Explaining her disappearance she says, ‘I think probably the best bit of advice I got was from Rick, who I was going out with—we brought up his daughter and put her through school—and he said to me, “Whenever you’re around your gay friends, you act gay. If you want to be a woman, hang around real women.” And that’s what I did. I disassociated myself, really, from everybody.’
‘I find that a bit sad,’ Doug says, tapping his long, unpainted, almond-shaped nails on the tabletop in contemplation. ‘Because the thing is, they’re part of your life and you shouldn’t have to cut that part out. He probably looked at it like: “That’s a journey you go through.” But it’s not so much the destination sometimes, it’s the actual trip that’s more important.’
Doug is right. It is sad. Because this is the old guard who walked through fire together: warriors in silken feathers and bright war paint. They are the only ones who truly understand what it felt like to walk into ‘unexplored territory’, to be at once home and ‘in a foreign country’. They are the only ones who are stabbed in the guts, still, by the term ‘queer’; who always stumble over the word ‘transgender’ because, to them, there are only guys and girls, really, and regardless of whether you’ve had The Change or just put on a frock for the night, they will call you a girl and mean it. Sandra’s wholesale loss of these ties was the loss of a chance for true connection and support.
But Doug is also wrong about these losses. In the same way that he, who insisted at various times on running male-only bars, clearly prefers the company of men or queens, Sandra prefers the company of straight women. That’s who she feels most herself with. The fact that her drag days were a period of adolescent experimentation from which she felt the need to move on must be understood in the context of her entire life. So while Peter and Stacey and Celestial Star have not disappeared exactly, they exist now only to the extent that the sun and the motion of the earth exist in the wind. As she told me once: ‘I’m just Sandra. I’ve lived so long like this that I don’t refer to the other side. The other side is foreign to me.’
Doug rings Jullianne Deen the Costume Queen, with whom he is still close, and excitedly informs her that Stacey is here. Sandra smiles at Jullianne’s audible delight. Jullianne tells her that she is still designing and, though she experienced difficulties with her eyes, has had the loving support of ‘the man of her life’, her partner of twenty-five years. Sandra mentions that she, too, had a long-term partner, was married for fifteen years, though it went a little pear-shaped towards the end because he wanted to own her, ha, good luck.
And here it is, in Jullianne’s happy voice bouncing down the line and in the slight angularity when Sandra brandishes her second marriage and when Doug invites us into his dark bedroom, fires up the computer and shows us hundreds of photos of his past glory: the costumes and the applause and the parties could give you nothing that you weren’t willing to give yourself.
So though they sit watching the screen with the same wistful smile that makes their wet eyes wrinkle at the corners, though they have both gained weight and lost elasticity, though they remember with great fondness the same names and laugh the same delightfully wicked laugh, though they sit there, side by side, the distance between Sandra and Doug is the distance between planets.
The thing she has with Maria is different.
When the girls ask her what that thing is, she explains that, no, she’s really not interested in women per se. ‘It’s just probably more her soul that I like.’ Maria is good to her, ‘like a gentleman’—despite the fact that she is significantly smaller and younger than Sandra, still in her teens. Part Aboriginal, part Italian, Maria Gloria Paten is ‘quite boyish looking but in a beautiful way’. She wears a uniform consisting of a black T-shirt, a men’s business shirt with the sleeves rolled up and baggy khaki trousers. She is eighteen years old and lives at home with her mother and her sister and brother, both of whom are young enough when Sandra moves in that she refers to them as ‘the kids’. The mother welcomes her daughter’s tall, blonde girlfriend into their home. For the first time in a long time, Sandra starts thinking about the future.
The tide is out and they are posing for a photo together on the dunes. Sandra stands lower down the slope and steers Maria slightly in front to reduce their height difference. They look towards the camera, squinting in the harsh light against a grey page of sky. In red pants and a baggy old blouse, Sandra wears, for once, no make-up.
‘You know how the big op is coming up,’ she says after they break away from their friends to walk down the beach. Maria nods, walking with her hands jammed deep in both pockets and her shoulders hunched up, eyes gazing down at her sneakers kicking through the sand.
‘Yeah, so,’ Sandra continues, ‘this is the last chance I’ll have to have a child, or, like, a family, so I was thinking, maybe…’ She stops and looks down at her girlfriend, who is looking, now, out across the water, her thin eyebrows pinching together while the wind animates her short dark hair. Maria reaches for Sandra’s hand and they smile at each other and start to giggle.
They go about executing their plan with great practicality, despite the circumstances of their lives rendering it fairly unrealistic. They decide that Maria will be admitted to the hospital under Sandra’s name so that Sandra can later ‘be known as the mother’. They contemplate names, browse baby shops. When they find out that Maria is pregnant, they are delighted. ‘That was our aim,’ Sandra explains, looking back. ‘But we didn’t realise what the consequences would be, didn’t think about the complications. Could I have worked? Could I have done prostitution? Life has a funny way of working itself out, because it probably would’ve been quite tumultuous for the child.’
