Cheryl: My Story Page 5

  ‘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 café 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 café 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 café 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 café 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 betr
ayal 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 café 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 café 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’

  ‘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 café 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 café 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.