by James Argent
What about Lydia? I thought.
But Amy looked so attractive and the truth was I did fancy her. The drink had got the better of my judgement, so I carried on kissing and cuddling her. Things had just started to get pretty steamy between us when suddenly we both got a huge shock. The door flew open and in walked Sam, catching us together in each other ‘s arms. We didn’t see her until she was standing there right beside us. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t know where to look! Sam’s first reaction was to burst out laughing, but then her attitude hardened. I can remember her saying something along the lines of, ‘This is out of order! Arg. You’re with Lydia and you’ll f***ing regret it if she finds out.’
Thankfully, Amy and I came to our senses and the spell was broken. We went back into the party. The other guests seemed unaware of what had happened, but I wondered if any of them had secretly worked it out. It must have looked odd, the pair of us disappearing together like that. I didn’t blame Amy – she was single at the time, so she hadn’t done anything wrong. But I was mortified that Lydia would find out. I hoped that I could trust Sam, as she was one of my oldest and best friends from back in Essex.
The next time I saw Amy was when we were back on set. When we got a private moment alone I asked her how she was feeling.
‘I’m fine, Arg,’ she said, and she winked. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m good, Amy. You’re looking well.’
Neither of us said anything about our secret kiss and cuddle. It was one of those things that are easier to leave unspoken. Rumours about Amy and me later started to circulate around the set. I guess there was just a chemistry between us that we found hard to hide, although at this stage Lydia didn’t suspect anything. As far as I know she never got to hear about the incident in the loo. I felt stupid because I loved Lydia dearly and I didn’t want to be with anyone else, but at the same time I was young and all the attention I was getting was too much to handle. I felt a fool because I’d worked so hard to get Lydia to forgive me for the stolen kiss I had with a girl at the Ocean Club – and then I’d gone and done the same thing again with Amy Childs. I knew I was being selfish but it never crossed my mind to let Lydia go. I was naïve and thought I could have the best of both worlds.
I piled on a lot of weight over Christmas and in the months that followed. By the time the new series of TOWIE started in March I had ballooned to 17½ stone. Just a few months earlier I had tipped the scales at around 14½, so I had gained 3 stone in a few short months. When I saw myself on screen I was shocked by how big I looked and it became a bit of a talking point in the show. Mark made a joke about how he wanted to organise some pool parties, but he was worried about my size.
‘You’ll be jumping in the water and all the water’ll be jumping out,’ he quipped on air.
Meanwhile, Lydia and Debbie (who, despite her initial reservations about the show, had joined the cast by now) persuaded me to join a diet class. My weight is a big factor in my life, so naturally it became part of the show. The reason I’d gained so much was partly the lifestyle I was leading away from cameras. Before the start of the new series I’d been making four or five personal appearances a week at nightclubs up and down the country. The clubs would obviously encourage you to have a good time, so I was drinking quite a lot and then following it up with a kebab or a visit to a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s every night. It was a vicious circle of booze and junk food. There would be crowds of girls queuing to speak to me at every club and my personality began to change. I think Lydia could sense that I was becoming more independent, and she hated my going off partying all the time. Although she enrolled me in a diet class, Lydia didn’t seem overtly worried about my weight gain, and I wondered if secretly she felt a bit more secure about me because it made me less attractive to other girls. In fact, Lydia used to like cuddling up to me because she could lie on top of me, and she said I was like a big comfy waterbed. What did concern her, however, was the amount of time I was continuing to spend with Mark or away making personal appearances, which we always referred to as PAs. I’d receive requests from all over the country to attend nightclubs, and when I arrived the place would be packed out. It sounds silly but it felt like pop stardom because there was so much interest. Jack Tweed’s brother Lewis drove me to the events. He had a little Smart car and we would sometimes travel up the motorway in it for hours on end. It was cramped inside but it did the trick just fine. If the venue we were visiting was more than two or three hours away we would usually be put up in a hotel, which meant I was away overnight. I earned good money from all the PAs, but for long periods of time I was away from Lydia and it’s hard to keep in contact by phone when you are in the middle of a nightclub. I think the stress of wondering what I was getting up to started to take its toll on her and she became very insecure about our relationship. The balance seemed to have tipped away from her slightly and, even though I still wanted be with her, my head had been turned by the showbiz lifestyle. Of course, she was on TOWIE herself, but I seemed to be the character who was getting all the interest from the public. I think Lydia was affected by the fact that I’d changed a little, and I think it knocked her confidence.
