There are two photos of Peter and Linda at Simon’s christening. In the first, the couple stand stiffly in front of the brown wall of Our Lady of Perpetual Help with Bill and Ailsa between them, in a supremely awkward tableau. Little Simon, enfolded in white finery, is held by his grandmother Ailsa, who stares, unsmiling but not without something like pride, down the barrel of the camera. Bill, in a grey suit and tie, looks down at the baby, touching him stiffly as if in benediction or disbelief, the effect being less one of emotion than simply of a man unsure what to do with his hands. Next to Ailsa, Linda stands with her hands clasped in front of her, most likely already pregnant with Nathan. She looks radiant in her green dress, truly beautiful and proud. Peter, her opposite bookend, stands next to Bill at an angle to the camera; it should have made for a pleasing composition but the effect is jarring because none of the others have followed suit. Peter wears black pants, a knitted vest and a light purple shirt open at the collar. While the others are uniformly dark and plump and short, Peter is as golden and slim and tall as a sunflower. Looking at the camera with his eyebrows raised and his hands clasped behind him, he appears startled, as if he has interrupted someone else’s family portrait. In the second photo, a priest in purple robes sprinkles water over Simon’s head as Linda holds him over the font and Peter smiles—genuinely smiles—down on his son.
Sandra has kept these photos for forty-three years. She took them with her, along with her clothes, one towel, one set of sheets, one place setting, the punchbowl set received as a wedding gift and the car, when she left Benjamin Street. She carried them with her to the numerous houses she has inhabited in three states over the last four decades. She has lost along the way her parents, her siblings, one wife, one husband, her children, her stepchildren, numerous friends, two businesses, two houses, two cars and a big toe, but she has kept these photos close. The reason for their dearness, however, is less than clear.
‘I don’t know why I kept them, but I kept them…’ she said, vague but not evasive, when I asked her about it. She has never displayed them or shown them to others. You can barely see her baby son’s face. You can, however, see the faces of her parents and her ex-wife, none of whom she holds in particularly warm regard. So I wonder whether these photos are more in the nature of witness: I am the man, I suffered, I was there. I had a wife and baptised my son in our family’s church. I tried.
Though her appearance and her names and her roles have changed drastically throughout her life, Sandra has walked through her days with the same heart and the same bones and this, I think, is what the photos are saying. Without a family to hold her memories—to reinforce her existence by remembering moments from the book of her life with joy or embarrassment or empathy or still-jagged resentment—she is the sole bearer of her entire history. If she doesn’t attest to the early part of her life, the fact that it happened at all will vanish entirely. This is what it means to lose your mother, who carries within her irreplaceable memories of your personhood, and it is compounded exponentially by losing your entire family.
She gratefully accepted some of Ailsa’s good crystal (offered by her brother Simon), after the mother who repeatedly rejected her passed away. ‘I just loved crystal,’ she said when I asked her why. For a moment I see the child who grew up admiring the rainbows trapped in that glassware. ‘And there was probably something there as well, if you know what I mean…’
I do know what she means. It may be accurate to say that I feel it; that something inside me cracks crisply, as happens sometimes when boiling water is poured into glass. Just as Sandra keeps the good crystal, I keep a high school graduation ring, engraved 1973, six years before I was born. It is not in the spirit of fondness that a child who has been abandoned by her mother safeguards the physical traces she left behind. It is more in the way of self-confirmation: though I may be unlovable, to her, I am not so singularly grotesque as to have sprung fully formed from the ether. I am rooted just like others in the Order of Things and the Family of People.
The only time I have seen Sandra discomposed is when I ask whether she has ever attempted to find her sons using Facebook or Google. At this, she blushes so deeply that the whites of her eyes flare and her features wince slightly as though the muscles have cramped. For one heartbeat she says nothing. Just holds her head very still and looks at me through sea-blue irises under the high blonde bridges of her eyebrows. Great eyes, Sandra’s. Huge, strangely healthy-looking. Luminous spheres moving in their sockets like the wet blue earth on its axis, taking in everything we never want to see here.
