‘Breathe through your mouth! Concentrate on it!’ Sandra commands as she turns the doorknob and leads the charge straight ahead into the dim apartment.
The first thing I notice is the flies. Their papery corpses are crisp underfoot. I wouldn’t say that the place is carpeted with flies, but there is a pretty consistent cover of them on the tiles. It is a small apartment. The laundry cupboard is located in the tiny foyer and the dryer door is opened wide. A basket of clean clothes is on the floor beside it.
I walk past a bathroom and two small bedrooms and into a living room–kitchen area. The TV has been left on and is playing cartoons. There is a balcony at the far end of the apartment; a breeze blows in through the open sliding door and over the sofa, which has been stripped of its cover but not the person-shaped rust-red stain spread across the seat nearest the window. The stain is shocking and frightening but not as frightening as the tableau of life suddenly interrupted.
Cheryl is in the main bedroom guessing about the face of the woman whose underwear drawer she is emptying. Tania is making an inventory of the kitchen. She opens drawers and cupboards, taking photos of everything inside. The top drawer has the full complement of cooking utensils owned by high-functioning adults. The cupboard has a big box of cereal, a jar of Gatorade powder. A grey plastic shopping bag of rubbish is suspended from the handle of the cupboard under the sink.
‘Everything has to go,’ Sandra says, striding through.
‘The fridge comes with the apartment,’ Lizzie reminds her.
‘Ah.’ Sandra is dismayed. I watch her mentally flick through the library of disinfectants in her van. ‘What else comes with the apartment? We need to be clear or else we’ll throw everything out.’
The lone magnet on the fridge says: If your doctor is closed, we’re open. After hours medical helpline…
On one side of the kitchen sink is a pile of clean syringes. On the other side, an unopened box of organic cotton tampons, tossed there like they were purchased an hour ago and are waiting for the milk to go into the fridge before they are taken to the bathroom cupboard. Tania photographs a drawer full of grey plastic bags.
Everyone has gathered around a few framed photos of the deceased woman with friends or family.
‘What a waste, hey,’ someone says, peering into it rabbinically.
‘Pretty girl,’ another says. I wonder if that’s what she looked like when she died, or at the time in her life she would forever try to return to.
The cleaners are quiet and efficient; quick and respectful. They remind me of nurses. Black mounds of dead flies are pooled in the light fixtures. I scan the bookshelf. There is Narcotics Anonymous. There is The Secret of Attraction. Taking Care of Yourself and Your Family and When Everything Changes, Change Everything. There are DVDs. There is Bridesmaids. An ad for Big Hugs Elmo, the toy that hugs back, comes on the TV. I go into the main bedroom.
A copy of The Instant Tarot Reader holds a piece of black fabric in place over the window near the bed. There are bottles of Ralph Lauren perfume and a pink salt lamp and an organic lip balm from Miranda Kerr’s line.
‘Anything that’s personalised, anything that’s got her handwriting, her name…’ Cheryl reminds Lizzie as they squat to sort through the desk at the foot of the bed. They are winding up her phone charger and putting her handbag near the front door.
Sandra instructs Dylan to take the clean syringes and seal up the yellow plastic container of dirty syringes on the coffee table for the police ‘as evidence of drug activity’. Although the police do not disclose investigative details to Sandra, she knows this death is not being treated as a homicide. Still, she suspects the woman was not alone when she died. ‘You do your own Sherlock Holmes. You play detective all day long,’ she told me once.
I cross the hall. The bathroom cupboards are open. There are the usual creams and appliances. Fake tan. The brand of exfoliator I use.
I go back into the living room and force myself to look around slowly. I see two scattered bed pillows covered with the same red-brown stain as the one on the couch. Drying blood. I see a viscous smear of human shit on the floor under the couch. I see a big bottle of Pepsi Max, still full, and a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table, also full. I do not see any living flies. The apartment is simultaneously so full and so empty; absence is a presence like dark matter and black holes.
