Fierce (8 page)

In the shop, I bought a packet of cheese and onion crisps. But I was so fucking hungry that I’d eaten them before I’d even got back to the coach. I was sitting in my seat next to the window and as the coach pulled away I poked my head between the two seats and whispered to Aimee behind me: ‘Aimee, I’m starving. Have you got any food left? Can I have some?’

It was just at a moment when the coach was the quietest it had been on the trip that my sister replied, ‘Kelly, your breath fucking stinks. Fuck off.’

Cartoon-style, the coach weaved to the side of the road that led to the motorway and practically screeched to a halt. One of the teachers came marching down the aisle and said, ‘Kelly, who swore at you just then?’

I just kept looking forward and said, ‘I don’t know, Miss.’

As if I was going to dob my sister in it. As much as we didn’t get on at times, sibling rivalry and all that, there was no way I was going to dob on my sister. There was absolutely no fucking way.

The teacher knew it was Aimee, but she was trying to get me to admit it. When we got back to school, Aimee and I both got suspended and a letter went home to our parents. My mum was in the kitchen and read the letter that was summoning her to see the Head. In our bedrooms, Aimee and I were bracing ourselves for the biggest telling off we’d ever had from Mum – and the school.

I said to Aimee, ‘This is it. We’ve had enough warnings. Mum is going to lose it. She hates swearing and she is going to go absolutely nuts.’

I’d already said to Aimee just before we went in the Head’s office, ‘We’re done for, Aimee. Kiss your sweet ass goodbye.’

I mean, we’re talking about a school where you’d get a bloody detention if you used the wrong coloured pen, so you can imagine why they didn’t take too kindly to Aimee saying ‘Fuck off’.

Sitting in the Head’s room with the teacher and my mum, I was
perched on a plastic chair with my hands clenched underneath at either side waiting for the Head to say that we were going to get expelled.

Mum said to the teacher, ‘OK. Explain to me what happened.”

The Head came out with all this stuff about how Aimee had sworn at me on the school trip. But I had refused to say it was her when asked about it.

Mum just replied, ‘Do you really expect sisters to tell on each other?’ She continued, ‘All she said at the end of the day was: “Fuck off”. What is so wrong with that? Why didn’t you just give her a detention?’

Aimee and I looked up and were smiling at each other. We couldn’t believe that Mum was taking our side.

Mum then just stood up and said, ‘You know your problem? You need to get fucked.’ Then she turned to me and Aimee and said: ‘Come on we’re going.’

We couldn’t believe what had just happened. We were absolutely pissing ourselves laughing.

As we walked across the car park to where Mum had parked she said to us, ‘That’s it. We’re going to America to be with your dad.’

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being brought up in rural Buckinghamshire where the most exciting place to hang out was Pizza Hut, I couldn’t believe my luck when we moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1998.

We’d spent periods of times there during the holidays when we were kids, but this time was different because I was thirteen and could really appreciate the massive shopping malls and movie theatres that were all just five minutes away. Everything was local and twenty-four hours and quick, quick, quick! You want a pizza at 3 a.m.? No fucking problem.

Our move to America made sense. In the UK it had got to the stage where we were spending too much time apart from my dad because he was always touring or recording in America. My mum was spending more and more time away from us too. As my father’s manager, she was always
being called back on tour because Dad was being so naughty and had fallen off the tracks again. He would be off the rails on drink and drugs.

My mum would get phone calls from the crew who were with him on tour in America, saying, ‘Sharon, you’ve got to come back, Ozzy is off his head.’

There was no master plan when we moved to America. We literally packed our bags, left Welders and jumped on a plane for the eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles. I was too excited to give a shit about whether I would fit in or make friends. It was going to be fun to hang out in Los Angeles for a while. That’s the great thing about growing up with a dad who is on the road touring. You do become very used to change. But I was really missing my best friends Sammy and Fleur.

Every time my mum was on the phone to her business partner Colin Newman, who is Fleur’s dad, I’d screech in the background, ‘Put Fleur on. I want to speak to Fleur.’ I was excited about making friends at my new school. But that whole being the new girl thing was going to be absolutely shit. I started writing to Sammy and Fleur. We made a pact that they would come and visit during the next school holidays, which I was really looking forward to. I planned to take them swimming and shopping.

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mum registered me at a school about ten minutes’ drive away from the Beverly Hills Hotel, which everyone calls the Pink Palace. We were staying there while we looked for a new house.

I thought, ‘Fuck me. This is a cool place to live.’

The Pink Palace is on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is an area in Los Angeles. The Palace is the most exclusive hotel in the city and has kept its traditions from the 1950s. It’s very old-school Hollywood. It’s impossible to go there and not see an A-list star. It really values its guests’ privacy, which is why it’s so popular. My mum has been going to there since the 1970s and all the staff really look after her. It has the most amazing spa, where my mum used to get all her treatments done.

We were staying in one of the twenty-one private bungalows that sit in the hotel’s tropical gardens. The bungalow had a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi and the sun was always shining.

Every celebrity you can think of dines or has meetings at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was such a surreal experience for me. On my first day of school, as I walked through the lobby, Tom Hanks was having breakfast in the Polo Lounge, which is the hotel’s famous restaurant. I was lucky if I passed a sheep on my way to school in the UK, it was so remote.

From that day on, I saw every actor, TV presenter and singer in that place. Was it cool? Hell, yeah. There was Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts – everyone! My new school, Hawthorne School, was so fucking different to Pipers Corner School, the all-girls school that I’d left behind in the UK. I’d been used to going to a school where there were just 580 pupils. Hawthorne had more than 5,000 pupils and it was mixed. I felt my new school was not going to be anywhere near as strict as the one I’d left behind, which wasn’t going to be a bad thing. I didn’t have to wear a uniform at my new school either, which meant
I had been shitting myself because I didn’t know what to wear.

I’d just arrived in America, so I wasn’t up on what everyone else would be wearing. At my last school, I’d worn a bloody cape! So Mum took me to Fred Segal, which is a really popular store in America. It instantly became my favourite place. It was Mum’s favourite store too and it certainly beat the Marks & Spencer shopping trips. No offence. Because Fred Segal is one of the coolest places to hang out in LA, it’s always full of people desperate to get noticed. There’s always a bunch of wannabe actors or models just hanging out, hoping a model scout or acting agent will pick them out. They’re all fighting for the same acting job or modelling assignment, so will do whatever it takes to get seen. The plus side is that it’s full of totally different clothes and accessories. I’ve never gone there and not found something I’ve liked. They’ve got really cool clothes and that’s the reason it’s been around since the seventies.

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mum took me to school on my first day. The place was massive. There was a stream of people going through the gates. It was like going to one of my dad’s concerts at a big arena. I was taken to the principal’s office and handed a timetable. That was it. I was very much the British girl and my accent really made me stand out and soon enough I fell into that whole transatlantic accent thing. I’d go up at the end of sentences and all that shit. But, after a while, I realised I
wanted to keep my English accent.

I hated Hawthorne. I hated that school. I got lost in the crowd. It was a big school, so sometimes I would literally get bloody lost in the crowd. But it was more about the American education system which is just so different to the UK one. I didn’t have a clue what was going on in the lessons. Because I had dyslexia it meant that I was doubly struggling. It didn’t really seem to be working out for me at the new school.

It was around this time that I was also diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). There are different levels and symptoms, but generally it means that a person finds it difficult to maintain attention without being distracted. Jack was diagnosed with it at the same time too. I think that having ADHD was another reason I was struggling to understand the new lessons. As a child I was always bouncing about and jumping around, so I probably had it from as far back as then. My parents probably thought I was just being a lively kid.