Integral to this shift in messaging was the hiring of Melissa as office coordinator. Though Sandra is dreadful at delegating, she knows she cannot expand her business without it. Further, assuming it is indeed more effective to be feared than loved, Melissa keeps Sandra at a certain remove from the employees who might otherwise take advantage of her good nature.
On the surface, trauma cleaning as a career may have a darkly attractive quirkiness, but in fact it is dirty, disturbing, back-breaking physical labour of transcendentally exhausting proportions. Take, for example, a story baby-faced Dylan once told me while carrying bags of rubbish from a hoarder’s house to an enormous skip (thirty cubic metres, weight capacity of eight tonnes) Sandra had placed in the driveway.
‘Up in the country,’ he said—happy that day because it was his last before moving back home to New Zealand—‘this boy broke up with his girlfriend and made a homemade shotgun and shot himself in his garage. It was forty-eight degrees outside, it’d been baking in the garage for, like, four days and it was like fifty-eight or sixty degrees inside. We were supposed to be wearing those white suits but it was that hot and I was like nah, boxers and a singlet. Eleven and a half hours to clean. He had his gun safe left open so we had to clean it out completely. His tool box was open, we had to clean every single tool, and—’
‘—the roof,’ Lizzie interjected, walking by with a heavy black bag in each hand.
‘Yeah, the roof, we ended up just pulling half the roof off. Using scrapers and just pulling it out,’ Dylan remembered.
The STC cleaners I observe at work are fairly upbeat on the job, both under and away from Sandra’s hawk-eyed supervision. They tell me—with the euphemistic sloganeering of army recruitment—that they like the fact that ‘every day is different’ and are stimulated by the ‘challenge’. But the reality is that at this level it is not work you choose as a vocation, nor is it work you stick with if you have better options to support yourself or your family.
I have observed among the various cohorts of STC cleaners: anger problems, reading problems, housing problems, Olympic smoking and a couple of people missing large tracts of teeth. Some of these workers have to budget so closely they can’t afford to send an extra text message. Sandra confirms that her cleaners ‘come from the School of Hard Knocks’ and she prefers it this way. They’re more compassionate on the jobs that are the bread and butter of a business in which every client ‘has a problem of some sort’.
In 2015, after twenty years of running her business from home, Sandra moved the STC Services corporate headquarters to an office building in downtown Frankston. She took over one small office suite initially and then the one adjacent, knocking down a wall to expand. The resulting offices have no exterior windows, the ceiling is pitted, the heating doesn’t work and the easiest entry is through a bleak carpark at the rear, but Sandra has renovated the space with her magic touch.
‘I must say that I’ve got a very creative mind,’ she told me once. ‘I can see through things, or past things, or imagine things. I always had this thing that I want more out of life. I still have the belief that you’re as powerful as your mind. An idea could come and if you think you could go with it, you take the gamble and go with it.’ Sandra’s happiest times are when she is embarking on one of these new projects—a new business venture, a new lease; a new car, beauty treatment, renovation. At these times she is buoyant with enthusiasm, seeing only infinite positive prospects in the embryo endeavour, which she then progresses obsessively and at grand prix velocity.
This could be no one else’s office: it radiates the charisma of Pankhurst. Her corporate motto—Excellence is no accident—‘hits your face as soon as you walk in’; it is painted in white curling script directly onto a cherry-red feature wall and decoratively framed in white. There are red feature walls throughout, with black and white accents: the STC ‘corporate colours’. Symmetrical rows of ornate white frames showcase the professional and charitable achievements of employees past and present. There are mirrored tables with fanned brochures and flower arrangements and scented candles and when you walk from room to room, you do so on a freshly laid taupe carpet.
Sandra’s personal office is off to one side of ‘the boardroom’—an open space with a glass table that seats six. Next to her desk is a pristine glass sideboard set with flower vases and framed photos of Lana and the new dog, a rescue called Moët Chandon. Also a bottle of Scotch and a set of glasses, should anyone require a fortifying drink. Though she operates largely out of her car and from job sites, the radio on her desk is always on, ready for her return.
