Leigh is working in the kitchen, his heavy boots balancing on the shifting surface of bottles as he wobbles back and forth under spiderwebs, thick as dreadlocks, that dangle from the light above the kitchen table. We are surprised to find out, after he inquires, that we are the same age. He says I look younger; I think he looks older. For long stretches, there is just him and me, the crowded ghosts of Dorothy’s life and their strange music, which is the clear clinking of glass on glass and abandoned cutlery and empty cans and the rustling of newspapers when wrestled up into a new plastic bag. Sandra coughs violently outside.
The scale of the squalor is striking but not as unusual as you might expect. It is similar to an apartment nearby that Sandra cleaned last year: same type of client (female, later sixties, office worker), same mountains of empty champagne bottles choking each room, same ammonia smell, same years without electricity. The neighbours at that job had complained because of the rats that started climbing up the building. It took six people, including Sandra, twelve hours to complete. It took eight people to move the three tonnes of rubbish out of the apartment. At the time, I asked Sandra what the woman looked like.
‘She just looks like an old lady,’ she replied.
‘Is she unwell?’ I asked.
‘I think she’s just lonely,’ Sandra said.
I wobble up the glacier of glass and garbage out of the kitchen and grab the lintel of the doorframe for support before descending into the lounge room. From my vantage point atop this mountain, I look down onto a gold-framed painting of gum trees hanging over the fireplace. There are two black and white TVs in one corner of the room and as I stare into the rubbish, two broken chairs emerge from the accumulated detritus like dolphins in a magic eye picture. In addition to the hundreds of empty bottles—champagne and beer and wine and gin—that reach up to the light fixture, there are also numerous empty packets and cartons of Marlboros. An ashtray overflows on the mantelpiece; a few butts have burnt themselves out in the stuffing of a pillow. Against one wall a long, low display cabinet bares its rusted nails like fangs where the wood has rotted away. On its surface, amid the rubble from the caved-in roof, are cassette tapes of classical music and dirty pennies so worn the Queen’s face has been erased. Behind its glass doors the good plates are still neatly stacked.
The women that Sandra is now closest to are, in the traditional sense, ‘respectable’ and ‘normal’ and they reflect those qualities back onto her through their friendship. They are very different from each other, but all are intelligent, strong and caring people in whom you can see a wicked sense of humour, a low tolerance for what they perceive to be bullshit and a mainstream, politically conservative worldview. Sandra herself is a ‘long time Liberals supporter’, a fact that initially startled me but which, on reflection, serves as a warning against the assumption that trans is an inherently radical position.
In other words, while it might not be considered consistent with her social interests or experiences, Sandra has the same right as anyone else to choose her place on the political spectrum for the reasons that make sense to her. Sandra’s girlfriends are the women she genuinely likes and they are also, in various ways, the women whom she might very well have become had she simply been born female.
Katrina has known Sandra for nearly fifteen years. She stresses, as others do, Sandra’s big heart and her thoughtfulness, and says how much she respects her ‘because I don’t know if many people would have survived that childhood’. She adds, ‘Sandra is extremely private. When she is sick or sad or hurt, she doesn’t want you around. It’s almost as if she doesn’t deserve goodness. I’ve seen her desperately sick, and she just shuts down. I remember when I took her to the doctor, and she was thinking more about me getting home and her being a burden. I could almost cry, because I just heard the little boy that nobody cared about. I left her at the hospital alone because it was too painful for her to have me there with her. Sometimes it feels as if her needs are so great, I’m talking about the lungs and the liver, and, I don’t know, just everything.’
Unlike Sandra, whose position towards ‘God-botherers’ is variously annoyed, bemused or livid, Katrina is a church-going woman. ‘I would hope that I would never judge her and just accept her for who she is,’ Katrina tells me. ‘I said to Sandra, “God sees you as a human being. He looks down on you and says, ‘Wow, you are amazing, with all you have been through, you are still smiling, caring and sharing.’” I think we get our non-judgment from how we were brought up. It’s none of our business what people do in their bedrooms.’
