Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

lovely as I remember her. I always knew that she was something special, she always wanted to get to the top and it looks like now she is getting the chance to live her dream.’
    Later, Cheryl admitted she was devastated when Steve sold his story to the newspaper. However, she said she took it on the chin, admitting, ‘You just have to get a tougher skin, laugh it off.’ When the story hit the stands, though, she was straight on the phone to find out why he had done this to her. ‘I was so upset and so hurt,’ she recalled. ‘He treated me like shit the whole time I was seeing him. I rang him and said, “I want an explanation, because all I ever did was help and support you.” He started crying and said the papers had been hounding him for ten months.’
    Back in September 2000, however, a seventeen-year-old Cheryl met another boyfriend who would make a deep impact on her life. Strolling through the Byker region of Newcastle one afternoon after a shift at JJ’s, she caught the eye of a furniture salesman called Jason Mack. ‘From the moment I saw Cheryl I wanted her,’ the shaven-headed shop assistant told the News of the World. ‘She had the most perfect face, great legs and a fantastic backside.’
    It wasn’t long before they were dating seriously, but things weren’t exactly easy-going. Cheryl’s mum wasn’t happy about her daughter spending too much time with Jason alone at his flat, and eventually suggested that he come and stay with them – a clever way to keep a keen eye on the pair of them. But as Joan would discover, she wasn’t able to keep an eye on them all the time.
    Whenever Joan went on her Saturday morning run to Morrisons, Jason claimed in the News of the World that he and Cheryl were able to indulge in bouts of passion. But when they weren’t holed up in her room at home, they’d be out and about. Cheryl would treat Jason to expensive designer clothes, such asLacoste, Rockport and Henri Lloyd with money she had saved up from her wages from the café. In return he got himself a tattoo of a she-devil with the word ‘Chez’ etched underneath it.
    But wise Joan had been right to keep an eye on Jason, as she would later find out that he had an ongoing problem with drugs and alcohol. In his News of the World interview, Jason revealed that when he first met Cheryl, he was ‘doing a lot of cocaine’ and on some days would ‘blow £200 on the stuff’. He also admitted that as soon as he got up in the morning he’d be swigging from bottles of Bud until he ‘crashed out at God knows when’.
    Although Cheryl herself never indulged in such practices, Jason claimed that she was so besotted with him she couldn’t turn her back on him and bravely tried to help him kick his nasty habit. It was tough, but she proved to be a patient and thoughtful counsellor who helped Jason through the worst of his problem. ‘She’d sit with me for hours to talk me out of going out and getting drugs,’ he confided. ‘In a couple of weeks I turned my back on cocaine.’
    Drugs were something that would play a major part in Cheryl’s life over the next few years: their impact on her family and friends would have a lasting effect, ensuring that she’d never consider dabbling in any herself.
    Living on a council estate in Heaton was hard for many of the youngsters. There was little money and even less for them to do.
    ‘When I was growing up I did not have a clue about anything,’ Cheryl said in The New Statesman. ‘All I knew was going to school and going back to the council house, not always being able to have dinner, not knowing why we were skint, just assuming that’s the way things had to be.’
    And the solution for some of these directionless young people? To escape their monotonous lives by losing themselves in drugs. But Cheryl was different. Even though she’d quit school at sixteen, against her father’s wishes, and was finding it hard to make ends meet with her café job, she was determined to