Cleaner: Chapter One - Part Five

MELISSA

Surely I hadn’t heard what I thought I just heard.

But my boss was standing there looking at me with a mix of, I guessed, embarrassment, curiosity, earnestness and... hope? That look stayed poised, her eyes and mouth giving just the tiniest involuntary quiver. Her expression moved closer to something in the same family as panic, but toned right down until the only sign of it was a slight widening of the eyes; a moistening of the tongue.

“Sorry, what?” I said.

That broke the spell and she gabbled out the next three words with so little preparation, she hadn’t drawn enough breath to make them quite loud enough. “It doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything.”

“No,” I replied. “What do you mean?”

It was a slightly freakish moment, because ordinarily she was full of self-possession and poise, aloof and above me. There was a subtle tipping of balance to that equilibrium that left me feeling confused but oddly empowered. I didn’t question her. I never really spoke to her. Or I hadn’t.

“It was just...” She giggled, looking away and as she did so I saw that balance tip back again as she reminded herself who she was. And who I was. The self-possession returned. She drew a calming breath in, closing and opening her eyes, and by the time she turned back to me that tickle of exuberant childlike manner was gone. “I thought it would be... funny... for us to swap roles for the rest of the morning. But...” Here eyes flicked off my face and entered a different zone. Then they popped back as though a decision had been made.

“What do you say?” she said. “Nobody needs to know. We can swap clothes and you can lie around for a couple of hours while I do the cleaning. It’ll be... hilarious.”

I didn’t know what to make of it, but I suspected there was an undercurrent I wasn’t seeing, even if I could sense it.

“Swap clothes?” I asked, looking down at her slender shape and then to my own corpulence. We were about the same height but she could have worn me like a winter coat, I was so much bigger than her.

“I have some baggier outfits. I’m sure we could work something out. What do you say? It would be entirely radical.”

Could she really be serious? It sounded like the lead-up to a practical joke... though on second thought, it was unclear who would be the joke’s fall guy.

“Uh, sure,” I said, shrugging. “If you want to.”

The grin that shot across her lips was childlike; completely unimpeded. She took my hand and led me out of the pool room. “Let’s do it right away.”

I followed her down the long corridor to the soaring staircase and trailed up after her. She seemed almost to have forgotten me in her exuberance but I went on putting one foot in front of the other, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Why the hell would she want to switch places, even for a couple of hours? It was madness. What was the attraction to doing her own cleaning? Why not send me home and get on with it?

There were no answers and she was elucidating.

My boss’s bedroom was at the back of the house, overlooking the upwardly sloping garden, a multi-levelled wonderland of exotic plants and flowers around hidden clearings with statuary and stone benches. She had a gardener who came in twice a week to tend to it. I barely saw him, it was so full of foliage.

I had been in her bedroom before of course – I cleaned it regularly as a room she used a lot – but never with her there as well and certainly never on this semi-equal footing. In fact it occurred to me that detailed knowledge of this inner chamber was something we already had in common; a connection that no one else shared. 

The bed was an antique four-poster with carved spiral posts and dark red curtains. Unlike most of the rest of the house, which possessed a somewhat sterile modern air, this room was olde worlde, with ancient nick-knacks and matching oak furniture, lacquered a dark brown.

My boss didn’t pause. She went right to the closet’s double doors and threw them back, revealing the wide central area with mirrors on the back wall and the long opposing wall cavities filled with her glorious clothes.

I had admired her clothes with a salivating mouth for some time. They were infinitely more expensive than I could ever afford, and of course Dahlia’s figure could show them off as they were made to be shown off. My body was grossly obese. I couldn’t hope to make anything in there look good, even if by some miracle I could fit into anything.

But it was a beautiful dream, and for the first time since she made her odd request, I found myself getting caught up a little, especially when she turned to face me, beaming, and said, “It’ll be just like playing dressing up. Did you used to do that when you were a little girl?”

I frowned, trying to think back to a childhood that seemed a hundred years earlier and was certainly best forgotten. But it didn’t matter. She didn’t need an answer. She was busily going through the garments on the right hand side, looking for something I could fit into, oblivious to me again.

I stood back, watching her and I suddenly got the weighty sense that she really wanted to go through with this. She really wanted to swap places.

I’d never heard of anything so weird. But a little smile turned one side of my lip up.

If that was what she wanted to do then I was well up for it.