It doesn’t feel like anyone died here because it doesn’t feel like anyone lived here. It is hard to talk about the presence and distribution of ‘vibes’ in these small rooms without sounding like someone I am not. But something I have learnt in my time with Sandra is that, yes, spaces—like people—have voices.
I stand here, and listen to what Gordon’s house is saying in its vocabulary of ash and crumbs. It is that the true form of this house is not its apparent form. The lawn and the bathroom and the laundry room do not exist. The kitchen table and chairs do not exist. The bedside tables, sideboard, closet, washing machine: none of these exist. In this house, there is really only a triangle consisting of couch, pantry and bed. This internal geometry delineates the physical space essential for rest and sustenance, and oblivion through sleep or smoke or food or alcohol or undifferentiated visual traffic on TV. That space, however, was not sufficiently important to warrant the traditional separation of purposes: the carpet is a toilet and an ashtray and a trash can. The couch is a grave.
I flip through Gordon’s field guide and his wildlife painting books, wondering about the secret history of the pristine brushes and paper lying in his kitchen drawer. Gordon is no firebird. He neither burns brightly nor rises up from the ashes coating his carpets. I cannot get a clear sense of him. But I do know that for a time a man lived here who sought something in spells and in symbols. I know that Sandra is here instead of someone closer to him and that—because he was both a son and a parent—this would probably make him both sad and happy. I hear the silence between these walls that weighed on him before he died and while the life dripped out of him and after it was gone. It must take years to master the ability to paint a bird in flight, the angle of wing in air, the rise of muscle under feather. But you could practise for a lifetime and never capture the stillness it leaves behind.
8
In June 1980, Sandra strode through the grand complex of the Queen Victoria Hospital, her palms electric with excitement. In those days, the Queen Vic was on the north side of Lonsdale Street. It had been, since the late 1960s, Monash University’s teaching hospital for obstetrics, gynaecology and paediatrics.
The plastic surgery department initially comprised a senior plastic surgeon, Lena McEwan, and a young assistant plastic surgeon, Simon Ceber. At first, the clinic’s work consisted mainly of correcting cleft lips and other congenital abnormalities, including hand and genital abnormalities. In 1976, however, the surgeons were approached by Professor William Walters about a patient requiring a type of surgery not routinely performed in Australia. After corresponding with Professor Shan Ratnam in Singapore (who had, at that time, five years of experience in sex reassignment surgery) and reading the literature he suggested, the two surgeons ‘decided to go ahead and do one’. The surgery was successful.
‘So that’s how I got into it,’ explains Dr Ceber. ‘Having done one, Walters had another one within a few months. Word got around that we were providing this service.’
It wasn’t that this surgery had never been performed before in Australia—there had been ‘eight or nine cases’ in Melbourne. Rather, it had been performed extremely rarely and somewhat covertly. There was word that a small group in Sydney was performing operations, that a surgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital had been treating transsexual patients for a number of years, and rumour had it that over at the Royal Melbourne Hospital there was a surgeon who would operate on a Sunday morning in a locked theatre and transfer the patient to Mont Park mental hospital for clandestine post-operative care. In other words, these surgeons were as brave as their patients. By 1977, an interdisciplinary committee had been formally established at the Queen Vic to supervise the assessment and management of patients seeking sex reassignment surgery. By 1982, they had successfully treated about eighty-five patients.
Though she has no recollection of him, Dr Ceber—Sandra’s surgeon—is a meticulous and soft-spoken man whose grey-bearded face rests in a reserved smile. He carries within him almost the entire history of this branch of medicine: it barely existed when the weight of performing it for a significant portion of the Australian population was placed on his shoulders. ‘Initially I was just part of the team. It was exciting, challenging surgery because it was different. Later, there was no one else doing it. If I stopped, the whole clinic failed. So, that kept me going for thirty years.’
Was there anything that united the patients he treated over his career? ‘An obsessionalism about wanting to get their surgery,’ he says. ‘I think that’s what impressed me the most. The older ones, with professions and kids and wives, sacrificed a lot. Yet to them it was worthwhile. Transsexualism is not a choice.’
