Cheryl: My Story

by Cole, Cheryl

  I felt ecstatic, like the pieces of my life were clicked back where they should be. I cuddled up to Ashley with a big smile on my face, and it seemed like a million pictures were taken of us together that night. For once I didn’t care about the paparazzi. I wanted the world to see we had got through the past year, and that 2009 was going to be absolutely amazing for us.

  11

  ‘I just want to be a wife’

  ‘Remember when you gave me money for charity when I did Celebrity Apprentice?’

  ‘Yeeees …’

  ‘Well, I’m raising money for Comic Relief again. Can you make a donation?’

  ‘Sure. What are you doing this time?’

  ‘Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, with Kimberley and a few others.’

  There was a long pause before Simon said, ‘You’re mad. I’ll tell you what, I’ll pay you not to do it.’

  I started laughing but Simon was deadly serious, and for the first time I realised I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for.

  Kimberley had asked me to do the climb after she had already agreed to take part and then took a wobbler.

  ‘Please, Cheryl, I don’t want to do it on my own,’ she begged. ‘I’ve asked Sarah and she said no, she couldn’t cope. Will you come?’

  I wasn’t used to seeing Kimberley like that. Normally I was the one who was panicking and needed calming down, and she was always the sensible one who kept a cool head and took control.

  ‘OK, I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind a challenge.’

  To me it was just a charity walk. All I had to do was give up a week or so of my time and put one foot in front of the other, and we’d raise a load of money to help protect people in Africa from malaria. There were seven others taking part – Gary Barlow, Chris Moyles, Alesha Dixon, Denise Van Outen, Fearne Cotton, Ronan Keating and Ben Shephard from GMTV, all of whom I’d met before. I wasn’t bothered who else was going anyway; I was there to raise money for a good cause and help Kimberley do the same.

  I was so busy in the run-up to the climb, in March 2009, that I had no time to prepare properly or even think about it.

  At the beginning of the year I’d spent some time in a recording studio with Will.i.am, who had been telling me ever since I recorded my little part on his ‘Heartbreaker’ single 12 months earlier that I should record some solo material.

  ‘You know you’re gonna do a solo record, right?’ he said to me over and over again before I eventually said ‘yes’.

  ‘I don’t know how to do it on my own,’ I’d protested the last time I saw him, when we met up in London.

  ‘I’ll help you, every step. I want to be involved with your career. Come into the studio, write with me. I know we can do some great stuff. Say yes. You won’t regret it.’

  He gave me one of his charismatic smiles.

  ‘OK. I’ll try, after The X Factor. But I’m really not sure about this.’

  When the day came to actually go into the studio with him I was nervous but excited. I’d written songs before, but this was Will.i.am I was dealing with, one of the world’s biggest producers. How could I go into a studio – just me, Will and a pen – and write music?

  As I stepped into that recording studio my stomach was filled with a million butterflies but if Will noticed how nervous I was, he didn’t say anything.

  ‘You go first – you write your bit,’ he said.

  He was just so cool about the whole thing, while I was feeling very British and self-conscious. Physically putting pen to paper with Will beside me was one of the most daunting moments of my career. I was intimidated just to be there in the studio with him, but I took a deep breath and began to scribble down some lyrics.

  ‘I like it!’ Will said straight away. ‘That’s so good!’

  I’d been worried about him not liking what I’d done but he got me straight away.

  ‘You’re good. I told you, you could do it.’

  The next thing I knew I was in a booth, actually recording, and when I’d done it once it got easier each time. Will was so enthusiastic and encouraging that he made the whole thing seem so easy, and so much fun. We wrote six tracks together, and I loved working with him. It was exciting and new, and even though we hadn’t really spent much time together at all, he already felt like a really close friend to me.

  Around the same time, in early 2009, I was also working on new material with Girls Aloud and preparing for our fifth tour. We had our single, ‘Untouchable’, coming out soon, and the Out of Control tour was starting in May.

