Fierce (14 page)

It was another reason why I didn't like it. In the UK, if I'd done something stupid or pissed someone off, they would always say, ‘Kelly, you have annoyed me. You're being an idiot. Shut up or fuck off.' I liked that. You knew where you were. When my mum annoyed me, I told her. In Los Angeles, so many people just sit there when someone is being annoying and don't say shit. They just smile and try to appease them. I was always meant to live in the UK. British humour suits me and I like the directness that people have. My mum used to just laugh
and wind me up even more when I got annoyed with her. She'd come up to me and try and hug and kiss me in front of my friends. She'd say stuff like, ‘Oh, Kelly, your friends want to hang out with Kelly's mummy.'

I swear to God, my mum is going to be the craziest grandma because she just loves babies. She is an incredible hoarder. She's kept absolutely everything from our childhoods. Back at Welders, my mum has a box in her dressing room full of all the shoes we used to wear. There isn't just mine, Aimee's and Jack's first pair of shoes there. I could almost understand that. No, there are our second pair of shoes, our third pair of shoes. There are shoes in there that I had when I was six. She would never in a million years dream of throwing something out. Not even a hanky we'd probably once blown our nose on.

Do you want to know what one of the worse things about getting older is? You end up turning into your mother. I realised this when I was about fifteen. For a start, we have the same laugh. My dad would always say to me and Mum, ‘You two will never be lonely because of your laugh. It's so infectious that people will always want to be around you.' It isn't only our laugh though. We have the same size feet and hands. Our facial mannerisms are very similar too. I would love to be a successful businesswoman like my mum – when she walks into a room, she has a real presence. I think that's fantastic. Although, when she's in a bad mood, we all bloody know about it too. At times it was difficult because my mum would want to be our friend, but then she would go ape-shit if we went out too late. She was always screaming, ‘Why do you have to go out every night? You can't wear that. Why are you wearing that? Why are you putting that make-up on your face? Who's that you're hanging out with?' It used to drive me absolutely insane. And then, when I started hanging out with guys, Mum wanted to be the other woman in the relationship. Not in a sick way. But because she cares so much she always wants to be a part of my life. But you just don't want your mum hanging out with you when you're with a boy. Never!

F
UCKING
hell, I've had my heart broken. Hell, yeah. At the time it was the most horrendous thing I have ever experienced. The first time was when I was nineteen. I was dating a singer called Bert McCracken. He was in a band called The Used and I met him when I was seventeen and he was performing with his band at Ozzfest. It was my first serious relationship and it was during the time that we were filming
The Osbournes
, so the whole world seemed to know about Bert and me.

He was the first guy I'd really loved. I was so hung up on him. It was Valentine's Day and the cameras were in our house. It was my first big Valentine's Day and because he was on tour, I was thinking I would get flowers delivered. He called me up and said to me the stupidest thing that anyone has ever said to me in my whole fucking life. He said, ‘You know, Happy Valentine's Day, baby. You're so beautiful. You know you're so great. I am so glad I met you and you WERE in my life. One day you will be in that white dress walking down the aisle with me.

‘But you know, we can't date right now because I just want to ROCK!' He actually screamed ‘rock!' like he was at a concert on stage or something. He continued: ‘I just want to fucking ROCK!'

At that precise point, I just wanted to take a bag full of rocks and bash his fucking head in. That's what I wanted to do. But the pain of being dumped on Valentine's Day didn't end there. He then
came out with, ‘The thing is, people don't take me seriously because I date you. All I want to do is ROCK!' That last sentence ‘People don't take me seriously because I date you,' took away four years of my life. I was so unbelievably upset.

Instead of laughing at how stupid he'd sounded saying he just wanted to rock, I concentrated on the criticism about me. It sent me on a downward spiral of self-hatred. It sent me insane – I just kept agonising over why people wouldn't take him seriously if he dated me. I was so terribly distressed and I didn't want to date anyone for a long time after that. I just didn't trust anyone with my feelings.