When I ask him how this work was perceived by the broader community of surgeons at the time, he hesitates for a beat before saying, ‘It was looked down on. They looked at you as if you were doing something terribly immoral.’
•
There were successes; but mostly Sandra remembers that they came back from Cairo like the walking dead: maimed, burnt, scarred, ‘drug fucked’. Even with the flights and the hotels, going overseas for the operation was cheaper: ‘You’d just whore it for a week or two and you could go to Cairo.’ And the process at the clinic there was shorter and simpler—no waiting period, unlike Melbourne, where the doctors wanted you to live full-time in your gender identity for two years before surgery. But she had seen women who expected to come home exalting in their new bodies returning instead with stories of being burnt by faulty lighting or cut open in outdoor sheds. Sandra worked and saved unrelentingly for the right to walk into—or, more accurately, out of—the elegant building on Lonsdale Street: to have her surgery and recover in safety.
When she first inquired about the procedure she was told unequivocally that even the most straightforward cases take a minimum of two years to complete. She wanted it done yesterday but she still played the game, showing up early to her first appointment with the psychiatrist, smiling and overdressed. She had already had the feminising rhinoplasty and an eye lift; was not in possession of any obviously male facial features that could cause ‘incongruencies’ after her surgery, making it more difficult to integrate socially as a woman. She had breasts and soft hips, and moved with casual grace in her own skin.
‘I know this operation is a new sorta thing,’ she had told the psychiatrist as she settled onto his couch, casually crossing her legs and placing her handbag by her ankle, ‘and not many have been done. I reckon that’s about right, when you think about it, ’cause it should be saved for those who are absolutely certain that they need it. Well, doctor, what would you like to know?’
Eleven months later she was on the operating table.
•
Though the sex work she does and the drugs she takes and her overriding need for constant company frequently mean that she is not in control of herself or her environment, she is excellent at acting otherwise to conceal any vulnerability. So she does not cry in public and, while she might comment in the same tone as one comments on traffic that she is experiencing pain or discomfort, and though of course, she feels pain deeply, she never actually shows it or makes any practical adjustments to accommodate it. She is supposed to stay in her hospital bed for a week following her surgery, but after a few days she gets restless.
‘Cuppa tea? Cuppa coffee? What would you like, darl?’ she asks, leaning down and smiling into the faces of the other patients. Seeing that the nurses are run off their feet, she figures she may as well help with breakfast. Later that morning, bored, she asks one of the nurses if she might be able to go for a little walk? Thinking that she means to stay on the ward, the woman gives Sandra a brief nod of approval. She does not see Sandra put on lipstick or hitch her catheter up underneath the belt of her good kaftan dress; no one is at the front desk when Sandra walks into the lift.
Crossing the road towards the religious shops selling rosaries and bibles, Sandra is feeling slightly woozy but grateful for the fresh air when she catches a glimpse of a wom
an, tall and slim and blonde, reflected in the mirrored wall between two shops. She automatically appraises the stranger for a moment, enviously thinking, ‘She looks lovely,’ before realising that she is looking at her own reflection. ‘It is fucking ME!’ she says to herself, marvelling, incredulous.
She will forget the details of her surgery, boiling it down to its vaguely constituent steps. ‘First they remove everything and then insert it all and they had bolts inside you to realign your stomach, which was pretty painful. Then you go back and have the bolts taken out.’ She will, within the next three years, forget the year of this surgery. She will forget the names of her doctors and where she recovered and how long it took. But this moment—when she knows, not simply that she has done the right thing, but that she has been righted—will live forever, undiminished. There is harmony, correction, congruency; physically and mentally everything is finally in its place. This is the first time she sees herself, truly, as a woman and she will forever describe it as the happiest time in her life. Exuberant, she goes shopping to celebrate.
