Cheryl: My Story (34 page)

‘I will never, ever forget this,’ Derek said.

‘Nor will I,’ I replied.

I have always enjoyed giving presents more than receiving them because I love to see the look on people’s faces, and being there with Derek and seeing his face light up was such a privilege it brought a tear to my eye.

Being surrounded by so much nature also made me feel very emotional. One minute I’d be laughing my head off, watching in fascination as a baboon ate a peach like a little old man, staring back at me. The next I’d have a sad moment, like when I was looking at crocodiles on a river safari. ‘I should be scared of you but I’m not,’ I thought. ‘If I fell in, so what?’ It was like when I flew to Thailand with the girls, and I didn’t care if I fell out of the plane because I was already swamped in so much pain, nothing else could hurt me any more.

Every night I cried myself to sleep. I remember that very vividly.

I didn’t unload on Derek on that trip, and I had no signal on my phone in the bush so I couldn’t have spoken to anybody else if I’d wanted to. This was an escape, somewhere I had time to myself to think, and whenever I thought about Ashley and what had happened to us, the tears poured down my cheeks.

On the last day I was really ready to get back to the UK. It was like I couldn’t wait to do the trip, and then when I was away I couldn’t wait to get home. In hindsight, I can see that I was so unhappy deep down that no amount of running, here and there, could change things. I couldn’t run away from myself and my thoughts and feelings.

I mustn’t have been thinking straight when I packed, because when we got to the little local airport to take our internal flight to Dar es Salaam I didn’t have my passport. It was an 80-minute round trip to go back on a little charter plane and collect it from the hotel safe so we missed our flight back to London, and then the next one was cancelled. I had to be at the London auditions the next day, and I started panicking. I hadn’t told Simon where I was, and I knew there’d be war if I didn’t turn up. I phoned Lily in tears.

‘I’m stuck. You’re gonna have to get me a plane, somehow, to get us home.’

Derek was trying to calm me down, and I was apologising to him for getting him involved in another one of my dramas.

‘Don’t say sorry. It’s been
amazing
,’ he told me. I knew he meant it, but I still felt terrible.

In the end we got a rusty, smelly old plane to take us to Nairobi and from there Lily got us booked on a BA flight to Heathrow, which would get in at 7am. There was no airport lounge and we sat on these plastic chairs for three hours waiting for the flight, with me wondering how I was going to survive a whole day of auditioning straight after this.

When we finally took off I noticed I had three mosquito bites that weren’t there before. There were two on my foot and one on the right side of my face, and all three were really painful and itchy throughout the whole flight. I couldn’t rest at all and I had a massage as soon as we landed to try to make myself feel awake and alive for the auditions, but I knew I was going to have to explain myself to Simon. The bite on my face was absolutely huge by now and there was no way he wouldn’t spot it.

‘A safari! Are you mad?’ he said. ‘I could
never
go on one of those things.’

‘Well, you should go. You’re on your phone all the time, constantly stressing, and you can’t do that on safari. It would do you good – and you love animals. You’d love seeing them in their natural habitat.’

‘No, I couldn’t think of anything worse. As for dressing in safari gear – just no.’

‘Well, you might have a point there. I couldn’t see you in the hat …’

I was tired, but I enjoyed the next week of auditions, particularly when we went to Dublin and met Mary Byrne. She told us she was 50 years old and worked on the till at Tesco, and then blew us all away with the huge Tom Jones’ hit ‘I Who Have Nothing’. It was people like her who made me love my job, and I told her I really enjoyed her audition, and that I could feel myself getting goosebumps when she sang.

It was my twenty-seventh birthday two days later and I woke up feeling a bit ill. I hadn’t planned a party, because it was my first birthday without Ashley and I didn’t think I’d be in the mood. Lily got me two puppies from Harrods to play with – a little pug and a Chihuahua – because Buster and Coco were in Newcastle with my mam while I was away doing the auditions, and Lily knew I missed them. Buster and Coco love it up north, although Buster always comes home like cock of the walk, with what I call his ‘council estate swagger’. He’s a nuisance for days afterwards, but I’d much rather he was with my mam up there, seeing the kids, than being put in kennels.

