The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  Many of the women get in to get out. These women work in Hay Street for four to six weeks straight before leaving Kalgoorlie with enough money to pay for their housing or education, or a trip or a car. Some madams make employees who stay longer take a week off every three months so they don’t burn out. Some women take a few days off when they are menstruating; others just insert a sea sponge and keep working. Like them, Sandra is there to make money. She becomes one of the top earners. She makes a lot of money. ‘A lot.’

  She glistens in the doorway like something edible, narrows her eyes against the glare of late sun. She lives in the time before. When she has showered, long and hot despite the heat, while airing out her room. When she has washed her sheets, hung them to dry too fast in the stabbing sun and smoothed them back on her bed. When she has nested the pillows back in their places, given them one quick karate chop to make them sit just so. Cracked a joint. Chatted with the other girls. Regaled them in a whisper about how—despite the fact that her mailbox had been particularly full that morning, to the delight of the madam—she discovered yet another hundred dollars on the sink in her bathroom.

  ‘Huh!’ she marvels theatrically. ‘So I go to myself, “Fuck, what’d I do last night? If nothing else, I’m a good slut.”’ When they have chuckled and drunk from the bottles she buys for the house. When she has set her hair. Glued a nail. And finally, when she has angled a folding chair just so in the doorway, to enjoy the gentle warmth before it fades to a feeling barely remembered.

  She shares with the other girls what she’s been taught. To put a towel down on the bed. To slide across the bed, melting into ‘the goddess look’. To say, ‘Put your arm around me and kiss me.’ To heat a glob of Vaseline in one hand while the customer is thus distracted, then to throw a leg up near your head and reach that hand around the outside of the thigh and underneath, placing the lubricated fist in front of your crotch. ‘I have this thing that I don’t actually have sex with them,’ she says. ‘If you get the position of your arm right, and warm up the Vaseline right, they’ll fuck your hand! I’ll say, “Just kiss me a bit more,” (not that I want to, but to distract them) and they’ll get off like a rocket. Bang bang bang. Straight onto a blanket, you do the actress bit and then off you go. So I never really have sex. It’s quite ingenious really. That’s how I make my money.’ To assist her in this, she pops a lot of pills. This she also shares with the girls: ‘Mandies make you randy, make you root like a fucking viper and be making a lot of money.’

  But she also makes her money by looking like she has already made it. Each small room comes furnished with a double bed, a locking wardrobe, a dressing table with mirror, a bedside table and a washstand where the women wash the client while inspecting them for signs of infection before getting started. During her free time, Sandra cruises the secondhand shops in town and buys furniture. In her tiny room she sets up a wall unit and a free-standing bar stocked with liquor; she brings in a lamp, a rug, coordinated bedding, soft music. There, in that tin shack on the edge of a great desert, she transfigures an oasis into being.

  She steps back to check that the wine-red curtain is hanging straight and one of the younger girls stops in the hallway to gaze in.

  ‘It looks like a luxury to come into my room,’ Sandra explains. ‘I always make out like I’m very wealthy and well to do because it creates an illusion around me.’ What she does not say, because she has not realised it yet, is that the more she makes, the more she spends because the more miserable she is, really. Furniture, gifts, clothes, accessories, booze, drugs. She came here with the specific intention to make money and she is unrelenting about it, but unlike some of the other women who get in to get out, she is one of the girls who parties. It drains her savings, but on the other hand she remembers those pilled-out nights as ‘fun times, to say the least’. It is not quite a house, this long, low shack with its tin walls radiating heat in the summer sun. But it is home for a time.

  No one is sure how the rumour starts, but word gets around that there is a drag queen working on Hay Street. Drunk, laughing, enraged, the men have resolved to hunt him down—a preoccupation that survives when the alcohol wears off and renews itself in the pubs where they gather, reeking of cigarettes and beer and fried food and sweat. They are saying that the bloke is in the first room of the first house. The fearful vigilance Sandra carries just beneath her skin like shrapnel twists inside her now. She is tall, huge-breasted, she has large hands. But so does the Swedish girl in the room a few doors down who is taller, bustier, larger.