She buys chocolates and flowers for the nurses, new clothes to wear home and new records to play when she gets there. Checking her watch, she decides to head back to the hospital so she retraces her steps through the city. She grows impatient waiting for the lift, takes the stairs instead and enters the ward with her shopping bags, singing out her return to the nurses at the front station. They immediately go ballistic. She is suddenly surrounded by people and doctors come running, as though it was the emergency room, to check whether she is bleeding, whether she’s ripped her stitches. She is ordered to stay in her bed and lectured about how she has recklessly risked everything that has just been done for her. But she feels fantastic. ‘It was me. It was fucking me!’ she thinks from her bed, replaying that moment in the mirror over and over and over.
It takes a while before it hits: a pain she is at first unwilling and then unable to describe. It gets worse and worse until eventually all she can manage is a whispered ‘Pain…pain…’ The nurse on duty gets a doctor. He’s heard about this one, and takes his time sauntering over. Due to her earlier robust display and the fact that she is a transgender sex worker, he thinks she is trying to scam extra drugs. And despite the fact that the pain is so intense that she cannot speak properly, her anger raises her momentarily aloft. ‘You think I’m here…for drugs? If I…want drugs, I can buy drugs on the fucking…street. How dare…you…think I’m going through this for…’ But the doctor only closes his notes and walks away.
Time stops under the weight of this stabbing pain radiating from her guts. There is only the endless dark beyond the high windows and the insectile buzz of the fluorescent lights boring into her temple. At some point in the night, she crawls out of bed and over to the nearest window where she claws at the pane. If she had the strength to lift it open she would throw herself out; hurl this body where the bad is devouring the good out onto a bed of air and nothingness. This is where a nurse finds her, sobbing, resting her burning cheek against the cool glass. The nurse has her carried back to bed, examines her chart and orders an enema that resolves the problem entirely.
When Sandra is discharged, finally, she says to this nurse, ‘I don’t know how I can ever thank you.’
‘Just don’t show up here in three months,’ the woman replies with a tight nod, referring to the high rate of suicide attempts among Sandra’s peers. Sandra dutifully keeps her two-month follow-up appointment with Dr Ceber. But she never returns after that, despite the need for at least a year of aftercare.
She lives on her small savings while she recovers, growing bored and increasingly nervous about her seeming stasis and financial insecurity. She rolls joints and drinks tea and re-reads the same magazines while the rain beats down on the roof. Unable to use her body, at least for a while, she obsesses about finding new ways of making income.
‘I just need the rent paid. It’s like a cooperative, really, but I hold the reins. I only take ten dollars from every job, no matter what it is. What you do is your concern,’ she tells the new girl briskly. Then she stands up from the couch with some trouble and slowly shows her through the small house on Buckley Street in Footscray, where she has just taken over the lease. ‘Clean towels from here, dirty towels go there. If you’re between clients, hanging out in the girls’ room, just give a knock after a half hour’s up. That’s how we let each other know.’ Through the front window, she sees the cops pull up outside and excuses herself for a moment to let them in. They stand in the front hall for a few minutes where she jokes with them, has them laughing, slips them their cash, sees them off. Everything has run smoothly here, apart from that night when she lost her cool with one of the girls who was carrying on like a fucking banshee about something or other. Sandra picked up a bottle and threw it at her. ‘Just missed the TV by a bee’s dick! Would’ve smashed the TV to fucking pieces,’ she explained to the heads that popped out of the rooms at the sound of glass shattering against the wall.
She opens a small bric-a-brac shop in North Melbourne with her friend Robyn. The rent is only twenty dollars a week and she loves scouring estate sales and garage sales, loves tweaking the displays in the window, loves the process of turning nothing into something. But as soon as her body feels ready, she grabs the chance to make some real money. By October 1980, four months after her surgery, she passes the brothel on to one of the girls, hands the shop over to Robyn and heads for Kalgoorlie.
Sandra does not remember how she heard about Hay Street and the money to be made out west. But Kalgoorlie, six hundred lonely kilometres inland of Perth—itself one of the most isolated cities in the world—has been a frontier gold-mining town since 1893. Its brothels have long been part of popular lore, and it is also likely that Sandra would have encountered women in the Melbourne brothels where she had worked, going to or returning from their ‘tour of duty’ in the goldfields.
