I'll Be Home For Christmas Read online

  Born in Liverpool, ABBEY CLANCY balances her home life with her career as a model and TV presenter. She is an ambassador for many of the UK’s top brands and has designed her own clothing and jewellery lines as well as launching a range of baby products. Abbey is married to Premiership footballer Peter Crouch and has three small children. I’ll Be Home for Christmas is her second novel.

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

  Copyright © Abbey Clancy 2018

  Abbey Clancy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9781474050753

  For you, Mum.

  Love you loads. Don’t know what

  I would do without you.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  There are many aspects to the world of social media that I find confusing. Embarrassing. Overwhelming, even.

  Like when someone snaps a picture of me the morning after the night before, and sticks it up on Instagram without even a measly Willow filter. I mean, we’ve all been there, right? Your mouth feels like it’s been vacuum packed with a decomposing ferret, and your hair has gone full-on Walking Dead, and you know you’re just going to die unless you get immediate access to a paper bag full of McDonald’s hash browns?

  Yeah. Well, imagine in that precise moment, someone incredibly chipper bounces over, grinning from ear to ear at the sight of you, and wants nothing more than to snap a picture of you together, no matter how grey your skin is or how far down your face your mascara’s slipped. Not good.

  But – and I get this, I really do – it’s all part of my job. My job isn’t an ordinary job. It’s being a pop star – Jessika – to the world at large. Not very long ago at all I was the person who would have been bouncing over and asking for the pic, so I can’t complain. Not very long ago, I was scraping a living singing Disney covers at kids’ birthday parties, working as an intern at a record label, and filling in my lonely nights waitressing at glamorous showbiz events I wasn’t good enough to actually get invited to.

  So I get it. I understand that it’s all part of my brave, weird new world – and that I have a responsibility to suck it up, smile for the camera, even if I really, really don’t want to.

  I also understand that people will comment about me, and to me – posting everything from sweet compliments on my music through to borderline-stalker psycho abuse. I know everything I say and do will be analysed, twisted, churned up, chewed up, and spat back out by the media. I have help with that, in the form of my scary PR manager Patty, and I’m sensible enough not to take the nasty stuff seriously. I’ve worked hard on developing a thick skin, and coping with the demands of being famous.

  One thing, though, I don’t think I will ever get used to is this: my mother is currently trending on Twitter.

  To put this in context, my mother is a tiny Scouse powerhouse in her fifties, with dyed black hair, strong opinions and endless energy. I’d say she has zero per cent body fat, 200 per cent work ethic, and loves nothing more than her family, which includes my nan, who is officially ancient, my dad Phil, my older sister Becky, me and my little brother Luke (or The Knobhead, as he’s known to everyone who’s ever met him).

  She is also totally in love with her first ever grandchild – Becky’s baby Ollie, who is now four months old and rules the world from his bouncy chair like a benign Jabba the Hutt. He’s one of those fat babies with rolls of flesh everywhere, and his eyes completely disappear every time he laughs. Which is a lot.

  So, Mum is a family woman. Her life isn’t glamorous, or that interesting. She spends every spare minute looking after us lot, and still works on the tills at the local Tesco, even though she doesn’t really need to any more. She’s extraordinary, but ordinary, if you know what I mean – one of those salt-of-the-earth-women you could build an empire on the back of.

  All of which begs the question: why is she trending on Twitter? When did she even join Twitter? Why did she join Twitter?

  I scroll down the pages – literally endless pages – and see that every pic on there has the hashtag #jessikasmum. It looks like the whole of Liverpool has popped into the supermarket to pick up a packet of crumpets, a bottle of Prosecco, and a selfie with my mother. There are hundreds of them – all featuring complete strangers, gurning like idiots, and my mum, happily posing alongside them.

  My mum has described herself as ‘daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, and lover of all things Michael Bublé’. I suppose I should be grateful that the great crooner himself hasn’t also called in with a selfie stick in his hand.

  ‘Fab time at Tesco with mummy diva’, says one tweet. ‘Jessika’s mum is awesome’, says another. ‘Forget Jessika – her mum needs her own reality show!’ on one more. ‘Why’s she still working?’ asks a random girl who, according to her profile, loves knitting, cats and visiting S&M clubs. Hopefully not all at the same time.

  Mum’s still working, of course, because she wants to. Not because she’s skint, or because I haven’t offered to give her anything she needs – but because she is who she is. She’s my mum, and she’ll probably be going into Tesco when she’s eighty, popping her false teeth back in for photo calls.

  I close down the screen, and take a breath. Tell myself there’s no harm done. That it could be worse – my dad could be on Twitter, and then the world as we know it would collapse in on itself.

