Chanelle Hayes - Baring My Heart (9 page)

When the police left, they both came upstairs and, in a state of shock, Mum said, ‘Chanelle, the policewoman told us that you’re pregnant. We need to talk about this.’

‘I don’t want to. Leave me alone, please,’ I said, sobbing again. ‘When I’m ready, we’ll talk. But I need to deal with this my way.’

That night, I called Becca. ‘Mum and Dad know,’ I mumbled. ‘What am I going to do? I think I want to keep the baby but I can’t face talking to them.’

As calm as ever, she told me to get a bag of stuff together and she came to pick me up. As I left, Mum said, ‘We’re here whenever you need us. And whatever you decide to do, we will support you.’

I don’t know why I couldn’t discuss it with them and wish I had been together enough to sit down with them and go over it properly. But, as always, running away was the easier option, so I went to stay with Becca for two weeks.

During that time, with Spencer still AWOL, I decided that enough was enough and went round to his family home. Unfortunately, his dad answered the door and, giving me a look of disgust, said, ‘What are you doing here? You’ve tried to trap
my son into a lifetime of hell.’

He might as well have slapped me round the face. Too shocked to respond, I ran away from the house, tears rolling down my face. I was so confused. What had Spencer been telling them? That I had got pregnant on purpose? How could he do that?

Although I’d decided by now that I wanted to keep the baby, Spencer finally called me a few days later and what he said changed everything again.

‘Hi, Chanelle,’ he said brightly. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve reached a decision. I don’t care if you have this baby or not but, if you do, I’ll make sure everyone knows you’d be an unfit mother.’

I could not believe what I was hearing. As words refused to form in my mouth, he added, ‘I’ll say you can’t look after a child because you’re still a child yourself. The authorities take babies off young mums all the time. I’ll say that your family won’t be supportive and that your bedroom is too small. So if that’s what you want, go ahead and have the baby. But if not, I suggest you get yourself booked into Marie Stopes pretty quickly.’

He then hung up and I immediately wondered if I’d just dreamed the entire conversation. How could this man who’d said he’d never leave me say something so poisonous?

It was only then that I realised the magnitude of my situation and that I was on my own. The prospect of a termination now loomed larger than ever. My options had shrunk in the space of two minutes and all these questions once again began flooding my mind. Could I really be a single mum? What about my studies and dream of going to university? Where would I live when the baby was born? How would I provide for us both? Did I really want to bring a child into this world who didn’t have a dad?

As much as it pained me, it really did begin to feel like I had no choice at all. The idea sickened me but an abortion was my only way out of this mess. But could I go through with it?

I
was nine weeks pregnant when I booked myself in for the abortion and it was truly the single worst thing I have ever had to do. Becca drove me to the Marie Stopes clinic and tried to convince me I was doing the right thing.

‘You’re an ambitious girl and you’d ruin your career before it’s even started if you had a baby now,’ she said.

I looked out of the window. ‘Yes but do I really have the right to destroy a life because of that?’

‘Come on. What kind of life would it ever have, Chanelle? You’re just not ready for this.’

I couldn’t reply. My eyes were filling up and it took all my concentration not to dissolve right there in the car. When we got to the clinic, I could hardly walk up the steps. Inside, the atmosphere was like a morgue. There were a few other young women in the waiting room and I wondered if they felt as lost and ashamed as I did.

‘If it’s a tablet, I can probably face it,’ I whispered to Becca. ‘It won’t seem so much like I’m killing it. But if I have to be put to
sleep and have it ripped out of me with a vacuum cleaner, I can’t go through with it.’ She squeezed my hand tightly.

When the nurse called me in, she confirmed that I could have a series of tablets to bring on a miscarriage, which I was relieved about.

But first, I begged her to show me a scan of the baby. I was still so torn about my decision that I felt like I needed to see evidence of the life inside me. Although she was reluctant for me to see the scan, I persisted and she eventually agreed. And the image confronting me on the screen made it very real all of a sudden.

‘There’s its heartbeat,’ the nurse said. ‘There it is. Do you see it?’

I did and it was absolutely gutting.

‘I can’t go through with this!’ I wanted to scream. ‘It’s all just wrong!’