In 1980, Kalgoorlie was still the Wild West. Still very much that frontier town of miners and prostitutes, people arriving for the gold, working long hours on short-term contracts and divided by gender, with the attendant drinking and fighting and fucking. Whether you drove or took the train or flew in direct from ‘the eastern states’ (a phrase which still carries an air of cultural divide if not outright suspicion) your overriding impression on arrival would have been one of dust and tin, of heat, impermanence and remoteness.
While prostitution itself was not illegal in Western Australia, most prostitution-related activities, such as soliciting or brothel-keeping, were. But for nearly one hundred years the Kalgoorlie police pursued an unwritten but immutable practice of selective policing known as the Containment Policy, which ‘grant[ed] criminal immunity to a limited number of brothels, in order to “contain” the activity and enforce unofficial restrictions on the businesses and the work force’.5
The tin brothels of Hay Street became a major tourist attraction for both paying customers and voyeuristic visitors. By concentrating prostitution in one place, Containment had made Hay Street—and Kalgoorlie—infamous. Sandra, when she arrived, was not aware of the policy, but she came to know its terms intimately. They structured her life for a year and a half.
When she first gets there, she goes straight to the police station to register. Name, address, age, marital status. Photograph. They tell her the rules: prostitutes must reside on brothel premises and submit to weekly medical examinations; they are prohibited from visiting the town’s pubs, cinemas and swimming pool. They warn her that if she breaks these rules, she will be out on the next plane or train. Then the madam of her new house, whom she spoke to before leaving Melbourne, takes her on a tour of the town. Sitting in the hot car, Sandra listens while the madam explains the hours, curfew, job prices, payment protocol and the requirement to keep her doctor’s book up to date; also the house rules, which culminate in the admonition that should she fuck a black man, she will be thrown out.
Sandra’s house, like all the brothels on Hay Street, is a low-slung
corrugated-iron shed. There are individual bedrooms for the girls, all in a row, and a communal lounge room and dining area. Each bedroom has two doors: one opens back into the house and the other opens onto a long outdoor corridor running across the front of the house. Directly across the corridor from each of these front-facing doors is a second, open doorway which looks out onto Hay Street. She is expected to have her tea and be sitting in this doorway by 6 p.m. each day. There, under the lights, is where she will solicit clients while being gawked at by the tourists and townspeople who drive slowly past.
Taking her suitcase out of the car, Sandra asks the madam about the thick wire over the windows and light bulbs. The madam explains that the miners are paid fortnightly: every second week, there is no money in the town.
‘They want it but they can’t pay for it, so they get drunk and come up and raise a riot,’ she explains. ‘If something like that happens, you just lock the doors, love, and they can’t get in.’
She assigns Sandra to the first room. Number one. The room number corresponds to a number on the row of mailboxes lining the common area. In her mailbox Sandra will deposit, after a brief discussion with each client, the up-front payment. The madam will collect the night’s earnings from her mailbox each morning, tally it up, take half and return the remainder to Sandra. But sometimes Sandra will be groggily cleaning up her room and a hundred-dollar bill will unfurl from beneath an overflowing ashtray like a creature disturbed under a log. Another hundred might be shaken out from, say, the folds of her sheets as she strips her bed or plucked from between the empty bottles covering her bedside table like a stand of trees. These are the bills that maybe she doesn’t place in her mailbox.
The doctor, officially the obstetrician to the town’s married women, also visits Hay Street every week. In each brothel, the madams set aside a room for examinations. There he swabs for the common local sexually transmitted infections. Once a month, he takes blood to test for syphilis and hepatitis B and C. While many of the women are hepatitis B positive, and there is ‘a bit of chlamydia, a bit of gonorrhoea’, the overall rates are not high in the early 1980s, despite the fact that ‘practically no one used condoms’.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 12
