Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (21 page)

In June 2007, when the tour was over, Cheryl and Ashley
got to enjoy some carefree time together when they jetted out to the Sandy Lanes resort in Barbados to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. There, they basked in the sun and made the most of their intimate time away from the grey skies of the UK and the persistent gaze of the paparazzi.

When they got back to their Oxshott home, Ashley had a surprise for Cheryl – a £150,000 Bentley. While Cheryl was amazed by such a gift, she told Ashley that she couldn’t accept it. ‘It was lovely, but I just couldn’t…’ she said in the
Daily Star.
‘I have my own Mercedes SUV, and I bought that when I thought I’d worked hard enough to deserve it. I don’t feel I’ve done enough to deserve a Bentley. I’m not one of those girls who goes out and spends £1,500 on a handbag. At the moment the car is just sitting in our drive waiting to go back to the shop.’

But while Ashley was no slouch in the gift department, he was still not pulling out the stops when it came to more domestic roles! ‘He’s totally pathetic round the house. I’ve had this discussion with his mum where I blame her, basically,’ Cheryl joked to the
Sun.
‘She never made him do anything and they are so well looked after at football, too, that he’s spoiled. They don’t even want them picking up a heavy suitcase in case they get injured, it’s ridiculous. I’ve tried to help Ashley be a bit better. He’s now learned to iron – which is quite impressive for him.’

Cheryl also explained that she is the better cook of the two, and that she finds tidying up therapeutic. However, prophetically, she admitted that she preferred being a homebody because when they went out together girls threw themselves at him. At the time, though, she found it funny. ‘I trust him one
hundred per cent so I’m not worried about it,’ she said in the
Sun.
‘Maybe if I was insecure I would, but I’m not. These girls are sad anyway. I couldn’t be one of those footballers’ wives who just accept them sleeping around because they live in a nice house and have designer handbags.’

Back at the day job, Girls Aloud next released the ferociously energetic single ‘Sexy! No No No …’, at the end of August, which charted at number five, giving them a record-breaking sixteenth top-ten hit in a row.

Their fourth studio album,
Tangled Up
, was released in November 2007, and once again gave the girls a top-ten album, peaking at number four. Yet again, Girls Aloud found themselves a hit with the critics – the BBC labelled the album ‘yet another unrelenting pop masterpiece’ and called the girls ‘undoubtedly the best girlband the UK has ever seen’, while the
Guardian
described
Tangled Up
as ‘irresistible’ – but fans were disappointed by the album sleeve, which had dispensed with the usual picture of the girls and instead just featured the band’s logo.

Fans complained on their website forums that the album looked ‘cheap’ and ‘just like those unofficial albums you get in the bargain basement’. Conspiracy theories blew up that the album was released in preparation for the departure of Nadine Coyle. This was hastily denied and the band said that the lack of a picture was due to technical reasons beyond the band’s control.

The fans were soon given something to cheer about, however, as a 2008 Girls Aloud tour was announced following the success of their Greatest Hits tour in the summer. And a couple of weeks after the release of
Tangled Up
, the girls released what some fans consider one of their best singles yet, ‘Call The
Shots’. A lot more restrained than their usual fodder, but not quite as slushy as previous ballads such as ‘I’ll Stand By You’ or ‘Whole Lotta History’, the song won high praise from critics, such as Kim Dawson from the
Daily Star
who said it was ‘classy electronic Europop with real edge’. The video was shot in Malibu and featured the girls in purple dresses. Some fans thought the heavy-handed inclusion of the purple Samsung phones in the video was a product placement too far, but the quality of the song and its positive reviews helped banish the naysayers.

Prophetically, given her future role on the show as a judge, in December 2007 Cheryl and the girls made a guest appearance on
The X Factor
, to give the wide-eyed hopefuls – including the eventual winner Leon Jackson – some handy advice on singing and how to handle the press attention. And it wasn’t the only TV they were working on: as the year drew to a close, the girls started work on their latest TV series,
The Passions of Girls Aloud
for ITV2. Over the next few months, four of the girls – as Nadine felt it unnecessary to take part in a show that wasn’t directly promoting the group’s musical output – would each pursue a dream they had longed to accomplish. Sarah’s was to play polo, Nicola’s to create a make-up range for people with pale skin, Kimberley’s was to be in a West End musical, while Cheryl wanted to try her hand – or feet – at street dancing. Her pursuit would take her over to America where she would hang out with street dancers, meet choreographers and audition for a role in a video for Jamaican-American hip-hop artist Will.I.Am’s next single.