Derek came over in the evening and cooked something, and he’d made me a photo album of our safari on the computer, with
Lion King
music playing in the background. I had about three vodkas, ate loads of birthday cake and really enjoyed myself, despite not feeling one hundred per cent.

The next morning I woke up with what I thought was the worst hangover ever. I felt really sick and my whole body ached and throbbed. My skin was sore, too, which was really weird. It was actually painful to touch, and I thought I must have completely overindulged the night before.

I had to go to a photoshoot for some false eyelashes I was endorsing with Girls Aloud, and I remember apologising to the driver who collected me, because I just had to lie down in the back of the car. When I got to the shoot Lily had laid out a red carpet as another surprise as I hadn’t seen her on my birthday. She’d also got a giant cupcake birthday cake for me, but I couldn’t face eating any of it.

I was drinking water, thinking I was dehydrated, and then I tried eating a couple of sweets, hoping the sugar hit might give me a boost, but I couldn’t stomach them. I decided I must have eaten too much cake the night before, on top of the alcohol. People were asking me all day if I was OK because I must have looked half dead, but I just kept telling them, ‘I’ll be fine,’ because I was sure this was self-inflicted, and I didn’t want to moan.

The next day I was in Cardiff for more
X Factor
auditions, and I was really struggling now. I hadn’t really eaten anything for a couple of days and I’d practically collapsed into my bed after the photoshoot, then dragged myself here. I felt unbelievably ill and tired, and when I looked in the mirror my face looked puffy and different, like there was something seriously wrong with my skin.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to Pixie Lott, who was the guest judge and must have thought I was quite weird because I hardly spoke to her. ‘I’m not myself at all. I feel really ill.’

As I was sitting there I started to sweat, and then every five minutes my arms would go freezing cold and I got these huge, super-hard goosebumps all over them. I showed Pixie and Simon. ‘I did have a drink on my birthday,’ I said. ‘And I’ve not felt the same since.’

Nobody knew what to say because I didn’t look as bad as I felt, and I started to think I might have flu. I texted Derek, who was with his nana, and he told me that she’d had flu and it sounded like classic symptoms. As the day wore on I was finding it painful to even keep my head up and when we took a break the smell of food sickened me. By the evening my lips were deep purple, my fingertips were blue, and I was almost passing out. I now wondered if this was a combination of flu and exhaustion.

‘Lily, I need to schedule in some days off. I’m just wiped out.’

I felt emotionally and physically shattered by this point, and it also crossed my mind that this could be my body reacting to everything I’d gone through this year, telling me it couldn’t take any more stress.

I think Lily thought the same. She called Hillary, who said, ‘If Cheryl needs a week off, we’ll just have to tell Simon. It’s tough.’

‘Don’t say anything yet,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the
Vogue
shoot to do, and I’m not letting them down.’

I’d done a
Vogue
cover before and it was a big honour to be asked a second time. Besides, I’d already done the interview to go inside the magazine and I knew they had a renowned photographer travelling from Paris, so cancelling was just not an option.

Nevertheless, I woke up and cried on the day of the shoot because I felt so ill. Sundraj met me at the studio, took one look at me and said, ‘This isn’t right. You can’t do this.’

Unfortunately, we found out that the photographer had taken the Eurostar to Ebbsfleet in Kent instead of to St Pancras. It wasn’t his mistake and it meant he’d had a long drive to get to us, which made me even more determined to carry on.

‘Sundraj, I’ll get through it,’ I said. ‘As long as it doesn’t take too long, I can do it.’