Sandra places a birthday card with a sassy cat on it into a white rubbish bag full of personal items and then instructs Dylan to look carefully through all the books to see if there are any photos between the pages. The family want anything that’s personalised. It’s important.
The four small rooms are an encyclopaedia of striving and struggle. The basket of clean laundry. The elliptical machine painted thick with dust. The kitchen drawer of grocery bags at the ready for reuse. The Narcotics Anonymous handbook and the Secrets of Attraction. The clean syringes. The smell of death, unnoticed for two and a half weeks at the height of summer, which is seeping through my mask and into my mouth.
We step outside for a moment. There is blood on Lizzie’s gloves; redder—fresher—than the blood on the fabric of the couch. Someone asks Sandra where it came from if the house was locked up.
‘Maggots,’ she replies dryly. ‘Cycle of life. It’s quite amazing.’
While Sandra teaches Dylan how to double-bag the personal items so they don’t smell, how to wrap tape around the top in a way that is easy for the family to open, I stare across into the windows of the identical apartments surrounding us.
This is how it ends, sometimes, with strangers in gloves looking at your blood and your too-many bottles of shampoo and your now-ironic Make Positive Changes postcard of Krishna and the last TV channel you flipped to on the night you died and the way the sun hits the tree outside your bedroom window that you used to wake up looking at. This is how it ends if you are unlucky, but lucky enough to have someone like Sandra remember to go through your books for pieces of you to save before strangers move their furniture into the spots where yours used to stand.
4
Peter is introduced to Linda by a mutual friend one morning on the train to work. She flirts with him, this tall, gentle boy who is brilliantly blond in the morning light. She is short. She is a year or two older. She has beautiful eyes and long black hair and a cheeky smile and he likes the way he feels when she looks up at him. They chat shyly, swaying from side to side as the crowded carriage is pulled down the rails.
Later, when he is taunted by the men he dates about the little woman waiting at home, he will launch into a jeremiad about how it wasn’t supposed to be that way. We sorta become friends while we spoke on the train but, like, I weren’t interested in anythink really, just in someone to share a house with, you know? He will explain that the deal was: she had her room and he had his room. That things went fine there for a little while, until the Sunday morning she violated their agreement by entering his private sanctuary to serve him breakfast in bed, and then fucking seduced him.
And that is how he will always remember it: slightly wounded and wondrous, mainly for theatrical effect but also truly marvelling about how naive he was to think that just because he could complete the physical act of sex with her, he was meant to marry her. Still. He felt proud—for a time only, but even so, yes, very proud—to be doing what normal people did. He had something they had. He was, finally, inside.
Though he is nineteen, Peter needs his parents’ consent before he can marry Linda in the little bluestone Catholic church in the city. So he returns to Birchill Street, the papers folded crisply in his pocket like a bureaucratic exemption from his father’s violence and his mother’s contempt.
He stands in the living room and explains to them how he proposed to Linda and how she said yes and how he’s already asked her father for permission (leaving out the part about how he did so despite being frightened of her family—the father, the brothers; their hard drinking, their roughness).
Bill does not look up from his paper.
Ailsa leans against the kitchen doorway listening, tongue cocked. ‘Look, we know what you are,’ she shoots, squinting at him over her long nose through ice-light eyes so close together they always seem crossed. ‘We know this won’t work.’ She agrees to sign the papers anyway.
And then there is nothing more for him here, in this house where he learned to walk. So he mumbles his thanks and leaves feeling heavier with each step as the full weight of his mother’s words lands on him and he realises there is nothing he can do to make them love him.
He won’t, for many years, realise the glorious corollary of this: that there is nothing he can possibly have done to make them not love him. And although he will come to know this over the next forty years, to hold the dry thought in his mind, he will never come to feel it in that part of him below the neck, where true security resides. This will leave him prone to the dark like a light bulb loosely screwed into its socket and flickering.