  My life is insane. Nobody warned me being a pop star would be quite this crazy.

  #passmetheproseccoplease

  *

  I used to think my life was complicated when I was younger. I was sharing a scummy flat with my old school friend, Ruby, running our marginally successful Disney princess party business, feeding my body with a steady diet of cheap packet noodles and feeding my soul with a vision of becoming a singer.

  I suppose I was a typically star-struck girl from Liverpool who was a chasing a dream – a dream of becoming a pop star, of making it big, of hanging framed platinum discs on my toilet wall and playing to sell-out crowds in stadiums ac ross the globe.

  In some ways, all of that has come true. Sort of by accident, if I’m honest. I was singing at a birthday party in Cheshire, soaked to the skin and ‘Letting It Go’, when I was ‘spotted’ by a music mogul called Jack Duncan.

  When you read that in newspapers and magazines – ‘spotted’ – it always sounds like stardom happened magically overnight. Like the tall skinny geeky girl was shopping for a new pencil case in Paperchase one minute, and strutting her stuff on the Paris catwalks the next. And maybe, in some cases, that’s what happens, I don’t know.

  With me, it was different. After I was ‘spotted’, Jack whisked me away to a new life in London – but it was a new life that didn’t exactly start out brilliantly. I was working long hours as the office intern at Starmaker Records, slaving for the PR team by day and perfecting my craft by night.

  Well, that’s not quite accurate. Some of those nights, I’d spend with Jack Duncan – who’d spotted my talent in more ways than one. I still cringe a little inside when I think about Jack. I can’t say he exploited me, but he didn’t exactly behave like a knight in shining armour either – because while I was gullibly falling in love with him, he was part-time shacked up with my friend Vogue as well.

  It all came out in the wash, and we got our revenge – revenge that involved handcuffing him to a bed, taking obscene pictures of him in embarrassing positions and, more importantly, walking out on Starmaker to form our own record label – In Vogue.

  Still. Cringing inside, even as I speak. I have a trusting soul, and that isn’t always a good thing in show business – because the Jack Duncans of that world are literally swimming through its waters like seductive sharks, guzzling up tiddlers like me for breakfast.

  I went from being me to being a new and not-so-improved version of me – featuring on a number one single with Vogue, on the pages of all the bikini-body celeb-style magazines, even on the telly for a live Christmas Day broadcast.

  Between the glamour and the parties and Jack and the sheer wondrous hard work of it all, I lost my bearings a bit though. I forgot who I was. I left behind Jessy, the nice girl from Liverpool who loved her family and kept her feet on the ground, and embraced Jessika, who, possibly as a result of some kind of toxic poisoning from all the fake eyelashes and fake tan she used, could be a bit of a bitch.

  I’m not proud of some of the things I did back then, but I am proud that I pulled it back. It’s not easy to get any kind of balance when your entire life is a crazy carousel of lunacy, but I did.

  I didn’t do it alone, though. I did it with the help of my family, bonkers as they are. I did it with the help of Vogue, who might be a diva but has a heart the size of a planet. I did it with the help of Neale, my stylist and the most fabulous and best of friends.

  Mainly, though, I did it with the help of Daniel Wells – the love of my life.

  *

  Daniel Wells is my real hero. He’s Han Solo and Jack Bauer and Barack Obama all rolled up into one. He doesn’t look or act like any of those people – I’m just trying to convey how brilliant he is. To me at least.

  Daniel and I have known each other since we were toddlers. He used to live next door to us on our quiet terraced street in Liverpool, and there are, I believe, photos still in existence of us playing with rubber ducks in the bath together when we were two. We still sometimes take a bath together, but things tend to end differently these days.

  Daniel was a geek before it was remotely cool to be one. Overweight, over-haired, over-pimpled and over-shy, he spent his teenage years locked away, writing songs, fiddling with tech, and, it turns out, pining over me.

  We lost touch for years when his family moved down South, but he miraculously appeared back in my life just when I needed him most. I had recreated myself as Jessika, and he had recreated himself as Wellsy – the coolest record producer of his generation. But while I embraced the madness of public life – I was always a much bigger show-off than him – he’d become a hermit, setting up his studio in the wilds of the countryside, his anonymity and lack of showbiz neediness somehow making him even more desirable within the industry.

  He’d not changed a bit – he still knew me inside out, upside down, and standing on my head. He still understood me, warts and all, and loved me anyway. In fact, the only thing that had changed about Daniel was the way he looked – time had been kind to him, good genetics allowing him to blossom into a taller version of Leonardo DiCaprio. Cute Leo – like Catch Me If You Can Leo, not the Leo covered in blood and drool like in The Revenant.

  I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say he saved me. Or, at the very least, he made room for me on his life raft as the Titanic was sinking – unlike that cow Rose.

