Chloe Sims - The Only Way is Up - My Story. Chloe Sims
with Danny, and after a couple of months things became quite serious between us. Living with four other people was starting to annoy me – the flat was always a complete tip – and Lee had his own place.
I used to spend most nights over at his place and, although the sex wasn’t great, I liked the fact that he was a big deal over there. It may have just been Majorca but he had status and money. I realised that the problem was that I didn’t really fancy him – not like Danny – but I put it to the back of my mind.
One night, me and Lee went out for a few drinks at one of the bars on the strip. We didn’t really go out to the strip that often; the novelty of all these bars on your doorstep had worn off and we were a couple so we used to stay in more. This seemingly innocent drink was to create a whole new nightmare, which would make the fight with the German tourists pale into insignificance.
After a few early drinks, we moved on to a nightclub. Anyone who’s ever been to Majorca will most likely have fond memories of the clubs on the main strips; they are great institutions. Unfortunately, the club we went to was upstairs, meaning some tricky negotiation of the many steps on the way out in the early hours! After a couple more drinks in the nightclub, we decided to call it a night.
We were leaving the club when the DJ played Whitney Houston’s ‘It’s Not Right But It’s Okay’, which at the time was ‘my song’. Over the years, I’ve had several tunes that I just love and play over and over again. This was my current favourite, so I told Lee to hang on and ran back inside the club. Just as I got on to the dancefloor, a fight must have broken out – although I didn’t see it – and someone threw a bottle at someone else and it smashed and showered me with broken glass.
It all happened so quickly. I didn’t know what had gone on and I didn’t know I was hurt until I looked down and saw my arm was bleeding. I must have been in shock. Then I felt something on my forehead and realised my head was also cut. It seemed like slow motion to begin with, and then the next thing there was blood everywhere – it was pouring down my face. I ran out of the club, down the stairs and into the middle of the road below. I was screaming because I didn’t know what had happened and all I could see was this blood. At the best of times, I’m terrible at the sight of blood and I went into meltdown. I didn’t know where the blood was coming from at this point – I was standing in the street, going mental.
Lee found me out on the strip and managed to call a first aider from one of the other bars, who came straight over. They took me back to Lee’s place and tried to calm me down. I was taken to hospital, where I had an X-ray, a tetanus jab and got stitched up. The cut actually wasn’t that big, but it was right in the middle of my eyebrows and, when I saw it in the mirror, I couldn’t stop crying.
My dream had always been modelling but now I had a big scar right in the middle of my face! I cried for hours – I was absolutely devastated and thought my modelling career was over before it had even begun. I was sure any chance of doing modelling would be out of the window. I had a big, ugly, red scar on my face and I was so gutted. I had to wear butterfly stitches on it for ages and, for years afterwards, it was red and really noticeable.
For ages, after that horrible night, I would sit and stare at myself in the mirror, wishing the scar would just disappear. If only I hadn’t run back in that club to dance, it would never have happened. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and because of that the rest of my life might be affected and my dreams shattered.
The scar has faded a lot now but you can still see it if I don’t cover it up with make-up. Now it’s just part of my face because it has been there for so long, but at the time it was a huge deal to me and I was devastated.
Things with Lee plodded on, and after a while I talked him into getting an apartment with me, so I was finally able to leave my mates in the shared apartment. Me and Lee lived together for eight months and things were pretty good between us, although I still didn’t really fancy him. I had started to get homesick – I missed my dad, my brother, my sisters and all my other family, and I started thinking more and more about home. By this time, I had been away for more than a year.
I used to say to Lee, ‘I want to move back to England,’ but he would always say no. You don’t have to spend very long in Majorca to realise that most people working out there stayed because they were running away from something in the UK; there would usually be a reason why they didn’t want to go back. There were lots of long-term workers, familiar faces on the strip, who had been living there for years and years, and probably didn’t know any different, who had lost touch with any reality that existed for them before Majorca.
Lee was from Worthing in West Sussex, and, although he wasn’t running away from anything, he had been out in the Balearic Islands for a few years and was settled, with no desire to go back home. Life seems good when you have money and the sun shines every day. It was different for me – I couldn’t imagine this life long term. I really loved my family and missed them so much. I told him I wanted him to move to Essex with me, but he used to say, ‘No, babe, I’m staying here.’
I’d have my dad on the phone telling me I should come home if I wasn’t happy, which just made it worse. The more I thought about home, the more miserable I became – Dad had been home in the UK for while, after his year job was finished, and I just couldn’t hack it out there any more without family around me. I’d had such an amazing time and I’d grown up a lot, but I was still only 17 and a long way from home. It was only a few months until my 18th birthday, and I really wanted to go home. I begged and pleaded with Lee to come back with me, but he kept saying no.
Then, one day, I gave him an ultimatum. I remember we were lying in bed together one morning and I turned to him and said, ‘I’m sorry, Lee, but I’m just not happy over here any more. I miss my dad and I miss my home – I’ve decided I’m going back.’
He replied, ‘Well, if you’ve made up your mind, then I guess I’ll have to come with you.’
I couldn’t believe it – I was over the moon! After living this crazy life, I was finally going home. Lee sold his car, we quit our jobs, moved out of the apartment, said goodbye to all our friends and headed home.
We arrived back in the UK and rented a flat in Loughton, Essex. Lee got a job working in sales, which was what he had done before Majorca, and I started working for a courier firm in Blackfriars in central London. The money was good but the job was crap, and I hated it. I had a long commute into London every morning and then back to Essex again in the evening, and it was rubbish. After a few months, I quit and got a job working in a mobile-phone shop, near where we lived in Loughton. It sounds bizarre now, but it was the first mobile-phone shop in the town!
Now that I was back in Essex, I couldn’t help thinking about Danny Chapman, who I’d had the brief romance with a year earlier. Things with Lee weren’t great – he didn’t really want to be in Essex and I think he resented me for making him move back.
That November, it was my 18th birthday and my dad gave me the best present I’d ever had – a gold Rolex watch that he’d bought for my mum 20 years earlier. I’d never seen it before – he had kept it hidden all that time because he’d been planning to give it to me on my 18th birthday. Originally, it had a leather strap on it but he had a gold bracelet made for it, especially for me. I loved it. When I saw it, I cried. He bought me ten driving lessons as well and I was chuffed to bits – all my friends had already learned to drive when they were 17 but I’d been in Majorca with my moped to get around, so I’d missed out. Now I was desperate to pass my test.
Lee treated me as well. He bought me a Louis Vuitton handbag, which was really pricey and my first ever proper designer bag – I took it everywhere with me.
The thing was, I still couldn’t get Danny out of my head. Then, one day, about two months after I arrived back in the UK, fate brought us back together. A couple of Lee’s friends from Sussex, who I’d met in Majorca a few times, had come up to London, shopping for the day, and I’d told them I’d take them to east London to meet my Nanny Daisy.
We were on the Roman Road, waiting to cross at a set of traffic lights, when a car slowed down to