Finally, Sandra said, ‘I’ve got to ask you Aunty Dot, no one will validate that anything ever happened to me. I don’t know whether I dreamed all this or I was imagining it ’cause no one would talk about it. Can you tell me, was it all in my mind or did things really happen, was I bashed like that…’
And Aunty Dot was probably speared by the question. She probably felt a maternal urge to protect Sandra by not pressing on the wound, felt her tongue falter under the golden rule against mixing in but also a justified anger at Bill’s criminal violence. So she said to this lovely blonde lady, in whom she clearly saw the sweet face of the gentle boy she had known, ‘Well, let me put it to you this way, my dear. It wasn’t a very good life for you.’
Sandra walked back to her car in her good shoes, past her old house with the bungalow out the back and drove away. Not long after that, Aunty Dot died.
•
Sandra touches on a number of theories about her parents.
‘I always thought that my mother was my mother, but my father wasn’t my real father and that’s why he hated me,’ she says. But that theory went out the window when they told her she was adopted. So it led to a different idea.
‘I can always remember being in the kitchen with my mother before I was seven and hanging on to her leg because I think all I ever wanted was to be loved by somebody and, by being an adopted child, there wasn’t that love there,’ she says, her voice quivering very slightly.
An aunt once told her that Bill was her biological father, and that her real mother was in fact Ailsa’s sister Sheila, with whom Bill had been having an affair and who died in childbirth. She doesn’t know what to believe.
‘My father hated my guts. He made no bones about it. Look, they knew I was different but they just thought I was a gay person, I think. But I didn’t know what I was myself! I just always knew…well…I don’t really know.’ She pauses to think. ‘I just sort of felt different. I didn’t feel normal.’
The key question in Sandra’s cosmology is not to do with sexuality or gender or adoption or Catholicism or alcoholism. It is how a parent can shepherd any newborn through infancy and childhood into adolescence, and cease entirely to care about that child’s way in the world.
You want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Imagine Bill and his self-loathing or trauma or mental illness; imagine his helplessness and rage every time he decides to raise another glass and throw another punch. Did he blame himself for the death of his brother all those years before? And find an echo in the death of his newborn son? Did he meet something in the army that ate away at him like mould, turning him dark and soft on the inside until he could not hold himself upright without a drink?
It is impossible for a parent to be an alcoholic without spreading their emotional isolation, like a disease, throughout the home. Imagine Ailsa, the girl who loves to bake, the woman whose cakes are light and high and whose dark religion tells her to fear her effeminate son. Imagine how every day she drags herself out of bed to wrestle with her dead baby and her newborn and her three other children and her husband who cannot stop drinking and beating her. Imagine her nausea rising from sheer exhaustion, the helplessness and fear and pain that bubble up to scald her and everyone she touches. Perhaps Ailsa and Bill are sufficiently hateful to deny us even the basic satisfaction of conceiving of them as villains.
And yet. Imagine the feeling of holding a six-week-old baby boy, using your arms for his bed and your hand for his blanket and your name for his name. Think of the way his heartbeat slows when you hold him close. Imagine that baby as a boy frozen in his bed, straining to read the sound of a motor in the driveway over the noise of his own racing heart. Think of the pain his father deliberately inflicts on him, think of his paralysis and how, in some universes, the Big Bang happens in reverse: an instant retraction of time and space to a point of singularity.
No longer allowed home, Peter went to stay with the McMahons, the family of his friend Mary who lived about five kilometres away. They took him in and included him as part of their family for six months until they left for a long holiday overseas. Before they went, they arranged for him to move in with their eldest son and the father connected him with his first real job.
Fitting and turning wasn’t really his bag because he hated the greasy hands, but the security the job offered was a welcome relief. For the first time, Peter felt normal, even successful, turning up to work each day at Brunton’s Bright Steel, freshly showered, always on time, a Vegemite sandwich shyly tucked in the small bag he carried with him on the train. He felt tall inside walking into the factory complex in the growing shadow of the Westgate Bridge, then being built. He was an efficient worker, too, and a quick learner and excellent with people, so he was quickly promoted to the laboratory where they started training him in metallurgy.