Walking through the boardroom, you arrive at the training room where today Melissa is standing in front of a table laden with cleaning products, leading new STC recruits through their first training session in an authoritative and slightly nasal monotone. She has written the agenda on the whiteboard behind her:
• Time management—Working together
• Cloth’s—washing + drying, colour order
• Caddies
• Uniform—what is right uniform?, footwear, tattoos
• Sick days—How much notice is needed
• Mobile phones
• Disciplinary action
• Turning up for work on time
The audience, five men and five women divided informally but rigorously by gender, as at a high school dance, sit on cherry-red chairs. Anglo–Australian to a person, they wear work boots or sneakers and, like Melissa, sunglasses propped up on top of their heads. The men range in age from mid-thirties to late fifties, and though some have more facial hair and others have fewer teeth, they look like brothers in the sense that they are all the same type of man: white, reserved, sun-leathered, too thin. The women range in age as well, although more towards the younger end of the spectrum. On the floor are various plastic caddies—yellow or red according to whether they are intended to service kitchen or bathroom—filled with cleaning products.
A ‘mental health nurse by trade’, Melissa was the underpaid coordinator of the cleaning business downstairs until she defected upstairs to the greener pastures of STC. When she speaks to the room it is with the voice—strained but resolved—of someone with an unshakeable work ethic who is not comfortable with public speaking. You can hear the words of Sandra, who has instructed her to crack the whip.
‘Time. Why are we having problems with time? One at a time, put your hand up,’ Melissa asks.
‘Lack of communication,’ someone offers.
‘What else?’ Melissa asks.
‘Organisation,’ someone else calls out.
‘Spot on,’ Melissa says. ‘That is the only reason we are having problems. The only way you are going to meet timeframes is to work together as a team. At the moment I’m hearing a lot of feedback. This person is not doing this and this person is struggling doing this, but you know what? I don’t want to hear it. It’s about teamwork, guys. If you can’t do it, we might as well close the door now. It’s harsh, but do you understand where I’m coming from?’
‘Yes,’ a morose chorus.
Though her voice thins out sometimes, self-conscious, Melissa’s style of Socratic questioning appears to be having an effect.
She pauses, her mouth set in a straight line. ‘Some jobs, you may come up against a tricky situation. If you feel it’s going to take an hour longer, don’t ring us when you’re due to walk out the door. Call us when you do your walk-through. Are there any other questions on the timeframes? If youse’ve got questions, now’s the time for youse to fire them at me.’
One employee raises his hand. ‘Just that sort of job that we did, that putrid job, where it was squidging right out the back door. That was hard because we had the client changing her mind all through it…’
‘In situations like that, the chances are that the client has been billed with extra,’ Melissa answers before moving on. ‘Does anyone know what a rectification is?’ Silence. ‘A rectification is when I get a phone call, and the client goes,
“Look, everything else with the clean was great, bar this particular area.” Now, we offer a hundred per cent satisfaction guaranteed. If the client is not happy, we go back and we fix it. Now if we go back and we fix it, you still get paid for it, but who does it cost?’
‘The company, I suppose,’ one of the men answers.
‘As of today, that is not what happens,’ Melissa says.
‘We’ve got to go back and fix it for free,’ someone says.
‘Yes,’ Melissa confirms, slowly looking around the room. ‘Those who don’t know me, I can be really cutthroat. Really cutthroat.’ She raises her eyebrows and nods solemnly. Moving on. The cloths. There ensues a discussion about how they should be kept (sixty per bag inside of which lies another bag, differentiated by colour, for the ‘dirties’), folded (‘nicely’), stacked (‘Neat and presented. If I go out to a job and they are not like that? By jeez, look out!’) and washed. The last topic opens up a lively debate. The cleaners have been encouraged to take their cloths home and launder them to bring to their next job.
