Cheryl: My Story (8 page)

Gillian was working in the café now too, and I looked after Warren for her on my days off. I’d learnt how to feed and change him and I absolutely loved him. ‘I want lots of children,’ I thought to myself. ‘And I want to have my kids young.’ Gillian was only 21, but that was seen as the perfect age to start your family, and I definitely wanted to start early too.

‘How’s the songwriting going?’ Jason asked me from time to time. He knew all about the singing and dancing I’d done over the years, and how I’d let everything slip after my last relationship. I’d started writing a few lyrics again but I didn’t have a plan about where I was going from there. I was just happy to be back on my feet after Dave, and I’d tell Jason, ‘It’s good. I love it,’ and we’d leave it at that.

Jason’s furniture business was thriving. He was doing a lot of house clearances as well as running the second-hand shop, and he had a good reputation in the trade. Locally, he was viewed as someone who was making a success of his life. My family didn’t like the fact Jason was 11 years older than me, but if anyone said anything I always reassured them I was fine. ‘I’ve got an old head on me shoulders,’ I’d say. ‘Jason understands me.’ They could see how much better I was, and they left me alone.

Andrew came out of prison around this time, which was another positive thing in my life. He’d served four years and I assumed being locked up would have taught him a lesson and that he would put his criminal past behind him. He’d been inside for most of his teenage years, and I hoped he’d start a great, new life.

My relationship with Jason progressed really quickly, and when I was 17 we moved into a flat together just over the road from my mam’s. It was that close, in fact, you could see into the kitchen from her front window. All Jason and I had to begin with was a second-hand kettle from his shop and a tiny black-and-white TV with a piece of wire sticking out the top, which you had to twist around to stop the picture from fuzzing. There was one bedroom and a bathroom you couldn’t turn around in, but it was ours.

‘What’s for tea tonight?’ Jason would ask when he went out to work in the morning, because he knew I liked to cook for him and was enjoying being a little homemaker.

‘I’m makin’ us chops with gravy and veg,’ I’d say excitedly. I was feeling stronger all the time, and I was looking a lot better and gaining a bit of weight. ‘Can’t wait,’ he’d wink. A look from him would make my heart jump. I felt alive, like a normal teenager. I was finally through the darkness.

One night I arranged to meet Jason at a friend’s flat not far from ours. We were all going to just chill out together, that’s what I thought. I took a bit of money in case we wanted to get a takeaway and I was looking forward to a relaxing evening, but when I walked in the flat my heart nearly stopped. Jason was standing there in front of me, but he looked like a total stranger. His jaw was swinging everywhere, he was talking absolute rubbish and his eyes looked black instead of blue, because his pupils were so big.

‘What’s he taken?’ I screamed. Jason was swaying in front of me with a crazed, aggressive look on his face and I started panicking like mad. ‘Tell me what he’s taken! Jason, what have you taken?’

I knew he hadn’t got like this by smoking weed, but I knew nothing about the type of drugs that did this to you.

‘Cocaine,’ his mate confessed. ‘He did cocaine.’

I got Jason home eventually but I didn’t sleep a wink all night. When he finally came down and took control of himself again I begged him, ‘Please don’t ever do this again. It was so horrible to see you in that state.’

‘I won’t. I’ll never touch it again,’ he promised. ‘I don’t know what possessed me.’

I hated drugs with an absolute passion. Anything other than weed frightened me to death, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to get high like that, or into a state where they were out of control and frightening the people who cared about them.

‘I’m so sorry, Cheryl,’ Jason said, when I told him exactly how I felt. ‘The last thing I would ever want to do is scare you.’

Not very long after that night I bumped into my old friend Lee Dac. He was one of the boys who had been in my back garden doing the Mr Motivator routine the night my mam found Lindsey and I fully clothed in our beds, planning to sneak out and go camping. I saw Lee standing outside the metro station and he told me brightly that he was going to see Andrew at a party in two days’ time.