Peter was in the lab at 11:50 a.m. on 15 October 1970, when the steel girders on the bridge turned blue under pressure and collapsed with a roar that could be heard over twenty kilometres away, killing thirty-five construction workers. The light bulbs in the lab and on the factory floor burst out of their sockets, plunging the rooms into a darkness in which one worker became caught in a machine, screaming while the ground trembled. Over the factory’s back fence, Peter watched emergency workers arrange their cars into a square where they threw body parts away from the crowds that had gathered nearby. It was his ‘first seeing of death’. By the time construction on the bridge resumed in 1972, Peter had moved on to another job.
‘I was married by then…I’d met a girl on the way to…’cause I lived at, um, I must’ve lived at Williamstown then, over the Mars Music Store…because on the Williamstown train, going to Spotswood, that’s where I met this girl…’
Sometimes, listening to Sandra try to remember the events of her life is like watching someone reel in rubbish on a fishing line: a weird mix of surprise, perplexity and unexpected recognition. No matter how many times we go over the first three decades of her life, the timeline of places and dates is never clear. Many of her memories have a quality beyond being merely faded; they are so rusted that they have crumbled back into the soil of her origins. Others have been fossilised, frozen in time, and don’t have a personal pull until they defrost slightly in the sunlit air between us as we speak. And when that happens there is a tremor in her voice as she integrates them back into herself, not seamlessly but fully.
Sometimes, though, the smallest particulars—names and feelings and exquisite details—are so quickly recalled and finely drawn that it is like she has been holding them, all this time, in the palm of her hand. She can sketch, at any moment, the floor plan of her childhood home and explain to you how the master bedroom was near the front door, which had a glass panel running down the side. How you stepped down into the lounge room and where her mother’s display cabinets were built into the wall and how they were filled with the good crystal. Where Barbara’s bedroom was and the boys’ bedroom was. How you stepped outside into the backyard onto ‘a patio-type affair’ that eventually became the bungalow to which she was exiled. But the age at which that exile occurred changes drastically. Sometimes it is seven, then eleven, other times it is thirteen. No matter how many times we go over this and over this, it is never clear.
What I think is that there were two seismic shifts in the way Sandra was treated as a child. The first came when her younger brothers were born. From the age of seven, she was subject to significant neglect and abuse. However, she probably continued to live inside the house, sharing a room with her brothers, until she was around thirteen. I say this because the yard that she landscaped while her family was away on their Tasmanian holiday included a fishpond. The bungalow that Bill built for her to move into was placed over that fishpond. So she must have been sent to sleep out there when she was thirteen.
This might have been a practical measure to save space in a small house or maybe, like the army cadets and the crew cuts, it was the way the Collins boys were toughened up to become men, but it
was also a continuation of the particular neglect and violence that she had been subjected to for most of her childhood.
So I tell the story here as Sandra remembers it most often—as an exile from the table and the home and the family at seven years old—because all memory is a particular metaphysics in which our experiences of reality constitute our only reality. Regarding the question of historical truth, the answer is both that there must be one and that there is none. When it comes to Sandra’s history, this problem is compounded: her reality is as conflicted as it is real.
Girl, interrupted
I pull up in front of a complex of endless Soviet-style apartments and walk over to the immaculate travelling hardware store that is the STC van, where I am handed a white disposable jumpsuit. The package specifies the garment’s ‘application’ as follows: Asbestos Removal, Abattoirs, Painting, Forensics, Insulation, Laboratories, Factories, Food Processing, Waste Control, Medical, Law Enforcement, Pesticide Spraying. I am also given a disposable respirator mask and a pair of blue rubber gloves. Four of Sandra’s cleaners are there: Tania, Cheryl, Lizzie and Dylan, everyone reduced to a small cheery face sticking out of a white disposable hood. Dylan, tall and still baby-faced, hands me two flat white things that look like chefs hats but turn out to be shoe covers. I glance at the others to figure out how to put them on.
