Back on the footpath, I look up and down the street. The neighbourhood is shabbier than it first appeared and the smell with no name is here too, high on the breeze, its meaning as public and as private as a song. I ask Kim how she got into puppeteering. She answers that it was a way of working through the things she couldn’t speak about. How does she manage to work that marionette hanging inside without hopelessly twisting all the different strings like everyone else?
‘It’s like playing an instrument. It’s like dancing,’ she says simply.
Her house looks like the aftermath of a personalised earthquake visited by a vengeful god but even here, in the midst of such disturbing chaos, what Kim has elegantly just confirmed is the profound power of sequence; the beauty of order. Heartbeat, breath, ebb tide, flood tide, the movements of the earth, the phases of the moon, seasons, ritual, call and response, notes in a scale, words in a sentence. Human connection and security lie here. Sandra will start work at Kim’s house next week.
2
It didn’t start at the twenty-buck fuck shops. It didn’t start in the barnlike brothel where the girls roosted like hens, wire on the windows and around the light bulbs to prevent the men from ripping them out of the ceiling. It didn’t start with the boyfriends who stuck around only as long as her money lasted, or with the beatings from the cops who hated boys dressed like girls or with the women who wouldn’t open the door when she stood outside pleading in the dark, naked and bleeding. It didn’t start with any of that. It started when she was a little boy in a small house with a dirt driveway running up along the side.
Maybe his name was Glen. Maybe it was Daniel. Or John or Mark or Tim. The actual name matters only because it is a piece of information that Sandra chooses to keep for herself. Statistically, it’s most likely to have been Peter. And although that was not his actual name, it is what he’ll be called. Not for lack of imagination, but because he had the right to be treated like any other boy born that year, and he was not.
If his father drove in a straight line up the driveway, Peter knew he wouldn’t be beaten. But if the car rolled in crooked, it meant his father had been drinking, which meant that he would wobble with purpose to the detached room out the back where his son lay, tensed, in whalemouth darkness. Then he would grab the boy and beat his thin body with the copper stick his wife used for stirring laundry.
‘He’s at it again, Pammy,’ the neighbour would say to her daughter, drying her hands on a dishtowel before turning around to shut the kitchen window gently on the boy’s cries. ‘Better go and turn up your radio.’
Sandra’s father, Robert, was born in 1923 and raised in Footscray. When my father-in-law talks about growing up in Footscray, he talks about the rope walk, long and narrow under its corrugated iron roof, and how the boys who worked at the rope factory became men who died early, their lungs full of resin and dust. Footscray is gentrifying fast now but this inner-city neighbourhood was a major industrial zone from the mid-1800s until the 1960s, when manufacturing began to decline, and a part of town where no one had it easy.
The Collins family lived on Droop Street initially, a road that drops obliquely, if not with melancholic defeat, away from West Footscray and sags towards Footscray proper as if gradually shoved out of place over time by forces beyond its control. Robert was eleven when his fourteen-year-old brother, Harold, died in 1934. In 1939, sixteen-year-old Robert Griffith Parker Collins carried his four names across state lines to Greta, New South Wales, to enlist in the Second Australian Forces, but by 1942 he was back home living with his parents and working as a labourer.
By then the family had moved to Birchill Street, which shows itself as a tiny T on the map of West Footscray; an oddly shaped street possessed of not one but two dead ends. It was, however, agreeably nestled within easy walking distance of Sims grocery store and St John’s Primary School as well as the chemist, the post office, the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and, were she to deny one’s pleas for intercession, as she did regularly but through no fault of her own, Footscray Hospital. Seven years later, Robert was still living at home—now with his wife, Ailsa—and making a living as a grocer while she worked as a saleswoman.
By 1954 the couple had finally struck out on their own, at least as far as the small white cottage immediately opposite his parents. From here Robert, whom people inexplicably called Bill, would set out each day for his clerical role at the Royal Australian Air Force Base in Braybrook, followed by an evening shift at the Plough Hotel during which he would drink himself into a rage and then drive sloppily home to beat his wife and children. This was Peter’s home, where he was brought after he was adopted through the Catholic Church in the early fifties. Six weeks old.
In the taxonomy of pain there is only the pain inflicted by touching and the pain inflicted by not touching. Peter grew up an expert in both. Malnourished, the skin on his thin neck perpetually covered in boils, he was as scarred as the surface of Mercury; a planet lacking atmospheric protection, exposed to the hurtling debris of space and wearing its history of collision and battery on its face.
The second child and the oldest son, he was adopted after Bill and Ailsa lost a son in childbirth and were told that they could have no more biological children. For about five years it was just Peter and his older sister, Barbara. But then Ailsa fell pregnant, first with Simon and two years later, Christopher. That’s when they told Peter that he had been adopted as a replacement for the son they had lost. And that they had made a mistake because they now had not just Simon but also Christopher, you see? This was stated clinically, as a matter of fact, ‘nothing bitter and twisted or anything’.
A few years later, they moved Peter out of the room he shared with his brothers, with its bunk beds and black walls and bright red bedspreads, and into a low shed his father built in the backyard.