‘It’s not my right to go into their life,’ she replies, too lightly. ‘I’m quite happy with the status quo. I think, leave good enough alone. If they really wanted to search me out, they could.’
Could they? Her name has changed so many times.
‘If they were looking for Sandra Vaughan, it would be very hard,’ she concedes. ‘They might even have grandchildren themselves. After all these years, it would be so complicated for them to tell their children. You think: Fuck, I don’t know whether I want to be part of that mess.’
From left: Barbara, Peter, Simon
Sandra’s father, Bill, with an unidentified child, possibly Peter
Peter and Linda’s wedding day
Simon’s christening: Peter, Bill, Ailsa, Linda
Dorothy
As the heartwood of a tree sings to you of thousands of sunlit days and rainy hours—specific symphonies of soil and the seasons of weathering and revival that will grant you the structural strength to reach for your share of the light—the rotten core of Dorothy’s house is a whispered scream that hurtles you backwards through decades of pitch darkness.
Dorothy’s house is located around the corner from a cafe that makes its own raw almond milk and a boutique that sells a 280-dollar grey sweatshirt. Sandra and I and four of her cleaners arrived just before 9 a.m., and the first thing the cleaners did was take the front door off its hinges. This was because it would open only partially before it hit a solid, sloping mass comprising empty champagne bottles, newspapers, fast-food wrappers and small grocery bags of rubbish that reached a metre and a half up the walls and surged down the hallway like a great and frozen river.
The next thing the cleaners did was quickly don their face masks and thick rubber gloves, bend low at the waist and start scooping the rubbish into industrial-sized black plastic bags. This technique soon proved extremely inefficient. All the discrete items of rubbish had fused together over the years—partly as a result of drowning in and drying after the rain that poured unimpeded through holes in the roof; partly by being constantly compacted by Dorothy walking over it to fetch an item balanced on top (a pair of white sneakers, reading glasses, a magazine) or to settle on whatever softer part of it she used as a bed. So the cleaners used rakes to chip away at the mass, and a shovel was wielded like a pickaxe, and Joanne called out to Sandra at one point asking her to please pass the crowbar.
‘See, people think “cleaning” and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,’ Sandra said as she went to fetch it. ‘We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer…’
It was 2016 when I entered through the kitchen window, my fingers digging into both sides of the peeling white frame and my sneakers scrambling ridiculously for purchase against the crumbling bricks. It was 2016, and I could hear the drone of the talkback radio station Sandra had tuned in to on her portable radio. But when I lowered myself into the kitchen, my feet landing not on the floor but on a deep and shifting layer of cheap champagne bottles, it was 1977. Or so said the calendar on the wall and the His Master’s Voice refrigerator and the brown newspapers folded neatly on the kitchen table amid huge piles of rubbish and rubble from the collapsing roof.
Outside, Sandra, arboreal in the morning light that fell across the overgrown garden, was picking her way over the broken beer bottles glinting in the grass. In a new pair of blindingly white canvas sneakers worn, as always, without socks, and a blue and white silk blouse
fluttering in the breeze, Sandra should have been setting off from her Santorini hotel to buy souvenirs. Instead she leaned in through the kitchen window and took in that boneyard of empties with one hard look. ‘The only thing that happened here after 1977 was the bottles,’ she said.
This is the home of Dorothy Desmond, who slept here like a stillborn until yesterday, and of her mother before her. Dorothy, who has lived here for at least thirty-five years, probably longer, who is in her early seventies and who very recently came to the attention of the community organisation that contacted Sandra to clean her home. Dorothy, who is the subject of concern, definitely curiosity, also pity, maybe affection and possibly fear from neighbours who have known her for as long as she has lived in this house, but who have never once been inside. Dorothy, who, like her house and like Sandra here today working on her behalf, is at once too foreign and too familiar to be easily understood.