With our hoods up and our blue gloves on we stand there looking like something between Smurfs and astronauts. Except for Sandra. Sandra is wearing a slim-line purple parka—ironed—with jeans and spotless white canvas sneakers. Sandra looks like she should be enjoying a Pimm’s after a walk along the beach. Instead she leads us through the security gates, into an elevator and up one floor to a flat where a young woman died of a heroin overdose and lay undiscovered for two and a half weeks in the summer heat. Sandra will collect the deceased’s personal items for the family, appraise what needs to be done to rent the apartment again and supervise the cleaning.
A man on the ground floor looks up and asks what we are doing.
‘Just some maintenance, darl,’ Sandra reassures him, which, in its way, is the truth.
One of the cleaners unlocks the door. Sandra has a quick look inside. ‘Ugh. Stinks,’ she says. ‘Right. Masks on, breathe through your mouth!’ She warns everyone to watch out for syringes while helping Tania don her mask. Tightening it, Sandra says to her wryly, ‘You may never breathe again, but don’t worry about it.’
Cheryl takes out a small jar of Tiger Balm and rubs it into each nostril before slipping on her mask.
Sandra remains unmasked. ‘Been doing it for so long, I don’t bother…Grin and bear it!’ she sings.
It is not her most visible trait—you would miss it altogether if you did not know her well, if she had not let you in sufficiently to welcome your calls with a sweetly rasping, ‘Good morning my little dove’—but that is what makes it her strongest: a bodily fortitude so incredible that it cannot be ascribed to mere biology. Aside from carrying around with her a lime-coloured leather handbag of fine quality in which she keeps an electric-blue tin of mints, six lipsticks, three jail-sized key rings, tissues, a camera, a little black diary for notes, a pen to write them with, a Ventolin inhaler, a mascara, a bottle of water, her iPhone and a cord with which to recharge it, Sandra also carries the burden of lung disease so severe that she cannot take more than a few steps, however slowly, without fighting for breath. And though you will hear this struggle, and though the sound of it is excruciating (even if it doesn’t descend into one of the frequent coughing fits so powerful it seems like it will turn her inside out), she will get on top of it as quickly as possible, accept no concern or special treatment, and resume whatever activity or conversation was interrupted with such competent dexterity that, if you remember it at all, the interruption will seem as significant as one sneeze in a cold.
It is, of course, not a cold. It is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with lung fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension. It can be managed with daily oxygen use, rest and the avoidance of environmental threats, but it is incurable.
Sandra uses her oxygen tank sparingly because she believes that the more she uses it, the more she will need it and it is one of the Golden Rules of Pankhurst ‘not to be reliant on any person or any thing’. So while she keeps the tank at the ready, it is more in the spirit of a safety net (‘If I end up getting pneumonia, then I’m fucked.’) rather than as a tool for daily living. As regards rest, she does not. She works at least six days per week and while she might make it home, some days, by four o’clock to watch The Bold and the Beautiful, it is not unusual for her to leave home at 6:30 a.m. and return at 7:30 p.m. She averages twelve hundred kilometres per week, driving to and between jobs across the state.
She will sometimes take perfunctory precautions against the environmental threats she encounters numerous times each day (sick clients, black mould spores, pathogens in accumulated biological material) by wearing a mask or gloves. But these are quickly cast off because they impede her ability to work efficiently, and because she does not want to alienate her already-distressed clients.
‘I’m meeting someone there, quite often a family member, I don’t want them to go into shock, like, “This person from outer space has come here.” I grin and bear it and I go in,’ she explained to me once.
In addition to severe pulmonary disease, Sandra also has cirrhosis of the liver. The causes of her conditions are various and not susceptible to confident isolation. The chemicals she used in the early years of her cleaning business may play a role; so too her decades of double-dosing female hormones. Then there are viruses and biology and a factor euphemistically known as ‘lifestyle’, which carries with it specious overtones of culpability. Her drinking, and her years of heavy drug use earlier in her life, conform with the fact that trans people have higher rates of self-medication.