•
Why, at nineteen, would Peter have required parental permission to marry? Perhaps it was an administrative quirk at that particular church? Perhaps the parental consent Sandra remembers obtaining was in fact for something else entirely, the lease on her first flat, maybe? Or perhaps it wasn’t a permission form at all but rather, simply, a wedding invitation? Sandra does not remember. Like the year of her marriage or whether she had a wedding reception or the births of her children or the details of her divorce or the year of her sex reassignment surgery, she simply, genuinely, does not remember.
‘It’s a complete blackout.’
‘I don’t know, isn’t that weird?’
‘I’m not that good with dates and remembering.’
‘I’ve lost a couple of years. It doesn’t add up to me. It just doesn’t add up.’
‘I don’t really know, to be honest with you. I’ve just cut it all out.’
The things Sandra doesn’t remember could fill this book, could fill many books, could fill a library. Sometimes I imagine those books. They are unlike the books I grew up around: soft, yellowed bricks smelling of home. Instead they have immaculate spines and uncut pages. I hear the crisp crack they make on first opening. Some of the books are part of a series (Peter Collins: Early Years, Lives of Birchill Street, Peter Collins: Lost Years, 1973–89). Others are monographs (Adoption and the Catholic Church in Victoria). There is memoir (Early Influences, Rooms I Lived In), cooking (Cake Icing & Decorating for All Occasions by Beryl Guertner), history (A Social History of the Western Suburbs). This library of things Sandra doesn’t remember includes works in other media: a watercolour of Birchill Street at dusk, road maps, photographs, a shopping list scribbled on the back of a phone bill (eggs, flour, bread, milk, gin).
The library they fill, dark and silent as a crypt, exists as much as it does not: it has a shape. In this way, the things Sandra has forgotten are as telling as the things she remembers and this helps me make sense of a life that has left such light traces on the historical record. The dates and facts that can be externally verified are the stars I steer by. Much has been lost, but I have studied you for years now, Sandra P. You are my Talmud, my Rosetta Stone, my Higgs boson. Where my research runs dry, I can offer only educated deductions and informed imaginings, but what is the alternative?
Whatever its name, I refuse it. Sandra, this is your story. You exist in the Order of Things and the Family of People. You belong, you belong, you belong.
Bill drops Ailsa off at St Augustine’s and then he drives away. Anticipating that his mother might loudly proclaim her objection to his marriage, Peter has arranged with his friends Ian and Freda to sit near her during the ceremony and escort her out should this happen. And although Ailsa keeps quiet, her objection is still within the range of human hearing. Seeing her sitting there, silently smouldering, Peter knows that while his mother hates him for being different, and would abhor him more had he confirmed her clear conviction regarding his homosexuality, equally she doesn’t want this for him—the best chance at repressed normality offered by Melbourne in 1972.
He will never be sure why she comes that day. Perhaps it is for appearances, so that people won’t talk more than she thinks they already are. Perhaps it is staking her claim to some measure of the pride she is entitled to in raising a child to adulthood. Perhaps it is punitive or retributive or an act of witness to the injustice she sees in the ceremony, sitting there in silent incantation as if to say, ‘It’s bad enough that you are an abomination, but now you will drag this poor girl down with you.’ The three possibilities are not mutually inconsistent.
After the wedding, Peter and Linda take a tram with their friends back to their small house on Farm Street, posing for photos along the way in the early summer sun. Peter has prepared all the food for the party, buying scallops from the fisherman next door—who tipsily tells the couple that he is enjoying their party more than his own daughter’s wedding the week before because everyone is so happy and relaxed, sitting around tables in the small marquee out the back.
On Monday, Peter is back at work selling tickets at the train station during the day and cleaning a bank at night, where Linda comes to help out and keep him company. Soon he gets a better-paying job at a tyre company where the boss is a bully but, for the first time, Peter is finally able to start saving some money.
They look at a two-bedroom terrace on Benjamin Street in the suburb of Sunshine. As Linda makes small talk with the owner, Peter floats through the rooms, his mind reeling with ideas. Though the space is small and dim, he sees in it the home it will become: where walls and windows can be added and removed, how the furniture they can’t afford yet will be arranged, the colour he will paint the walls, the shape of the garden he will landscape.