‘We live in a boarding house,’ one of the men says. ‘And our friends are jacking up about putting these things through the washing machine, which I did not blame them at all…’
‘I don’t blame them, either, especially if it’s somethin’ real dirty,’ another agrees.
‘I’ve been going to the laundromat,’ says another.
‘So, whose responsibility should it be for the cloths?’ Melissa breaks in.
‘Yours,’ says one of the men.
‘Really?’ Melissa asks, blinking at him.
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘To make sure we’ve got clean cloths to work with. If we have to go to the laundromat in our own time and wash ’em…’
‘Well, if you are washing them in your own time, at home and what not, fill it in your timesheet,’ Melissa tells him. ‘Now what happens when they come to my place? I put them in the washing machine. I put them in the tumble dryer. And while I’m sitting watching Home and Away, looking after my kids, I start folding cloths and get ’em ready for the next day. Now I do that in my time. Why do I do it in my time?’
‘Because you can,’ one of the men replies.
‘Well, no, I’ve got kids. I have three children,’ Melissa says evenly, staring back at him. ‘It’s because I want to see the company grow, OK? I’m more than happy to take them to my place, literally to boost the company. So if you don’t want to wash them and put them in the dryer, drop them off at my place. Create more work and drop them off at my place, OK?’
‘I can’t afford to pay for them no more,’ one of the men says.
‘Let’s work on my place at the moment,’ Melissa says. ‘I’ll speak to Sandra and come up with another scenario, even if we have to get a washing machine and dryer and put it somewhere.’
Silence.
‘We do care,’ she says, looking around. ‘I think you all know that Sandra takes care of you as best she can.’ And then, referring to her old boss: ‘You can always go downstairs and work for that mongrel.’ She walks back to the whiteboard.
• Cloth’s.
‘Sick days: obviously because you are employed on a casual basis, you don’t get paid for it, OK. However, if you are going to call in sick, I don’t care if you text at one o’clock in the morning, but please try not to text us at six-fifteen. Sandra has always got her phone next to her because she is on comms with the trauma,’ she says, referring to the government unit that coordinates responses to homicides around the clock.
Next item: ‘Mobile phones. I know some of you have pre-paids and it’s hard, but when you get your text of a night to say what time you’ve got to start work, just send a reply, “Received” or a thumbs-up,’ she says. ‘There must be at least one person on every job who has a phone. If I need to get hold of you, I need to get hold of you. With the work that you do, we want to check to see that nothing has happened. So that covers that. Now the big one. Caddies.’
She reaches towards a red plastic caddy on the table behind her. ‘The caddies have come back atrocious and it’s not good enough. Nozzles should be faced out and closed off.’ She peers into the caddy and plucks out a spray bottle. ‘No!’ she says triumphantly, finding the nozzle open. ‘Why do we close nozzles off?’ she asks the room.
‘So they don’t leak,’ someone replies.
Melissa nods. ‘Everything we do makes sense. What do we need in the caddies? Let me tell you what we need in the caddies…’ She then whips through the core cleaning products, many of which bear the fey names of cartoon ponies.
‘Glitz. What is Glitz?’ Melissa asks.
‘It’s got to be multipurpose, wouldn’t it?’ Leigh replies.
Melissa nods in confirmation. ‘It’s awesome stuff. Just don’t get it in your eyes because it burns. What’s it for?’
‘To remove the mould around showers, build-ups underneath the shower screens,’ someone calls out.
Nodding her approval, Melissa selects a bottle of bubblegum-pink liquid. ‘Speed. What is Speed?’ she asks.
‘Mainly for grease, mainly for kitchens, tiles and oven tops,’ another responds.
‘Would you call it an all-purpose?’ Melissa tests.
‘No, not really,’ he replies.