I’ve never done a photoshoot so quickly in my life before. I remember the make-up artist looking at my purpley blue lips and saying, ‘Right, what are we going to do with
those
?’, there was a guy pulling at my hair and someone else was painting my nails, all at once. The smell of the nail varnish was super strong, like Andrew’s glue in the house back home, and I sat there feeling horribly nauseous and wanting to vomit. Unbelievably, just 15 minutes and four costume changes later, everything was done.

‘I’ll just lie down for a minute,’ I said, and apparently I was out cold for a full hour.

Sundraj lifted me up and I was drenched in sweat. Even my hair was soaking wet.

‘You’re going home and you’re having a week off,’ I heard him say.

I agreed, because I knew there was absolutely no way I could carry on. I forced myself to eat a handful of cashew nuts when I got in. There was nobody in the house, and I literally collapsed on my bed.

16
‘You’re tryin’ to kill me!’

‘Tell me everything,’ I said to Derek. ‘I want to know all the details.’

I was delirious when I was admitted to the Cromwell Hospital the week before and I couldn’t remember a lot of what had happened in there. I knew this was going to be embarrassing, but I’d learned by now that you have to forget about your dignity when you go into hospital. You leave that at the front door and pick it up on the way out.

Derek started to laugh mischievously. ‘Honestly, Cheryl, do you not remember how
scandalous
you were in the Cromwell?’

That was typical of Derek, teasing me and looking to make light of a situation. He was only trying to cheer me up but I still cringed. Some of the things that I could remember myself were embarrassing enough.

‘You’re tryin’ to kill me!’ I shouted at the first doctor who examined me. A blood test taken at home had confirmed I had malaria and Derek and my mam had rushed me into hospital for emergency treatment in the early hours of the morning. Just a few hours before that, on the Sunday afternoon, I’d been trying to convince Derek I was fine even though it was only the day after I’d collapsed on the
Vogue
shoot. It was the fourth of July and I know what a big deal that is for Americans. I begged him to go out and watch the fireworks. ‘I’ll be alright,’ I said. ‘Don’t let me ruin your Independence Day.’

‘No way,’ Derek replied. ‘Enough’s enough. You need to see a doctor.’

I was lying on the rug in front of the fire at home. Derek said my lips were blue, and I was sobbing and crying. I’d phoned him up that morning and said, ‘Please can you come over. I feel seriously unwell.’

I can only remember flashes of this, because by now I was starting to get delirious. I’d been so ill for days already but I was still trying to convince myself I had the flu, and was exhausted. I’d get over it with a bit of rest, that’s what I was saying.

Derek was having none of it. He got a taxi to the local chemist and bought a thermometer, and when he took my temperature it was 104. He had to keep doing it because he couldn’t believe the reading.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I’m calling the doctor myself. I think you might need a blood test.’

I went crazy, shouting at him that I hated needles. I associate them with pain; emotional pain. They make me think of heroin addicts. Just the thought of a needle can transport me back to a dark, terrifying place in a heartbeat. I didn’t tell Derek all that, but I pleaded with him not to pick up the phone.

‘How do you know what I need?’ I shouted. ‘What are you on about blood tests for?’

He rang Lily, who rang my doctor. She agreed to come over, even though it was a Sunday. I can remember the doctor trying to take blood, but I was going in and out of consciousness.

‘I can’t find a vein,’ I heard her say. The thought of a needle going in my arm made me want to vomit. Apparently I had no visible veins. The doctor couldn’t even get the tiniest baby needle in my arm.

When she failed to take blood, the doctor asked me to provide a urine sample. I struggled to do it, and what I produced looked brown and as thick as honey. Disgusting, I know, but that’s the truth.

‘This is serious, and I mean serious,’ the doctor said.

She called her partner and he arrived with his wife, who is South African. Derek called my mam and told her to get on a train down from Newcastle straight away.

All the while I was crying and drifting in and out of consciousness.

They tried again with a needle, tying a tourniquet around my arm to raise a vein. It sickened me, and I was so angry with Derek for making me do this. Finally, they got a little spot of blood out of my arm.