•
Ailsa is the ‘prima donna of sponges’. She loves to bake, and Peter’s first memory is of hugging her leg in the kitchen. When he grows too tall for that, he never stops trying to be close to her. His eyes follow her around the kitchen, around the house, out the door. His eyes map her face. Is she angry? Is she sad? What can he do to make it better? To feel the weight of her hand pressing gently on the back of his shoulders; maybe even her warm cheek on his ear? Is there something he can help her with after his father leaves for work in the morning? Something he can do for her after school? He would give anything to sit quietly next to her while she talks on the telephone with her sister or flips through a magazine. If he is lucky enough to eat dinner with the rest of the family, he will check her face during the meal and again while he is cleaning up. When that is done, he will check once more just to be sure that nothing has changed, that there’s nothing he might have missed. And then he will look at her, silently saying goodnight, willing her to come tuck him in, to stay next to his bed where he can see her outline in the dark and hear her breath while he falls asleep.
But though sometimes she seems less angry, or at least more distracted, he never finds what he is looking for. Instead, she busies herself with the house and the shopping and the cooking and cleaning and her church, and her other children as Bill beats Peter for their misdeeds.
‘See? See what you’ll get if you do it again?’ his father, breathless and sweating, warns the other kids after he gets through with Peter. And then he locks his son outside to watch from his room in the yard as the house lights glow yellow and then go out.
Because Peter is not allowed into the family home after 4:30 p.m. each day he lives delicately, like lace, just at the edges. This presents a range of practical problems. First there is the food issue: he is always hungry. How does a starving child feed himself? If he is smart, he steals canned fruit or baked beans from the pantry when no one is looking. And that will work until he accidentally burns part of the house down.
One of Peter’s chores is to light the hot water system and one day he forgets. He panics. He tries to fill it up with the petrol that goes in the law
nmower, and the laundry room catches fire. Strangely, he doesn’t get beaten for the fire; he gets beaten for stealing food after his stash of crushed, empty cans is discovered hidden behind one of the walls that burns down.
The ‘whole street is family’—both blood relatives and ‘your close people’ whom you would also call aunty and uncle. Aunty Dot lives right next door. Aunty Rosemary lives next door to Dot. Peter’s paternal grandparents still live across the street; Grandma grows lilies in the front garden. His grandparents come over on Sundays for dinner and, while they know Peter has his own room out the back, to them it is just a practical measure in a small house. What they do not know, as they sit there at the table with their son and daughter-in-law and four grandchildren eating ‘a roast and three veggies overcooked to the shithouse’, is that this is the only night of the week that Peter is allowed inside the house, the only time he is given a meal.
Throughout the year, everyone carries their hard rubbish to the vacant patch of land at the end of the street. Here, as the seasons change, rises an increasingly sprawling pile: the chair missing a leg, nubs of brooms worn down with sweeping, wooden crates missing planks like teeth; all the broken things mixed together to form a jagged accumulation that is monstrous against the night sky, though its parts are as familiar as breathing. And then, on Guy Fawkes Day, it is lit and the children cheer.
Peter loves this time, when he feels included in something both ordinary and majestic. The adults stand around, chatting and drinking while they stare into the flames which burn themselves to death, leaving the ashes that will blow away over the coming days so that the next chair can break and be dragged down to start the pile anew.
Without regular nutritious food, Peter’s teeth start snapping off at the gums. In a few years, he will break several teeth at once by biting into a banana sandwich. All his teeth need to be removed by the time he is seventeen. None of his siblings have similar problems. The gully trap by the side of the house where he squats over the drain for a drink is also the only place he can wash. He is not bathed regularly nor taught how to clean himself. There is an outdoor toilet he can use but the bathtub is inside and he has no access to it. His pale skin becomes red and inflamed; he is uncomfortable and embarrassed in his bubbling body.
The hours spent alone grind by in stupendous boredom but of greater import is the unfulfilled human need to belong, to be loved: to feel sufficiently safe that energy can then be directed towards learning and growing and loving others. The door to Peter’s family shuts on him every day at 4:30 p.m. and therefore that door, along with so many others, never truly opens.
Though Peter does not like school, where he is regularly caned by the nuns and made to kneel in the corner for acting out, he enjoys the walk there each morning. Left on Blandford, then down an unmade road through the tip in order to bypass the house with the Alsatian, emerging onto Essex, past the house of the woman known only as the Witch and then straight down until Eleanor Street. He loves looking at the way the ladies do their gardens. He feels safe on the way to school, not because there are no dangers but because he knows clearly where they are and how to avoid them.
Forbidden to bring friends home, he starts visiting the nuns at St Joseph’s Convent after school. He spends all his spare time there doing work for the sisters, who are cold but predictable, and whose small house across from the school is a sanctuary. When he knocks at their door, they put him to work with odd jobs or errands and in this way he is made to feel useful and accepted. Being of service is its own reward; it distracts him, fills him with purpose and pride. Also they feed him afterwards: a cup of tea, a slice of toast.
