Tough Love
Authors: Kerry Katona
About the book
Leanne Crompton had it all â beauty, fame, money. But when Leanne is sacked by her modelling agency she soon finds herself penniless. With her seven-year-old daughter Kia to support, she has no option but to head north to her home town ... back to her wayward family.
With a brother just released from prison, another being taken for a mug by his wannabe-WAG girlfriend, and two sisters trying to escape her shadow, life with the Cromptons is a harsh reminder of how far she's fallen.
Now, starting over and with an explosive secret to hold on to â the identity of Kia's dad â things start to get tough. Can she trust her ruthless mother Tracy not to sell her out to the papers? Or will Kia's dad catch up with her and silence her for good?
Tough Love
is the startling debut novel from former pop star and tabloid favourite Kerry Katona. Her memoir,
Too Much Too Young
, was a
Sunday Times
top ten bestseller.
Kerry was born in Warrington in 1980. She came into the limelight when she joined the hugely successful band Atomic Kitten, but left in 2001 when her first daughter was born. As well as winning
I'm A Celebrity ⦠Get Me Out Of Here!
she has been a regular presenter on
Loose Women
, starred in the successful Irish TV series
Show Band
, and has been the subject of a prime time ITV documentary,
My Fair Kerry.
Her memoir
Too Much, Too Young
was a
Sunday Times
top ten bestseller.
KERRY KATONA
Leanne opened the paper and looked at the young blue-eyed, blonde-haired vision of tabloid beauty staring back at her, the pert breasts and happy-to-be-there smile. She threw it aside. She wasn't particularly interested in what Mel, 18, of Colchester had to say about the war in Iraq. She knew that the girl's problems extended only as far as whether the spray tan she'd had before the shoot was too orange and if her false eyelashes were alluring or, horror of horrors, made her look like Jackie Stallone. The Knowledge and Knickers speech bubble that the papers insisted on printing above the new breed of page-three girls' heads was always made up in two seconds flat by some hack in Canary Wharf â it had nothing to do with the models. âThat's not Mummy,' Kia, Leanne's seven-year-old daughter, said, climbing on to her mother's knee.
Leanne looked at her and shook her head. âNo, darling, that's a pretty lady.'
âMummy's pretty too,' Kia said.
Leanne smiled at her daughter, grateful for the compliment. Leanne was pretty. She was five foot five with an hour-glass figure and her blonde hair and green eyes ensured that heads turned when she walked into any room. They had also ensured that until recently her career had been long and lucrative.
She had agonised over telling Kia exactly what she did. She didn't think it appropriate that her young daughter should know that Mummy made her money as a glamour model, but at the same time she was proud of her work, so why should she hide it from her? In the end the choice had been taken out of her hands by her less than thoughtful mother, Tracy: she had given Kia a locket with a picture of a topless Leanne in it. Mother of the Year Tracy wasn't.
In fact, Leanne had recognised Mel. She had been sitting in the waiting room at Figurz Management when Leanne was given what she could only describe as the Right Royal Boot. Jenny, her manager for the past nine years, had summoned her into her spacious office and sat her down. Leanne had known something was wrong as soon as she got the call to go to the office. Jenny didn't usually do the office. She liked to sink a couple of bottles of Pinot Grigio and go over the proofs for whatever men's magazine Leanne had
been starring in that week. The office meant bad news.
âI suppose you know why I've asked you hereâ¦' Jenny, with her vicious bob and her black-rimmed glasses, had lit a cigarette and leant back in her chair, inhaling hard, then letting a plume of smoke out of her nostrils. Leanne's throat had dried. She had an idea of why she was sitting there, but she wasn't sure she liked it.
âYou and me, Lee, we go back a long way.' Leanne hated it when Jenny called her Lee. âAnd I've always said I'd be straight up and down with you, haven't I, girl?' Leanne winced. She wanted Jenny to get this over and done with, whatever she was going to say. âAnd I've always said, “Tits is tits,” haven't I?'
And I've always wondered what the fuck that's supposed to mean, Leanne thought but didn't say. She wouldn't. She was terrified of Jenny, if she was honest.
âWell, tits is tits, but there's younger tits coming through that door, if you know what I'm saying.'
âLook, Jenny,' Leanne's voice wavered, âI offered to get a boob job and you said no, natural's what everyone wants.' She didn't really want one. Her boobs were big enough as it was. She didn't need ginormous plastic orbs bobbing around so she couldn't see her feet.
âThat's true, sweetheart. Natural is what
everyone wants, but so's young. And you might be young to some bloke in his fifties, but twenty-five's over the hill to an eighteen-year-old brickie who wants a quick lump in his trousers while he's eating his corned-beef sandwiches.You get where I'm coming from?'
