CLEANER: Chapter Four - Part Two

DAHLIA

When I opened my eyes the room was still very dim, what early morning light there was restricted by the tiny window. My vision was blurry. It was always blurry now. With constant wear of my glasses I had pushed my vision three prescription notches away from normal, sufficient to effectively ruin my eyesight when I wasn’t wearing them.

I turned off the alarm then lay in bed thinking about that.

My eyes were so used to the glasses now that I couldn’t see straight without them. I only had two more prescriptions to go before I reached the same one that... the original Melissa had worn. I wondered if I was ready to go up another notch already. My brain had been able to keep up with each progressive change so far, adjusting to the focus distortion until I could see again. Maybe I could. What would that feel like?

I lay there imagining the thicker lenses, the heavier frames on my face. I imagined taking them off a week from now and having even worse eyesight, like looking into pools of rippling water. I got a dreamy sense of mild euphoria, my mind trundling along considering each aspect of that, the sensations I would feel; the impact it would have on my long term vision.

Was I permanently damaging my eyesight? Would I have to wear thick glasses for the rest of my life?

The headache I seemed to have all the time now crept up the back of my head, making my scalp feel too tight for the skull inside it.

I sat up on the edge of the bed and sighed. I didn’t have time to waste ruminating. I had to get ready for my cleaning duties.

I was weary in a way I hadn’t felt before coming to Greece: partly the limited sleep I was getting before the daily grind began day after day, and partly the extra weight I was carrying now.

I put on my glasses and went to the mirror to look at myself.

The woman I had been; the slim and beautiful super model; was well and truly gone now.

Over the past two months I had consumed perhaps five or six times as much food each day as I might have done in my old life. All-you-can-eat breakfast buffet followed by all-you-can-eat lunch and all-you-can-eat dinner. On top of that I had chocolate and crisp snacks throughout the day, swilled down with Coca Cola and a doggy bag of dinner leftovers that I troughed on before bed that amounted to another large meal.

I had put on a lot of weight. A lot.

The extra fat had gone onto my stomach making a pillowy fold distending my waistline. It had gone onto my thighs and buttocks, swelling them. It had gone onto my upper arms giving me growing bingo wings that rippled like liquid when I made rapid movements like when I was mopping the hotel floors. It had gone into my breasts, making them swell, becoming rounder, but also making them hang differently; deeper. Most disturbingly it had gone onto my face.

My eyes, nose and mouth were in the same place but as my cheeks and neck showed greater and greater signs of thickening it was becoming like those features were a little mask placed on the front of a head too large to fit it.

With the bobbed brown hair and the glasses I was looking more like the real Melissa than ever. My features were still my own but the extra fat showed me now that we really hadn’t been that different in the first place. Our eyes were the same shape, equally placed and the proportions were a close match.

I wasn’t Dahlia anymore. Nobody would have recognised me; not immediately at least, and certainly not without a sense of shock, disbelief… and disgust.

Looking at myself I was filled with that same sense of disapproving wonder now. I couldn’t believe I’d really gone through with this; that I’d actively pursued the destruction of my beauty. But surely that beauty was gone now, at least by the standards of most men and women. A minority of people might have found me attractive now; those who liked big women; but to the bulk of the population I was no longer a sex object at all. I was just a fat woman, barely worth a glance; someone who sank into the background in any situation with her mousy hair and squinting, befuddled-looking eyes.

The headache got worse, sucking at the backs of my eyeballs.

I pressed my eyes tight shut and rubbed my pulse points in little circles.

The room was a mess, clothes on the floor, sweet, crisp and kebab wrappers, pizza boxes and empty Coke bottles discarded on any surface available. I spent so long cleaning in the day that I couldn’t face doing it in my own space. There was half a bottle of gin still open next to the little TV. I eyed it, wondering if a tipple or two before work would help with my headache.

I had a brief shower instead, not bothering to wash my hair then put on my cleaning uniform.

The first one I’d been given was still hanging in the wardrobe, untouched for weeks. I had gone up two sizes since then. It was laughable how tiny that one looked now compared to the one I had to wear now, and this one was straining at the seams. Tight across the folds of fat, it accentuated them in a way that was both horrifying and fascinating to me.

I looked at myself in the mirror now, dressed in the garb of my role.

It didn’t feel odd anymore, so much time had gone by of daily toil, but I was being reflective this morning and I regarded the type of person the uniform made me look like, especially with the added bulk I’d gained.

I went to the bedside drawer and took out the pair of glasses with the next prescription up. I took off the ones I was wearing, pitching my vision out of focus, and placed the new, heavier frames on my face.

My vision distorted again, making it harder for me to see… but not impossible. I squinted, giving my brain the command to begin getting used to them.

Just one more pair after this and my eyesight would be as bad as the original Melissa’s had been.

The headache got worse behind my eyes but that same sense of dreamy euphoria returned anyway, a pink glow that centred on my lower regions.

I looked at my reflection, distorted though it was, and smiled at the fat, plain woman looking back at me; the hotel cleaner.

That was me. I had really changed. And I was going to go on changing.

Every day I got a little fatter; my eyesight grew progressively worse. One day soon I would be as close to being the original Melissa as it was possible to get.