by Chris Harris
Julie Stevens once had Lewes at her feet. Now, her greatest pleasure is causing chaos outside her daughter’s school, where every angry motorist feeds her insatiable appetite for attention. But when love unexpectedly enters her life, one final act of vanity sets in motion a tragedy nobody could have imagined.
In her heyday, Julie Stevens was one of Lewes’s hip girls. For two decades she was one of the highly polished girl all the girls wanted to be and hated in equal measure, and the girl all the boys wanted to be with. This was perfect for Julie Stevens because she was an abject narcissist. For Julie, there was only one place better than heaven and that was the place reserved for the human gaze.
As such, she lapped it up and squeezed every granule of attention her looks would garner until the last moment, when she conceived Penelope at 38. Swanning around the Lewes town centre, the coffee shops and pubs of the idyllic town, attracting looks of admiration and jealousy would have to be paused for a while. Being seen with a baby, toddler and young girl was not a respectful look.
The father was a highly successful businessman, lured by her looks and reputation. She managed to maintain a humble, charming aura for the couple of months it took to get pregnant. Reece Sharmer was delighted, and so was Julie, who could sacrifice her dowdy flat for Reece’s large Edwardian six-bedroom house on an exclusive road in the town. The loss of attention was very much negated by the comforts of her new lifestyle.
But it was never enough. Reece soon tired of the demands for holidays, new alterations in the house, new 4x4s and, of course, as the looks began to fade in her eyes, beautifully mature in others, she took to the surgeon’s knife. Reece was king of his surroundings at work, but at home, he felt inadequate. He moved out. Julie had kept her flat and he moved in. It was simpler that way. He’d always wanted all the trappings of wealth, but hadn’t thought much about bringing a human being into the mix, and he preferred the simplicity of the flat to the trappings of wealth if it meant not being with Julie.
He kept putting off the aggro of the divorce; his business was all-encompassing, and he had little Penelope every other weekend, the joy of his life, whom he didn’t want to root out of her home. Hearing about the string of boyfriends living the luxury life he paid for annoyed him, but he reasoned, again, it was better than being with Julie. It was complicated.
Julie soon tired of the boyfriends who she felt undervalued her; if there was not full-time praise, they were not appreciating her enough. But soon she swapped them when a new ruse and a return to form appeared.
Penelope attended Southover Church of England Primary School, just behind Anne of Cleves House. She would boss the yummy mummies out of the way in her huge black Range Rover in the school car park. She loved the power, but it was only a small hit, gone in minutes, until the day she was late.
Between 8.30 and 8.45 in the morning, Southover High Street in Lewes is a very busy place. If you know Lewes, you know the centre is very compact, and therefore navigating the roads early in the morning is very difficult. Especially when Julie Stevens had taken the view that she could just park on double yellow lines for the benefit of her own convenience.
Running late one day, she decided to park on the High Street, dangerous, but it saved minutes as it was really close to main school building. It caused enormous inconvenience to rush-hour traffic; people beeped their horns at her, shouted at her to move her vehicle, and called her a disgrace, an appalling mother; the road was so dangerous.
She loved it; she loved the attention. She didn’t care if it was aggressive and negative; it was attention, and she thrived on it. After all, some attention was better than none. It felt like a return to form.
She began dressing up for the school drop off, parading herself in all her yummy mummy glory, taking the abuse, the thrill, the adrenaline. But after a couple of weeks the headmaster Derek Capul hauled her in, seemingly, for the rollocking she was expecting.
Derek was another divorcee, and the meeting was a culmination of an over thirty-year infatuation with Julie Stevens. They had both attended the Priory School in the town, way out of his league; but like everyone else, he fancied her something chronic. Life is a great leveller and he had grown into quite a striking figure. The complaints he had received from residents tired of the beeping horns and shouting 8.45 pm every school day gave him the perfect excuse to bring her in. Yes, he understood why she parked there; he would ignore the complaints and, by the way, “Would she like to go out on a date?”
To her surprise, a perfunctory date meant to win the headmaster over and stretch her ritual further into the summer term went really well, and soon they were lovers.
In the mornings, he would look at her in awe as she read out the opprobrium and praise she’d received on the town’s Facebook group. She accused the motorists of misogyny and abuse. The town was split, or rather the usual numpties on the group, between support and condemnation. Either way, she didn’t care, each carried equal weight with Julie because all the posts were talking about her.
Reece had begun noticing a change in his daughter. The vanity and the precociousness that had rubbed off on her from her mother were thankfully deserting her. But with that, some of her fun and loving personality seemed to drift away. He began to miss her young, showy swagger. Over the summer, he had his traditional week away with her in the Lake District, and it was there it unravelled. Away from the mother, she opened up, it became apparent that she was struggling with the daily school drop-off fiascos.
“What’s up poppit?”, he asked her one afternoon when they were sitting by Windermere having an ice cream.
“ I don’t want to go back, Daddy.”