But as sensitive as Katrina is towards Sandra, there are moments when she exhibits an emotional astigmatism that serves to highlight the magnitude of Sandra’s larger, lifelong battle for social acceptance.
‘My husband thinks Sandra is lovely. When Sandra met him, she said to me, “He’s the sort of man that I would like, but a man like him would never look at a person like me.” Sandra is very sensible. She knows that people don’t like poofters and transsexuals, and she gets it, because she doesn’t either, that’s why she doesn’t hang around them. They are usually warped, weird, dirty and disgusting, and she doesn’t want to be like that. She is working hard to support herself so that in her old age she can just have a nice, decent life, and I really hope that she has peace.’
‘It’s making me look like a fuckin’ idiot,’ Sandra seethes into her phone, pacing in front of Dorothy’s house. ‘I’m trying to keep my cool, ’cause you know how angry I get. We can’t afford to be fucked around and I gotta get down to a double stabbing in Dromana soon. OK…So, how far away are you then?’
The bin company was supposed to deliver two skips by 9 a.m. It is now after eleven, so the cleaners have had to stack Dorothy’s open garage full with bulging rubbish bags. More bags line the fence along the front of the house. Not only does this violate local council laws, it will waste time later in double-handling the bags to load the skips when they finally arrive. Sandra, who always ensures that she shows up to appointments early or, at the very least, punctually, is incandescent. Rule of Pankhurst: do not waste Sandra’s time.
An older woman walks a small white dog towards the house. She is snow-haired, pink-scrubbed and wearing a sensible vest. As she passes, Sandra leans down to coo at the dog and the woman looks at her and the STC van and the mountain of black rubbish bags but she absolutely does not look inside the house, although the doorway is a few feet away from her sturdy white sneakers.
In a small voice, the woman asks after Dorothy by name, with quiet alarm. Sandra reassures her that Dorothy is being cared for. Telling Sandra how she has lived in the neighbourhood for forty-seven years, the woman recalls when Dorothy lived here with her parents and how Dorothy’s mother died forty years ago. Moulding the dog’s lead in her soft, white hands, the woman explains that Dorothy has no family now.
‘She lives in her own world…’ the woman says, her eyes drifting across the many rubbish bags, in search of somewhere familiar to rest. Finding none, she walks on saying, mystified, ‘But she’s such an intelligent person…’
Dust billows out like smoke from the front doorway as Rodney and Jade chip into the solid glacial mass, calving large icebergs and smaller loaves that can be thrown into bags and carried away. Two hours have passed since they started and, through this back-breaking effort, they have cleared about a metre into the foyer, excavating, in the process, the ancient mosaic of the carpet, worn down to white thread except for a few patches where the deep reds and blues of the original design are just visible. Swaths of exposed brick run along the walls where the paint and plaster have crumbled away. Windows of blue sky appear through the missing slats in the ceiling and the holes in the roof.
Sandra walks back around the house and leans through the kitchen window to check Leigh’s progress. Through nonstop labour, his morning’s achievement has been to clear one small patch of kitchen floor—the linoleum is black and slightly moist, a clearing in the forest. He shows her where he just fell through
the floor, also the other spots where the supporting boards have rotted away from the rains which poured through the roof, filtered through newspaper and bottles, pooled for a time and slowly seeped away. Sighing, Sandra zips one long, apricot-coloured nail across the screen of her phone and dials the job contact. ‘I think there might be a bit of a problem if she wants to come back here because the floors are rotted through…’
Another neighbour stops out front. She has lived in the neighbourhood for thirty-five years and asks with concern after Dorothy. Sandra says lightly that she’s just here today to help. ‘I can’t believe it,’ the woman says, dazed. ‘I was just speaking to her last night. She was sitting right outside here. She’s clever, very clever. She travelled the world when she was younger, had a good job…’ She starts wringing her hands in a way that makes the sunlight flare on her Fitbit. ‘You know when the gas went off?’ she asks, referring to a two-week outage in 1998. ‘It never came back on here.’