I mentioned once to her how I read that, even on the normal dose of hormones, the medical recommendation is to stay as healthy as possible through diet, exercise and abstaining from cigarettes and alcohol. Her thoughts on this were expressed by a prolonged period of deep laughter and, as she finally dabbed at her eyes, the comment: ‘Fuck me, that’s a bit like a comedy routine.’
Sandra has not had a cigarette in ten years, but while she has abstained from alcohol during the periods in which her health has been particularly bad, she allows herself ‘a [couple of] glass[es] of wine [and]/or Scotch’ every evening—against medical advice, given the condition of her liver.
Every day she wakes up early to the drone of the television in order to drown out the demons that wake alongside her. And though it’s only partly successful she gets up anyway and dresses nicely anyway and goes out to run a business anyway. She hustles for more work and repeatedly tears herself away from the Velcro of her mind to crack jokes and, after a long day of driving between jobs that range from the distasteful to the apocalyptic, she returns home to cook herself and Lana a fillet steak, administers that speedily nibbling dog a sliver of Prozac and pours herself her drinks after retiring to her couch to finally enjoy a few hours of peace.
Which is all to say that Sandra’s diagnoses, while true, are not truer than her will. But she’s long known that the body can be a liar. So when you ask her how she is doing, she will say, ‘Oh, you know, mustn’t grumble,’ and then scoop you up and rush you through the latest updates on her plans for beauty treatments or expanding her business.
‘Once I make up my mind to do something, I’m very powerful. Nothing can gild the lily. I’m very focused. It’s like smoking. Since I was diagnosed with lung problems, I stopped like that.’ Sandra snaps her fingers, and the gold heart dangling from her bracelet clinks against the chunky chain. ‘There’s no weaning or waning, it’s bingo. I’m a firm believer that you’re as powerful as your mind. Firm believer. Mmmm,’ she growls in agreement with herself.
Thirteen-hour work days and six-day work weeks and forty-eight-hundred-kilometre months and deep laughter from the woman whose heal
th was judged, by three different specialist panels, too risky to waste a lung transplant on. All agreed that she would not survive the surgery, in part because of the condition of her liver. She told them, ‘I don’t want to die grasping for air. It’s better that I have the operation. I’m in a win-win: I either get the operation and I live, or if I die, I go out trying.’ Still, she was denied.
Her outrage at this was expressed once when she told me that one of her hoarding clients, an elderly man whose oxygen bottles were sitting in a pile of his own faeces, had mentioned that he had been offered a lung transplant but wasn’t sure he wanted it. She was utterly enraged recounting this to me: ‘He gets a chance and I don’t?!’ She could understand neither how he was a better candidate nor how one could be ambivalent about the proffered organ. ‘You take opportunities when you get them, baby!’
When I asked Sandra’s doctor what the average patient with her comorbid conditions would be doing each day, he replied that they would be at home, resting. I mentioned how much she takes on and her seemingly infinite energy, and he responded drolly but with clear fondness and admiration: ‘She should just be tired all the time. I can’t imagine what she would have been like without this.’ He stopped to ponder the counter-factual scenario for a moment before shaking his head. ‘It’s just incredible.’
Sandra’s lifestyle is not what runners would call a suicide pace. On the contrary, it is deeply sustaining. ‘I like to keep busy,’ I heard her explain to a client once. ‘Having a terminal illness, I find that it keeps my mind busy, I don’t think about it, and I stay positive.’ She has no more chances for a lung transplant. ‘None at all. Signed, sealed and delivered. How many times have they had me dead and buried? They should name me Lady Lazarus,’ she laughed. I had seen for myself the months of deep depression that followed the panel’s final decision. The months when she found that the less she did, the less she wanted to do, until she was, yes, willing herself to die.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 4