Also in December, Cheryl revealed that notwithstanding all the success with the band, marriage was the best thing she’d experienced so far. She told the
News of the World
: ‘I still
get butterflies when I’m going to see Ashley or when he calls me. We both work away a lot, so time together is precious. We make an effort to go out on dates, but I find it difficult to glam up for him as I always look that way for work. Weirdly, Ashley loves it when I don’t wear a scrap of make-up and I’m in my tracksuit. He tells me I look gorgeous and I say: “Are you having a laugh?”’

She also admitted that Ashley had shattered all the preconceptions she had had regarding footballers. ‘I had a stereotypical image of a footballer in my head before we met, but he was nothing like that. I was surprised when he always rang on time, or turned up to a date five minutes early with a bunch of flowers. I believe he’s my reward for all the shit I’ve had in the past.’

But on 8 December 2007, Cheryl’s life would be thrown into turmoil when Ashley dropped a bombshell that would leave her utterly destroyed.

Cheryl Cole was feeling a little snuffly when she arrived at Sketch bar and restaurant in London to watch her bandmate Nicola Roberts’ fashion show on 18 January 2008.

For the past few weeks, Cheryl hadn’t been able to shift a nagging cold that had taken hold over the Christmas period, and today’s damp drizzly weather wasn’t exactly helping. The last thing she needed to do in her poorly state was to trek across London and get photographed in the rain. But she knew she had no choice in the matter: there was no way she could let Nicola down by not showing up. So, reluctantly, she braced the horrors of the morning, hopped into a people carrier with Kimberley and headed into central London. When she arrived at the venue, the paparazzi appeared to be particularly fierce, surrounding the girls as they tried to make their way inside. Cheryl, having finally escaped the crush, joined Nicola in the main hall, where she was busy rehearsing the fashion show.

The whole event was the exciting culmination of Nicola’s episode of
The Passions of Girls Aloud.
Her task was to design and produce a make-up range specifically for pale skin. She said she was fed up with hiding behind a fake tan all these years and was ready to embrace her own natural colour.

After the catwalk show, which went down a storm, the girls mingled backstage and posed for photographs for an
OK!
exclusive, answering questions about their day, and Cheryl explained how she hadn’t really enjoyed her festive period all that much. ‘I had a terrible Christmas,’ she said. ‘It was really awful. I had this cold all the way through, so it wasn’t a lot of fun.’ However, she seemed brighter now and even let slip that she was hoping to start a family with Ashley after the upcoming tour came to an end.

But those eagerly anticipated plans were dramatically put on hold just seven days later, when Cheryl’s life was turned upside down. The
Sun
had contacted Cheryl’s PR to let her camp know that a story was going to break that Ashley had allegedly cheated on her with a hairdresser. The couple had had to endure girls’ accusations that they’d slept with Ashley before and each time they had been proven as liars.

Normally, Cheryl would have shrugged off the claim as yet another attempt by a kiss-and-tell girl to make some money out of a famous footballer. She trusted Ashley. She had said time and time again that she never had any reason to doubt him and was convinced he had been true to her.

‘It doesn’t bother me when I see pictures of him coming out of clubs with girls trying to throw themselves on him because I know he’s not interested in them,’ she once said in the
Mirror.
‘We actually have a good laugh over some of the stuff people
write. When you start believing stories over your man, there are problems with the relationship anyway. I would always take Ashley’s word over anyone unless I had solid, hard evidence something was definitely true. It just hasn’t been an issue and it won’t become one – we trust each other.’