I think of the pot of bleached chicken bones on the gas stove in the kitchen, the holes in the roof, the razorwinds of eighteen winters. I think of how Dorothy passed dark time here surrounded by everything and nothing while the deluge of rubbish inexorably submerged her life like a village drowned. Though she remained inside her childhood home, changing nothing for forty years, that place was as far from her as the moon.
‘We all live our own lives, you don’t pry,’ the neighbour says haltingly. From the footpath, I look up at the corroded gutters lining the roof; they have deteriorated so badly they look like lace. ‘Sorry, my heart is hurting at the moment,’ the woman says, palming her chest before walking on.
It’s all still here. The tin mail organiser on the kitchen wall with neatly folded gas bills from 1971 ($3.51, PAID), the Australian Women’s Weekly reporting how Jane Priest stole a kiss from Prince Charles, the polystyrene Big Mac containers, the neatly wrapped brown paper packages on the shelves in the fridge, the good dishes, the rubbish that hasn’t been taken out for decades. But despite the food wrappers and the alcohol dregs and the pyramids of cigarette butts, you smell none of these things.
‘Newspapers are broken down, furniture’s broken down, everything’s broken down,’ Rodney mutters, hefting a bulging rubbish bag out the door. ‘As soon as you start movin’ it, it falls apart.’
An elderly Greek neighbour in an adorable pink cardigan wanders over eating an ice-cream, despite the early hour. Rule of Pankhurst: ‘There’s always a stickybeak.’ She smiles at everyone and then her face folds down like an umbrella as she peers for the first time in thirty years into the house six metres from where she sleeps. ‘What happened?’ is all she can say.
Gripping my arm like a bird on a branch, she insists on leading me through her front garden and into her house, where she takes me on a tour. The layout is exactly the same as Dorothy’s. Except the floors are mirror shiny and sunlight fills the rooms like music and there are photos, everywhere, of her children and their children. ‘I see her, sometime, up there.’ She motions towards the main road at the end of the street, shaking her head and looking bereft. ‘I say, “Why don’t you go home?”’ Then she starts speaking only in Greek, which I do not understand.
6
Transsexuals suffer the oppression of the homosexual, they suffer the oppression of women…They can’t vote, most of them can’t hope to leave the country to enter another country. Most of them can’t get finance. All of them except for myself have been unable to carry on their previous profession. The only reason I could was because…I’d been fortunate, by some accident, to have fooled the Registrar of Nursing into thinking I was a Miss instead of a Mister when I registered…But I know doctors, I know psychologists, I know teachers, I know optometrists who have been struck off their registers and they have been refused entrance back into their professions just because they have had sex change surgery. So they suck cocks up in Victoria Street or take off their clothes four times a night in a strip club in King’s Cross. Or they work as waitresses in hotels which is somewhat better, or perhaps worse, than sucking cocks.
Vivian Sherman, 19751
•
Once a week, on Saturday mornings, a group of sleek young men who call each other darl and queen and lovey climb the concrete stairs to someone’s flat, fight over which record to play and who’s taken whose spot on the sofa, roll swift joints from the communal bowl on the coffee table and then begin a ritual that starts with this: an assortment of metal files, tiny scissors, glue, solvent and bottles of red lacquer amid handfuls of plastic fingernails scattered on the table like runes waiting to be read. They smoke and snort speed and drink nice cups of tea or gin and do their nails.
First, the old polish or nail is soaked away. Then the natural nail is filed and an artificial one is glued down. When this dries, it too is filed and another artificial nail is glued halfway along its length. This makes the nail long but not long enough for the desired ‘talon look’ so the process is repeated until three artificial nails are glued securely in an ascending line, filed smooth to blend into each other. Lastly the long length is coated with layer upon layer upon layer of paint. The process cannot be rushed but once it is finished—hours later, just in time to run back to their own flats to get ready for the night—you cannot tell where the real nail ends and the fake nails begin. To the girls there is no question that they look better than the real thing.
