The Great Cleanup

“Don't worry! We have someone here to take care of brave Herman”.

And indeed, two beefy lads were already running towards the tamer of the motorcycle and road, who flung his arms wide and smiled in his sleep. They lifted Herman up, perched him up on top of themselves and carried him away somewhere.

The gentleman with the bow-tie went back to his admiring tone:

“So this is what you are like!” Then he blanched: “But what have they done to you?”

Anna, feeling scared, looked all over herself. No, she found no wounds, not even a scratch. But she realized what the matter was: next to the magnificent house and the smartly dressed gentleman, Anna looked rather strange in her blue dressing-gown and the red slippers with furry white poof-balls, which by some miracle stayed on her feet. Luckily the gentleman did not see what she wore under her “outer garments”. Anna was embarrassed:

“Well…”

“Never mind!” the impressive gentleman reassured her.

He immediately beckoned to two young ladies in bright light dresses, who were standing on the porch of the house:

“Help Mathilda get herself in order, then serve the table, we'll be having lunch. But no hurry, carry out all the procedures properly.” Then he turned to Anna again: “With your permission, I'll get back to my business. I need to settle something here. You do know that with what we do, delays have dangerous ends…”

Again she just had the time to start with: “But…” when the gentleman already turned around and went away at a brisk pace. Anna looked at the girls, intending to explain that she is not Mathilda at all and some mix-up has happened. But both ladies, a redhead and a mulatto, shook their heads, refusing to listen:

“We were commanded to help you get back in order. Nothing else concerns us. Please, come with us. If you refuse, we’ll be in trouble with the master…”

Anna pitied the girls who could suffer because of her. Besides, she really appreciated the chance to fix herself up. Perhaps she could live with the dressing-gown and the slippers, but she also noticed she had dirty hands and arms. Sniffing the air, she felt that she smelled of asphalt, car exhaust and the devil knows what other unpleasant road stuff. Anna could well imagine that her hair was now unkempt and, in all likelihood, not quite clean too. With this imagination, she agreed:

“All right, let's fix me up a bit, but then I will explain everything…”

The girls held her elbows carefully, as if afraid that she would slip on the stairs of the porch and break into shards like a crystal vase, and led her into the house. Together they went through a spacious hall, full of marble sculptures of fair naked young men and maidens, its walls covered with paintings of unintelligible colourful scrawls and squiggles.

The red-headed girl proudly pointed to the paintings:

“Van Gogh… Monet… Pissaro… Morisot…”

“Piss pot,” the mulatto took her turn, pointing somewhere, too.

They came into a corridor with bronze, or perhaps even gold, candelabra, holding energy-saving electric bulbs. The girls opened one of the doors:

“Come in, please.”

They entered a small well-lit room. At one of the walls there were a small table, a few armchairs and a locker. The other side had a shower cabin in the left corner and another door in the right one.

Now that they stopped, Anna could finally take a good look at the ladies accompanying her. One was about the same age as herself, but well-groomed, and so she seemed to look nearly ten years younger. She was a head taller than Anna and, unlike Anna, had red hair and green eyes. She kept squinting, as if she was near-sighted or hiding something deep in the wily pupils of her eyes.

The other girl, a bronze-skinned mulatto, had brown eyes. Straight black hair streamed down her shoulders. She was far younger than her mate and, therefore, than Anna too.

The redhead pointed to an armchair:

“Please undress and leave your clothes here. While you take a shower, we shall prepare the baths, fresh underwear and clothes…”

Then she opened the door inside the room and disappeared into it, along with the mulatto.

Anna thought she might well do without a bath and without someone else's clothes. After all, her dressing-gown was not so dirty; she did not fall, nor did she end up in a puddle or a ditch. But, to keep a healthy body and spirit, she really did need a shower. So Anna undressed, placing her dressing-gown and underwear, which she did not intend to leave behind, in a neat stack. Entering the shower cabin, she turned a handle, and many streams of warm water gushed at her from all sides. A blissful shudder ran across Anna's body. One could get lost in these streams for a lot of time, but Anna changed the mode of the shower and swiftly washed herself under a tight bundle of water coming from above.