‘That’s good to hear,’ I said, thinking it was just like old times, with my brother back in the neighbourhood. ‘Hope you enjoy yourselves.’

‘Thanks, Cheryl. You take care of yourself.’

Just four days after that encounter I was talking to another old friend, a girl I’d grown up with, when her sister ran over to us in a panic and said, ‘Have you heard about Lee?’

We both looked at her sister blankly and I felt my pulse quicken.

‘No, what’s happened?’ I asked.

‘He’s been found dead. Suspected overdose.’

The words hit me like bricks and I could feel my legs buckle.

Lee had always been in and out of my life, ever since I was about 10 or 11 years old. He was one of the lads everybody knew and I was just so shocked. I started shaking and feeling sick as my friend’s sister went on to say he had taken heroin. ‘It just shut his whole system down, just like that,’ she said.

My friend collapsed, sobbing hysterically, and that was a shock in itself because she was a super-confident person, the type we called an ‘it’ girl. I’d never seen her lose her composure before, ever, and I started crying and trembling and thinking about how I’d seen Lee alive and well, just a few days before. It didn’t seem possible.

The news spread like wildfire, and Andrew came round to see me in a terrible state.

‘I’m gonna kill the drug dealers,’ he ranted. ‘How can this happen? I saw him two days ago! We had a laugh together. I saw him at a party. It was just like old times and he was absolutely fine. This is just insane! Someone’s gonna pay for this!’

Andrew asked me if I’d go with him to the funeral parlour to say goodbye to Lee, and I agreed even though I didn’t want to.

As soon as we got there I really wished I hadn’t gone. I was totally unprepared for what I was about to see, and the hideous memory of that day has stayed with me ever since.

Lee was lying in his coffin wearing his best shirt and smelling of his favourite aftershave. The smell was so powerful it made him seem alive, and I wanted to speak to him but knew I couldn’t. He still had the spots on his face he’d had the few days before when I’d seen him at the metro station.

‘What have you done?’ Andrew screamed at Lee. ‘What have you done?’ It was just so painful and heartbreaking. Lee was like a waxwork of himself and I just couldn’t take it in that he was not breathing and I would never talk to him or see him again.

I didn’t feel strong enough to go to the funeral because I knew Lee’s mother was in a terrible state and I couldn’t bear to see her grieving so badly, so I stayed at home and cried all day long. Jason wiped away my tears. He was as shocked and gutted as the rest of us.

‘What
is
this drug?’ I cried. Heroin seemed to have just come out of nowhere. I’d heard of people taking speed and Ecstasy on our estate and I knew about cocaine because of Jason, but in my mind heroin was some obscure rock-and-roll drug from the Seventies that had no place on our estate at all. What was it doing
here
, killing my friend?

Lee’s death sent shockwaves around the whole of Newcastle. It was the first case anybody really knew of, or at least that’s how I remember it. You’d have thought such a disturbing death of a teenage boy would have shocked people into running a mile from heroin – that’s certainly how it made me feel – but no, it wasn’t like that at all.

Unbelievably, my other friend was so cut up about Lee’s death she lost it completely and started taking heroin herself. I knew users said it gave you the most amazing feeling, but I’d also learned by now that you could get hooked after taking heroin just once, and then if you didn’t carry on smoking or injecting the drug it would make you feel very ill.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said over and over again to Jason. ‘I just don’t get it. Is this really happening?’

Not long after Lee’s death a girl I went to Walker School with also died from a heroin overdose. Then another friend of mine, Kerry, who’d been in the year above me at school, started taking it with her boyfriend. She was killed after going round to her drug dealer’s flat armed with a knife. A fight broke out and Kerry was stabbed in the main artery in her neck and bled to death. Other friends of mine went to see her in the funeral parlour and told me she had a patch on her neck, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head for the longest time either.

‘It’s like an epidemic,’ I cried to Jason. ‘Like this evil presence has just landed here and started killing all my friends.’