But this time was different. Cheryl knew that this particular claim had legs. In fact, she had been expecting this story to come out eventually. She recalled in the
News of the World
how several weeks previously, on 8 December, Ashley had arrived home in the morning, after a big night out, looking terrible. His face was dazed and his clothes were covered in vomit. Of course, Cheryl knew immediately that something was up. Before she could say a thing, however, he hugged her tightly, broke down in tears and told her that something terrible had happened …

The night before, he and some mates had met up to enjoy a few drinks and stopped off at the CC Club in central London. While they were there, they were joined by a group of girls, one of whom was a hairdresser called Aimee Walton, who got chatting to them. As Premiership footballers, they were used to the attention of girls, but these ones seemed fun and nice enough – so together they downed vodka cocktail after vodka cocktail.

As the evening progressed, and Ashley became more and more tipsy, one of the party suggested they go back to their flat at Princess Park Manor to watch boxer Ricky Hatton’s world title fight on their big-screen TV. The girls, no doubt unable to believe they were hanging out with some of Britain’s top sports stars, readily accepted the invitation and headed back with them.

But it wasn’t an easy ride. While two of Ashley’s mates
jumped in a cab, he and another friend, CJ, got a lift with the girls in their car. As they wound their way through the streets of London heading north, Ashley, who by now was totally out of it, complained that he wasn’t feeling well, and before the girls could pull over he ended up throwing up all over himself. When they arrived back at the flat, Ashley, barely able to walk, had to be helped inside and Aimee insisted that she would take care of him. Putting him to bed, she headed to the kitchen to fetch a bucket and to get some damp cloths to clean up the mess. What happened after that Ashley claimed not to remember.

However, in her own story for the
Sun
, Aimee alleged that the pair of them had had sex several times. She also revealed that during one bout of passion, Ashley had actually vomited, before mouthwashing and carrying on.

Although Cheryl was prepared for the story, it was still a blow. How could he have done this to her? Okay, so she trusted him when he told her he couldn’t remember doing anything with this Aimee girl, but he had put himself into a situation in which he could be taken advantage of. And could she really believe that Ashley had not done anything? Was his memory loss just a convenient way of avoiding the truth?

She’d always said that if Ashley cheated on her, she would just leave, knowing there was no future. But now she was faced with the possibility that the worst had happened, what would she do? She still loved Ashley as much as she did before he’d come clean and even though he had hurt her, she couldn’t bring herself to love him any less. But then she was angry at him, furious that he could do that to her, could make her feel this way.

He knew that she was a loyal wife who would never do anything to hurt him and that she expected the same from her
man. And now he appeared to have thrown it all away. Cheryl revealed in her
News of the World
interview how she told Ashley she didn’t want him near her that day and told him that he had to sleep in the spare bedroom. For the next few days, tensions in the household were fraught. She still couldn’t forgive him for what he was alleged to have done. She was feeling hurt and she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. They started to row constantly. Joan, who was living with them at the time, knew something was up and asked Cheryl if there was a problem. Not one to keep secrets from her mum, she eventually broke down and told her mum what had happened.

As days passed, Cheryl began to soften. As Ashley had football commitments and Cheryl had planned to head back to Newcastle to be with her family, the couple spent Christmas apart. But during this time, Cheryl came to realize that she simply couldn’t give up on her Ashley. He was the man she had married and had promised to stick with through good times and bad. With a new year just a few days away, she wanted to kick off 2008 on a positive track and even began to think about finally starting that family she had spoken about so often.

But then Aimee’s kiss-and-tell in the
Sun
in the new year brought all the memories back, only this time, Aimee had elaborated on what Ashley had told her. If Aimee’s story was to be believed then Ashley had definitely cheated on Cheryl. He had slept with another woman behind her back. Nevertheless, in public Cheryl stood by Ashley and spoke to the
News of the World
two days later to tell the nation that she believed her husband hadn’t slept with Aimee. And how did she know this? Because, Cheryl countered, if he were as drunk as Aimee said he was, he wouldn’t have been able to perform. ‘I know Ashley
intimately,’ Cheryl said. ‘When he’s under the influence he
isn’t
capable. When I heard what this girl had said I realized she’d made part of the story up. And, to be honest, that has helped me get through this.’