At first, Lydia put on a brave face and suggested the time was right for us to show a bit more commitment by moving in with each other. She said we could find a flat, or, better still, a cottage where we could bring along Mr Darcy and make a happy home for the three of us. I agreed and we started to look around. When an apartment became available in Abridge it seemed like the perfect solution. There was only one potential drawback: it was directly below Mark’s flat and I knew Lydia wouldn’t want to be so close to him.
‘How can you have a serious relationship and then have your best mate living upstairs?’ she complained.
We later dropped the idea.
It was while I was making a personal appearance in the West Country that I cheated on Lydia by sleeping with somebody else for the first time. I am not proud of it. Mark and I were appearing at a nightclub in Bristol for a couple of nights in a row when it happened. The club was packed to the rafters and there were a group of girls who looked like glamour models who came back to our hotel afterwards for a drink. Up until now I’d resisted the temptation to stray from Lydia, but a definite change was starting to come over me. I’d never known women to throw themselves at me like this before, and I found the heady mix of adulation and fame too much to handle. I was also drinking a lot and on this occasion I was very drunk. One of the girls followed me to my room and we had sex. It didn’t last long and she went home straight afterwards. I hated myself for it – I felt terrible. The next morning I was very homesick and I felt guilty about Lydia.
I don’t know why I did it, other than to say that I was young and foolish. I guess boys will be boys, although that’s no excuse: Lydia deserved far better from me. The horrible thing was that, after it had happened the first time, it got easier to slip again in future. I cheated on Lydia several times with girls who threw themselves at me while I was making nightclub PAs. The strange thing was that I never once enjoyed it. I think it was just a power thing: a part of me wanted to be a bit of a geezer to impress my mates. But feelings of guilt and remorse soon followed. It was driven by my ego. The only time I enjoyed sleeping with someone was when I was with Lydia, so it wasn’t as if any of these girls were satisfying me in that respect. I just did it because I could. I suppose there was a side of me that wanted to sample a single lifestyle. I was twenty-two and the only girl I had even been with up until now was Lydia. I wanted to have my cake and eat it. It didn’t happen every week, but I continued to be a naughty boy over a long period. It was never a case of having to work for it: the crazy thing was that, because I was on the telly, girls would just come up and blatantly offer it to me on a plate. On one occasion I came very close to being caught by the press. It was about a year after I’d first cheated and it again occurred in the West Country. I was drunk and I was flirting outrageously with some girls during one of my nightclub appearances. One of them
whispered in my ear, ‘Arg, let’s have sex.’
It was the sort of offer that most young blokes in their early twenties can only fantasise about, and I admit I was openly tempted. My head was spinning from the booze and in truth I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I agreed to leave the club and I ended up cheating again.
I got a terrible scare a few days later when somebody started posting comments about me on Twitter, saying words to the effect, ‘I know what you did after the nightclub.’
A few days later the media got to hear about it and the TOWIE press office received a call from a national newspaper. I was in a terrible state over it because the call came in on the day that I was with Lydia’s dad, Dave, who was accompanying me to a show that I was performing at in Birmingham. The story was due to be published on my birthday, but I denied it and thankfully it never appeared. It had been a close shave and it shocked me into behaving myself.
