Essex Boy: My Story (21 page)

So then I did what I always do when I am single because, as you know by now, I am not very good at being alone – I sat at home and started texting girls to cheer myself
up.
One of my friends is mates with Sarah Harding.
I’ve always thought she was the fittest in Girls Aloud, and that she seemed sexy as hell, but also down to earth and friendly, despite being
a celebrity.
I was sure she was well out of my league – shit, I’m sure she could get anyone!
– but I thought I’d give it a go.
I’m never afraid of a knockback, so I
said to my mate, ‘Oi, set me up with her, will ya?’
and he checked with her and she said he could give me her number, and we started texting.
She was good banter on text, and after a
bit I asked if she wanted to go on a date and she said yes, but that it would be too public if we went out so I should go round hers.
Fuck!
Sarah Harding was inviting me to her house.

So I went round and we watched a film and chilled and chatted and got to know each other.
She was a really sweet, nice girl and she was just as down to earth as she seemed.
She really opened up
with me about her life, and I was touched that she felt so comfortable with me.

Then I went round a second time and we got on well again, but I also realized it was too soon after Amy for me to get into another relationship, and she deserved only the best, so in the end
nothing happened.
She is a genuinely lovely girl, and when she finds the right guy to settle down with, they are gonna find themselves with a gorgeous, fun and sexy girlfriend.

And I loved meeting her – that is something that would never have happened if I hadn’t been famous.
But it’s funny dating someone when you’re both well known.
You can
never go out and date the way you would normally.
Things aren’t allowed to progress in the same way.
You have to keep everything secret and creep around, and most of the time to keep it
private you go to each other’s houses.
I don’t mind on one level, as all the wining and dining stuff has always made me feel awkward, like I said, but it does feel like proper
relationships can never develop in a relaxed way.

I had a similar experience with another girl I have seen from time to time since late 2010 – Sheridan Smith.
Apparently she used to fancy me and followed me on Twitter, but I didn’t
follow her so I never noticed her tweets.
Then in November 2010 she started in
Legally Blonde
in the West End with Denise van Outen.
Denise does the voice-over for
TOWIE
and so
they came to Sugar Hut for a party after their first night performing.
I got on with Sheridan straight away, and really liked her, but just as a mate.
I was with Lauren at the time but I liked
Sheridan as a normal, straight talking girl who is like one of the lads.
I could leave her with my pals and she would be there chatting away.
So nothing happened at the time, but we kept in touch.
Then I went to watch her in
Legally Blonde
with two of my mates – imagine three straight lads off to watch that – and we had a few drinks together after and chilled out, and
then, well, things have happened over time, whenever we have both been single and up for meeting.

I saw her a couple of weeks before the National TV Awards, then when I saw her at the ceremony itself on 22 January 2013 I felt like she practically blanked me.
That has always done my nut in
about her, that she seems to act like she doesn’t really know me in public.
Just before, I had been getting texts like, ‘Hello, baby, how are you?
I’m always thinking about
you,’ and that kind of thing.

I got to the awards and said, ‘Hey, Sheridan!’, all happy to see her.

‘All right, Kirk,’ she said, and she walked off.

How hard is it to have a conversation?
I am sure that won’t ruin your image!
But there you go.
She is a lovely girl, though, and she’s someone who, in a different set-up, without
fame getting in the way, I would have liked to have had a proper relationship with.

The one person my thoughts kept going back to was Gemma.
She and Amy are still the only two girls who have properly got under my skin.
I know people say you can only have one
soul mate, but I think I have two.
I love them both, but it doesn’t look like I will ever end up with either one.
Even when I had been with other girls after we’d split up, I would be
thinking about Gemma.
Not in a fantasy way, but in a ‘Oh, Gemma would have done that differently,’ or ‘I miss how Gemma would do that,’ kind of a way.
I would even miss the
way she kissed, which was the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life.
But I knew I had fucked it up with her.
There is no way she could forgive me yet again, and I kept going over and over
everything I had said to her, really beating myself up about it.

My head was all over the place, and then in July 2012 I did a photoshoot with Jodie Marsh that I hugely regretted.
Jodie had been a friend for a few years through Sugar Hut, where she was a
regular, and although she had been a bit of a pin-up for me and most of the lads around Essex, nothing had ever happened between us.

When I had just split from Amy, Jodie was into all that bodybuilding, and I really didn’t like the changes she was making to her body – I thought it didn’t look good.
But I
admired her for trying to set up a business herself selling a nutritional range.
So when she was looking to drum up a bit of publicity, I agreed to tweet a picture of us kissing, to help her out as
a mate.
Then we did a photoshoot to promote her range where we were pretty much naked, but it was so tacky and horrible that I hated it.
Afterwards, all sorts of stories appeared in the papers
saying that I had dumped her because she wouldn’t have sex with me.
We were never even dating!
I just didn’t need it.
It was one thing to help her get some publicity, it was a totally
different thing to be the fall guy for those kinds of stories!
I went right off her after that, and we are no longer friends.
To be honest I think she is a waste of space, so that is all the free
publicity I even want to give her in this book!

