OASIS?

by Vandemonium1

Dear Van1andCTCstories bloggers. It’s time to sing for your supper. Ok, pretty please. CTC has only had time to have a perfunctory look at this story. Any mistakes you spot or suggestions for making it better, don’t be shy, let rip. It been independently rated at 3.5/5 pickaxe handles.

There is little sex in it.

I’ve always wanted to write a story backwards. This is my attempt. Let me know how I went.

V1

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Susan Smith, Susie to her friends, picked up her bag of purchases from the passenger side of the car, shut the door, and headed to go inside through the internal door in the garage to the house. Just as she reached it she looked back, in thought.

After two years of shit decisions, you finally made a good one, girl.

The decision in question had been to take the Porsche 911 to the shops to get her supplies today. That was the next decision she’d made after deciding to drive herself rather than getting Jeeves to chauffeur her as usual. Jeeves had been quite obviously peeved at her decision. His suck-lemon face being a dead giveaway. He considered the collection of cars, consisting of the Bentley, Mercedes, Porsche, Range Rover, and vintage Mustang, as his private property, which he occasionally allowed other people to ride around in the back of. Susie knew he was hovering somewhere, ready to leap out with polishing cloth and vacuum cleaner as soon as she was out of sight.

Susie’s heart was still racing a little from her drive. After driving quite responsibly into town, she’d made her purchases and then headed in the direction of home at the same sedate pace, the Porsche like a stallion being reined in, before an urge became too strong to resist. Taking a right, then another right, she’d headed all the way across town to the neighbourhood she’d grown up in. The one on the ‘other side’ of the railway tracks.

What a buzz that had been. Driving down streets in a car worth more than the houses she was passing. Wearing a designer outfit that probably cost more than the entire wardrobe of the women pushing prams along the sidewalk. She’d escaped. By hard work and determination, she’d improved her situation to the point that she could sneer at her old neighbours.

She later accepted it was a mistake to drive down her old street but at the time her hands on the steering wheel seemed to be on autopilot. She’d smiled with fond memories when she’d had to stop while the game of street cricket being played on the road by some scruffy ten-year-olds was temporarily disbanded so she could pass. That meant she was going quite slowly when she passed her childhood house. She glanced briefly at it before feeling the overwhelming urge to get home as quickly as she could. Stopping only to make some more purchases, she headed back to the mansion. Once past the city limit, she opened the powerful engine up as quickly as she dared and relied on the car’s legendary road handling to arrive home alive.

Susie made a brief diversion into the servants wing of the house to tell Jenny, their cook, ‘No,’ Susan corrected herself, ‘My cook,’  what she wanted for dinner, before heading to the formal side of the mansion. Walking past the library, pretty much sealed since her husband had died, she went into her favourite sitting room. It was the smallest of them, the others being too big for her when she felt lonesome as she did tonight.

She took her latest purchases to the bar at the end of the room and removed the bottles from their brown paper bags, tequila and Cointreau, and proceeded to make herself a very large margarita. Noticing there was no ice in the fridge, Susan was about to ring for the butler to bring her some, before she remembered it was his day off. She decided she’d do without and carried her drink to an overstuffed couch and did what she’d done for the last two nights. Sat there and wondered what to do.

Three days ago, she’d sat in this very spot and given her last two friends their marching orders. They’d been the last of her old friends, the last two that hadn’t abandoned her. Susan had been perfectly sober at the time while her friends were drunk on her expensive champagne, after going out to the most expensive restaurant in town, on her coin. Susan had had a sudden revelation. These weren’t really friends. Not true friends. They’d been mere acquaintances in her old life and had only been promoted to friend status when the others slowly or otherwise drifted off. Susan now realised they were users, only hanging around for the things she could provide them with.

After those revelations, Susan acted decisively and they were unfriended. They’d said some pretty hurtful things on the way out, reinforcing to Susan that they’d been pretending friendship and that she’d made the right decision in ousting them.