•
Phillip John Keen, whom the newspaper will describe as ‘an expert in certain aspects of the martial arts’, lived in West Footscray one kilometre from Sandra’s childhood home. He was on the door at the Night Moves disco the night Maria went to see Sandra perform in the show. He was in charge. And Maria comes in, all swagger, to watch her red-haired girlfriend with the amazing tits. Maybe Keen has it in for her. Maybe he has it in for dykes. Maybe he’s jealous of her. Maybe he’s jealous of the girlfriend. Maybe he’s repulsed that he’s jealous of either of them. Maybe he hates Maria’s dark skin and beautiful face. Maybe he hates that she is not afraid of him. Maybe he just wants to feel the force of bone on muscle.
The great Celestial Star has a few minutes before she goes backstage to get ready. Once made up she’ll go straight on stage; the make-up has its own momentum and it’s best not to dissipate that energy, but right after she performs they’ll go home, to Maria’s mother’s place. Maria can’t stay up as late as she used to and they don’t need to be out to have fun anymore. It is a time of becoming for both of them; Maria is three months pregnant with their child and Sandra is pregnant, in a way, with herself, about to start the process for the bottom surgery that will complete her transition. Maria leans back in her chair, looks over towards the stage and pops her sneakers up on the table as Sandra lights the cigarette poised between her long nails.
‘Feet off the fucking table,’ Keen barks as he walks by, hitching up his pants. Both women glance up with mild surprise at the bouncer. They hadn’t noticed him approaching.
‘Fuck him, he can come back and ask me nicely,’ Maria says. Sandra chuckles as she stands up, blows Maria a kiss and walks through the crowded club to the stage door. Just before she disappears backstage, she looks back. She sees that Keen has returned to their table, sees him throw Maria’s feet down. Maria stands, furious now, and glares up into Keen’s face. He pushes her roughly towards the front door of the club and out. As Sandra jostles her way back over, Maria reappears and lands one great shove into Keen’s chest. This is when he throws her on the ground and jumps on her stomach, landing on her with his knee. Then, after a long moment, Keen—panting, triumphant—grabs Maria under her armpits and drags her outside.
Though her pulse quickens, Sandra is sure
it’ll be all right. Because Maria is Maria. Because it has to be.
But Maria doesn’t get up. Though Sandra kneels by her side and shakes her shoulder and says, ‘Come on, love, let’s go home,’ her head just jiggles softly. Maria is still not getting up when someone shouts to call an ambulance, or when the cops suddenly materialise because they’re always around the neighbourhood anyway. Maria is still not getting up when Sandra starts wailing and is escorted, gently, out of the club by one of the cops and placed in the back of a divvy van, which is the only peaceful place the man can think of.
But then, like a prayer fulfilled, ambulance sirens confirm that Maria has finally come to; is about to be taken off to be made better again. Only now can Sandra take a shuddering gulp of air, unfold herself from the car and look around. This is when the reporter with his notebook curled in his fist comes racing across the street and hawks her hope out of mid-air as he shouts at the cop standing next to the car, ‘What’s the dead chick’s name?’
That’s how the world ends. Though she stands there, taking up space on the pavement in her red wig and tight dress, she is suddenly gone; nobody to no one.
Sandra does not need a physics lesson to understand that time dilates; life taught her early that some seconds are cruelly quick and others are torturously slow. She is floating away, unmoored from the grounding mass of the earth and suddenly, somehow, it is morning and she is scared to go back home after giving her statement. She is scared of showing other people her pain, and her grief is too large to hide, so she stays away from her friends and Maria’s family. She is scared, too, that they will blame her for not protecting Maria. She is scared that it will come out that Maria’s girlfriend is actually a drag queen in the club where she was killed and, also, that Maria was pregnant with their baby. She is scared of the way Maria’s family will look at her when they find out that their daughter’s girlfriend, who has been eating with them and laughing with them these many months, was an imposter all along. With each realisation, she falls further down a hole so black it inhales light until she is trapped in each too-slow second with no way of escaping and nowhere to run to if she could.
A tall, gaunt figure with broken nails and dirty hair, she hunches into the front door with her key one last time, when she knows Maria’s mother will be out cleaning houses and the kids will be at school. Glowing with shame, she gathers up her few things, wounded by the couch and the cracked bathroom tile, by the view from the window and the hum of the fridge—by how completely unchanged it all is and the fact that the last time she stood there, she was a different person. Someone with a home, loved by the woman in the warm body beside her with a second chance at family floating inside it.
She crashes wherever she can. The cops are cracking down again. She cannot make money by pro-ing down Acland Street or Robe Street or Fitzroy Street or any of those streets. So she goes to a brothel on the Nepean Highway. When the freeway expansion goes through years later, this house will be demolished, taking with it the small, dark rooms where she knelt or lay face down: bound, bleeding, white-pale; quivering like something slapped down on a butcher’s counter.
This is unregulated submissive BDSM work, work Maria never would have allowed her to do, work that is ‘like a mind fuck’: the bottom of the food chain. This is where, like Maria, she just lies there, internally wounded, and does not get up.
