Fierce by Kelly Osbourne Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t go, Mummy and Dadda.”’

    W HEN my father used to go away on his own, we had a rotation list for my mum’s bed. This is how it went: my mum would sleep on the right-hand side, one of us would be in the middle, one on the left and another would lie at the bottom. Actually, it was only me and Jack who swapped, Aimee would always be next to Mum.
    On some trips, Mum and Dad would have to leave really early in the morning. They didn’t like to wake us because it was too early. Also, it would have made us even more upset. So Mum devised this little way of letting us know how much we were loved and that she was thinking about us too. It must have been really hard for her to leave behind her babies. Mum would go around the house and write on everything in one of her red lipsticks. I would lift up the toilet seat in the bathroom and there would be a message written underneath the lid saying: ‘I love you, Kelly.’ Or she would write on the wall behind my bed: ‘Love you. Love, Mummy.’
    They would be all over the place: on the walls, on the fridge door, in the bathroom. She still does it today. It’s her thing. Jack still has one of those messages. She wrote it when we were living in Welders. It’s in red lipstick on the wall above his bed.
    As soon as I woke up on the morning Mum and Dad had left the house, I would race down to their bedroom. I’d hunt around for one of Mum’s nighties and I would scrunch it to my face and breathe inher perfume. I loved the fact it reminded me of my mum and it was a tremendous comfort. I would sleep with it under my pillow until the day they returned and then I would put it back in her drawer until next time.
    During the time they were away, my life would be ruled by the stupid tour books that every band’s management company has made up. They basically have the dates for each venue followed by the names and numbers of all the hotels Mum and Dad would be staying at in each city. Then there would be a page of names and numbers of every single person involved in the tour. I would go to my mum’s office and find the tour book and keep it opened on the calendar page. After my dad had performed at each venue, I’d do a bright red tick across it and count down the days.
    When Mum went on tour with my dad she was incredibly torn at times. There had been a period when I was about six that we moved to America for a few months and had actually gone to school there. It had been so my mum could keep us all together. We soon moved back to the UK. But moving out there permanently was obviously something that my mum was thinking about.
    In 1996, my mum came up with an idea for a festival called Ozzfest. It was a massive tour around America of heavy metal and hard rock bands. Some of them were already established and others were up and coming. It was really successful and Dad was the headline act with his band. Because it was an American festival, it meant my mum had to go there more often for meetings and to set things up.
    In the summer after I’d turned thirteen there was a school trip to Wales. Aimee had also joined the school at this point. In the past, we had not always been able to go on the school trips because we would sometimes be away with Dad. But we wanted to be with our friends, so we signed up for the three-day visit.
    When we got to the hostel, we soon realised that the food was going to be shit. Aimee and I are really fussy eaters. We don’t like fancy food. On the menu it was all kidney and haggis and pretty crazy shit. Well, it was to us. It wasn’t that I was so much bothered about the taste. I just didn’t like the idea of eating some poor fucking animal’s kidneys.
    Aimee and I hardly ate a thing for three fucking days and we were absolutely starving. The packed lunch that my mum had done for us both to eat on the way, we’d made last during the trip. We’d rationed it to keep us going. On the coach on the way back our stomachs were rumbling. When we stopped at a