‘It is a multipurpose, all right? In every kitchen caddy we must have Speed.’ Melissa then plucks a small yellow bottle with a green lid from the caddy. ‘I love this stuff. It’s my favourite chemical in a caddy. Jiff. It’s incredible, there are millions of uses. You can use it on walls, it’s great for making the property smell nice.’ She briefly holds up another bottle. ‘You’ve got your Exit Mould, unfortunately overrated.’ She returns to the Jiff, cradling it in one hand while patting its green lid with the other, her square acrylics catching the light. ‘I want you to go back to basics, all right? I used this in a squalor clean the other week. My God, the joint smelled amazing. Correct usage of Jiff?’ Without waiting for an answer, she grabs a plastic bucket from one of the caddies and elaborately squirts the bottle into it. ‘That’s it! To a full bucket of water—or three quarters.’
Then she stops and calls for questions.
‘We’ve gone through a spate of really bad cockroaches,’ Rodney starts. ‘It doesn’t matter how hard you clean, you’re going to end up with cockroaches straight back into the mop buckets and everything. I’ve tried bombing them beforehand, I’ve sprayed and the cockroaches just stay.’
‘The thing with cockroaches, and when we do bedbugs…’ another employee joins in.
Raising her voice to be heard and directing her answer to Rodney, Melissa answers, ‘Yes, the same as when we get fly faeces. Look, it’ll sound rude but once we do a job, and the client gives us the OK, it’s no longer your problem.’
‘Yes,’ Rodney replies, ‘but when you get thousands of them, though…it’s getting to the point where you cannot work comfortably…There are nests above your head and they’re fallin’ on you…’
‘We might look at getting it sprayed before you go in,’ Melissa replies, gathering up some plastic implements from the caddy. ‘Squeegees for the shower, spatula, there’s to be two scourers per caddy…’
With its bare walls and empty shelves, Gordon’s house has less personality than a cheap motel room. There are no sheets on the double bed, cratered in the middle from the weight of its owner. Stuffing spills out from a duvet with no cover; its fabric, like the pillows nearby, is a strange, urinous colour.
‘Was this white or tan?’ I ask.
‘They don’t make that shade of tan,’ Sandra says archly as she pulls out a drawer in one of the bedside tables. It is lined with a single crisp sheet of newspaper dated 6 November 1995, on which rests one bar of yellow soap, an empty velvet jewellery purse and an Estée Lauder Pleasures fragrance sample. A headline on the newspaper identifies Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin. Used towels and wrinkled clothes and books are strewn over the bed. Isis Magic: Cultivating a Relationship with the Goddess of 10,000 Names, Kabbala, Enochian Ma
gick. There’s an empty chocolate-milk carton on the floor.
Under the bedroom window, on a sideboard covered in dust, stands a small Egyptian-style statue of a woman with the head of a bird. The broken wings of a similar statue lie nearby on the carpet. The body is nowhere to be seen but the feet stand on the sideboard, tiny and absurd, like a poor man’s Ozymandias. The drawers in the sideboard are empty except for the bottom drawer, where Sandra finds a collection of cards: tarot cards, cards with Hebrew text, cards with saints and religious scenes, cards with prayers. One depicts the Angelus, another St Peter. One has a prayer for motorists.
The open shelves built into the wall across from the bed are bare, save for some carefully rolled bath towels and a large Esky. Similarly the closet is sparsely and randomly populated with shirts, two suitcases and a barbeque in a box. On the otherwise empty upper shelf is a squat pile of books: Painting Birds, Wildlife Painting, a field guide to birds of the region. Sandra finds a plastic bag stuffed with birthday cards. Christmas cards from Gordon’s mother. Father’s Day cards, one for every year going back at least a decade, from Gordon’s son.
Of course everyone is somebody to someone. But it is hard to reconcile the accumulated mouse shit and cigarette butts with the son and father so steadfastly honoured in these many cards with their painstaking rainbow-coloured letters. As the years they inscribed in the top left corner ticked by, did his family actually know this man? Or were they—through his choice or theirs, through circumstances too large to circumvent—merely close strangers, like the passengers he picked up?
Trent calls out to Sandra from the living room. Smiling, he hands her a roll of five hundred dollars in cash that he found stashed under a couch pillow. Sandra thanks him without ceremony and places the money with the other personal effects she will turn over to the landlord.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 11