Girls aside, everything else in my life was going from bad to worse.
Things with Nan had been going downhill for a while.
I used to go and visit her in the care home, but she
never knew who I was.
It was like it wasn’t my nan any more, and so I stopped going to see her.
Even when Mum had her out for weekends to stay with her, I couldn’t face going round.
That sounds horrible, but it was putting bad memories in my head, and I wanted to remember her as she was.
Is it wrong to say I just wish she had died as she had been, so people could remember her
like that?

I know some of my relatives thought I was bad not going to see her, but I hope people can understand why I didn’t.
Obviously it wasn’t that I didn’t love her or I didn’t
care, but seeing her would have upset me so much that it was probably better for both of us that I stayed away.

Nan’s time was up in July 2012, shortly after Amy and I split up, and I was gutted, but I knew in a way that because of the senile dementia we had really had lost her a long time before
that.

At the same time, I wasn’t getting on well with my dad.
We had a falling out over some new girls he had hired to work in Sugar Hut, called Sugar Hut Honeys.
The idea was that they were
good looking girls who would be great promotion for the club, but the first time I saw them they were in bikinis.
I went off on one, thinking that is how they would be dressed all the time and
accusing Dad of making the club tacky.
But the reality was that the bikinis were just for a photoshoot, and they are in dresses the rest of the nights.
I had got the wrong end of the stick, but by
the time I realized this it was too late – we’d already had the argument and there was bad feeling between us over it.

I also felt like Dad was enjoying the lifestyle that came with fame a bit too much.
I would be home at night just watching a film, and I’d hear him get back late with a group of people and
head for the hot tub.
It just didn’t seem right, and it was beginning to feel like I was the mature adult, and he was acting like a teenager!

To make things worse, I was still suffering from dark moments, getting anxious and depressed over nothing, thinking strangers in the street hated me.
But this time my paranoia started expanding
to include people close to me as well.
I would wake up and feel down all day, for no reason, just thinking I had no mates and no one liked me.
I’d sit and start deleting numbers from my
phone, feeling there was no point in keeping them, when these people weren’t my true friends.

Other times I would start the day off fine, and be walking down the road happy as Larry, when suddenly, for no reason, it was like a black cloud would come down over me, and I’d go home
and cry.

It was the one thing I didn’t feel like I could talk to my mum about.
Maybe because I didn’t understand what I was going through or why.
I would have felt stupid saying, ‘Hey,
Mum, I reckon people hate me.
No, I don’t have a reason to say that or any proof, I just feel it.’
But that is what I was feeling.

One of the big problems for me was – and still is, really – that I was stuck between two worlds.
I am not from the same world as the rest of the people on
TOWIE
.
I have not
grown up knowing the nice lives that they have, where you don’t have to fight for survival.
I don’t think I will ever fit into the moneyed world of people like them, and the other rich
people I have met since becoming famous.

But on the other hand, I don’t really fit into the world of the people I grew up with any more.
I do have money, and it does set me aside.
Plus the whole celebrity thing means they look at
me differently.
I might spend my evening on a red carpet at a premiere, and much as I’d like to take some of my Seabrooke Rise mates with me, they wouldn’t fit in.
It wouldn’t
work.
So I don’t fit perfectly with either group of friends.
I am on my own, floating somewhere between the two.
As I kept going over and over that in my mind, it would only add to my feeling
of loneliness.

I had no girlfriend, no management – CAN obviously decided not to represent me after all when Amy split with me – no real mates (I believed), and no work, other than the odd bits I
was still doing down at Sugar Hut.
I really felt like things were falling apart for me.

I was totally lost and alone, and more paranoid and panicky than ever.
I would spend hours going over and over my life, thinking about where things had gone wrong, trying to work out what I
should have done differently.

One time I started watching bits of
TOWIE
back on YouTube, and I was watching my boxing fight with Mark.
I started getting angry and stressed, and I guess my adrenalin was building and
I could feel a panic attack coming on.
I called Dad on his mobile, but he was in America and couldn’t do much, except try to calm me down.
But I was struggling to catch my breath, and it was
making me worse, and I was saying, ‘Dad, I can’t breathe,’ and that was it, I passed out, bang, on my floor.
I came round a couple of minutes later, but I felt dizzy and panicked.
It was the only time I actually passed out, but it was scary, and showed just how bad my anxiety was getting.

I was still being invited out to loads of places, and I’d go even though the people there weren’t really my mates.
Then when I was there I’d feel anxious and regret ever having
left my house.
So after a while I stopped going out at all, and would just sit in, chain-smoking, alone with my thoughts.

Mum didn’t know what I was going through – I was still popping round to see her, but she would never really come to my house.
It always felt too awkward, with Dad right next door,
and as though I was rubbing our wealthy lifestyle in her face.
So any time she questioned, ‘Are you OK, Kirk?
You don’t seem like yourself, and you’re not looking too well,’
it was easy enough to brush it off as tiredness.

Dad didn’t know what I was going through either, despite the fact that he lived next door.
That is how little contact we were having with each other by then.

One person who did help me through it was my cousin Scott.
He is eight years older than me, so we weren’t close when we were younger.
But by this time the age gap didn’t matter, and
he started coming round more.
He understood me, and talked me through a lot of things, encouraging me to get back out there.
He is big into the gym and started taking me down there with him, almost
like he was my own personal trainer.
He has become one of my best friends, and I owe him a lot for helping get me back on track.