  ‘You know what we’ll do?’ She smiles, this beautiful woman Sandra will always be grateful to, but whose name she will forget. ‘We’ll swap rooms.’

  From the girl’s sparsely furnished room nearby, Sandra strains to hear what’s being said as the men walk up the veranda and through the door of room number one.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ the woman greets them.

  ‘We reckon you’re a bloke,’ the spokesman says menacingly.

  Later the woman will tell Sandra how she responded. How she opened her robe so that she was perfectly naked. How she leaned back on her elbows and splayed her legs. ‘Do I look like a bloke?’ she asks evenly. ‘Do I fuck like a bloke?’ She addresses this question directly at one of the men.

  ‘No,’ comes the muttered reply.

  ‘Well. You best get word round town that you’re dreamin’,’ she says lightly.

  Down the hall, in the room that feels like a cage, Sandra’s heart is racing as the men clear out. If someone told her then that eighteen years later this town would elect a transgender former prostitute and brothel madam as a local council member she would have died laughing.

  She flies back to Melbourne and the memory of Maria to testify against Phillip John Keen. Back also to the doctor who refills her prescriptions for hormones and for drugs. Back back back.

  There were two reports in the Age on the coronial inquest into Maria’s death. The first, 28 February 1980, described evidence that ‘[a] bouncer at a disco jumped on the stomach of a pregnant girl before she died…Maria Gloria Paten gave an awful scream and moaned before the bouncer dragged her outside’. The coronial court was also told that ‘Miss Paten was dressed as a male at the time’ and heard evidence from Miss Amanda Celeste Claire ‘who described herself as a trans-sexual and Miss Paten’s lover’.

  One month later, the ‘pregnant girl’ had become ‘a 19-year-old woman’ who incidentally happened to be ‘three months pregnant at the time’. This article shows how, in committing Mr Keen for trial on a charge of manslaughter, the Coroner laid a good deal of blame on the small shoulders of the victim: ‘Mr Griffiths said Miss Paten had provoked Keen…but that his actions in refusing to re-admit her to the disco on June 26 last year had “overstepped the mark”.’ The Coroner said: ‘I have no doubt that the deceased provoked Mr Keen into doing what he in fact did, that is when she was on the floor, he jumped on her, landing knee first on her stomach area.’

  It would be twenty-five years before the Victorian legislature recognised this language for what it was and repealed the defence of provocation on the grounds that it predominantly operated to excuse male violence towards women.

  Sandra gives her evidence, reliving that night on the stand, and afterwards she drinks alone and takes her pills and sleeps with the television on in a shitty motel at the edge of the city. Then she catches a plane back west where she sits still for five hours straight, grey as a dead tooth.

  Sandra remembers how Keen responded to the suggestion that his attack on Maria was racially motivated by offering his Asian fiancée as proof that he wasn’t a racist. But she has forgotten whether he was found guilty of the crime. She thinks he went to jail; can’t say for sure. The court file on the matter contains only the charges and various adjournment orders. I wonder whether Sandra’s uncertainty is proof that, in the end, retribution is irrelevant. Or whether it just shows how good she is at escaping.

  She leaves the first brothel to go work for another
Hay Street madam who made her a good offer. One day she wanders into the shared kitchen and opens a cupboard. Sorts through its contents, throws out expired packages and cans, arranges others according to size and shape. Inspired, she moves on to the fridge. Then the pots, the pans, the cutlery. She goes shopping for food. From her own pocket, she starts cooking meals for the house.

  ‘You’ve got a flare for this,’ the madam comments appreciatively. ‘You make a home for them.’ Looking to retire and move to the suburbs of Perth, the madam asks Sandra if she would be interested in taking over the business. Sandra is flattered by the show of confidence but declines.

  ‘I sorta really don’t want to make a life career out of this, you know,’ she replies. ‘It isn’t really what I want to do long term.’ And by the time Sandra leaves Kalgoorlie, they are—perhaps strangely—very good friends.

