Love, Lipstick and Lies (15 page)

He loves music and has taught himself how to play the keyboard. It used to be that he was obsessed with Usher and had to listen to him whenever we drove anywhere. Thankfully that phase is over and he will now listen to pretty much anything, not that I’ve got anything against Usher! Harvey loves Jay-Z and Drake.

At night he is really good at going to bed. He takes his iPod and listens to music, plays with the frogs on his bed, and when he’s had enough he’ll turn off the iPod and switch off his light. Sometimes he’ll come into my room and chat away and I’ll have to say, ‘Harvey, it’s time for bed! Go back into your room.’ And off he’ll go. I think he knows he’s being cheeky and likes it.

He loves going on holiday and is the easiest one of my children to fly with. He is used to travelling first-class where there are flat beds and screens and dinner is served. Harvey is in heaven with a screen he can control, and food coming round regularly every few hours. It’s a bit of a shock to his system if we ever fly with budget airlines! I was so embarrassed when we were boarding
an easyJet plane recently and he said in a very loud, clear voice, ‘Mummy, where are the beds and duvets?’ I bet all the other passengers must have thought: What a spoiled brat!

When he was much younger Harvey didn’t seem able to show affection unless you asked him for a cuddle. It was as if he had to learn how to show it, which is part of being autistic. But he’s very affectionate now. He has definitely become close to our family and knows exactly who everyone is. He likes going on the quad bike with Granddad Price and being thrown by him into the swimming pool. He likes Uncle Dan Dan (as he calls my brother) bouncing him up and down like a frog. He’ll give my sister orders and say, ‘Aunty Sophie, can you get me …?’ He knows how to work us, put it that way!

Having Harvey has taught me so much. I have definitely learned patience and have a lot more empathy with other people now. I know I’ve changed because of my son. I would love to adopt a child with disabilities, but the trouble is adoption can take years and years and I hate that because there are children out there who are desperately in need of a home now.

Because of Harvey I’ve got involved in things I perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have done. I’m patron of Vision charity and take part in fund-raising events for them, and I’ve raised money for Autism Independent UK. I’ve met people, such as parents of disabled children, and young people with learning difficulties I might never otherwise have met.

Thanks to Harvey my family were guests at a charity event at the Olympic stadium in 2012. Harvey was asked by Vision to start the charity mascot race. It was such an honour to be there. I was also asked to appear on Channel 4 during their coverage of the Paralympics, and I invited the para-equestrian Natasha Baker to my house to ride one of my dressage horses. She rode him brilliantly and I told her she was always welcome to come and ride whenever she wanted. In fact, I thought she looked better on my horse than on hers! However, she won two gold medals in the 2012 Paralympics, and you can’t do better than that.

Having Harvey in the family has had an impact on us all. My brother has got very involved in fund-raising for charity. In 2013, for example, he ran the London Marathon to raise money for the Jeans for Genes charity, which raises money for children born with genetic disorders, like Harvey. In 2012 my mum went to India and spent three months working with children in the slums of Goa. She already has other plans to work with the charity Chain of Hope that arranges open-heart surgery for children from undeveloped countries. She will look after the children, as a kind of surrogate mum, when they come to London for their operations. As she said, being with Harvey, ‘Puts life in perspective and makes you appreciate it more. Seeing what a disabled child has to go through makes you want to give something back.’

I don’t know what the future holds for Harvey. My
mum is convinced that if all his medication is balanced and his ADHD and ODD are controlled, then he will be able to hold down some kind of job when he finishes school, so long as it is repetitive and not too challenging. There is a charity called Remploy, which specialises in finding and providing work for disabled people. She thinks he could become more independent and live in the log cabin in the grounds of my house with a carer. Maybe she is right. Harvey has already surprised us with his progress and he continues to do so.

You have to take every day as it comes with Harvey. We have good days and we have bad days, we have funny days and challenging days. But I love him to bits and he’s perfect to me. Harvey might not have his biological dad or Pete in his life any more, but he still has my family and we will fight all the way to give him the best possible life.