She did not have to lose time looking for a shampoo or shower gel. One of the shelves in the cabin had everything necessary for washing. Anna did see such things before, but she never ventured to buy them. Her husband earned decent money, but they could never afford this kind of soap, shampoo and conditioner. Right now, however, she was not burdened with such choices, so, with a clear conscience and a clean spirit, Anna enjoyed the very expensive soap, shampoo, conditioner and something else, she was not exactly sure what, in a pretty tube with “eco-friendly” in a few languages on it.

Upon exiting the shower cabin, she did not find her underwear or dressing-gown. A few towels of various colours and sizes were lying in their place. Anna dried herself off with the yellow and light blue towels, wrapped herself with an emerald one, placed a pink one in a turban shape on her head and opened the door that the girls went into.

She found them waiting for her in another room, in armchairs, looking through some fashion magazines. The ladies were wearing swimsuits now. The redhead had a green and blue monokini with narrow cloth bands, while the mulatto sported a red bikini that seemed to consist of thin ropes. The spacious room was well-lit and warm like the previous one.

As they saw Anna enter, the girls stood up. The redhead pointed at three baths, which were level with the floor in the centre of the room:

“The first one has milk. The second bath contains liquid chocolate. Champagne in the third. Which one would you like to start with?”

Upon hearing of the complete set she was being offered, Anna decided to delay explanations regarding who she actually was and what she was doing here. After all, she could just as easily settle everything after trying these promising baths. It was, of course, not so easy to work out the best beginning…

“So, milk in the first… chocolate is second… champagne, third…”

As she repeated this again, it dawned on her that she did not have to worry about the right order, that she could do exactly as she pleased; the girls were ready to obey any of her whims and nobody would judge her here. Thus she made her verdict:

“You know, let's just do it as it is. The milk one, the chocolate one, and then…” she remembered how her husband's friends discussed vodka and beer, “…let's polish it off with champagne.”

Nodding in agreement, the ladies approached her, removed the towels, held her elbows again and helped her into the first bath:

“Be careful, three steps here…”

Anna quietly entered the white warm liquid, feeling its softness and a pleasant milky odour. As she descended to the bottom and submerged herself all the way up to the chin, she felt another wave of pleasure rolling over her body. Feeling a ledge, she sat down on it, throwing her head back onto a dedicated head rest. Within less than a minute she was completely relaxed and just zoned out, like Herman back at the motorcycle.

But Anna remained asleep just a few seconds. She shuddered from a sudden thought: “Perhaps this is not milk at all, but yet another narcotic? I have no idea where I am and why.” She remembered the white dart, stuck in the strong arm of her saviour. After glancing at the girls, who were again reclining in the armchairs and looking through magazines, she scooped up a handful of the liquid and tasted it. It did, indeed, appear to be whole milk.

The redhead actually noticed that Anna tasted the liquid in the bath, reading it in her own way:

“Rest assured it's fresh.”

“Morning milking,” the mulatto added, her eyes still on her magazine, “We bathed in the evening one ourselves after the sunset…”

Anna gradually relaxed again and, once more, felt herself falling asleep. Yet she did not like the idea of nodding off in someone else's bath, so she decided she's done with the very pleasant milk and stood up, white drops trickling down her body.

At once the ladies sprang up, helping her move over into the next pool. Then they went back to their armchairs and magazines and kept silently reading, or perhaps gazing at pictures.

The content of the next bath resembled some kind of liquid dirt. Anna cautiously stepped into the slippery substance and descended into it up to her shoulders. Yet the smell in the bath was quite pleasant, even somewhat dizzying. Again Anna could not refrain from tasting the thick liquid, and again this would not escape the redhead's notice.

“Dark Swiss chocolate,” the girl remarked.

The mulatto, all in her magazine again, bragged:

“We bathed in Belgian chocolate the day before yesterday…”

Anna would hardly be able to discern the country of origin of liquid chocolate. Belgian, Dutch, Russian… She would enjoy it just the same as the Swiss chocolate now. She was all warm, tasty, very pleasant to the touch and to the thought of the diversity of bathing…

Next they were washing the chocolate off her in the third bath, the one with champagne.

“Crystal Brut,” the redhead informed.