  •

  Sandra left Kalgoorlie but where did she go? In the fathomless cosmos of her twenties and thirties, dates and places float completely free of each other. The name of the Swedish girl is lost. The names of the madams are lost. The names of the brothels, the precise length of time in Kalgoorlie, all lost. I scrap draft after draft of my timeline and even when I am assisted in my task by Sandra’s recollection, the narrative remains a tangled necklace. Events link into one another only so far before they halt, abruptly, at some great knot where they loop over each other so tightly that some seem to disappear altogether. Still, I pinch at it and pick at it, seeking slack, until, sometimes, it loosens and a line—a dented, mangled line—spreads out.

  It is most likely that sometime in 1982 Sandra took what she had managed to save and bought a ticket to Sydney, perhaps on a tip from the madam or one of the other girls. There, she worked for a few months at a brothel in Lidcombe because that is where she met Rick, a client who kept coming back just to visit her and, soon, to take her out. Rick, who looked like Clint Eastwood and whom she called Clit Eastwood. Rick, for whom she went to sleep wearing make-up and for whom she woke up early to reapply it. Rick, who told her he would’ve married her if it weren’t for this ‘mental problem’ he had with ‘the whole gender thing’. Rick, who was never faithful to her and who lived off her like a gut worm for years and called her ‘Frank’ behind her back.

  But Rick keeps coming back and for that she is willing to pretend it doesn’t hurt so much. She is excellent at patting this pain down, blending it into the landscape the way she contours her foundation. They make plans to move to Melbourne together.

  Despite all her hard work, her savings are drained by the money she spends on drink and drugs, on partying, on the people around her and on Rick. When she moves back to Melbourne she returns with nothing, to nothing; she discovers that Robyn has ripped her off, selling the furniture she left in her care as well as everything in their secondhand shop. Sandra never even knew she was a junkie. She has to start over again, sleep on floors again, work long shifts again at the brothels to save enough to make things comfortable for Rick when, eventually, he joins her.

  The line between who she once was and who she is now is concrete, but it is also porous. She gets dressed up one evening and drives back to Barkly Street, Footscray with a friend to play bingo, have a few drinks. Does she return to her old neighbourhood that night out of pride? As a claim of right? Perhaps it is a test, a personal challenge. Or it could just be hard loneliness, that type of desperation that makes one accept the stab wound of familiarity as a substitute for true connection.

  Her friend Kat, chain-smoking rollies held between thumb and index finger, reminds her of Maria; dresses and acts like Maria. Adrenaline shooting down her arms, Sandra steers past the darkened Sims grocery store where she still expects to see her mother walking out with flour and sugar, past the post office and the barber shop and the floors she used to sweep while the men smoked and laughed at her for being such a little poof. She parks and gets out of the drivers seat, hoping and dreading that she will see a familiar face. But even if she does run into someone, she will be protected by her make-up and her hair, her clothes, and her body. Like the time her cousin walked into the brothel. Looked right at her before he chose another girl. Didn’t even recognise her.

  ‘You’ll never guess who’s here,’ Colleen hisses urgently into the phone near the bar.

  ‘Can’t hear you!’ Linda yells, standing in her kitchen. Between the noise of her brothers drinking at the table and the kids playing footy inside and the roar of the pub behind her sister on the other end of the line, it is impossible to hear what Colleen is saying. ‘Hush, will you? It’s Colleen,’ she yells at the boys.

  ‘Peter’s here!’ Colleen says, louder now. ‘Dressed like a woman again! But I recognised him! The bingo down near Barkly Street!’

  Linda herds both boys outside to play. Closing the back door, she explains hurriedly to her brothers as she runs into the bedroom to change her clothes, ‘Pete’s down at the pub near Barkly Street. I’m going, you’ve gotta go home.’ The large men exchange looks. They slowly finish their ciggies, drawing down to the filters. They leave their beer cans on the table and shuffle outside to jump on their motorbikes. Too pregnant now, at eight months, to catch a ride, Linda jogs over to borrow the neighbour’s car.