‘What is it with you, that all your relationships happen so quickly and become serious so soon?’ my friend Jane asked me when I told her that Leo was moving in with me.

‘I don’t know. I think it’s because I’m so open and I wear my heart on my sleeve. And when I fall for someone, I really fall for them. I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am, all or nothing,’ I replied. ‘I always have been and I think I always will be.’

Jane raised her eyebrows and gave me a look that said, What are you like!

It’s a nightmare when I fall for someone. Other people are able to play it cool, play games, but I have never been able to do that. When I fall for someone I pretty well let my guard down. I still keep some barriers up, though,
because of what happened with my first marriage, and from the way one of my former boyfriends, Dane Bowers, left me broken-hearted all those years ago, in such a terrible state that I took an overdose. Should I have been more cautious with Leo? At the time I believed I was doing the right thing, one hundred per cent.

* * *

Those first months Leo and I were together were wonderful. I had the feeling that this really was a fairy-tale romance, that our meeting had been intended all along and here we were together. Everyone who met Leo really liked him, including my family – and they can be a tough crowd to please! My step-dad Paul thought Leo was a man’s man, and joked that he was all right even though he was an Argie. Typical Paul! My brother said that he would always distrust men’s motives for getting involved with me, but because Leo didn’t know who I was when we met, that was a positive sign.

The language difference was still an issue, but Leo enrolled in a language school and I was hopeful that he would make rapid progress and then we would be able to communicate more easily. I felt really optimistic about our relationship. He was into country life, just like me, but he also liked socialising. I could take him anywhere and he would fit right in and be charming and friendly to everyone. And at least I didn’t have to worry that he’d change into a dress halfway through the evening.

At the end of May we went out to Marbella for a short holiday with my friends Jane and Derek. Overall we had a good time: sunbathing, swimming, eating out, then hanging by the pool at the exclusive Ocean Club, drinking cocktails and messing around in the water. Leo and I re-enacted the iconic scene from
Dirty Dancing
when Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey above his head. Yeah, nobody puts Katie Price in the corner … We got the first part right and then Leo dropped me and I tumbled head first into the water, very inelegantly.

But it was here that I started to see a flaw in the man I had thought was so perfect. Leo had a jealous side to him. We went out clubbing one night, and he made it clear that he didn’t like me wearing a short dress. Well, screw that! I wear what I want. No man is going to tell me how to dress! I hit the dance floor and, because he didn’t think I was paying him enough attention, he got the hump and ruined the night with his attitude. Back at the hotel he said, ‘We finish, we finish!’

Well, we made up that time, but I wasn’t impressed.

Other problems started to surface, the biggest of which was Leo not having a job. While his English was so appalling, he wasn’t likely to get one either. At first it didn’t seem to matter so much because I was taken up with filming my new series,
Signed by Katie Price
, and Leo would come with me while we filmed, and we went here, there and everywhere together, and it was busy, and it was fun. But it got to a stage where his lack of a job really started to grate on me. It wasn’t long before
he dropped out of English classes. I never understood why, his English had hardly improved at all. As a result he would be at the house, in my face, all the time, from the minute I stepped through the door after work. And then, when I would be getting up early to go to work, he would be lying in bed because he had nothing to do that day, other than go to the gym, which I paid for, in my car, using petrol I had paid for. He’d make out he did things round the house and in the garden but he kept breaking things! Like the garden tractor, for example. I’d tell him that I didn’t need him doing jobs for me, that I paid other people to do those things and wanted him to concentrate on language school. I didn’t think it was good for him always to be hanging round the house. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t trying harder to make a career for himself in the UK.

I wanted a man with a job, someone who was engaged and interested in their work, so that we could have good conversations in the evening. There are only so many times that you can ask how the gym was … Again, at first it wasn’t such a big problem; after all, I had wanted him to move in. But the man I had wanted to move in with me was very different from the Leo who would spend hours on the phone or his laptop, claiming that he was working when I had no idea what he was really doing. He often seemed miserable and subdued and yet when we went out with friends he would be completely different, the life and soul of any event. It crossed my mind that he was feeling homesick and depressed
because he wasn’t working, but it wasn’t up to me to find a job for him and I didn’t see how I would be able to anyway.