Rumours of my infidelity started to circulate on the TOWIE set, and it wasn’t long before they started to be alluded to on air. Of course, I denied them, but it was a case of no smoke without fire. Ironically, at the time that I was playing the field, Mark took the plunge and vowed to settle down with Lauren. He proposed to her on the show and they went about organising a huge engagement party. I couldn’t believe it when he popped the question, but it was typical Mark – always causing a stir. Lauren was like the cat who’d got the cream and she immediately began to move all her things into his apartment. For a while it really did look as if Mark was loved up and finally ready to settle down. There was a funny scene in TOWIE in which his grandmother, Nanny Pat, told him it was finally time to throw out his lucky pants, which he wore when he was on the pull. When the engagement party came along it was suitably grand. Mark and I arrived on a pair of white horses to be greeted by all the other guests, while Lauren followed us in a white Rolls-Royce. There was a funny moment with the horses because I weighed so much. I had trouble getting mounted and I had to be helped on and off.
At the very moment that Mark and Lauren were loved up, the friction between Lydia and me started to surface. We were still hunting for somewhere to live together and I found what I thought was a great option. I’d been earning good money and my dad and I decided to invest jointly in a town house in Woodford Green. It was derelict and needed renovation but I thought it would make an ideal home. I bounded round to Lydia to tell her the news, but, instead of her being delighted, we had a huge row.
‘You’ve hardly spent any time with me recently, so how can you be ready to move in with me?’ she complained.
I was defensive, but Lydia gave me a whole list of reasons why she was unhappy with me. She said that I never answered her phone calls, that I was always with Mark and that I never took her out. Lydia was also upset about a conversation that she’d had with Mark a few days earlier. He’d told her that, even though everybody thought I was a good boy, I was actually worse than he was when I was out. It was a throwaway comment that Mark made because he was fed up with always getting the blame for leading me astray. To Lydia it was like a red rag to a bull and things came to a head during a scene on TOWIE.
‘He turned round to me and said that you basically cheated on me,’ she told me in front of the cameras.
I tried to reassure her that Mark had meant it as a wind-up, but Lydia started crying. At times like this we’d get swept up in the emotions of the moment, regardless of the fact we were being filmed. I felt awful standing there listening to her while she was so upset.
‘I just have got no trust in you whatsoever. You lie all the time about where you’re going; you have girls; you’re disrespectful,’ Lydia told me in front of the cameras.
Our row ended with Lydia getting hysterical and afterwards she refused to see me for a while. I tried going round with flowers but Debbie refused to let me in.
Debbie was so angry over the rumours that I had cheated that she later confronted me in the street about it, but I denied everything. I was worried that, if I admitted it, Lydia and I would never get back together. I was just too much of a chicken to come clean. I was scared of what the consequences would be and I was too cowardly to admit it.
When Lydia quizzed me about it I became extremely defensive.
‘I didn’t cheat on you, so don’t start accusing me of things,’ I would say.
We had another blazing row in front of the cameras, which ended with Lydia telling me, ‘I just hate you so much, James.’
By now Lydia was sick of me. She’d made it clear to me that she regarded herself as single and we split up for a while. I was unhappy about it, but I still hoped there was a chance we could turn things around in the future.
At the time that Lydia was hearing rumours about my cheating with girls in nightclubs, she was also becoming suspicious of my friendship with Amy Childs. Amy and I had continued to flirt occasionally since our secret Christmas kiss, and we appeared together in a number of scenes on TOWIE, including when I asked her to be my tennis partner in a sexy tennis outfit. Eventually, Lydia became so upset with it all that she confronted Amy, who told her nothing was happening between us.
Looking back, I am not proud of the way I treated Lydia, and I would like to apologise to her for the way I behaved. The crazy thing was that, even though I cheated on her, if Lydia were to go near anybody else it would still make me insanely jealous – as I was about to find out.