But I bit my tongue. Some part of me knew I had to keep calm, even though it was so hard not to lose the plot. Seeing such physical signs of the baby being alive and breathing was absolute torture.

The nurse sent me away that evening to have one last think about what I was going to do. Not surprisingly, I hardly slept a wink all night. The next morning, Becca picked me up again. ‘Are we still going ahead then?’ she asked me gently.

Wasn’t this Spencer’s job? He was the one who was meant to be holding my hand, guiding me through this agony.

‘Yes, my mind is made up,’ I said firmly.

Straight after I took the first tablet, Becca and I both burst into tears and clung to each other. I don’t know what I’d have done without her there.

A bit later, I went into the toilet and half-heartedly tried to stick my fingers down my throat to bring it back up but nothing happened.

I had to take a few more pills when I got home and, before long, the miscarriage started. I spent the whole of the next day doubled over in agony and bleeding heavily.

It was the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced, knowing that my baby was being expelled from my body. It seemed so brutal and I could hardly speak in the days that followed. Becca respected my wish not to talk about it and, eventually, I returned home and broke the news to Mum and Dad.

They hugged me for a long time and Mum said, ‘I would never have tried to influence you but I think you’ve made the right decision. It would have been different if Spencer had wanted the baby but I don’t know how you would have managed alone.’

She was right, of course, but I was inconsolable about what I’d done. I woke up every day thinking, ‘You’re a murderer,’ and genuinely hated myself. Worryingly, for the first time in a long while, I thought about killing myself again. Some days, when I was driving to work, I’d think, ‘I don’t deserve to be here. I might as well just drive off this bridge.’

Why not? It made sense to me – I’d killed someone. Was I really any better than my mother’s murderer? Looking back, I must have been suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress but I never saw that at the time. At my lowest, I even tried to get Spencer to come back to me. I was so shattered that it seemed like only he could fill the void that the abortion had left. I called him and said, ‘Can’t we put all of this behind us now and get back what we had before?’

I must have sounded so desperate and he didn’t want to know.

‘Stop calling me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see you or speak to you. Leave me alone.’

I also grew obsessed with how my tummy looked after the abortion. I was convinced that being pregnant, even for a short time, had left me with wobbly skin. It was nonsense, of course,
but I decided I had to get my stomach taut and rock-hard as a way of eradicating the evidence of what I’d done. So I started going to the gym for two hours every day, before college in the morning and then after my shift at the call centre if I was working. I’d run and run on the treadmill until I was exhausted and afterwards would go and sit in the sauna for ages to try and sweat more out of me.

Mum became so worried about my weight obsession that she hid the scales at home.

‘Why are you working out so much, Chanelle?’ she asked. ‘You don’t need to, you know. You look perfect as you are.’

She and Dad would make me eat big meals with them, so I started taking laxatives as well. The problem went beyond my weight too, as I also had my hair extensions taken out and got my hair cut really short. With my self-image in tatters, depriving myself of food was a way I could make myself feel better. On a good day, I could get away with eating just an apple and an orange and it became such an obsession that I stopped going out with my friends. Drinking would just fill me with unnecessary calories.

As well as going to the gym twice a day, I sometimes even went for a swim at the pool next to college during my lunch hour. Before long, my weight had dropped to 6st 12lbs, which was severely underweight for my height. I felt drained and exhausted all the time and, at work, I kept having to cancel calls that came in because I didn’t have the energy to answer them.

One day my friend Jamila – who’d gone with me to meet Victoria Beckham – sat me down for a chat. ‘Chanelle, what’s going on? You look awful. Your clothes are falling off you and you’re deathly pale. What’s this all about?’

‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I’ve just been working hard and dashing around so much that I’m not eating as much as before. But you
know me, I still love my McDonalds.’ That was blatantly untrue – I was stick-thin and hadn’t been near a burger in ages.

Things took a turn when I went to see my doctor and asked her to prescribe me some slimming pills. She frowned, took a knowing look at me and said, ‘How have you been feeling since the abortion?’

She had hit a raw nerve and the tears began to flow.