He kept asking if I could get him work with magazines. Here we go again, I thought … no way was I doing that. In the early weeks of our romance we had done a shoot together, and later we had done one shoot and interview with
OK!
, but it was all very low-key and I was determined that I wasn’t going to go down that road again of doing shoots and interviews with my partner, just so they could get famous on the back of my name. I told him that I didn’t want to work with him; that I’d done that in my previous relationships and wanted to keep ours more private.

I used to say to people, ‘What do you know about Leo?’ And they’d reply that he was a polo player, or that he was a model, but that was pretty much the extent of their knowledge. And I’d reply, ‘Good, that’s exactly how I want it to stay.’

‘But I moved over here and gave up everything for you,’ he said, during one of our conversations about his lack of work.

My heart sank when he said that. It sounded as if he was expecting me to transform his life. It wasn’t fair.

‘Don’t say that,’ I told him, feeling upset. ‘It was your choice. I never made you give up your TV work and move over here.’

He was an intelligent guy; he should have been able to get a job for himself. My step-dad, Paul, even offered
him work with his fencing company. Okay, it wasn’t glamorous, like modelling or TV work, but it would have given him some money and some independence. But Leo turned it down; I got the impression that he thought it was beneath him. Well, he didn’t think it was beneath him to live off me.

Why couldn’t he get a modelling job? I know at twenty-five he was getting on a bit in model years, but he was still a gorgeous guy and I’m sure he could have got work if he’d put his mind to it. I tried to tell him that he wasn’t going to get a TV presenting job in the UK because, for a start, he couldn’t speak English, and nor was he well known enough. By now I had seen his Argentinian TV game show. I had thought he must be the presenter, but no, he was the sidekick who got to hold up the scores, a bit like the girls on something like
The Price is Right
. Leo was the eye candy.

He was appearing in my reality series, but that was purely so we could see each other. He got paid ten grand to be in my show, and to be honest I hated that because it felt as if he was making money out of me. And I didn’t like the way he seemed to put on an act for the cameras and come across as this fun-loving guy, when the reality once filming stopped had become so different.

And I couldn’t help feeling that he was lazy, enjoying the life-style I could give him while not really putting in any effort himself. An example of this was in July during one of the signings for my novel
The Come-back Girl
, where I was trying to beat the Guinness World
Record for the longest book-signing by a single author. It was a very big deal for me. Leo had come with me to Leeds but instead of supporting me he lay in bed, moaning while I was getting ready in the hotel room, as if I was interrupting his beauty sleep! I lost it with him and shouted, ‘If you’re going to come to work with me, don’t think you can stay in a hotel room and sleep! You’ve got to get up!’

In the end it took my manager going in and giving him a talking to before he finally shifted his arse. And while I was in the O2 Arena signing away for all my fans, Leo strolled around with my brother looking at the crowds and apparently lapped up all the attention when they noticed he was my boyfriend and wanted to take his picture.

* * *

In July I finally managed to complete the purchase of my new house: a farmhouse outside Horsham in West Sussex. It was set in over fifty-two acres of land, and I planned to build stables and an indoor school, and keep my horses there. I was convinced that I would be able to ride more often if my horses were just outside my back door, and I loved the fact that the children were going to have so much space to roam around and play in. The house needed a massive amount of work, though, including an extension, new kitchen, bathrooms and a cinema room. I had employed an interior designer to work on the plans for it. I like a minimalist, stylish look,
with muted colours, lots of cream, taupe and silver. The only bedroom that I planned to be pink was Princess’s. There we were pinking it up to the max, with a pink fairy-tale castle bed and hot pink walls, with fairy-tale figures painted on them. I knew Princess would absolutely love it. Junior was going to have a football-themed room as he was getting into sport, and Harvey’s room was going to be painted green with frogs all over it, his obsession.