Peter will forget the name of the hospital where his first child was born and whether he was there for the birth, but he will carry inside him always, etched in miniature, the floor plan of this house which he bought, on vendor’s terms, directly from the owner.
Turning up the music and propping the front door open, Peter and Linda build a front fence to the sound of Joe Cocker’s ‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’, taking turns to go inside and flip the records. They do the housework together and the gardening together and their friends come over in the evenings to visit. Linda’s father comes over too, and helps Peter knock out the small front window and replace it with a larger one, and the freed light comes gushing in and over the bed where the couple wake excited about the new day, and curl up at night, whispering and laughing.
Peter starts renovating the rooms by himself, one at a time, using the skills he is gradually teaching himself by watching a neighbour renovate the house a few doors down. This is how he learns to build the exposed brick arches he is so proud of. He gets ambitious and installs an electric doorbell. Every time someone rings it, though, the lights flicker. ‘I don’t quite understand electricity,’ he admits to Linda the first time this happens, and they dissolve into giggles.
She adores him, her tall blond husband who is so handsome and funny and gentle. She loves watching him fold eggs into batter and coax weeds out of the ground and twirl spiderwebs down from the mouldings, her Pete who teaches her so much and makes her feel so safe, her husband who is so unlike the under-fathered boys and drunken men she grew up twisting around like a void. She loves how he sees things so differently and what it will look like, this life they are building together on Benjamin Street in Sunshine.
She doesn’t know that her whole family think he is gay and she wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had told her. There’s certainly nothing wrong in the bedroom, except for his frequent migraines. And the fearsome nightmares that make him thrash around, violently kicking her in his sleep. When he jolts awake, sweating, he tells her he is stressed by work: the boss, that bastard, it’s nothing, love, I’m fine, go back to sleep.
But the dreams don’t let up. So one Saturday afternoon when Peter is out with friends, Linda marches down to Olympic Tyres in Footscray, her thin lips set in a line. The door bangs shut
behind her as she walks up to the dirty front desk and demands his pay, directly from the boss, informing him that her husband will not be coming back.
‘Oh yes he will,’ the man laughs, looking down at her.
‘Wanna make a bet?’ she replies, eyes narrowing. ‘I’m pregnant and I’m getting kicked in the stomach of a night because of you!’ She walks out proudly with the money she came for and goes home on the bus, looking forward to surprising Pete with the news that everything will be OK now. She can still work for another few months until the baby comes and he’ll find another job soon, there’s so many things he’s good at. The house is still empty when she gets home so she waits up for him and dozes off, around midnight, on the couch.
When we talk about newlyweds in 1972, we talk about children—not just the babies conceived as soon as possible after, and frequently before, the weddings but about the couples themselves, who were often still teenagers. This was true of Peter and Linda, both of whom were just doing their best to follow the script.
Their son Simon, named for Peter’s beloved younger brother, is born when Peter is twenty. And though he has been secretly seeing a man named Michael throughout Linda’s pregnancy, he is truly delighted when the child is born. He is ‘so fucking happy’ in fact that he breaks things off with his boyfriend. Lighting a joint, Peter writes him a note saying, ‘You need someone who doesn’t use somebody up just because they are lonely. Please understand, I have a family now. I must go straight and just think of being a good father and husband. I want my marriage to last.’ His second son, Nathan, is born nine months later.
‘Irish twins,’ he chuckles to the husbands of Linda’s girlfriends when they stop by to visit the new baby. ‘Every time I touch her something happens! We’re like fuckin’ rabbits.’ The words feel strange in his mouth, like he’s wearing, somehow, someone else’s dentures. The words he can’t say would feel much more natural: how much it has unsettled him; how their crying evokes within him the whiplash of his own father’s rage; how he feels even less at home here than in the house in which he grew up; how he is scared; how he is not coping.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 5
