'You want to get tips,' I explained to Marek, our Polish cleaner, 'You should be more a maid more like her.'
Across the street was a girl of about 19, dressed in a fancy dress French maid's costume stumbling home, presumably from a party the night before. She was dressed in a tiny black dress, low cut with a short skirt, white apron, stockings and heels.
Marek looked at me blankly. He didn't appear to have got the joke. I never knew how good his English was. Since I'd been working more from home and she had been more at work, my wife had encouraged me that it was worth giving him a tip to make him work better.
My response to this was to jokingly point out the differences between Marek and the kind of cleaner I'd have liked to have had, but I felt perhaps something had been lost in translation. He didn't seem to respond to my remark at all. If he did want that tip, I thought, he could at least manage some kind of polite comment even if he didn't find it much of a joke.
I let it slide and thought that that was probably the end of it. I'd all but forgotten mentioning it the next morning when, about an hour after my wife had left me alone in the house, Marek came round to do his daily clean. Only today, there was something a little different about him.
His walk sounded different down the hallway, more clicking than thudding, and, as he entered the bedroom I was using as a study, I could see why. On his feet instead of his normal casual boots were a pair of six inch stilettos!
I ran my astonished eyes up from these shoes along two long, shapely legs wearing nothing black thigh high stockings. Around the tops of these stockings, my gaze met the white lace frills around the hem of a little black mini dress covered by a tiny white lace apron. The dress clung around his waist but was surprisingly convincingly filled out around his chest where the white lacy bodice revealed a little of the bra he was wearing underneath. He was even wearing a white lace maid's cap on top of a wig of chestnut curls that made him look completely feminine.
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