11
A BOY CALLED JOEY AND A FRACAS AT A POOL PARTY
I didn’t know it at the time, but Lydia was about to give me a dose of my own medicine. It happened at a pool party that Mark organised in the Essex countryside, and it shocked me into mending my ways. Lydia and I had remained apart after our recent string of rows, which meant that in theory we were both single and therefore free to date other people. In reality, the thought of Lydia being on the arm of anybody else still made me feel physically sick. I admit I was being hypocritical, since I’d done my fair share of cheating, but my own behaviour was still a secret that I was trying to deny. Call me old fashioned, but I wanted Lydia to stay well away from other boys while the feelings between us were still so raw. There had been a brief scene on TOWIE where she had bumped into a boy called Rob in the street, and later it emerged that they had exchanged telephone numbers. At first I didn’t think too much of it, because I was convinced nothing would come of her and Rob. He was a good-looking boy, but he just didn’t seem her type and there wasn’t any chemistry between them. It never occurred to me that Lydia would invite him to an event at which I was present.
When Mark announced that he was planning to hold a pool party I knew that he’d want to do it in style.
‘What do you mean, a pool party?’ I asked.
‘We’re talking champagne sprays and Playboy girls,’ he told me with his usual swagger.
Mark’s idea was to recreate the glamour of Marbella in the Essex countryside and he arranged to borrow a luxurious mansion, which was out in the sticks near a village called Theydon Bois. It was a fantastic property that had a large terrace and garden, plus, of course, an all-important outdoor swimming pool. It was the ideal spot to host a fantastic champagne bash. I agreed that was a great way of getting loads of gorgeous women to show off their bodies in bikinis while all the boys relaxed in their swimming shorts. The producers of TOWIE loved the idea and all the cast were invited to attend. For Mark it was also a way of sending out a message that he was still the No. 1 man in the show.
There was a new kid on the block by this stage in the shape of Joey Essex, who’d joined TOWIE in Series 2. Joey had caused quite a stir by organising a series of ‘reem parties’, which were a huge success (reem is Joey’s favourite term for something that is fantastic). All of a sudden, it was as if he was the new up-and-coming Essex boy. Joey is a wonderful character. I knew him before he joined the cast and we were good friends, and we still are. The first time I’d spoken to him was while I was on a holiday in Marbella. Lydia and I were at a club called News Café and I went ou
t onto the balcony to get some fresh air. Joey was there with a phone clamped to his ear while having a furious argument with the girl he was dating at the time. They had been childhood sweethearts.
‘I’m not outdoors. I’m being good. Leave me alone!’ he shouted into the phone.
I’d seen Joey’s face around Essex a few times in the past, but we didn’t really know each other. After he finished the call I asked him if he was all right.
‘Yeah, I’m just rowing with my bird. It’s a nightmare. How are you, mate?’ he asked.
We introduced ourselves and I offered to take him inside and buy him a drink. Joey is a very kind-hearted, nice boy. You could tell straightaway that he loved getting up to mischief and in many ways he is like a big friendly kid. Back then he was obsessed with sunbeds and he looked so brown that I imagined he must have spent a lot of time on them. He was almost orange and I thought he looked a bit like a Ken doll. I talked to him a little bit about his girlfriend, whom he later split from before he joined TOWIE.
After our conversation in Spain, Joey and I would shake hands if ever we bumped into each other around Essex and we later arranged to go on a night out together to a club called Funkymojoe in South Woodford. Joey had only just broken from his girlfriend at this stage but he didn’t let it get him down. He was this cheeky chappy who went around the club snogging girls. He wasn’t on the TV at the time but he still seemed to have girls queuing up to kiss him. We bumped into Sam Faiers and Jess Wright in the club and the four of us posed for some photos together. Joey was in a great mood and I suspected that he secretly knew that he was about to join the cast, although nothing had been announced. After we left Funkymojoe we went off for a kebab together and he ended up coming back to my house in a cab. We crashed out together on the same bed, snoring our heads off. When we woke up the next morning we had terrible hangovers, and our friendship grew from then on.