  And now, we’re together. So together it’s unreal. In public, we might be Wellsy and Jessika, but, in private, we’re just Jessy and Daniel. Loved-up in a way I’ve never known before. He has his career, I have mine, and we both have each other. My time with him is precious and perfect and utterly satisfying in every possible way. He’s the kind of man you can watch a box set of Happy Valley with one minute, and have Olympic-level sex with the next. He doesn’t care if I look like crap, or accidentally leave my hair extensions hanging on the back of the bathroom door like a skinned cat, or fall asleep at 8 p.m. because I’m exhausted. He understands my lifestyle, and he understand me. Frankly, I can’t believe how much I lucked out – in many ways, but mainly with Daniel.

  It sounds simple. Idyllic, even. But, of course, it’s not that straightforward – nothing ever is. Because I still spend a lot of my time in London, for work, and he’s still based at his farmhouse in Sussex. Because I’m living in the public eye so much even my mum gets approached for selfies, and he values his privacy.

  Mainly, at the moment, because I have a brain tangle about what will happen next. Part of me just wants to run away to the countryside and snuggle up with him for the rest of our lives. We could raise chickens and sheep and maybe even add to my mum’s adorable grandchild collection. I’m sure we’d be happy. Super-happy, in fact.

  I could eat more carbs and grow a muffin top and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t mind, and we could go for long walks and have long baths and turn into one of those couples who don’t even own a telly. Maybe I’d even forget to brush my hair and end up with dreadlocks. We have enough money, and we have enough love, to make that a possibility.

  But, of course, it wouldn’t work. I don’t really like being separated from my hair straighteners for too long, and Neale would bitch-slap me with a dead mackerel if I didn’t exfoliate every day. Plus, it’s not all about the money, is it? I wasn’t chasing this dream of mine for so long just for the money. Even if I’d won the EuroMillions on one of those bonkers rollover weeks, I’d still be working.

  Because it’s about more than that. It’s about the music. It’s about singing, and performing, and building the only career I’ve ever wanted. It’s about that dream I’ve always had, and about that work ethic I inherited from my parents.

  Daniel can get away with building his superstar career from the sound-proofed comfort of the South Downs – but, sadly, Jessika can’t. Jessika needs to be out in the world, posing for those photos even though she feels awful, going to those parties, and putting in the hours perfecting her craft. Jessika needs the spotlight, even though Jessy sometimes wishes she could hide away in a darkened room and scoff a box of Matchmakers instead.

  And Jessika – I really must stop talking about myself in the third person – has just received what might be the opportunity of a lifetime.

  Chapter 2

  It pinged onto my iPhone X last Thursday, and at first I thought it was just something fun from Vogue or Neale or maybe something a bit mushy from Daniel, but when I looked at the email, it came from an unfamiliar email address, but had a very familiar name.

  Cooper Black.

  Cooper Black, former frontman with hit boy band E-Z Street. Cooper Black, whose denim-clad limbs and perfectly ripped abs have graced the walls of millions of teenaged girls. Cooper Black, who is about to launch his much-anticipated, and apparently much cooler, solo career.

  Cooper Black, who is – for some reason – a huge fan of Jessika:

  Hey, Jessika,

  I’m a huge fan. Love your voice, your style, everything about you. I think we could make beautiful music together – don’t you? I have a ‘featuring’ slot waiting for you on the new single, if you’re interested. Let’s talk.

  There’s a lot going on over here in the States, and I’d love for you to be involved.

  And now he wants me to leave everything behind and go and work with him in the US.

  Part of me is so excited I could kiss a camel, possibly with tongues. It is beyond awesome – not only has someone like Cooper Black even heard of me, but he wants to record with me, perform with me. It’s a chance to take my music across the Atlantic, to open up a whole new world of possibilities. It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

  But it’s also thousands of miles and several time zones away from the rest of my life. I’d have to move away from Daniel, from Vogue, from my family. I’d have to make a choice that I’m not sure I’m ready to make.

  I have no idea what to do, and don’t have a clue who to talk to about it, either. My mum and dad would just want me to do what makes me happy. Daniel would be heartbroken. Vogue would possibly feel betrayed. Neale would be pipping at the thought of going, and planning his wardrobe accordingly. They’d all see only part of the big picture – and it’s up to me to see the whole shebang.

  It’s way too complicated for me to figure out – how do I pursue my own ambitions without hurting the people I care about?

  At times like this, the thought of dressing up as Elsa and singing to a bunch of screaming kids in a soggy garden seems like an appealing option. The rain never bothered me anyway.

  Potentially life-changing emails from all-American pop idols aside, everything is going brilliantly.

  *