Unbreakable: My New Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

opposite me.
    After a couple of minutes, I glanced across to find him looking faintly perplexed.
    ‘I didn’t know Kylie had a brother.’

2
    Minnie

    A woman’s best friend.
    T here was another reason why series four of The X Factor was such a strain. Ever since I’d started working on the show I’d had a special companion – someone who always took my side, defended me at every turn… and could bite your hand off if she felt like it. No human could ever fill this role. I am talking about Minnie, my unutterably gorgeous, white fluffy Pomeranian who was the canine love of my life. She was my best friend in the world and went everywhere with me. But during that last season, she had got a lot quieter and I’d started to worry about her. I wondered if the constant travelling, the interminable transatlantic flights, weren’t taking their toll.
    Originally she had been Kelly’s dog, but from the moment she and I met, we just connected. It was kismet, and she never left my side. Every single day for the previous twelve years she had been there, no matter what. During those terrible months when I had colon cancer, unable and unwilling to communicate with human beings, she was glued to my side, even in the hospital. If I went to make a cup of tea, she would wake up from her snooze and follow me to the kitchen. If I got up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, there she would be trotting along beside me. When Ozzy and I went on tour, she would just pine and refuse to eat until we got back. In the end we had no option but to take her with us, and she and Maggie – a Japanese Chin that we got at the same time – became a familiar sight on the hard-rock circuit.
    Her loyalty and her devotion to me were quite extraordinary. But she didn’t see herself as a lapdog. She was my guard dog, albeit a diminutive one, but what she lacked in stature she made up for in ferocity, snapping at anyone who came too close to her precious mama.
    The list of those who learnt to give her a wide berth could be enough for a feature in Hello! magazine. She went for Piers Morgan backstage at America’s Got Talent . She had also taken chunks out of Patrick Swayze and David Hasselhoff. Even Ozzy incurred her wrath on a regular basis. Every time he got into bed, she would curl her lip at him and make low growling noises.
    ‘Fucking hell, Sharon, it’s been twelve years . Surely she must recognise me by now?’
    Poms live to a good age – often as old as eighteen – so that April I had no reason to worry when she started to cough. But we knew she had had heart issues for a couple of years, and we’d been told to watch her weight, but I didn’t put two and two together.
    It was a Saturday evening in July 2008. Ozzy and I were at home, enjoying the comparative peace of our new house at Hidden Hills, a gated community in Calabasas right on the northernmost tip of LA with nothing else beyond it except wilderness. The dogs, of course, loved the space and freedom it gave them. Even Minnie had been known to gambol about on the grass. Not this night. She was curled up beside me, not even moving when I did. Something wasn’t right. I was aware that she was unable to walk more than a few yards without needing to rest. And now there was the coughing. I had got used to it over the preceding few months. It was Ozzy who picked up that tonight something was different. Although by now it was gone ten, I called Dr Lisa, the vet who’d looked after all our dogs since way back when and whose practice was in Malibu, where we used to spend our summers and where we bought so many of our dogs. She was usually happy to make house calls, and with sixteen dogs to take care of, from inoculations to minor ailments, she was a regular visitor to Hidden Hills. However, this time she said we should bring Minnie to the clinic immediately. There were scans that would need to be done in situ, she explained. Malibu lies ten or so miles up the coast north of Los