That didn’t stop her being incredibly lonely the rest of that night and the following one. Susan had never been one for self-doubt and philosophy, but she now realised the one thing her millions would never buy her was a friend.

With the margarita empty, Susan poured another one. Less lemon soda in this one, she had a figure to maintain after all. It would maybe take three of them to blot out her error of judgement of the previous night.

Resolved not to spend another night alone, she’d put on her fines and hit a couple of bars near the centre of town, and in the words of her old vernacular, ‘tied one on’. It was no great surprise when she’d been awoken by her bed-mate trying to sneak out of her bedroom the next morning but tripping over something. He looked to be less than half her forty-five years and mustn’t have liked what he’d woken next to. Certainly not enough not to try for a morning delight with her. She’d drifted off to sleep and so never knew whether he’d emptied her purse of all notes before or after he woke her.

The sudden realisation that she’d never really be sure if a guy was interested in her out of love or just after her for the money and lifestyle, triggered the deepest loneliness in Susan she’d ever felt. ‘Hah, love’, thought Susan, ‘Who could ever love you? Those days are gone.’

Those words were spoken to her reflection in the mirror when she’d finally roused herself from her hangover. A mirror she was finding it increasingly more difficult to look in.

The looks all the household staff gave her that day told her that not only did they not approve of her wanton behaviour of the previous night, but they thought it too soon after their master’s death for her to be soiling his memory.

Memory of these thoughts forced any effects Susan was feeling from the two margaritas out of her head. She looked around the room and decided that things her two former remoras had said during their eviction had spoiled this room for her as well. Pouring a third, she went in search of a new room to call hers. The problem was that just about every part of the mansion held one bad memory or another. She felt uncomfortable in the whole wing that contained the library. That was her late husband’s domain and still smelled of him and his beloved pipe, over the smells of old leather and paper. She’d grown to hate him over the time of their marriage and would now always associate the smell of pipe tobacco with him. Internally she’d been immensely relieved at his death the previous week.

That left the east wing of the house, the servants having made it clear with their body language, if nothing else, that her presence in their wing wasn’t really very welcome. The east wing was the bedroom and relaxing part of the house. Susan hadn’t been into the master bedroom since Winthorpe had died. It held very unpleasant memories for her, being the first place they’d ever had sex. Well, intercourse that is.

Susan wandered from room to room.

‘Not this one, that’s where Winthorpe and his daughters planned the wedding,’ thought Susan. The girls being excited by the responsibility and the unlimited budget, if not by their prospective stepmother.

‘Not this formal dining room, that’s where I realised Winthorpe’s friends would always look down on me because of my accent and the fact my father wasn’t rich and couldn’t trace his ancestry back two hundred years.

‘And certainly not this lounge,’ thought Susan, ‘That’s the couch he once bent me over and fucked me with his pathetic penis, thinking he was a mighty cock warrior, who magnetically attracted a bride thirty years his junior.’

The memory of him pawing her whenever and wherever he liked, made Susan ill.

‘Ok. So, I was a trophy wife. After struggling all my life, wasn’t I entitled? Sure, I didn’t think it would come at such a price, but what is done is fucking done.’

Susan retreated to her former sanctuary because her third mind deadener was empty. She re-filled it and re-commenced her search for a new haven.

‘Not this one. This is where Winthorpe’s son and two daughters sat me down three nights ago to let me know they’d been disgusted with my behaviour and attitude at their father’s wake the day before. Up until then they’d thought I had some love for their father but after the wake they realised I was a deceptive money grabber that just viewed their father as a sugar daddy and was now happy he was gone.’

‘I certainly am,’ thought Susan, ‘No more gagging when I couldn’t avoid spreading my legs for him. No more feeling like puking when I had to suck his pathetic cock or pretending pleasure when he stuck his lubed four inches up my ass. Probably shouldn’t have gotten drunk at the wake and laughed so much, though.’ The caterers had been paid till midnight, but the place was empty by seven.

