Cheryl: My Story

by Cole, Cheryl

  ‘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 …’

  ‘It’s a camel, Cheryl. Camels groan,’ Ashley snapped back.

  ‘But what if his feet are hurting, treading through all those prickly bushes …’

  ‘Babe! Is there any chance you can shut up?’

  I was shocked. Ashley had never spoken to me like that before, ever.

  ‘OK. Not a problem. Just don’t talk to me, and I’ll not speak,’ I replied.

  When we got off the camel it did the loudest moan of all and I was not happy, not at all. The sun was setting and we were given strawberries and champagne along with all the other tourists, but I was still fuming with Ashley.

  He took hold of my hand and pulled me towards him, and I thought for a minute he was going to do something stupid like push me down a sand dune to try and break the ice. Instead, he led me away from the other tourists and got down on one knee, right there in the sand. It took my breath away, because he looked choked with emotion. He then started crying, told me he loved me and asked, ‘Will you marry me?’

  It was a really amazing, heart-stopping moment. I started crying too, and I told him ‘yes’ without having to think about it for even a fraction of a second. Ashley then put the most incredible diamond ring on my finger, and the other holidaymakers applauded, having worked out what had just happened.

  We kissed, and I felt like the happiest girl in the world. I had no doubts, no worries. We were meant to be together, and right from that moment I couldn’t wait to get married.

  When we got back to the hotel we phoned all our friends and family to break the good news. Ashley told me that a few days earlier, when he’d locked himself in the bathroom, he had in fact been phoning my dad, to ask for my hand in marriage. He’d introduced himself as ‘Ashley Cole’ as he was so nervous, which threw my dad a bit by the sounds of it, but of course he had given his blessing.

  The girls were just screaming with excitement, and from the minute we put the phone down to my friends I wanted to start planning the wedding.

  ‘It’ll have to be next summer,’ I said, thinking about the World Cup, and the fact that Girls Aloud were planning to go on tour again in the spring.

  ‘That soon?’

  ‘I don’t see the point in being engaged for 10 years – do you?’

  ‘No, babe.’

  That’s how it went. Ashley was happy for me to do all the planning, and I was happy to do it. I wanted a fairytale wedding, something that would be all girly and twinkly and special.

  When we got back to the UK we were absolutely devastated to find there was a picture of us in Heat magazine. It showed us both crying, just after the proposal. It was such a private, personal moment and we’d been so overwhelmed that we hadn’t given it a second thought when one of the guides had taken a photograph of us.

  We were naïve, but it was another lesson learned. It meant that when OK! magazine got in touch shortly afterwards and asked us if we wanted to do an exclusive deal for the official engagement pictures, plus the wedding, we decided it was best to be in control of the stories that were being put out and do the deal, rather than leave it for journalists and other people to put pictures and false information out there.

  ‘If you give them the story, nobody else is digging for it,’ we were advised by one of Ashley’s agents. ‘Also, you’ll get the best security you could wish for at the wedding, not to mention a fabulous set of pictures.’ He explained that, because a wedding is a public event, without proper security we would be leaving ourselves open to a repeat of what had happened with the proposal in Dubai, which we didn’t want at all.

  Ashley and I reluctantly settled on a deal on the understanding that we’d spend every penny on the wedding, as we certainly didn’t want to profit from it.

  I still had doubts, though and I bitterly regret not listening to my gut feeling. I should have known from experience that instincts like that should not be ignored – look what happened the night I went to The Drink nightclub with Nicola.

  Anyhow, before we knew it Ashley and I were posing in the flat for glossy photos.

  ‘What are we doing?’ he said to me through gritted teeth as we smiled and embraced for the camera.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘None whatsoever.’

  We found ourselves saying the same thing again when we turned up for a photoshoot to promote the National Lottery’s Dream Number. This was in the run up to the wedding, and again was on the advice of Ashley’s agent.

  ‘What do we have to do?’ Ashley said.

  ‘Just put on these white clothes, cross our fingers and hope the pictures turn out well,’ I laughed.

  We got slated in the press for those photos, and I’m not surprised. We looked ridiculously cheesy, and you can tell just by looking at them that Ashley especially felt really uncomfortable, posing like a medallion man in a white shirt open down to the naval. I can remember him hissing in my ear: ‘Get me out of here,’ to which I replied: ‘It’s too late. Just smile.’

  ‘We should have just pegged it,’ we joked afterwards, but then we had to get our heads round the fact the press reproduced the pictures time and time again, complete with stories or jibes from national newspaper columnists.

  I’d been labelled a WAG practically as soon as I started dating Ashley, and once we were engaged the term was used more and more. It annoyed the shit out of me, because to me it’s a derogatory term, meaning a girl who doesn’t earn her own money or have a career in her own right. It baffled me that some girls actually aspired to be labelled a WAG. ‘Where’s their pride?’ I always thought. It never occurred to me that there w
ere also plenty of girls who would claim to have slept with a famous footballer, even if they hadn’t. Or, even more bizarrely, that there were people out there prepared to start a vicious rumour that Ashley was gay. Unbelievably, both of these things happened at the start of 2006 as we prepared for our wedding that summer.

  First, a girl claimed she’d slept with Ashley on New Year’s Eve while I was away on a shopping trip to New York with my mam. The News of the World was prevented from running the story because Ashley’s lawyers got CCTV footage proving he was alone in a restaurant at the time the girl claimed he was with her.

  It was horrible to have to deal with that when I was enjoying planning my wedding, but I never doubted Ashley for a second. ‘What a load of crap,’ were my exact words, as soon as I heard the allegation, and before knowing there was proof it was a load of rubbish. To me, this was simply an extension of the press interference we already had to put up with, although of course it was far worse than having a tour guide sell a picture of us, or being slated by a nasty newspaper columnist.

  Ashley was very relieved by my level-headed reaction, but I just knew it was some stupid girl trying to make money or get herself in the papers. ‘You don’t have to be grateful that I haven’t gone mad,’ I said to Ashley. ‘Why should you worry about anything? We’ve proved you’ve done nothing wrong.’

  Weeks later, disgusting stories started circulating about Ashley being gay and doing something sexual with a mobile phone and one of his male friends. I actually burst out laughing because it was so ridiculous, but Ashley didn’t find it funny at all.

  ‘For God’s sake, when are they gonna leave us alone?’ he said. It was claimed there was a video proving the allegations, and Ashley just kept saying, ‘Go on then, play the tape but don’t just write bullshit.’