At thirteen he gets a job after school sweeping up hair at the barber shop. Someone comes in asking for French letters and: ‘Do we sell French lettuce?’ Peter politely inquires of his boss. The men in the shop disintegrate into barking laughter and never stop giving him shit about it. He spends his pay on toys and new clothes for his little brothers. He buys Simon a chemistry set and carries it proudly back to Birchill Street, where Bill throws it out of the window in a drunken rage, smashing it to pieces.
Bill continues to regularly attack Peter, his hot breath smelling of booze and his caterpillar eyebrows meeting in dark concentration as he sets about beating his child with his fists or the copper laundry stick. When he is feeling particularly sadistic he will tie the boy to the clothesline for better purchase. And though everyone turns away, and his mother’s silence slices through him—still, Peter climbs in through the kitchen window every time he hears his father doing the same to her. But his parents always reconcile and then they both, somehow, just hate him more.
Peter avoids playing with other boys, prefers the company of the girls in his class, so Bill tries to toughen him up by forcing him to join the army cadets. Peter dreads the weekly session at the Drill Hall. To avoid going, he feigns ingrown toenails so painful he can’t walk. At school, forced to play football, he stands apart from the team, eyes lowered, hands jammed deep in his pockets. He tries to act casually invisible, hoping the ball never comes near him and hopping out of its way when it does. He endures the jeering and wrath of the other boys.
And then, one day, a change. The family is going on holiday; they will take the overnight ferry to Tasmania and drive around the countryside for a week. Peter is not invited. Bill tells him to paint the house while they’re gone; Ailsa says if he does a good job they’ll bring him back something special, something he really wants. His siblings chatter excitedly in the back seat until his mother slams the door shut on their voices and he watches the car drive away.
After he finishes painting each day, Peter carefully rubs the white flecks off his skin with turpentine before walking down the road to the quarry next to the YMCA, where he picks through rocks and trash under the darkening sky. He selects the cleanest bricks and hauls as many as he can back home. Kneeling at the edge of the lawn, he arranges them with great care into a neat, scalloped border. The process of imposing beauty on the backyard is calming and his heart skips a little when he imagines the surprise, the appreciation on his parents’ faces. He would do all this for them, happily, in the hope that it might be his key inside, but his mind does also wander to the gift his mother promised.
The house is freshly painted and the garden is perfect when the car pulls up a few days later and Peter runs out to greet them. Ailsa herds the younger children inside, Bill silently unloads the luggage and carries it in. And then Peter is just standing there, alone again in a tidy yard. His sister leans out of the screen door and shoves the small package at him: a pair of plastic cuff links in the shape of Tasmania.
Sandra’s voice gets tight with the memory of that day. ‘They said to me that they would bring back something I really, really wanted, and all I really, really wanted was a transistor radio, so I could have some company.’ She gets up from her large green sofa and walks into her kitchen where she reaches over the sink and grabs something off the window ledge: a small radio. ‘I didn’t get it off them, but I have this one now as a constant reminder.’
As she turns the dial back and forth between her long red nails, tinny voices swell and fade in the space around us and I remember reading that all static is radiation, still, from the Big Bang; a living memory, an echo.
Ailsa is at her cake-decorating class and it is raining on the night Peter is finally exiled from his family. Bill is barking at him, forcing him to get his hair shaved into a crew cut. This time Peter refuses and Bill throws him out. Seventeen years old. Peter will only see his father three or four more times before Bill dies of heart problems at the age of fifty-five. On one of these occasions Bill tries to run him over in the street with his car. And then there will be Peter’s eighteenth birthday party, when Bill turns up drunk and wielding a knife to the tiny flat where Peter is living. Peter will have no idea what sparked his father’s rage that particular night but will be forever grateful to his neighbour, a Hungarian single mother, who intervenes and drives the man away.
Her younger brother, Simon, is the only family member she has maintained contact with throughout her life. But Simon, who was not spared Bill’s violence by virtue of being his biological son—or less effeminate—would never talk about their childhood, cutting Sandra off when she tried. She did, however, go back to their old street when she was in her forties, to visit Aunty Dot, who still lived next door.
Sandra called her up and told her ‘what the situation was’ (that she was now living as a woman) and that she would love to pay her a visit. Aunty Dot invited her over. Sandra was emotional on the drive back to her old neighbourhood. She was trying not to cry because she had applied her make-up with extra special care that day and didn’t want to look ‘like a shitbox’ by the time she arrived. Her desire to look respectable and successful and feminine magnified the silent struggle for dignity and autonomy faced by all adult children trying to go back home on their own terms. She knocked on the door and Aunty Dot welcomed her in.
‘I always thought there was something different about you, Sandra, because you loved frilly curtains and you loved girlie things,’ Aunty Dot said to the graceful woman sitting on her couch. They had a cup of tea and spoke lightly of easy things and for long moments Sandra let herself feel the impossible warmth of if this were her childhood home and Dot were her mother; wrapped herself in the feeling like a fur coat in a store and then cast it off before she got too comfortable.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 3
