halo around his head.

It was the early hours of the morning when he left, and sure enough he got photographed leaving the hotel, with a funny smirk on his face and carrying the dog in his arms. The stories that accompanied the picture insinuated that Derek and I were having some sort of relationship.

‘Like
what
are you doing?’ his friends said, and Derek couldn’t believe the photo was absolutely everywhere, all over the internet and the British press.

‘My God, I’ve never looked so gay in my life! What they thought I was trying to do with you in that hotel room with the dog and the funny smirk I have
no
idea!’

The suggestion we’d met on a video just weeks earlier and were now having a ‘relationship’ as he watched my marriage crumble was a joke. From Derek’s point of view I’d turned from a perfectly normal singer he was doing the tango with one minute, into a crazy drunk woman who was weeping and wailing and shouting and screaming the next. It’s not exactly relationship-building stuff, is it?

I called Ashley from LAX Airport before I boarded my return flight to Heathrow.

‘I’m divorcing you. I want you out by the time I get home.’

He was clearly dumbstruck, so I carried on talking.

‘I literally want you to be out of that house, with your stuff, and I don’t care if you’ve got to hobble. Get out before I get home. It’s over.’

‘Right. OK,’ he stuttered. ‘I won’t be here. I’ll be out when you get back.’

Hearing those words brought me no peace of mind whatsoever. I was willing him to fight. Even now I wanted him to say, ‘No, you’re my wife and when you get home we’re gonna talk about this,’ but he didn’t.

‘What a
wimp
,’ I thought.

I got Sundraj to put out a statement that said: ‘Cheryl Cole is separating from her husband Ashley Cole. Cheryl asks the media to respect her privacy during this difficult time.’

I thought that making an announcement would at least stop the speculation and might take some pressure off, but I knew that landing at Heathrow was still going to be horrendous. Before I got off the plane I put on big sunglasses and took a deep breath. I just wanted to get to my car and get home as quickly as possible.

The amount of paparazzi and TV film crews was absolutely unbelievable. There were scores and scores of photographers and cameramen, all pushing and shoving and shouting to get a shot of me. I felt tiny and vulnerable, and it was a total shock to my system. I was going through hell, and I was being treated like some kind of performing animal. It was inhumane. I felt like one of those caged bears who’s prodded with a stick to make it dance. How could other human beings treat me like this and think it was acceptable?

Mam was at the house when I got back, and she told me Ashley had left just a few hours before I arrived.

‘I gave him a hug before he went,’ she said.

‘What did you do that for?’ I asked angrily, because I didn’t think he deserved a hug, especially from
my
mother.

‘I can’t bear to see anyone in that much pain.’

I texted Ashley and thanked him for going, and giving me my space. He’d taken a few bags but his stuff was still all around the house, and I could smell him everywhere. I couldn’t face looking at our wedding pictures, and I turned them all to face the walls.

‘Mam, by any chance do you have the stories?’ I asked.

I was jetlagged and felt dizzy, but I knew it was time to read them.

‘Yes. I knew you’d ask for them. I have them all.’

Mam brought them out, put them in a pile in front of me and left me alone.

As I started to read, I felt numb inside. I was freezing up, protecting myself, to try to deal with the pain. I read each and every story, one after the other. There were four different women, all making different allegations. I knew about the first girl, the sex-text one, and now I was turning the pages in horror, reading that all the other three were saying they had sex with Ashley.

I was subconsciously looking for something that wasn’t true. I read a text message that didn’t seem real. ‘Would Ashley
really
write that?’ I thought.

One claim went back six years and I just thought: ‘Why would you come out with that now?’ This girl was saying she was with Ashley the night we were first photographed together at the Funky Buddha nightclub, but I knew
I
had been with him then. I didn’t believe her and I was looking and looking, hoping I could find flaws in every story, wishing that somehow Ashley was right, that this was some kind of media vendetta against him that had got dangerously out of hand.

I didn’t get my wish, of course. Another girl said they drank rosé wine in a hotel bedroom together, and that Ashley smoked. He does like rosé wine, and at first I told myself she could have seen him drinking it in the bar rather than sharing a bottle with him in the bedroom, as she claimed. The smoking, though? He’s a footballer and this wasn’t something he did in public. Hardly anybody knew he smoked.

There were other little details in the stories nobody could have known, nobody
should
have known, except me. Holding hands in the bed. That hit a nerve, a big one. That was
my
husband that someone else was talking about. The description ‘like relationship sex’ was so painful to read I blocked it out totally; I just couldn’t deal with it. The fact that he’d been cheating on me when he was away with Chelsea also made my blood run cold. I’d always thought I didn’t have to worry when Ashley was at work, because the club wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behaviour, but I had a sudden, horrible realisation that if I ever did get back with him, I would end up being one of those horrible, paranoid wives I never wanted to be. I’d already banned him from socialising with certain friends, but I couldn’t stop him going to work, could I? I’d be worrying myself sick the whole time.

When I’d finished reading I stared at the papers in disgust and disbelief. It was as if I’d been physically attacked by them, because I felt winded, like the pages and the words had punched me in the stomach. I pushed them away, feeling sick at the smell of the newsprint, and then I actually vomited.

I didn’t believe everything I’d read, but I’d seen enough to know that the trust had completely gone out of our marriage, and I was doing the right thing divorcing Ashley. It was almost like payback time. He had hurt me so very badly, and divorce was the only way of getting back at him, of showing him how much damage he had actually done.

I sat alone for ages, thinking to myself, ‘I have no idea who my husband is any more. I don’t recognise him. The man I’ve just read about isn’t the man I married.’

Seeing the papers had given me another, very unexpected shock too. I’d been so caught up in my own problems that the whole scandal about Wayne Bridge’s fiancée, Vanessa, having an affair with John Terry had literally passed me by. It had clearly come out in the press just before the stories about Ashley. Thinking about being on the beach with Wayne and Vanessa and their child the summer before just added to the pain and confusion I was feeling. It was like the world had gone mad, and I couldn’t understand what made people cheat and cause so much chaos and upset.