In the way that black is the presence of all colours, silence, for Sandra, is the presence of all noise. The things that silence says to her are so oppressive and terrifying that in order to fall asleep she requires, without exception, the aid of a sleeping pill and the noise of her television, which she sets each night to turn itself off, eventually, on a timer. To avoid waking up to a silent house, the first thing she does each morning before opening her eyes is reach for the wand of her remote and conjure the television back to life. This televisual drone and the murmurmurmur of talkback radio in her car, at a worksite, in her office (whether she is in it or not), the chiming of her wall of clocks on the quarter hour and the light conversation she can coax into existence with anyone, anywhere, constitute a precondition for life.
‘I can’t do quietness. I can’t cope with quietness,’ she has told me, admitting that her need for company is ‘a bit of an Achilles heel’. But while she once surrounded herself with companions whom she supported in exchange for their company—synthetic friendships that poorly approximated the real thing—she now has a number of much healthier relationships.
Margaret and Sandra have been neighbours for four years. They are similar ages and are in frequent contact. Like Sandra, Margaret married and had children early; unlike Sandra she was left to raise an infant alone at the age of twenty-two when her husband died in an accident. A couple of years later, Margaret met John, who had come to Australia from Liverpool on a dare from the boys at the pub.
When I sit down with them, it is their forty-fourth wedding anniversary and they are still delighted by each other. Margaret and John have known great pain; they are fun and sweet and brave, they are wonderful company and they think the world of Sandra, whom they met when the units they all now live in were being built.
‘She introduced herself and we just started talking,’ Margaret says. ‘She was just one of those people who you could click with straight away.
‘She’d been quite sick, I believe, when she moved in. Well, as it happened, at the same time John had cancer. And he was going to the Alfred for chemotherapy and I found out that Sandra was in hospital. When he was having his chemo, I went up to the ward to visit Sandra, I hardly knew her then, and it sort of progressed from there.
‘Going through the process of John having the cancer, she was absolutely amazing. She would ring me every day just to make sure I was OK and she was always trying to get me to come up and have a meal with her and make sure I was feeding myself properly ’cause I was running backwards and forwards to the hospital,’ Margaret says. ‘She’s got a lot going on in her own life, but she finds the time for you. She’s a very generous person with her time but also with her whole self. With everything.
‘This may sound silly but when John was in hospital, I’d just got home exhausted, and she popped in. She said, “Ah, I’ve got something for you.” In this little box she had a little green frog cake. And it seemed such a small thing but it was a big thing for me,’ Margaret says, her voice shining still with the joy of it. ‘And she would’ve probably had a really busy day doing all sorts of other things and trying to look after her own health, and then she stops on the way home and buys me this little frog cake.
‘When you look over what she’s been through, another person might say, “I can’t deal with the human race anymore.” But she’s not like that,’ Margaret says. ‘Even with everything that she’s gone through, she’s come out the other side even bigger and stronger. She just seems to bounce back. I think you must just be born with it or something. It’s in you just to be that strong.’
‘And she’s full of ideas all the time,’ John adds. ‘I honestly don’t know where she gets the energy from.’
Both Margaret and John worry that Sandra is ‘generous to a fault and people could take advantage’, and people did take advantage of this quality, for decades. Now, though, it inspires care and admiration in the small, disparate, low-maintenance group of people she keeps around her.
Margaret describes how Sandra came out to her: ‘We were just sitting there one afternoon, chatting away, and she says, “By the way, I’m not what I seem, you know.” And I said, laughing, “What are you talking about?” That came out of the blue. And she goes, “Well, you know, I was a bloke once…” I went, “Oh, get out!” And then she told me a few things and we had a bit of a cry and a bit of a laugh. I asked how accepting people had been of her and she said that there’d been a bit of problems. Until she brought it up, it wasn’t in your face, like “There’s something different going on here.” No, it wasn’t like that at all. There’s just this beautiful woman. I think she was incredibly brave to do what she did at that time. You’re talking forty-odd years ago, and back then it would have been an incredibly hard thing to do. A lot of less stronger people wouldn’t have got through it.