  As a result, practically the only preparation I did for Kilimanjaro was to ask my mam to wear in my hiking boots, as she’s the same shoe size as me. ‘Can you just put some thick socks on and wear them round the house?’ I asked her.

  ‘Aren’t you meant to wear them in yourself, Cheryl?’

  ‘Yes, Mam, but I can hardly walk round recording studios in those, can I?’

  I had a setting that was actually called ‘Kilimanjaro’ on the treadmill in my gym at home and so I’d have a go on that occasionally, even though I hate running and usually gave up before I’d completed the programme. Ashley thought I was crazy for agreeing to the climb, but he didn’t seem worried like Simon was and he happily gave me some money and got his friends to make donations too.

  ‘Good luck, babe,’ he said. ‘Hope it goes well.’

  There was no fuss, and my mam was just as laid-back. ‘Bye, Cheryl,’ she said, just as if she was waving me off to catch the bus to town. Besides Simon, my brother Garry was the only one who was really concerned about what I was doing, as he watches all those extreme documentaries and knew that people had died on the mountain.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Statistically, what are the chances of things going wrong? We’ve got film crews with us and the best guides possible.’

  We flew to Nairobi and had to take a little plane from there to Tanzania. Kimberley was taking the whole thing incredibly seriously, and she had lots of emotional calls from her family, who were all telling her they loved her and to stay safe. ‘If anything happens to me, remember I love you,’ I could hear her say.

  A group of Maasai warriors appeared near the base camp, which was amazing as they literally came out of nowhere and started bouncing really high on their bare feet all around us. It was incredible, and seeing them gave me a sharp reminder of why I was there, to help people like them.

  Kimberley told me that malaria kills a child every 30 seconds in Africa, when a £5 net could save them. They were the only numbers that lodged in my brain, because that was all that mattered to me. The fact the mountain is 19,340 feet above sea level and temperatures on the climb can range from 45°C to minus 25 didn’t register with me at all, until I was actually there, finding that out first-hand.

  ‘This is so scary,’ Kimberley said on the first night. We were sharing a tent with Alesha Dixon, tucked up together like three sausages in our sleeping bags. I hadn’t enjoyed the first day of climbing at all. I’d expected it to be more of a hike than a scramble up actual steep rock, but nevertheless I’d just put my head down and got on with it. I was relieved to finally be in the tent at our first camp, and I actually found it quite a novelty and was enjoying the feeling of being on an adventure.

  Alesha is good fun and we had plenty in common, as she was in Mystique when we were starting out with Girls Aloud. We also had another link, though this one wasn’t fun at all. Her husband had cheated on her with Javine, the singer who very nearly made it into Girls Aloud. I didn’t know Alesha well but I knew that her ex-husband was MC Harvey from the band So Solid Crew, and that Javine had a baby with him. I remembered that Alesha had texted me to offer support when I went to Thailand after Ashley cheated, and I’d understood why, because she knew what I was going through.

  I really enjoyed having a different girl with us, but Kimberley just couldn’t relax at all. She was flapping and nervous and panicky about every noise outside and every detail of the climb.
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  ‘Lighten up,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I wish I’d never agreed to this,’ Kimberley said. ‘Anything could happen …’

  ‘Stop it! We’ll be fine. Get some sleep, we need all the energy we can get.’

  As the days went on, I must admit I got where Kimberley was coming from. I had totally underestimated just how physically demanding it would be to climb and climb for hour after hour. My toenails were falling off and I had huge blisters all over my feet that absolutely killed me. I’d gone from being in sweltering heat at the start to enduring freezing temperatures like I’d never experienced before. Then the altitude started playing with my brain. The less oxygen there is in the air, the shorter your breath, and that affects how you function. My legs got heavy, I felt dizzy and light-headed and I became a bit delirious, laughing hysterically one minute and crying the next. It’s like I wasn’t in touch with my emotions, and I had next to no contact with the real world because my mobile signal cut in and out very randomly, so I literally felt like I was on another planet.

