‘Fine. Just not doing so much now I’m in the café more.’
We’d shuffle out when the bell went, promising we’d be back soon.
‘Bye, pet,’ Mam would smile. It was the same smile she used when she said goodbye to me at the Royal Ballet all those years ago, or when she waved our Garry off on a school trip. She treated us all exactly the same, no matter what any of us did.
‘I’ve done something really stupid,’ one of my friends told me one day. She’d come into the café for a cup of tea and some sympathy.
‘It can’t be that bad. Tell me what you’ve done.’
She was in a terrible state and I sat down beside her and held her hand as she struggled to get the words out.
‘I had a one-night stand last night with someone …’ she sobbed.
I gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Don’t cry. Do you want to tell me who with?’
She took a deep breath and said, ‘You know that Dave, the one who lives …’
Nothing could have prepared me for that. It literally took the breath out of me and I felt I was going to suffocate. Never, ever, could I have imagined Dave would have cheated on me, let alone with someone he knew to be my friend. We’d been dating for 12 months and he meant the whole world to me. I was madly in love with him and I thought he loved me too.
I don’t remember my friend finishing her sentence but I heard enough to be left in absolutely no doubt she was talking about my boyfriend. My heart sank into my shoes and I started panicking like mad. I just couldn’t believe my ears.
Nobody beside my mam knew I was dating Dave. My friend didn’t have a clue, and I certainly wasn’t going to enlighten her now. It was all far too much to deal with.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to get back to work,’ I gasped. I felt the colour fall out of my face and I ran into the kitchen, thinking I was going to choke or be physically sick. I don’t know how I struggled through to the end of my shift, but I did, smiling at the customers and chatting away as best I could.
Afterwards I ran home, locked myself in my bedroom and cried my eyes out for hours and hours. I was heartbroken, absolutely devastated. They say the first cut is the deepest and they’re not wrong, or at least that’s how it felt at the time. I couldn’t imagine feeling a worse pain than this. It was like an actual physical stab to my heart.
I eventually went round to Dave’s and went crazy, and I mean crazy.
‘It’s not true. She’s making it up,’ he said pathetically, but I knew it was him who was the liar. My friend was so ashamed of what she’d done and wished it wasn’t true. By contrast Dave had good reason to lie, and his deceit was written all over his face. I felt so disgusted and insulted that he had the cheek to deny it to my face after behaving like that behind my back.
‘I was so proud of you,’ I shouted. ‘I was so proud of us! I had a ridiculous amount of pride in our relationship. It was so good! You’ve ripped me heart out!’
The betrayal was just unbearable. I didn’t know how I was going to cope with it, and the truth is I didn’t. The next morning I got up late, moped around the house and smoked weed before I’d even eaten anything. It sounds so disgusting now, but that’s what I did. I literally turned into a depressed teenager overnight. At first I couldn’t bear to tell my mam what Dave had done to me because I knew it would have devastated her too. Instead, I bottled everything up, smoking more and more weed every day.
I managed to drag myself into the café on the three or four days a week I worked and I somehow put on a brave face for the customers, but it was never easy. I remember having a row with Nupi once that must have been really bad, because he fired me on the spot even though we were close friends by then. I got another job in a pizza place, but after two weeks I was in a terrible state and Joe demanded to know what was going on.
‘I have to clean out this big dough machine,’ I cried. ‘And the owner is horrible. He keeps making suggestive remarks to me.’
Joe went crazy, threatened the guy and told me I was never stepping foot in the place again. When Nupi found out about the trouble he gave me a job in a new café he’d opened on the Quayside.
‘Thank you, Nupi, you’re a real friend,’ I told him, but inside I was dying, wondering how I was going to hold the job down when I felt so bad.
All of those events are quite blurred in my head because, looking back, I had sunk into a very deep depression. I began having panic attacks, gasping for breath and feeling my heart racing for no reason. I was skinny to begin with but now I had absolutely no appetite, and my weight dipped to less than six stone. I was incredibly anxious all the time, to the point where it felt like my heart was beating so fast it was eating me up inside. I ate crisps and junk food to survive, but stopped having proper meals. I didn’t have a clue about healthy eating and couldn’t have told you the difference between protein and carbohydrate, so I had no idea how bad this was for my health.
As the weeks went by I also became quite reclusive. If I didn’t have to go out to work I’d stay in the house in my pyjamas all day. Then I’d start feeling frightened and paranoid about ever going out again. I think I was a bit agoraphobic, because when I did step out of the house I felt really vulnerable, like something really bad was going to happen to me. Needless to say, my singing career was put completely on the back burner. I didn’t even have the will to sing in my bedroom or write the odd lyric, let alone think about getting back up on a stage.
‘I’m takin’ you to the doctor’s,’ Mam said one day. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’
I think a few months had gone by, and I didn’t argue. The GP took one look at me and said flatly: ‘She’s depressed.’
I was given a prescription for beta-blockers and was told I was actually suffering from clinical depression. Apparently there was a history of it in the family.
‘The pills will slow your heart rate,’ I remember the doctor saying.
‘Good,’ I thought. ‘I’m sick of it beating so fast.’
The tablets were bright blue, but were not the magic cure I’d hoped for. From the very first day I hated taking them because they made me feel dizzy and sickly, and at night when the rest of the world got quiet my brain became super noisy and loud.
‘What’s the point of life?’ I’d think to myself. I was too much of a wimp to think about actually ending it all, but for a long time the thought wasn’t far away.
‘Pick your chin up,’ Joe would say to me if he came round and saw me still not dressed in the middle of the day – but some days I was too low to care what anybody thought of me, even my big brother. Sometimes I’d go round to the neighbours’ house, still in my pyjamas, and play with their dog, Oscar. I must have looked a total mess but I didn’t care about anything, least of all what I looked like. ‘You need to snap out of this,’ Joe would tell me, but I just didn’t know how.
Joe had got himself a good job at the Nissan factory and his life was sorted, but I knew he’d had some problems in the past. He of all people was somebody I should have listened to, but I don’t think I was ready or capable of doing anything other than wallowing in my depression.
‘I wish I could snap out of it but I can’t,’ I’d think to myself, but I never said that to Joe.
My dad was kept in the dark about a lot of this. ‘Cheryl, you’re looking a bit thin, sweetheart, are you eating enough?’ he would ask, but I never told him the half of it. He’d have gone mad if he’d known I was taking pills, and so I kept it from him.
‘It’ll pass,’ Mam said many times, but I didn’t believe her. Other relatives who knew I’d split up with my boyfriend, though they’d never met him, would say things like: ‘Never mind, Cheryl, that’s puppy love for you,’ or, ‘You’ll be seein’ someone else before