CLEANER - Part One

WARNING: I will soon be releasing a new and improved version of this story that will be extended and polished. Read on by all means but you may want to wait and get the full experience.



Cleaner 


In which a retired model takes precarious and drastic steps to experience a more... ordinary life.

Once I had eaten the breakfast my cook had made for me, spent an hour or two picking out the clothes I wanted to wear for the day and lounged by the pool for a while, I caught myself looking at my reflection in the wall high mirror in my dressing room. And yawned. Not because I was tired.

I was very beautiful you see. Actually I was gorgeous. Many men had told me so. But this (though very flattering at first of course) was starting to become very boring. I was beginning to realize that the ivory box I had built up around myself kept me in as much as it kept other people out.

What I decided I needed was a return to something a bit more real. There were thousands of real lives out there in the world that I could have lived.

One morning I was scanning through the satellite channels looking for anything to amuse me and I found myself more absorbed in what my cleaner was doing. I started to watch her all the time.

Melissa wasn't that much older than me but she was my opposite in almost every other way. Whereas I had long slim beautiful legs, hers were fat and stocky as much as the rest of her body. My small but elegant breasts were dwarfed by the huge ones that hung from her chest. She wore thick glasses when I could see perfectly. As for her hair, it was a bob with a long fringe, while my luxurious blond hair was forever dropping seductively (and in a way I found utterly irritating) over one eye.

She'd be down on her knees, swabbing, or dusting around me, or Hoovering the floor. She felt uncomfortable doing these things with me watching but I liked to, and I was the boss. It made me feel funny to imagine someone doing something like that for a living. It was so simple.

I lay, imagining what it would be like having such a simple purpose in life - something to occupy my time so completely. It made me want the same thing, curiously. I wanted to live with such purity.

Of course I could have fired her and done my own cleaning, but there would have been no necessity. I didn't want to just do it. I wanted some kind of transformation to occur. I wanted to have to do it.

So one day I went up to her and I stood there, long legs smooth and slim in high heels filling her field of view as she scrubbed, and I asked if she wanted to trade places with me. For the day.

She thought I was joking. As I continued to insist she thought I was crazy. I could see the fear in her eyes that I was setting her up for some kind of practical joke. I reassured her and offered her money to go along with it.

In the end she agreed.

We went up to my dressing room, huge, plush, warm and furry. I knew it was probably bigger than her whole house. I told her to go into the wardrobe, the massive, corridor long wardrobe, and choose anything she could fit into to wear.

She chose a silk, slinky trouser outfit held up by elastic that left her arms bare. It barely fit but made her look almost good. I helped her with her hair and make-up, showing her how to do it.

Then I turned my attention to her clothes.

I disrobed and climbed into them: the shapeless dress that looked sack-like on my slim body, the clunky shoes. I brushed my hair out straight and then I slipped her pebble glasses on, going instantly blind.

It felt so good to undergo this transformation - to become her.

We stood there gawking at each other and then I demanded that she take my place and I hers - that she call me Melissa.

And for the rest of the day, I scurried round doing the cleaning while she watched television and swam in the pool.

She was greatly bemused by the whole thing but I paid her a whole lot of money to keep it to herself. We even hid our escapades from the other servants…

*  *  *

For the following weeks this is how it went.

Whenever she came we switched places, her languishing while I worked. Spending so long as Melissa was therapeutic. It was great to be someone else for a while.

It wasn't enough however.

I started to insist that she spend her days working out on the extensive exercise equipment I had in my mansion. She grumbled at first but seemed to like the idea, as if she'd always wanted to get trim but had never had the willpower before.

I, meanwhile, started grossing out on junk food. Cream, chips, burgers, bacon, chocolate, crisps. And the pounds started adding up. It only took a couple of weeks for my perfect figure to become just average and then start to lean towards plump.

I managed somehow, with constant obsessional effort, to be able to see through Melissa's glasses, my brain making the necessary adjustments. Then the headaches began in the evenings that only went away when Melissa came next morning and I stuck her heavy frames on my nose and got her to put on contacts.

I became Melissa's personal trainer, bawling her out if she didn't do enough exercise. I gave her money for contact lenses.

And all the while I made sure she kept it a secret at home, although they must have noticed her starting to slim. I meanwhile stopped seeing my boring old friends. I only wrote or spoke on the phone. But I kept promising a comeback.

After about six weeks of this I had Melissa tell her husband that I had asked her to accompany me on holiday for three months. Apparently he was put out but the money I offered persuaded him to let his sweetheart leave.

Melissa was getting into this. She loved pretending to be me.

As soon as we left town we switched places. She became me (nobody out there recognized me) and I became her servant and travelling companion. We went to Los Angeles and as she lay on the beach and went swimming in the pool I scurried about fetching her things.

All the while though, I porked out on fatty foods while making sure she exercised.

After the first month I found that I could hardly see now if I removed my glasses. I say "my" because twenty-four hours a day now, I was Melissa. And I was fat. My breasts were becoming enormous, my chin had dissolving into a large fold.

Then the final stage came.

We both had plastic surgery. Working from photographs of our original states, we had the surgeons reconstruct our faces until we looked identical to one another. My eyes were pushed closer together, my nose hooked downwards. My ears were enlarged. We had our hair done, hers now long, straight and blond, mine thick, dark and cut straight in a bob.

After we had recovered she looked beautiful.

She looked exactly like the retired model Topaz.

And I looked like her cleaner.

I stood in my hotel room, staring in the mirror at a face I recognized. It was Melissa's face. I had been transformed completely. I looked exactly like her from the fat legs crammed into high heeled shoes, past the bulging hips and stomach, the enormous breasts, all crammed into a shapeless short sleeved dress; her face with its gaping little eyes and saggy chin, the thick glasses.

I was no longer the woman I had been in any way.

Even our voices, through long and arduous practice had come to resemble the others’.

I was her.

*  *  *

It was then that we returned.

When we got back to the house my butler remarked on how Topaz was back to her real self. He had become a little worried that she had been putting on weight. He was relieved to see she was “back to normal.”

I loved the anonymity. The butler treated me exactly as though I were a lowly servant. I was scum beneath his shoes. He saw me as Melissa.

I was Melissa now.

We had sorted it out while away. Now we were back, she was to take my place completely. I had briefed her on every little detail she needed to know. Anything else she could improvise. I had even told her intricate details about my finances. I wanted her to have complete control.

I wanted to leave my old life behind completely. Not completely obviously. This process was strange - I’ll admit that it was obsessional - but I still had my head glued on. Before we proceeded with the final stages I had insisted that Melissa sign an agreement to keep my private details secret and that she didn’t actually retain rights to anything of mine. I decided that the swap would go on for six months. After that time we would reverse the process. I’d give Melissa a generous bonus to take away with her and I might even write a book about my experiences.

It was going to be a fantastic busman’s holiday, superior to any that had been taken before. I was a different person now. It was so relaxing!

I just didn’t realise that the new Topaz was getting far too used to her new life…