  One night when we got to a camp I heard Fearne Cotton telling Denise Van Outen she was getting up to go to the toilet, and then I heard a loud crash as she keeled over. Fearne had severe altitude sickness and needed urgent medical help. Another time poor Alesha nipped out for a wee and actually fell down part of the mountain. I just couldn’t go to the loo behind a bush; I got total stage fright, especially when I saw a camera pointing at me one time. ‘Get out of me face!’ I shouted, taking a huge hissy fit.

  Chris Moyles gave me his huge coat one day when I was shivering, and Denise was very supportive the whole climb. She is one strong woman, I can tell you. I listened to Denise’s words of encouragement and got on with it, but Kimberley was finding it much tougher. She would be all over the place, crying like a child does when you need to keep wiping their face and holding them.

  The seriousness of what we were doing really hit me on the third day. We passed a guy from Leicester who was rocking on both legs and was so spaced out he was hallucinating. ‘If he doesn’t get down quickly he could die,’ his guide told us.

  I had a sudden, sharp realisation at that point. The reason Kimberley was suffering worse than me was because she was used to her life running so smoothly. She’d been with her boyfriend, Justin, for six years, and nothing in her life was extreme or scary. She’d hardly even changed her hairstyle in all the time I’d known her, let alone anything else, while I had gone through all kinds of crazy dramas. This was the first time Kimberley had felt so frightened and vulnerable in her life, while to me it was all part of the journey.

  I was probably hallucinating a bit, but I imagined seeing my life as one of those ‘colour by numbers’ pictures, the ones I used to do as a child. It was a kaleidoscope of vibrant, clashing colours that were painted everywhere. I’d had so much colour in my life I wasn’t daunted by this challenge at all. I’d gone through much more frightening things than this, and that was why this wasn’t so tough for me. I’d not climbed Kilimanjaro before, but I lived my life climbing mountains of other kinds, and I’d learned to expect the unexpected, because that’s what life always brought me.

  My phone signal kicked in when I was literally up in the clouds, and I dialled my dad’s number as quickly as I could.

  ‘Hi Dad!’

  ‘I thought you were climbing the mountain?’

  ‘I am. You know when you used to say to me, “Cheryl, get your head out of the clouds?”’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, I’m ringing to tell you that I’m in the clouds!’

  My dad was laughing his head off. The signal cut out, but talking to him really raised my spirits.

  A bit later on, I was happy to see I had a voicemail from Ashley. We’d managed to speak once or twice, and now I dialled the number excitedly, looking forward to hearing his voice.

  ‘Babes, it’s me. Basically I’ve been arrested. I’m in the police station. Sorry. Call me …’

  The battery died halfway through the message, and so did something inside me. I asked Denise if I could use her phone, telling her Ashley was in some kind of trouble. I couldn’t believe he’d got himself arrested, especially when his reputation was already so bad.

  I didn’t get through straight away and I started getting agitated.

  ‘What the hell has he done now?’ I hissed. ‘I’m climbing a mountain for charity and he’s getting arrested. How does that work?’

  ‘I got f****** arrested for telling a police officer to f*** off,’ Ashley told me, when I eventually made contact.

  I didn’t get the full story, but I heard enough to know he’d been drunk when he did it. That was all I needed to know. I tried to hold myself together, telling myself at least he wasn’t in danger, and that I would just have to deal with this when I got home.

  It was emotional enough on the mountain without this. He wasn’t even meant to be going out drinking. How could he do this to me, now?

  We’d been going for four days by this time and the altitude sickness really hit me in a big way. I started projectile vomiting as soon as I smelt the food in the camp, and I needed an injection in my bum to stop the nausea. It worked, thank God, because this was the toughest day ever, even without Ashley’s contribution.

  The summit was in sight and it was minus 25 degrees.

  I remember Denise talking about being in Chicago, the musical, to keep my mind off the pain in my feet. ‘I can’t do it,’ I told her, ‘You can, Cheryl. Get up! You’re a Geordie, come on, you’re meant to be tough.’