But she is not Maria and something continues to beat inside her. She supplements what she makes there with quick money from the cheap brothels in Fitzroy. Through this long Melbourne winter, she is focused on doing the work she has to do, not just to survive but to flourish. On the first anniversary of Maria’s death, she will be complete.
Eventually she will remember Maria with warmth and sadness, though when she calls her ‘Marie’ it will be unclear whether this is affectionate or forgetful. But today she is putting a small suitcase into the boot of a taxi and directing the driver from East St Kilda into the city, telling him the quickest way to get to the hospital on Lonsdale Street. The car slows to a crawl in traffic and she turns away from the cold glass, through which the finer details of cigarette butts, drink cans and chewing gum make her think that perhaps nothing ever really gets thrown away.
Then they accelerate, and her elbow bumps hard up against the pane, that line separating here from there, invisible, almost, and she looks impatiently up ahead. She is inches behind the driver. She is listening to his radio station. She is inhaling the air he exhales. She is trying not to watch his flesh spill out like flood tide from under his T-shirt and around the buckle of his seatbelt. And then they are stopping in front of the hospital and she is handing him banknotes warm from her pocket that are now warm in his hand.
She is slamming the door shut behind her and forgetting to say goodbye because she is now walking into her future, and that is a thought she pulls up and over herself like a blanket.
Driver
I wouldn’t call this a home but it is where a bus driver lived until earlier this week. Sandra says he bled out through the nose, something to do with alcohol poisoning or an infection, she’s not sure. But it’s a small house and a small job, requiring only her and one other cleaner, Trent, who is tall and thin and quick to offer a gummy grin from under his baseball cap as he drags the cleaning equipment in from the van. As they gather the driver’s scant personal possessions and prepare the house for the next tenants, the way he died takes up less of their energy than the way he lived.
Gordon shared his small front lawn, with one large tree and some pink flowers just starting to bloom, with the unit next door. The shadowed front porch, caked with so much bird shit it looks like someone spilled a can of white paint, was his alone. A broken armchair slumps there, its seat slit down the middle. The front door is battered, streaked with dirt, and it opens into the living room with the blue couch where he died.
The walls are bare. There are brown bloodstains on the couch and on the carpet, which is a sea of hand-rolled cigarette butts flecked with eggshells and dried dog shit. Though there are a few pieces of furniture (two armchairs pushed up against the wall, an end table) and some bits and pieces (a dictionary, a plastic watering can resting on the couch, an incense burner on the radiator), the room is arranged so that there is really just the couch and an enormous TV resting on a low shelf coated with white-grey dust, pristine like new snow.
The house is cold from the air blowing in through the open screen door, diluting but also diffusing the intimate and awful smell of death. I trail Sandra as she follows the bloodstains from the couch into the small kitchen and up to the sink where a waterlogged, bloody singlet lies in a heap. She wonders aloud whether he took it off to staunch the bleeding; then, accepting the uncertainty, she starts appraising the bench. Lemon halves turned mahogany, the black fingers of bananas flecked white with mould. The drawer she yanks out contains, instead of cutlery, unused paint brushes and thick white paper.
The pantry is full of instant noodles, canned soup. Empty dog-food and water bowls lie on the floor next to the miniature fridge. She peers down at the coins and papers scattered on top and, seeing an identification card, notes in passing that she and Gordon were born in the same year. ‘Mouse shit,’ she says, tracking a glossy nail along the top of the small table pushed up against the front window.
I wonder, not for the first time, who will do this work for Sandra when she passes. She is open about her plans: ‘I’ve left any money that I’ve got to the university to educate someone who can’t afford to be educated in the medical side of things. My body goes to the university to be used as a guinea pig, you know, for trials or whatever. I do not want a funeral. I just want to be here one day and gone the next. Enjoy me while I’m here, but not when I’m gone. Really, to me it’s false bullshit when we all say, “Oh, such a lovely person.” Oh, crap! I was a bitch at times, I was this, I was that, sometimes I was nice; get over it. Everyone who dies is perfect.’
She shapes the various medications scattered across the table into a
small pile for collection. Then she strides down the short hall into the bedroom, leaving Trent to clean the living room.
As the boss, Sandra is, variously, mother hen (‘This guy had bled out quite badly and Lizzie sorta buckled under and cried. So I called her mum and said, “Give her a ring, she’s feeling a bit stressed.”’); bad cop (‘Look. I’m three times your age. I need glasses to read and I can spot a cobbie at a thousand paces. And you’ve told me you’ve done the cobwebs? I don’t think so.’); and hanging judge (‘A new broom sweeps clean!’). Though she naturally inhabits the role of commander-in-chief, Sandra’s disdain for administrative detail as well as her ‘disease to please’ have not always sat comfortably with the exigencies of managing staff.
From a human-resources perspective it can be said, historically, of the STC cleaning staff that there has been persistent tardiness, absenteeism and inefficiencies in the use of company property. There is a Himalayan attrition rate among the employees. Some are transient, others have made the error of mistaking Sandra’s equitable manner for weakness. This has resulted specifically in a few incendiary dismissals, and generally in the decision to move the STC offices from a room in her small house to commercial premises in an effort to become ‘more corporate and more disciplined’.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 10