Who the fuck says that to someone? I had to walk back down the stairs and into the kitchen at Doheny and have the MTV cameras capture me saying I had been dumped on Valentine's Day. I tell you, it was bloody humiliating and upsetting. And because of the show, the whole world knew about it. There was no running away.

Now I laugh about it. It was like a scene from the mockumentary
Spinal Tap
which took the piss out of a rock band. After that phone call, I never saw or spoke to Bert again. In the early days I wouldn't have known whether to have hugged or punched him if I'd bumped into him.

Now, I wish him the best life has to offer. He taught me that I was capable of loving someone who was outside of my family. Looking back though, I can't actually think of one single thing that we did together that I thought was fun. I don't even know why we dated in the first place. I really don't. I wish I'd known Amy Winehouse in those days. Believe it or not, she gives the best fucking advice.

Years later, when I was living in London and we'd become friends, Amy really made me look at heartbreak in a different way. I'd been seeing a guy for nearly two years, who I really fucking liked. He was in a band that was doing well. We had first met in Monaco – we hung out and got on really well. I'd never met anyone who I'd clicked with like I did with him. Anyway, it turned out that he'd been lying to me about being single and I was so upset. That's when it started to get, as the Facebook status says, ‘complicated'. I was the idiot who had sat around for two years thinking he would go out with me.

Amy had come round to my house one afternoon and she was so great. She said to me, ‘Kel, you've got to look at it like this: whatever you had with him, no one can take it away. You had that with him.'

I thought, you're right. It ended in a shitty way, but the good times no one would be able to take away. It instantly made me feel better and helped me move on.

Deep down, all Amy wants to do is have a family, settle down and be left the fuck alone. That girl is not stupid.

W
HEN
I was growing up, I was adamant I would never drink alcohol because of my dad’s problem with booze; it felt like I’d been put off for ever. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always work out like that. And even though I grew up to not have a major problem with alcohol (bottles of wine can stay in my house for months and I don’t drink them if I don’t want them), I did develop my own vices that would make me more understanding of my father’s addictions.

When I was a kid, I didn’t know what the future held, so I often felt very angry about my dad’s drinking habits. When he wasn’t getting high on drugs, he’d be going through a period when he would be drinking a lot. He’d start off being someone who was cool to be around. But after a period on the booze it would make him angry and difficult. When we were living at Welders, if Dad wasn’t on tour,
we’d get the full force of his addiction to alcohol and it wasn’t always pleasant, believe me.

My mum did her very best to shield us from my father’s drunken behaviour, but there were just some things she couldn’t stop us seeing. When you’re the child of someone who has a drink problem, it turns you into the parent. That should never happen. One afternoon Dad had got really drunk and puked everywhere. I was trying to get him to drink some water. Crouching on my knees on the floor next to my parents’ bed, I was holding the glass to his lips and encouraging him to drink it as he lay there. It was really stressful. I had all these emotions like, is this my fault? Why is he doing it? Is there something I can do to make it better? It was hard at times, really hard.

My mum always made sure we were very informed about what was going on and what everything meant and what someone had to do in order to get better. She would sit us down in the kitchen and say to us, ‘Your father is an alcoholic.’ Then she would tell us what that meant. My definition of alcoholism is a whole bunch of things: disruption, worry, hope … it isn’t as simple as saying it’s just drinking too much. There’s so much more to it.

When I was nine my mum got a doctor to come and visit us at home at Welders and he sat and explained what it meant to be an alcoholic. We could ask any question we wanted. That really helped and I think it was really brave and right that my mum did that. Sometimes it takes an authority figure other than your parents to explain something that at the time seems so complicated.

That’s not to say that, in the past, I haven’t got really angry with my dad for his drinking. There was one afternoon when we were living in America, not long after we’d started filming
The Osbournes
that I just lost it. I turned around to my dad, who was drunk and standing in the middle of the kitchen at Doheny, and screamed, ‘You know what, you’re absolutely pathetic. I am fucking sick of this. You’re a shit father.’