“French,” the mulatto explained.

This third bath was not just a bath, it was a jet tub. The submerged aerated streams softly crashed into Anna's body. Thousands of bubbles pleasantly tickled her skin. In a couple of minutes Anna seemed, not just to relax, but to get a bit tipsy from the tasty champagne fumes. She was simply drowning in the intoxicating pleasure. She remembered how she met her then-future husband, a bear-like laggard who was the cousin of a girl in her college class. He was even named Teddy.

He waited for her after class and took her to a café close to the college. There he ordered some pastry and a couple of glasses of champagne, offering one to her:

“For our promising acquaintance!”

Anna did not refuse, even though she never drank any alcohol without her family before that time. Her father and mother used to explain to her: “You can only drink with someone you trust. Someone who will not take advantage of you when you don't control yourself. Someone who will help if you suddenly feel unwell…”

Her sizeable future husband elicited such trust in her that Anna actually drank two whole glasses. She felt so easy, so good. They chatted about anything at all: the intricacy of cutting out a double-breasted overcoat, the pleasures of winter fishing. They talked in the café, then in the park next to it. And they kissed. Then she did feel unwell, and he escorted the pale, reeling girl home, carefully holding her by the waist, then by the hips. He handed her over to her parents, stating: “I love your daughter and I am asking for her hand in marriage!” In the morning Anna's mother, handing her an aspirin and a glass of water to help with the hangover, informed her that their response was “we are not against it, but she has to decide everything herself when she's all sobered up”. And decide she did. Yet, at the crowded wedding, holding hands with her Ted “the Bear”, she drank just one glass of champagne. She knew a second glass would be excessive, leading to unpredictable consequences…

So now Anna felt like she has had one glass. Turning away the second, she stood up. The bubbles started popping ticklishly on her skin…

Once she emerged from the third bath, the girls, despite Anna's weak protests, wiped all of her body with some sort of aromatic scrub wipes and placed her down on a soft narrow bed that was covered by a sheet with a picture of a gorilla-like bodybuilder:

“You will need to have a bit of patience. Things got somewhat overgrown while you were stuck there…”

Picking up a small electric device and a pair of tweezers, the mulatto started removing the hair under Anna's arms, on her legs, below her belly. Meanwhile, the redhead proceeded to mask the woman's face:

“It is made of avocado, with passionfruit sprouts and extract of marine iguana placenta. It is excellent at refreshing the skin on your cheeks, gets rid of wrinkles and any swelling under the eyes. I do this on myself every day…”

Completing the mask, the redhead turned to manicure and pedicure. As her body was in the busy hands of others, Anna had nothing to do and felt somewhat lost, nearly falling asleep again. But very soon the girls snapped her back into her senses by forceful massage with all four hands:

“Some more patience, please. But you're sure to lose at least a pound.”

Anna did believe them, as she could feel the pulling, the pinching, the slapping. Well, at first she could. In a few minutes she stopped feeling anything at all. She felt, in part, tuned out: her body seemed to exist on a separate plane, her head remained alone with its lax thoughts…

When the massage was over, the ladies spread some kind of cream over Anna.

“It will be absorbed in fifteen minutes. A great tonic. And while it's absorbing, we'll dress your hair in a new style…”

The redhead pressed some button and the bed turned into a lounge chair, with Anna half-laying, half-sitting in it and her head accessible for hairdressing.

The girls picked up combs, scissors, tubes, jars, barrels. Anna's head was engulfed in hissing and whirring. Of course, she was familiar with the sounds. She usually visited a good (or so she thought) hairdresser in a salon a street away from her home. But her hair was never cut and styled by four hands at once before. She was a bit puzzled and scared; after all, a hairdressing is not a massage, everyone around her would see the results immediately.

Yet the ladies were so confident and concentrated that Anna's worries left her soon. While they were cutting, styling, fixing, blow-drying her hair, she felt her strength starting to return. Now she remembered what they were saying about this cream: “It will be absorbed in fifteen minutes. A great tonic.” “Perhaps I should ask for its name,” she thought, “It's a nice thing.” But she decided not to ask, as she thought she was unlikely to be able to buy it later. Everything in this house was too expensive for a common housewife.