Nicole
Something awful is going to happen in Rio.
Out of the window of the aeroplane I saw a flash of lightning tear the sky. I started to shake.
The PR from record company came to sit beside me.
‘Robbie Williams is such a lovely guy,’ she said. ‘You’re so lucky to be engaged to him.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be very happy.’
But even as I said the words, I did not beliee them.
When we got to the hotel, I went straight to my room. The light on my telephone was flashing. I had a message. I knew it was from Rob. I was scared to play it. I walked around the room, unpacked, picked up the telephone and dialed for my message.
‘It’s me”, Rob said. ‘Call me.’
I could hear in his voice that something wasn’t right. He had been fine when I had left him six days earlier, and fine last night on the telephone, but now –
I dialed Rob’s number in England.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked him.
‘We don’t see each other enough,’ Rob said. ‘I think we should end our relationship.’
‘We’re engaged,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’
'Yes', Rob said. It does. But I'm confused.'
‘I new spmething was going happen.’ It was all I could say. ‘I knew it.’
I was very calm. I did not shout. Rob had made up his mind, there was nothing for us to talk about.
‘Is that it then?’ I asked him.
His voice was very small. ‘Yes it is.’
I put the phone down, and I started to cry, to howl. I had five days in Brazil before I could go home. How could he do this when I was so far away and I had so much work to do? Why did he do it the telephone? Why couldn’t he wait until he saw me? What on earth had happened in the last few hours? I was crying so loudly, the others heard me and came to the door.
‘Nic, are you all right?’
‘Let us in.’
‘What’s going on in there?’
I dind’t want to tell them, I din’t want anyone know. They loved Rob and our relationship was seen as something really positive. I coundn’t bear for everyone to know that it was over. I refused to let anyone in. I wouldn’t speak or open the door.
Natalie
I was sunbathing by the pool. All Saints were doing a circuit of South America and this was our only chance to get a bit of sun. But upstairs in her hotel bedroom, my little sister was crying her heart out. I couldn’t just sit there. I went back upstairs.
‘Let me in, let me in,’ I kept begging her.
I was in pain with her. When Nic’s heart breaks, my heart breaks too.
Nicole
Eventually, the storm subside a little and I unlocked the door. When Nat, Mel and Shaznay hugged me, I just cried more. I was jet-lagged and shocked. Shaznay went to the mini bar and got me a drink. No one knew what to do. It took an hour for them to pull the ragged parts of me together. I kept thinking: I have to work, I have to work, when all I wanted was to be at home and hidden under my duvet. It was 2 p.m., we were not working until the next day.
‘Can we go to the bar in the hotel?’ I asked. ‘I want to get hammered.’
I took my engagement ring off. I had a tan and the ring left a white band aroud my finger. I couldn’t take that off. It started clearly back at me: you were engaged to Rob and now you are not.
The bar was closed so we ended up in the sandwich centre. Melanie was six mounths pregnant so she was not drinking but, together with Nat, our assistant Shiara Juthan and our tour manager, Johnny Buckland, I got plastered on tequila – shot after shot. I had twenty shots in two hours. I was loud and careless and totally unlike myself. I wa trying to obliterate myself.
I was so angry with Rob, so filled with despair and so panicked at the thought that I had to give interviews and perform the next day – so many people were couting on me. I wanted to numb out totally. I wanted everything to disappear.
‘I want to go for walk on the beach,’ I said.
It was 4 p.m. The sun was shinning, the beach was deserted. We started walking but I fell behind. They were all up ahead. I was such a puppet, never doing what I wanted. I had totally blurred the line between my personal life and the band. It is all my fault, it is all mu fault. The words were running around in my head. I turned towards the water and started walking into
the ocean. I wondered what it would be like to immerse myself completely. I could just walk and walk.
‘Nicole’, Shiara screamed at me.
She ran into the sea and pulled me out. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to keep walking.’
It seemed so simple. Just one foot in front of the other. Walking away from it all. Then the tears, again. I was far from home, far from anything that might comfort me. I had no answers to anything, my life was a mess.
Shiara steered me back to the hotel. My clothes were soaking, so I went to my room. There were no messages from Rob – not on the hotel telephone and not on my mobile. I coundn’t stay there, waiting for him not to call me. My heart was shattering.
I went back to the bar and had a few more drinks. Shaznay and I played a game with our hands. I laughed. I was out of it. I didn’t care.
When Shaznay and Melanie went to bed, I stayed up with the others. I was still hard at it at 7 a.m. and the first interviews were due to start at 2 p.m. I went back to my room. I felt like a zombie but coundn’t sleep. My heart was going to explode.
At 2 p.m., Shiara knocked in my door.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t slept.’
‘You’ve got to eat something,’ she said. ‘You have interviews to do down by the pool.’
Food? The thought of it turned my stomach.
‘Tomato soup,’ I said, ‘I might be able to eat that.’
Shiara brought me the soup and I tried to get some down, but the mixture of alcohol and pain had twisted my stomach into a knot.
‘Let me sit it out a bit longer,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you all down by the pool.’
Rob, hangover, guilt – it was a deadly concoction. I put on a Pair of dungarees and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like a child in a clown’s outfit. My face was gaunt, my eyes were sunked in. I tied my hair back. I always take care with how I look, but that day I looked so awful I didn’t care. I put on a big pair of black sunglasses and went down to the pool.
I had the sensation that it was not me walking out into the hallway and going down in the lift. My body was doing it, but I wasn’t there. The girls and ten Brazilian journalists were all seated around a big white plastic table.
‘Hi,’ I said. I’m sorry I’m late but I’ve been feeling unwell.’
I sat down. I looked around the table at each of the journalists’ faces, then I burst into tears and ran from the pool and back to my room.
Look what Rob’s done with me, that was all I could think, sitting alone in my room and howling. He had turned me into a freak. I had been his shoulder to cry on, much as he had been mine.
I rang Rob. I told him I hated him.
‘You’ve lost the best thing that ever happened to you,’ I yelled.
Rob was very quiet. He hates confrontation. I got off the telephone feeling slightly better. In the mirror my eyes were swollen and red. I felt ugly and rejected. I had a show to do.
I went to the TV studio in the same unflattering dungarees. As we got out of the car, we were swarmed by fans. Beautifulsuntanned girls in skimpy clothes. I felt hideous.
‘Nicole,’ one of the girls called out in a broken English. ‘I just want to know you’re so lucky to be Robbie.’
The contrast couldn’t have been sharper – the mess that was my life and the world saw me. To them I seemed to have everything – everything that would make their lives glamorous and full. In reality I had nothing: a band I hated and, now, rejected by the man I loved.
Backstage, each of us had a different make-up artist. I sat there like a doll, as a woman with orange hair worked away at my Face. Dirty make-up sponge, big apple-red Aunt Sally cheeks, orange eye shadow. She painted my eyebrowns light brown and smeared blue eye liner around my eyes. No mascara.
Melanie came in, looked at me and burst out laughing. Then everyone came in to see.
‘Do you want to change it?’ Shiara asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’
I wanted to go in front of the cameras looking as awful as I felt inside. In the midst of this crazy machine that went on around us, it was a way I could be real. Look, my grotesquely painted face said to the world, I am in pain.