‘I feel terrible. I hate myself and all I can think about is that I’m fat. Please help me.’

She handed me a box of tissues and waited for me to stop crying.

‘OK,’ she said, moving her chair nearer to me. ‘Chanelle, I think you have depression,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go on any tablets for it at the moment because you could get addicted to them. But you certainly don’t need any slimming pills. You need to put on weight, if anything.’

I sat in silence, taking in what she was saying. Depression? Is that why I loathed myself so much? I guess it made sense.

‘I think what you need is some counselling, from someone who can really understand what you’ve been through.’

She gave me some leaflets to take away and I decided to start seeing an abortion specialist. Almost instantly, I started feeling better. It really did help to talk to someone neutral about it and to know I wasn’t alone. Unlike the patronising therapy I’d had a few years ago, this was more adult and I found I could open up easily. The counsellor I saw never judged me, and said, ‘You have nothing to feel guilty for. What you did was not wrong. You need to let go of these feelings to allow your body to heal mentally.’ It all made sense. ‘Stopping eating is probably a reaction to the trauma you’ve been through and a way of taking back control,’ she said. ‘But you don’t need to punish yourself in that way.’

Over time, I began to come to terms with it all. I started
eating properly again, stopped the crazy workouts and, gradually, felt the self-hatred melt away. At last, I felt I could get on with my life again. All this time, I hadn’t heard from Spencer but one day, about six months later, he called me up unexpectedly and said, ‘Chanelle, can we meet? It’s really important. I need to talk to you.’

‘How dare you call me?’ I said. ‘You have no right to get in touch after what you did to me. I have nothing to say to you.’

‘Please, just give me ten minutes to explain some stuff to you,’ he persevered. ‘Then you never need see me again.’

In the end, I agreed to meet for a brief talk. I didn’t want to open up old wounds but I suppose I was also curious. I’d never got any answers about why he behaved like he did, so this could be the final piece in my closure.

We went for a drive and, after a few awkward minutes, I pulled over the car.

‘Do you realise how much you hurt me?’ I started off. ‘Don’t think anything you can say will ever take that away. Because it won’t. The way you abandoned me was despicable, Spencer.’

Right then, he put his head in his hands and cried. I’d never seen him do this, so it was quite a shock.

Through his tears, he said, ‘I’m so, so sorry. I can hardly live with myself for what I did to you. I hate myself for it. Can you ever forgive me?’

I felt surprisingly calm. It was all done and dusted as far as I was concerned and I didn’t want him back in my life.

‘Spencer, you broke my heart into a million pieces but I’ve dealt with it now. It’s in the past.’

I’d got the apology I’d wanted at long last, so I couldn’t feel angry any more. After having his baby growing inside me for several weeks, I suppose there was a weird bond underneath all the pain.

He looked into my eyes and said, ‘So is there no chance we could ever get back together?’

‘I’ve moved on, Spencer, it’s too late,’ I said.‘I’ve had to change as a person since what happened. I can’t go back now.’

‘Please, Chanelle. I know we can get back on track,’ he begged. ‘Remember how good we were together.’

‘Spencer, if I’m honest with you, a part of me will always hate you for what you did. So I can’t love you again.’

He nodded sadly and that was that. Who knows, it could have been so different. I occasionally find myself thinking about what we might have had together if he’d been man enough just to admit he had been terrified. But it wasn’t to be. He texted me on New Year’s Day that year because that’s when our baby would have been due. ‘Thinking of you today,’ he wrote. It was too late for all of that though.

A few months later, shortly before my
Big Brother
experience began, he got back in touch again. ‘Look, I’m really sorry, please can you forgive me?’ he said, yet again.

‘I can’t, Spencer. I’m willing to try and look past it and be friends. But I’d never trust you again. I can’t picture a future with you.’

But when the calls kept coming, I stopped answering them and told Mum to say I was out if he dropped by. Part of me wanted to try to look past all that hurt but I’d put up a wall that I couldn’t knock down.

The next time my path crossed with Spencer’s, it was over a ridiculous story he sold about me while I was in
Big Brother
. I’ll tell you about that incident later but, in the meantime, there was the small matter of me actually getting into TV’s most famous madhouse.