‘Sometimes I feel like she’s still struggling with it, even this far along. At times she does seem to be on guard. Like even going over to the shopping centre here in Frankston, she’ll very rarely go there. I do feel that she worries that people will notice. People have been really cruel, over the years, to her. I suppose she’d like to think that everyone would accept her as she is, she’s a beautiful woman, but she worries that they’ll pick it straight away. She told me that one person said to her, “Oh I told my friend and they said they’d picked it.” Well, that hurt her. I just think that’s horrible.’
Sandra has lived largely in stealth since the early 1980s. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was singular that halfway through our first interview she told me—a stranger still—that she had been assigned male at birth. I didn’t know then why she chose to be that candid with me that early; maybe I was lucky enough to ask the right questions in the right way at the right time. But knowing her now, I suspect it had less to do with me personally and more to do with the fact that I crossed paths with her at the point in her life when she was, finally, bursting at the seams with her story, with the need to tell and be truly known.
Sandra is not close with any gay women or men and she has no trans friends: ‘I don’t associate with any sex changers at all.’ This is because straight women are the people with whom she feels a genuine kinship. It is also because of something that an ex-boyfriend once said about the drag queens who used to form her social circle: ‘If you really want to be a woman, you have to disassociate yourself from them.’
‘That’s why I don’t have any gay, or any other sort, of friends. I don’t choose to associate with it. I live a normal, everyday life, a normal everyday existence. I might look a bit strange to some people. I might look too tall, but everyone is different,’ she once explained to me. Sandra’s lack of friendships with other members of the LGBTQI community is not active; she would not turn away from someone on those grounds. But her frame of reference regarding that community is her drag days. Her aversion is not to gay people or trans people, but to the image of herself that she associates with that period of her life. She identifies her ‘straight’ friends with a healthier, happier, safer and more productive self. This forms part of the context when she tells
me, ‘I feel quite successful—I’m not financially successful—but I’m successful in my life. I’m not a prostitute or a drug addict. I have a healthy, normal lifestyle. I have fantastic neighbours who treat me like gold.’
There is also this. I once asked Sandra to write down memories and thoughts about her life whenever they struck her, so that we could discuss them later. On the back of her work calendar for 8 December 2014, among some notes about helping the nuns after school, she wrote, simply: No old friends. And also: Can’t connect to people on personal level.
From what I have observed over time, this accurately describes her ability to form empathic, two-way, secure and lasting attachments. Her ability to make friends is matched only by her ability to lose them. One former friend, someone who had been particularly close to her, told me after their rupture that, although Sandra is fun and funny and ‘would give you the shirt off her back’, although this person—still—genuinely likes Sandra, ‘rather than people leave her, Sandra pushes them away’. This is particularly true if you get too close, need her too much or, sometimes, if you cease to serve your purpose. And it is done, occasionally, in such a hurtful way that it obscures the true nature of the act, which is shield rather than sword, gaping need rather than grasping greed.
Besides the flamboyance of cheap champagne bottles, passage around Dorothy’s kitchen is blocked by a haphazard mound of wine boxes that buries, entirely, one of two chairs at the kitchen table. But you can clearly see that the room is a time capsule: the newspaper reports that Evonne Goolagong is playing in the Open and that Jimmy Carter is gloomy about the American economy. A box of Arnott’s Uneeda biscuits is on the counter, cans of Guinness and bottles of Foster’s bear their retro logos without irony. There is the bag from the McDonald’s Southern Fried Chicken that was phased out in the mid-eighties. There is no water or electricity, the toilet is outside: a board with a hole in it. Sandra finds it, using a process of deduction, behind a thick veil of foliage.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 7