Winthorpe’s children made it plain that they wouldn’t contest their father’s will, they were all very wealthy in their own rights, but they wouldn’t be darkening her doorway again. That suited Susan, she had trouble meeting their gazes anyway.

Not that she couldn’t afford to give them half of what Winthorpe left her and still live in luxury for the rest of her life. She might have to let half of the staff go if she lived over a hundred, though. No, money was the very least of Susan’s worries.

Susan’s feet, on autopilot, took her back to the only room that didn’t contain conscious wrenching, painful or negative memories. Digging through her Prada handbag she unearthed her one link to her past life; her address book. It was battered and florally, as befitted the purchase by her sixteen-year-old self, all those years ago. Flipping through it was like an animated history of her life. Three or four friends from high school who’d sworn to be friends for life, but quickly disappearing, never to look backward, when they found an escape route out of the ghetto.

One name, in the Cs, gave her pause for thought. Claire Gourlay. She’d really stuck out at their school. She was the daughter of the town’s biggest employer and had returned home from an exclusive boarding school in a little shame, if you believed the rumours. Abortion complete, daddy chose to keep her on a shorter rein and enrolled her in the local school.

Susan had befriended her, rather than give her shit like the other girls, and it had paid off. She’d spent the equivalent of weeks at Claire’s house, wearing Claire’s old but better than her own, clothes, dining with real silverware, and hobnobbing with Claire’s posh friends. When Claire left for university a year later, she pretty much cut ties with Susan. If it wasn’t for an article in the local paper’s social section, noting Claire’s marriage to an aging multi-millionaire, Susan would have no idea where she’d ended up.

Susan never forgot that glimpse into the life of luxury and would envy it strongly until she met Winthorpe and made it a reality.

Susan continued working her way through the old address book.

There was one of the bitches she’d sent packing this week. The bitch had had the cheek to ask Susan to pay out her and her loser husband’s mortgage, thus cementing in her mind that she wasn’t a friend, just a fucking gold-digger.

Susan made it all the way to the Hs before the latest attack on her mood occurred. Helen Botham. Best friend since Susan had started work at the factory and the older woman had taken her under her wing. Loyal, caring, amiable, Helen. Really? She’d been very rude and abrupt when Susan rang her and invited her to be matron of honour at her wedding to Winthorpe. No amount of talking about the $15,000 dress Susan was thinking of getting commissioned for each of the bridal party would dissuade her oldest friend breaking off the friendship and inviting Susan to rot in hell. ‘Bitch.’

One by one came the rollcall of depression, as name and address of former good friends appeared. All had either sent emissaries to unfriend Susan or done it in person. ‘All bitches,’ thought Susan. 

The last name Susan had written in the book was on the page marked P; Portia. She was an old friend of Winthorpe and his late wife; Susan had met them, along with many other friends of her new fiancé, last year at her engagement party. They’d seemed friendly enough and happy their friend had met someone he loved. That was until Winthorpe had a little too much to drink and regaled everyone with the story of how he’d won Susan. A new coldness and distance marked all conversations Susan participated in after that. None of her old friends were at the party, for one reason or another, but the chief of which was Susan just didn’t think the roughnecks would fit in with her new circumstances. Their rough and ribald ways would only reflect badly on her.

All Winthorpe’s old female friends gave Susan their numbers sometime that night but none of them ever rang Susan or visited much after that.

‘Bitches’, thought Susan, ‘What would you have thought of good old Windy if you knew he died with a big dildo up my arse while I was pushed over the back of a couch squealing?’ Susan had compliantly bent over the couch when her husband lifted her skirt and pulled her knickers down. She’d silently sighed as he worked lube into her sphincter, he’d insisted on anal quite a few times lately, but honestly, his cock was so small that it didn’t bother Susan that much. Her attitude certainly changed when something cold and feeling about the size of a baseball bat was forced up into her bowels. The excitement must have been too much for him as his heart had failed just as he came, he must have been rubbing himself with his other hand. ‘If it wasn’t for me cleaning him up, the paramedics would have a tale to tell, I can tell you.’ Susan couldn’t admit to herself that the real reason for the clean-up was to protect her reputation, not her husband’s.