  The wind was howling around me as I walked, and it reminded me of being in my grandad’s high-rise flat in Newcastle. It made the same eerie whistling sound, and I felt I was actually back there, which was so bizarre as really I was walking on frozen gravel, surrounded by stars that were more yellow than I’d ever seen, and looking at the snow-capped summit shimmering against a massive moon.

  It’s very difficult to describe how testing it is to be up there, exposed to the elements. I used hand warmers to help me cope with the bitter cold, but nothing could help me deal with my emotions. I literally felt stripped bare, like my whole life was being tipped out around me as I took each step.

  I had time to think about things I’d buried. Andrew, my brother, had given a long interview to a tabloid newspaper a few months earlier. I’d been too up to my eyes working on The X Factor to really think about it, and if the truth be known I really didn’t want to think about it, but here on the mountain there was no escape. Andrew had told the paper how I’d visited him in prison and pleaded with him to turn his life around. I didn’t read it myself, but I know he repeated what he had said to me: ‘I’m too far gone.’ That’s what he’d told me to my face, the last time I saw him. I’d offered to help him, but he said he wasn’t ready to help himself, and he didn’t want to let me down. He had 50 convictions by now, and was as addicted to alcohol and drugs as he was to crime. It had broken my heart to see how low he had sunk, and now I was feeling incredibly hurt and let down that he had sold a story on me. I don’t know how many thousands of pounds he got paid for it. Even taking a penny for his thoughts was insulting to me. I’d told Andrew I loved him and I would pay for him to go into rehab. He was my flesh and blood. The money was there to help him and all he had to do was agree to help himself, but instead he’d sold out. His life was bleak and hopeless.

  I was crying as I neared the summit. Dawn was breaking, and the glacier was outstandingly beautiful, but when I actually summited it felt like an anti-climax. The landscape felt bleak and hopeless too, and I had to psyche myself up and tell myself it had all been worth it, because even if just one extra mosquito net could be bought because of me, it could save a life. I couldn’t save my brother, but at least I might be able to save someone else.

  Just as I’d underestimated the climb, I had not anticipated how tough it would be to get back down the mountain. It was so steep I was running down vertical drops taking really fast steps, like
a little kid running down a big hill. My feet were frozen and I felt like I had pebbles in my shoes. It was a horrible sensation, so I took them off and shook them but there was nothing there.

  I passed Kimberley who was still on her way up and I told her she had about 45 minutes to go to the top, and gave her the biggest hug ever. She cried, and the tears froze on her cheeks. It was impossible to stick together because you just had to do the best you could all the time, which meant one of us was usually ahead of the other. I barely recognised Kimberley as I waved her off, because she looked so emotionally zapped. We just looked at each other as if to say, ‘Who are we?’

  When we reached the next camp all the tents had blown away and we had to keep going for an extra three hours, which tested me in every sense. I was eating Kendal Mint Cake and Haribos for energy, and I was trying to keep myself mentally strong by thinking about talking to Ashley and all my family and friends when I finally made it down to base camp. There were black trees and clouds rolling past me, and I remember begging Gary Barlow to get us a helicopter.

  ‘We’ve done what we set out to do. We’ve summited. Please can’t we get a helicopter to pick us up?’

  ‘Cheryl, if you can get a helicopter to come out here, I’m in,’ Gary said.

  I knew there was no chance, but I was feeling desperate, and I knew Gary was suffering too as he has a really bad back that had plagued him the whole time. It had taken us four days to get up the mountain and I knew the descent would take about two days. When we reached the second camp we still had 14 hours to go, and I’d absolutely had enough of everything and everyone. I was dreaming of having a shower and a blow dry and wearing lipstick, but I had to settle for sleeping in the dirt yet again, wiping my face with a flannel in the morning, padding out my shoes with anything I could find to stop my blisters rubbing, and then walking for another six hours.

  ‘Keep going,’ I told myself. ‘Think how many mosquito nets we’ll be able to provide for people.’