  She scans the crowd for the blondest head. Walks over and stands at the end of the table and sees, almost, like words erased from a blackboard, her Pete chatting with ‘a girl that looked like a guy’. Sandra looks up with a polite smile that shatters into shards. ‘Linda!’ she says too brightly over her heart beating so hummingbird fast it feels still. She turns and strains to explain casually to Kat, ‘Just going to catch up with an old friend, love.’

  They sit on the steps for close to an hour as people push by to get to the toilets. Linda explains about her new man, how he is good to her and to the kids, though he doesn’t live with them. How Ailsa stopped speaking to her once she got pregnant. About the boys, how big they are now, how they’re doing at school, the way they remind her so much of their father. Maintaining eye contact, like a bird seeking land, she tells it all to Pete, but Pete is not there.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Sandra says. And also, ‘Really?’ And then, oddly, ‘I don’t like men anymore.’

  Linda nods at the words, too perplexed at first to feel a sting. Wonders whether that means he’s a lesbian now. Sandra stands suddenly and says that it’s been nice, really. Bingo is long over, and the pub is closing up. Sandra finds Kat’s familiar face; they join the people wandering out into the night. Absently stroking her stomach, Linda starts to ask for a phone number, but then she sees her brother out on the footpath, scanning everyone streaming out: hunting. His anger is a dark gift to her but she doesn’t want it, not now.

  And then it happens quickly. Linda’s brother pulls his fist back. Linda throws herself between them. Sandra reflexively raises her long, thin arms high in the air and stands there, eucalyptic, in the shadow cast by the street lamp. Then she pivots and runs down the street, her stomach lurching. He pursues her. ‘Look at that man chasing that woman,’ people shout on the footpath. Heads whip around in alarm.

  ‘Hoy!’ Kat barks and takes off after them.

  Linda, with her huge belly, follows for as long as she can before she has to stop, puffing, under that great weight.

  ‘It’s funny, I know. It’s funny now,’ Linda tells me, though everything in her eyes and her face and her yellowing photo albums spread out before us says otherwise.

  Celestial Star

  Maria Gloria Paten and Sandra, then known as Amanda Celeste Claire

  Late 1970s—early 1980s

  At a brothel on Hay Street, Kalgoorlie in the 1980s

  Sandra and Rick

  Janice

  It unsettles me whenever I think about it, my too-late realisation that Janice was actually talking; so still was her jaw, with its under-bite thrusting teeth up into the air like fence palings. But when everyone held still, you could feel it more than hear it, like the ocean in a shell, the low voice that barely murmured
over her lips before being swallowed back down to the darkness from which it came.

  ‘You know what my problem is? I’mtooslow. Why do I take so long?’ Janice was saying, smiling ruefully at Sandra while depositing a rubbish bag at the bottom of her front steps. Then she dashed back inside her house, locking the door behind her.

  Sandra and her crew of cleaners have been waiting outside Janice’s house for half an hour because, although Janice agreed to a 9 a.m. start when Sandra came last week to do the quote, she is now reluctant. Speaking to Sandra from the darkness behind her screen door, Janice politely asked for an extra half-hour during which—Sandra would see!—she’d do the work herself because this really wasn’t necessary after all.

  Sandra agreed to this request as a tactical measure and because the industrial-sized skip she’d ordered for Janice’s houseful of rubbish was still delayed in traffic. Two birds, one stone. She handed Janice a few jumbo black plastic rubbish bags and pulled a face mask out of the pocket of her purple parka. ‘Wear this over your mouth and nose, dear, you’ll feel better for it,’ she advised. Janice grabbed the mask and shut the front door.

  Sandra is perched gingerly on the low bricks lining an empty flowerbed, under the perfect blue sky. She checks her watch and her emails and banters with her employees, most of whom are standing in a circle nearby and smoking hard. Every few minutes Janice emerges, slightly bent over and gripping a bulging rubbish bag which she hefts onto the tiny patch of dirt and weeds outside her front door. She comments too brightly on how well and fast she’s working, before disappearing back through her door.