Leanne got where Jenny was coming from â loud and clear. She was telling her that her lucrative career as a glamour model was coming to an end. Leanne would have liked to think that in this situation she would stand up and tell Jenny exactly where she could shove her Eric Morecambe glasses, but she didn't. When it came down to it, she avoided conflict at all costs. With a mother like hers you didn't need to look for a fight â they came to you.
âWhat about my fan base?' Leanne had asked meekly.
âThey're a fickle bunch. They move on quickly, and that's what I'm here to spot.' Jenny looked at Leanne, who was fighting back tears now. She could have kicked herself: she didn't want to break down in front of the hard-faced witch. âI'm not saying you won't work again, sweetheart, just that you might have to do it with your top on.'
Leanne had stumbled out on to the street near Battersea Bridge. She got well away from the office before she fell in a heap and started crying. She'd had such a nice life for the last six years â parties,
premières, free holidays if she put her name to the travel company â and now Jenny, the number-one glamour agent in the country, was telling her it was over. What was she going to do?
She stood up, tears streaming down her face, and looked around for a taxi. Typical! There wasn't one in sight. Leanne walked on with her thumb out like a hitch-hiker, until a cab pulled up beside her, splashing mud up her leg. Brilliant! Could today get any worse? she wondered aloud.
As she climbed in, the driver stared at her. âYou're that Jodie Marsh, ain'tcha?' he asked.
Yes, she decided. It could.
*
âGet out here and fucking talk to me!' a man's voice screamed.
Tracy turned up the volume on
Jeremy Kyle
. She'd rather listen to someone else's problems than confront her own. Suddenly there was a loud banging on the back door, something she was well used to.
âI said, “Fucking talk to me!”'
Tracy raised an eyebrow and stuck a spoon into the tub of Dairylea she had grabbed from the fridge for breakfast; she had nothing else in and she was damned if she was going outside the house to get an ear-twisting from her ex-husband. Just as she
was about to find out the result of the paternity test on TV an almighty whack put paid to her morning of loafing around. She turned to see a foot sticking through her boarded-up back door.
âFor the love of God, Paul!' she shouted, jumping up from the settee and heading over to the door. The foot was waggling around. Its owner was obviously trying to free it.
âLet me in, and we'll have this out once and for all.'
âI'm calling the police. You're not allowed anywhere near here,' Tracy reminded him.
âThis is my fucking house!'
âIt's the council's fucking house. Get your facts right, dickhead.' Tracy stood back and kicked the foot as hard as she could.
âOw!' the disembodied voice wailed. âYou bitch!' The foot disappeared.
âNow, fuck off, or I'm calling the police and you'll end up back in the nick!' Tracy returned to the settee. This wasn't the scene of domestic violence she liked to paint but it was how she and Paul were with each other since they had split so acrimoniously. She was used to the frequent ructions and bored with them.
Paul and Tracy had been together since they were teenagers. He had always fancied himself as a bit of a hard man around the estate, but his hard-man credentials didn't stretch much further than
thumping people when he'd laid into the Stella Artois a bit harder than he should have. When they'd first met, Tracy had believed the hype. He'd been the tough lad at school, the one everyone fancied, but a few years with him had soon put paid to any romantic notions she'd had about him. He was a lazy waster who prided himself on not having had to get out of bed before ten o'clock since he'd left school. Something of a feat in itself, Tracy had often thought, seeing as they had five kids together.
Tracy loved her kids, she really did, but she often thought they didn't understand what she'd gone through, what she'd given up, to raise them. She'd been a looker when she was younger, could have been a model like Leanne, but instead she'd ended up sitting out her life in Bolingbroke Estate, Bradington's number-one problem area, so they were always being informed. Leanne didn't know she was born, Tracy thought. Granted, she'd had to go out and work when she was fourteen, but there was nothing wrong with that, Tracy told herself. Bit of grafting to pay some board had done none of her kids any harm.
The rot had set in between her and Paul years ago. He'd thought that having children meant giving up. He'd soon stopped looking at Tracy as anything other than the mother to his kids, and she'd wanted more. She'd wanted some romance
in her life, but there was a slim chance of that when she had five kids in tow and the only place for a night out was the Beacon, a dump of a pub where the men were men and the women looked like men.
Three years ago, on Tracy's forty-fifth birthday, Paul had produced the straw that finally broke the camel's back. He'd been promising to take Tracy out all year. They'd go into town and have a proper knees-up â they'd even go to a club. Tracy had bought a new outfit, courtesy of some cash that Leanne had put her way, and then Paul hadn't come home. She'd waited all night for him and in the end had gone into town on her own and got blind drunk. She couldn't remember what had happened, but her youngest daughter, Jodie, had informed her that when she and her mates found Tracy she was draped round some thirty-year-old and had been sick down her top. Eventually Paul came home all apologies but Tracy had known things had to change.