It felt like heroin divided the estate overnight after Lee’s death. You were either on it or you weren’t, but most people went to it. According to the papers a lot of them were trying to escape from the pressures of unemployment and living in what was, at the time, one of the most deprived areas in the country. That was the explanation, but I didn’t understand it at all. Heroin was cheap compared to cocaine, yet people were thieving to pay for their habit and ending up in prison. It was a hideous vicious circle of self-destruction.

‘Why?’ I kept saying, each time I heard of another neighbour or old friend using it. ‘Can’t people see it’s ruining lives?’

I just didn’t get it at all, but it seemed that people who kept away from it like me were a rarity. My world was shrinking, because I was outside the dark circle, and the dark circle was growing bigger all the time.

My friend who I was with when I found out about Lee went into total meltdown and became a full-blown junkie. I remember walking into her flat one day unannounced, and she jumped up and shoved something under the settee. It was silver foil and I just screamed at her: ‘You’re smoking heroin. I think you’re an absolute disgrace!’ She told me it made her feel good, gave her an escape. I just couldn’t comprehend it. She was someone I’d known since the age of seven. She’d always been the one who was popular and had nice clothes. I’d looked up to her for years, and now she was crumbling in front of me.

I thanked God I had Jason, because the rest of my world was disappearing so fast.

‘I’ll bring you some dinner into the shop,’ I said to him one day.

‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I can just grab something.’

‘I know, but I want to.’

I was on a day off and I didn’t have anything else to do. So many of my friends were now on drugs I hardly saw anybody else outside of my family, and Dolly. I didn’t even look after Warren any more because Gillian had decided she was missing out on seeing him grow up and had given up working at the café.

At lunchtime I walked into Jason’s shop with a bacon sandwich, expecting his face to light up when he saw me. He didn’t notice me come in because he was searching through the Yellow Pages, but my heart stopped when I looked at him. Jason had a roll of silver foil behind his ear, wedged there like a cigarette. It was the same silver foil I’d seen my friend trying to hide in her flat, and I knew exactly what it was used for. To complete the picture there was a known heroin addict sitting in the corner of the shop.

‘What the hell are you
doing
!’ I screamed, charging over to Jason and slapping him across the face as hard as I could.

I must have knocked him into the middle of next week I hit him that hard, and then I pegged it down the street with tears streaming down my cheeks.

‘Come back! I can explain everything! It’s not what you think!

Jason chased after me, screaming and shouting and swearing blind he wasn’t on heroin.

‘Look at me,’ he said when he caught up with me outside my mam’s house. ‘Do I look like I’m on heroin? You’ve got it all wrong, Cheryl.’

He certainly didn’t look out of control, not like he had done when he took cocaine. His pupils weren’t huge and he wasn’t being aggressive or talking rubbish.

‘What about the silver foil and that smackhead in the shop?’

‘The foil belongs to
him
, and you’re right, I shouldn’t have him in the shop. But honest to God, I’m not on it, Cheryl. What do you take me for? I swear to you, I’m
not
taking heroin.’

‘Look me in the eye and say that again,’ I said to him, and he did, over and over again.

‘I swear I’m not on heroin. You have to believe me. I’m not like that. I’m not stupid. I’ve seen what it does to people. I only smoke weed. Come on, Cheryl, don’t do this.’

I was too young and naïve to realise it at the time, but Jason was an extremely good liar. In the months to come he would pull every trick in the book to disappear and take drugs, always coming up with a more elaborate excuse.

Sometimes he’d pick a fight with me about absolutely nothing, and then go missing for four days because of what
I’d
said or done. Whenever he did one of his disappearing acts I’d be beside myself with worry, not knowing where the hell he was or even if he was alive or dead. We didn’t have mobile phones, and I literally had to sit tight and wait for him to come back. I’d get so worried I could barely sleep or eat, and I’d survive on cups of tea and the odd McDonald’s.