The fifties and the sixties had been a time of great and stealthy preparation, unknown even to the preparers, in the boilerplate suburbs and the bone-dry country towns and the beachside villages bleaching in the sun; in the Catholic schools and the Anglican church halls, at the milk bar and the footy and the cricket. Every place where no one ever would have believed that the meek lads, the smart-mouthed, the mother-combed, the gangly young men loathed by their fathers, would break out to become Carlotta or Terri Tinsel or Danielle Lawrence or Debra La Gae or Celestial Star the Girl with the 40-Inch Bust.2
Although unwelcome in his Footscray home, Peter had never ventured far from it. The respite he found with the McMahons, his first flat, his share houses and his homes with Linda were all within a nine-kilometre radius of the street where he grew up. St Kilda was different. Not so much because it was more than double the distance from his old neighbourhood or because you crossed at least one river to get there, but because, for a boy from West Footscray, it was like entering another dimension.
Peter knows just enough people in the scene to meet more people. He rents a room in a share house in Balaclava and has an instant circle of friends to eat with and go out with and stay in with and learn from. There is Nicole, small and gorgeous, a full-time showgirl and Peter’s best friend, whose attributes include: little hands, little feet, a deep voice, a dangerous mouth and a sister who is a fucking nut job. There is Carol, a bit of a lost soul, and also ‘a gay guy-girl’, whose particulars are now lost to history. Peter tries heroin and hates it; he tries speed and loves it. He spends hours at the dressing table built into the wall of his bedroom, reimagining himself and his surroundings. He hangs wallpaper for a feature wall. He disassembles his heavy wooden bed and lowers the mattress to the floor. His flatmates nickname him Joseph the Carpenter. He reassesses his nose. He ponders new names, practises new signatures.
At the time Peter thinks he looks fabulous but in the mirror of retrospect he stands there monstrous in his plastic wig and secondhand dress. Encouraged by some mates, he starts performing in the drag shows. He mimes the lyrics of the songs up on stage while wearing borrowed costumes and full make-up that he is gradually learning to apply by watching the queens work on their faces, like he watched his neighbour renovating a house.
It is an awkward period of adolescence that he will eventually recall cringing, and only with the help of royal remove: ‘That was in the very early stages when we were a little bit ugly.’
The shows are where he hears a wig called ‘a bonnet’ and a john called ‘a mug’ and Bette Davis and ‘J Crawf’ referred to like everybody’s cl
ose personal friends. The shows are where he becomes comfortable using female bathrooms, which are basically unisex anyway. The shows are where he learns to shape an eyebrow, to shade a jawline; where light should hit and shadow fall, what should shine and what should be matte, how to make lips and eyes bigger and noses and foreheads smaller, how to erase stubble and add lashes. How to transform himself from a timid, skinny dude from the western suburbs into a poised and elegant woman.
It takes longer, by far, to apply the make-up than it does to dance in the shows and although the same team dances in two or three shows each night at different venues around the neighbourhood, they have to completely change out of their hair, make-up and costumes just to cross the road. This is because if the cops catch men dressed as women on the street they will belt the shit out of them.
The cops beat Peter and his friends for looking too much like men, or too much like women, or because they are something in the middle, ‘not ridgy-didge’. The cops beat them for the same reasons that the state has made it legal to arrest them and fine them and imprison them: their very presence is, to use the legislative terminology, riotous, indecent, offensive, insulting; grossly indecent; an outrage on decency. They are told that it is illegal to dress as a woman, illegal to wear women’s underwear, illegal to loiter in a public place for homosexual purposes, whatever that means. The ones who are arrested are fined, or they are jailed in men’s prisons, like Pentridge, where they are raped.
And so they erase themselves with tissues and cold cream, fold everything neatly into bags and put on their boy clothes, their actual costumes, for the short walk just across the way. If they can afford to avoid this ‘constant off/on, off/on, off/on of gear’ by sharing a taxi to the next job, they are allowed two minutes to walk from the car into the venue; any longer and they risk being beaten and arrested.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 8
