I’m not like that and I have never snooped on anybody in my life, but I felt such a strong instinct that I just had to do it. Jason had gone to work and his jacket was right there in front of me. The coast was clear but I was still shaking with nerves, because I almost knew what I was going to find before I looked.
Inside Jason’s pocket I found a yellow plastic capsule from the inside of a chocolate Kinder egg, and in the middle of it were loads of wraps of heroin. Seeing the drugs with my own two eyes changed everything, in a heartbeat. I wasn’t going to give Jason the opportunity to lie his way out of this. That would have been just too insulting, even by his standards.
I wanted to flush the heroin down the toilet but I didn’t want to be responsible for Jason getting kneecapped by the dealers, so I opened the wraps and sprinkled the drugs all over our bed. Then I wrote Jason a Dear John, spilling my heart out onto two sides of A4 paper: ‘It’s over. I’ve lost sight of my dreams. I have to get out of this dark hole. I’m killing myself with worry.’ That’s what it was like. I left it there and went to my mam’s in floods of tears.
Jason flipped when he got back. He came round to my mam’s like a mad person, fighting with me and screaming, telling me I was crackers and paranoid, but I said to my mam, ‘This is it, it’s over.’
She came with me to the flat to help me get my stuff. One of the only things I owned besides my clothes was a set of jars for the tea, coffee and sugar. I’d loved buying them, enjoying setting up my first flat, but now I started emptying the contents all over the kitchen worktop. I thought I had to empty the jars before I could take them away; that’s how distraught and disturbed I was.
Jason appeared at the door as I was tipping the sugar out, and he charged straight over to me, looking exactly like he was going to kiss me. I had no time to react before his lips were on mine, but he didn’t kiss me – he bit my mouth, hard. I had a scar on my lip from an old dog bite, and I felt it rip open.
‘Mam!’ I cried out as soon as I managed to pull away from him and draw breath.
‘He just bit me face!’
‘She’s cracked in the head,’ Jason said, looking my mam straight in the eye. ‘Don’t believe her. She’s mad.’
Jason didn’t realise it, but my mam had been on her way into the kitchen just as he bit me, and she’d seen everything.
She was looking at me in absolute horror. Blood was seeping out of my lip now and there was no denying what had gone on, yet Jason carried on looking at my mam very calmly and continued to repeat his defence. ‘She’s mad. She’s making it up.’
It was the first time anybody had fully witnessed just how badly Jason treated me, twisting the truth and trying to make me question myself like that.
‘I’m getting you out of here right now, Cheryl,’ Mam said, bundling me and my belongings out of the flat as quickly as she could. She was so shocked by what she’d seen, and she couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.
When I got back to my mam’s the sense of relief was overwhelming and immediate. Without realising it, I’d been very alone for a long time when I was living with Jason.
Mam cuddled me and told me things would get better. It was the best feeling ever and as I cried in her arms I realised that I felt relieved to be rid of Jason – not just for myself, but for my whole family too. He’d driven a wedge between me and my family and had been a burden to everyone, although I couldn’t see that until he was finally out of my life.
It had been my eighteenth birthday about six months earlier, and I thought about how a big group of us had gone out to a local Chinese restaurant. I really wanted it to be a special evening. I pretended it was, but I knew that Jason was out of his head the whole time. None of the family said anything but, as I looked back now with my eyes wide open, I could see their faces in a whole new light. They were all looking at Jason as if to say: ‘Are you for real?’ A weight had been lifted from all of our shoulders now. That’s how it felt, very powerfully.
Joe was on my case straight away. He’d met his wife by this time and his life was all mapped out, which made him act the big brother even more forcefully than usual.
‘What are you gonna do with your life?’ he’d ask me every time I saw him. ‘You’re not doin’ anything with your singin’. Why not? You need to sort yourself out, Cheryl, because nobody else is gonna do it for you.’
I knew he was right, but I also knew I had to get myself strong again first, both physically and mentally. My heart ached for ages, and I just needed some time for the pain to heal.
‘I’m gonna do it, Joe, don’t worry. I’m gonna make it.’
I firmly believed this, even though I’d slipped so much further away from my dream than I ever had before.
‘I’ll get my dream back on track,’ I promised.
4 ‘I’m so proud of you I could pop’
‘I’ve seen this advert on TV for a show called Popstars: The Rivals,’ I said to our Garry one day. ‘I’m thinkin’ of applyin’.’
‘I thought you hated all that,’ he said, looking at me as if I’d gone crazy.
Garry had a point. When the shows Popstars and Pop Idol had been on in recent years I’d always said I’d never go down that route.
‘I’d rather do it by meself,’ I remember saying cockily, several times.
This was a new show, though, and the idea really appealed to me. Popstars: The Rivals was going to create one girl band and one boy band which would compete against each other in the race for the Christmas number one.
‘How cool would that be?’ I said to Garry. ‘Imagine being in a girl band and hanging out with a group of girls all the time. I’d love it. If that ad comes on again, write the number down for me …’
Spookily, at that very second the advert flashed up on the telly. Garry and I looked at each other and screamed in surprise as we scrabbled for a pen and he wrote the number down. I phoned up straight away and asked for an application form, hardly able to believe this had all happened in the space of a few minutes.
‘How weird was that?’ I said to my mam afterwards.
‘It must have been meant to be, Cheryl. Good luck.’
‘Thanks, Mam. Don’t tell anyone else I’m applyin’, will ya?’
It was about four or five months since my split from Jason and I was in a much better place. Even so, if this didn’t work out, I’d rather keep it to myself. I didn’t want anybody worrying about me all over again.
A few weeks after leaving Jason I had started contacting old friends I’d slowly cut myself off from when I was with him. One friend, a girl from Liverpool, had asked if I fancied a waitressing job on the Tuxedo Princess, which was a floating nightclub on the Tyne. It was only about six weeks after the split when she asked me and I was still a shell of my former self, totally lacking in confidence and all skinny and washed out. I didn’t even have my job in the café any more, because Jason had got me in such a state towards the end of our relationship that I couldn’t even cope with that.
‘Surely you don’t want to give me a job?’ was my reaction.
‘I’m proud of you for getting out of that relationship,’ my Scouse friend said. ‘I believe in you.’
She needed someone to serve shots of cocktails like ‘sex on the beach’ on the boat two nights a week, and after a bit of persuasion I agreed to give it a go. Right from the first night I could feel that it was doing me good to have to do my hair and put on a dress, and it was amazing how easy I found it to socialise again.
Meeting people who were normal and pleasant and out to have fun on the boat was just so refreshing,