Susan skipped to the end of the address book, the alcohol shielding her ego from the full weight of a truth her subconscious knew full well. She had no friends. Furthermore, she’d never know if someone in the future befriended her for genuine reasons or just for her money. A glimpse of an achingly lonely life surrounded by riches teased at the edge of her mind.

This spurred Susan to refill her glass. All the lemon squash was gone but that wasn’t a problem for her. Her search for a friend became a little more frenetic.

One name from the hurled address book screamed into her mind and gave her a purpose. Not only could they rekindle their friendship but maybe Claire could tell Susan the secret of how to get some real friends and maybe a genuine romantic partner or two.

It took her all of ten minutes to match Claire’s new surname to an address three states away, and a phone number that was answered by a snooty sounding butler. Luckily, the answer to the question, ‘I shall enquire if the Mistress is at home at the moment’, was yes, and soon Susan was chatting to someone she hadn’t seen in almost thirty years.  

The upshot was, there was no secret. Since her husband had died, Claire had been very lonely and threw herself into charity work to give her life meaning. Not that she missed her husband that much; she’d accepted she was a trophy wife; to be trotted out when required, then put away like his best golf clubs. She drifted away from her former friends and the only ones of her husband’s friends who visited after his death were obviously looking to bed her. Because they’d packed their two children off to exclusive boarding schools at eight years of age, they were both distant from her. She hoped that would change when they had children of their own.

Claire thanked Susan for reaching out and was very interested in catching up in person. Susan didn’t commit to a date; the conversation with her former friend had really, really depressed her. She quickly drained her glass. Standing to get a refill, she almost collapsed; her balance was shot to pieces. She wisely decided enough was enough and lock-stitched her way to the room she was sleeping in. It was the smallest bedroom in the house but still huge by any standard. She’d chosen it because Winthorpe had never fucked her in it.

Half-way through getting undressed, the tequila and Cointreau she’d imbibed made a break for freedom and Susan spent the next ten minutes on her knees worshipping the great porcelain god. When she felt it safe, she rose from her knees and rinsed her mouth of the foul, biting taste. Looking up from the sink, she came face to face with her reflection, clad only in panties. Reflexively, she lifted each D sized breast one at a time to see if the scars had disappeared yet. This triggered the memory it always did. The main memory that ended in her going to bed drunk every night for a long time.

Her ex-husband, Dave, bought her these beauties. She’d nagged and nagged him for three years to support her request. He resisted, citing the need to put all their spare cash into helping their children get educated as well as their class of people could, without crippling student loans at the commencement of their working lives after graduation. He was absolutely devoted to raising children that had a chance of breaking out from the social circumstances he’d never been able to. But Susan was insistent and finally after six months of no sex, her husband agreed to do even more than the twenty hours of overtime he was already doing every week.

Susan found a surgeon that would do the job on a payment plan and within months her B’s had become D’s. Within months of that, Susan was swooning over the extra attention she was getting when she went out with her friends. She never went out with her husband anymore. He was either working overtime or too tired from it.

Within another month she’d bumped into Winthorpe at a nightclub where he and some friends were slumming it. The sight of his Rolex and diamond cufflinks, as well as his finely manicured hands and refined accent really grabbed Susan’s attention. Her skilfully presented cleavage grabbed his. 

He plied her with enough expensive champagne that she found herself in his Bentley, in the parking lot, swallowing first his cock and then his load. Winthorpe was greatly impressed; the women he was used to frowned at performing fellatio and never, ever swallowed. From that night on they met at least three times a week, at the mansion, without Dave ever finding out.