Oh, why’s that? What’s wrong?” He was fully alert; Penelope and her mother were always so close, so he couldn’t believe she was breaking rank. It was a development he was delighted with, having been very minimised in the small family dynamics since he walked out on them.
“Mummy’s making everything so difficult.”
“What do you mean making everything so difficult?”
“It’s not nice being there anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, because Mummy’s started fighting with everyone about dropping me off, it’s all gone over the social media, and now everyone hates me.”
“But what about the headmaster? Have you said anything to him?”
“Well, he’s her boyfriend now. Anyway, everyone at school hates me because of her”
I wonder what she gets out of it, Reece reflected.
On their return, Reece filed for divorce and sought custody of Penelope. He cited his daughter’s expressed wish to live with him, the harm the revolving door of boyfriends at the family home was causing his daughter, and Julie’s increasingly outrageous behaviour outside the school. His wife’s narcissism was an awful trait, one in which he was allowed to abandon ship over, with no emotional repercussions, or so he thought, but it had gone too far and his daughter was suffering. In particular, the merry-go-round of lovers jarred; now he realised the mothering part of their arrangement had critically failed, it was time to address the problem rather than pay for the privilege of avoiding her.
Meanwhile, Julie and Derek had enjoyed the summer of their lives. While her husband was in the Lake District, they had escaped on a Mediterranean cruise. For Julie, it was bliss. A whole week surrounded by the adoring servant like Derek and middle-aged and elderly men ogling her as she lay beside the swimming pool, for ten hours a day in her skimpy bikini; it was everything she could have wished for.
But something rather peculiar had happened during those six weeks. Julie had, for the first time in her life, genuinely fallen in love with someone other than herself. His intelligence and his ability to understand her as well as worship her meant she loved being with him, his subservience helped, of course, but no, she found herself thinking and missing him when they were not together. He reasoned patience with her when Penelope, even though only seven years old, began to show teenage dissent.
The drop-off was becoming contentious within her small circle; Derek would bow, scrape and generally butter her up before landing the epitaph of a moralising conundrum, the denouement always linked in some way to her nuisance parking; Penelope, more forthright, hinting that if the shenanigans did not end, she’d move in with her father.
Apart from that it had been a perfect summer, but perfect summer holidays had to end, and as Julie began to suffer a slight bout of the blues, Derek was determined to make the first day back at school one that she would never forget.
Julie had promised them both that the nonsense would stop. She had meant it, too. But as she approached the familiar stretch of double yellow lines, she felt that old, delicious excitement returning. One last time, she told herself. Just one last time.
It was wonderful to feel that familiar rush again. The attention. The adrenaline. The sheer exhilaration of knowing she was the centre of everybody’s world, even if only for a few minutes.
‘Mum, Mum, Mum! Can we please stop doing this?’ Penelope screamed.
Julie could scarcely believe her ears. Penelope had never protested so vehemently before. How dare the girl, after all Julie had done for her, sacrificed, and now complain about what used to be the highlight of her mother’s day?
She turned on her daughter and furiously admonished her for daring to disagree.
But Penelope had had enough. She grabbed a handful of her mother’s hair.
“You promised you wouldn’t do this again, I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
“How dare you speak to me like that, just wait until I get my hands on you, missus!”
Without even a glance in her wing mirror, Julie flung open the driver’s door and leapt out of the 4×4, then dived through the passenger door to root her daughter out of the car.
Fair enough, the Parcelforce van driver was probably travelling a little too fast. But the subsequent investigation found no evidence he had exceeded the speed limit.
The CCTV footage showed precisely what had happened. Julie had jumped out of her vehicle without looking. The van driver had swerved violently to avoid her, mounted the pavement and struck a cyclist.
The cyclist was Derek, who died at the scene.
At the subsequent inquest, the coroner remarked upon the particularly tragic circumstances surrounding his death. Earlier that morning, the headmaster had collected an engagement ring from a local jeweller, who had made special arrangements to open early for him. He had intended to propose to Julie that very evening.
Colleagues testified that he had been an extraordinarily punctual man. Indeed, nobody could recall him ever having been late for school. Yet that morning, delayed by the jeweller, he had found himself running several minutes behind schedule. Had he been on time, he would never have encountered the Parcelforce van.
The coroner did not hold back in his demolition of Julie: “a twisted and dangerous game of cat and mouse had reached an almost inevitable conclusion, one of which has devastated you and you must reflect and learn from.”
The next day, in the aftermath, Reece took his daughter to school, an arrangement that would become permanent when a broken Julie capitulated to the divorce and returned to the dowdy little flat.
The motorists of Lewes gradually became accustomed to a rather pitiful sight. Each morning, at precisely the spot where Julie had once abandoned her enormous 4×4 with such gay abandon, a solitary woman sat on a little folding fishing stool. She would remain there for half an hour staring vacantly into the distance. Practically all motorists knew the story and loathed the woman, but what a tragedy; they would simply stare ahead towards the King’s Head pub on the roundabout and desperately fight the urge to think she got what she deserved.