At these meetings, Winthorpe got to try just about everything he’d ever seen in porn movies. Susan got to experience humiliation. This ranged all the way from, pretending to enjoy it while he unsuccessfully tried to titty fuck her lubed cleavage, to looking up at his face smiling down at her as he dropped yet another load of his stinky semen on her face. Facials was another thing Windy had a penchant for. The memory almost made Susan vomit all over again.

Winthorpe must have remained impressed because he offered to let Susan move into his house and when Susan insisted on the security of marriage, he agreed.

Dave was promptly ambushed with expensive lawyers and divorce papers left on the kitchen table, found after a sixteen-hour shift at the factory. To speed his decision to sign unopposed, Susan laid out her months of adultery in a brief handwritten note. She handed everything to her husband free and clear, except her personal belonging, all removed by the time he read the note. This included their eighteen-year-old car and their rented house.

Susan had wanted to pay off the surgical loan but couldn’t see a way that wouldn’t alert her new fiancé, and subsequent husband to the fact that she’d attracted him with silicon. A fact he never seemed to realise.

Her four children met with her at the mansion the day after their father was ambushed. They’d all refused the new cars Susan was offering, paying off any remaining loans they had or upgrading the younger two to better universities. After confirming their father’s story, they’d simply walked away without a backward glance. Ever since that day they’d refused her phone calls. None of them attended her wedding or Winthorpe’s funeral. In fact, Susan hadn’t heard any of their or her grandchildren’s voices since that point and as that day was over two years ago, her hopes weren’t high of ever hearing them.

Her offer, through a third party, to buy Dave a house of his own, had been returned with the polite words, ‘no, thank you’, written across it in her ex-husband’s distinctive script.

She’d only seen her latest granddaughter once, and that had been today. When she’d made the mistake of driving the Porsche down memory lane on the way back from the drugstore. She’d lorded it right down the street she used to share a house with Dave and glanced at her old address. And wished she hadn’t.

There was Dave, looking as ruggedly handsome and fit as he always had. He was sitting on his old chair out on the porch, next to an unfamiliar woman who looked to be about his age, bouncing a little girl on his knee as he gave her one of his famous horsey rides. The girl was obviously squealing in delight. Any doubts who the girl was were dispelled by the sight of Susan’s eldest daughter sitting nearby, looking fondly at her dad and smiling, while she held a video camera. The strange woman put her face on Dave’s shoulder for the camera. He turned his face and kissed the side of hers.

It suddenly struck Susan how wrong she’d been. Here she was driving a six-figure car, in a four-figure dress. Living in a house big enough to be a school, with enough money in the bank to live out her life in luxury, touring the world, staying at the best hotels everywhere and being spoiled rotten.

There her ex-husband was, probably still working fifty-hour weeks to meet the rent and utility bills, putting any spare cash he had into either a retirement account or paying off the kid’s loans. Sitting on his veranda with his lover and one of his loving children, having a ball and creating beautiful memories. Becoming immortal in the digital world.

While she was relegated to a backwater of history. Cursed by her children and unknown to the generation after that. Dead to them already.

She suddenly knew what happiness was. Dave had it in spades. She had nothing. And it was all her own greedy fault. She’d once stood on that side of the fence looking at this side and thinking how much an oasis it was. Now she stood amongst the blackened rubble this side, gazing in envy at the verdant scene over that fence, and felt sick.

Here was the reason for her stopping at the liquor store and buying enough alcohol to stun a bull rhino. Then drinking herself into a state of non-thinking, another task in which she failed.

Susan Cathcart, nee Brown straightened up and went looking for the sleeping pills she’d bought at the drugstore; the ones the pharmacist had warned her never to take more than two of. Tempting to rebel but Susan knew that she was too much of a coward. As usual she’d take the easy path. She be miserable. She’d be lonely. One of the bitches had said there was a price to pay for her choices. Silly me, I thought that was having to have sex with Winthorpe.

Now Susan knew it was a life without love.

Here endeth the lesson.

Now lighten the fuck up.