The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  Janice starts sorting through the piles on her couch, tossing things into the rubbish bag that Sandra is holding open for her. She holds up a photo from her teens; in it she is young and beautiful, sitting in the sun with friends. Then she holds up a frame but the photo inside looks like black scribbles on brown cardboard.

  ‘This got wet,’ Janice says woodenly, before explaining that it was an old family photo. She then picks up a nail buffer; scrutinises it for a while. ‘This is just a nail buffer. I don’t really have nails anyway,’ she says, placing it in the bag. And then, speaking to herself, sharp and low, ‘Why do you do this? You know what rubbish is.’

  ‘Because you see yourself as rubbish,’ Sandra says. ‘Time to start seeing the good in life. You deserve it.’ The angel statue suddenly slips off the couch and bounces on the carpet; a wing snaps off.

  ‘Is that a bad omen?’ Janice asks, looking up at Sandra frantically.

  ‘You know what it’s saying?’ Sandra answers with a smile. ‘I’m broken, but I’m not dead.’

  Though Sandra’s older sister Barbara and her youngest brother Christopher are alive, she hasn’t had contact with them in decades and so it is more accurate to say that her only remaining family consists of Kerrie, her brother Simon’s widow, who lives in Queensland. Kerrie has known Sandra for thirty-three years. Their relationship is amiable and, while not intimate, it is a significant one in Sandra’s life in that it is the only one that she has consistently maintained from the period following her sex reassignment surgery through her last years as a sex worker, through the time Sandra ‘was heavy on drugs, alcohol and things like that’, through her various relationships, businesses and health issues. Sandra describes her relationship with her brother and her sister-in-law as fond, but not particularly close: ‘there was an admiration but also a distance’.

  Kerrie and Simon met in 1982 and were together for twenty-six years. Very early on, and without fuss, Simon explained to Kerrie that he had ‘one brother, one sister, and a brother-sister’. Despite the five-year age gap and Simon’s signature quietness, the two siblings were similar in significant ways. Both were beaten by Bill as children and kicked out of home by seventeen. Kerrie describes Simon’s ability to handle painful memories or events as ‘making it water off a duck’s back. He left it behind. He didn’t carry things with him to make him a nasty person’. The corollary of this particular type of forward-focus, shared by Sandra, was that ‘if you crossed him, he did not care about you anymore. He would just wipe you out of his life’.

  Sandra loved Simon early and long. She named her first child after him. In turn, Simon ‘loved his sister. He was very accepting of her and her decision. He never, ever turned his back on her’. On trips back to Melbourne, he and Kerrie would always visit Sandra. But they did not tell Ailsa. Back at Birchill Street, Sandra was verboten. ‘I did try to talk to Ailsa, one time, about it,’ Kerrie told me. ‘I said, “Ailsa, sometimes people are just born with the wrong genes, and they can’t help how they feel.” But they were a generation that did not accept that sort of stuff. She would never forgive her.’

  Once, Sandra asked Kerrie to see if Ailsa would speak with her on the phone. ‘Ailsa said, “No, I don’t want him ringing here. I don’t want him to come here.” Sandra never got the opportunity to make peace with it and that’s why I think her sister was very wrong about the funeral.’ Kerrie is referring to the fact that when Ailsa died, Sandra tried to attend her mother’s funeral. ‘Her sister went off her scone, so Simon, for the peace of it, just said to Sandra, “Barbara doesn’t want you there, she is carrying on a treat.” He didn’t care if Sandra came and sat in the back of the church. But she didn’t come.’

  One of Sandra’s prized possessions is a guest book in which her past houseguests have left notes and in which, in 2001, Simon wrote: Certainly worth the trip for your fabulous cooking and company. After the obligatory crap—just remember that you are much loved, and that Kerrie and I think of you often. No matter what, always your brother, Simon.

  Simon, that little boy whose older brother Peter bought him a chemistry set with his first pay cheque, was awarded an Order of Australia for his army service in the field of engineering ten years before he died suddenly in Papua New Guinea, where he had been doing consulting work. Besides having photos from Simon’s award ceremony around her house, Sandra will speak proudly of her little brother’s achievements and show photos of him on her phone whenever it is near-relevant in conversation.

  No one is quite sure what became of Barbara after she ‘married some Asian gentleman’ but Christopher is an executive at one of Australia’s top private companies. In Kerrie’s opinion, ‘Sandra has sort of reached a point in her life where she is, I wouldn’t say “happy”, I would say “content with herself” and how her life has panned out.’

  All four siblings came from the same small house in West Footscray but if the metrics could be standardised, Sandra may be seen to have come the furthest. ‘Sandra has achieved quite a bit in coming from nothing and she has done it all on her own. She is an amazing woman, she really is, an absolutely amazing woman.’

  Sandra guides Janice outside for a rest. Overdressed for the day’s heat as though bundled against the memory of cold, Janice sips a little water and stands sweating in the sun. She cannot remain outside for more than a few seconds before she is compelled to run back inside and check that the cleaners haven’t thrown out anything of value. You can see the compulsion overtaking her, strangling her like a vine. At first she makes little excuses each time she darts back inside: she forgot her phone, her keys, she just needs to check on something, needs to check one last thing, oops, forgot one little thing, just one moment, be right back. But then, despite assuring Sandra that now she’ll really have a good rest out here, Janice gives in to the pressure mounting up inside her and dashes back in to claw through the rubbish bags. I can see it and I can feel it: intrusive thoughts are circling Janice like sharks, they are snapping at her, giving her less and less time between assaults, before dragging her under. Janice is drowning, she is being eaten alive.

  Seeing this, Sandra reminds her about the goal they are working towards. ‘Come on darl, remember the vision we discussed? You and your kids and a cup of tea on the couch?’ This is a Pankhurst trademark: encouraging her clients to think in terms of small, achievable goals. Where a client is even moderately receptive, Sandra will use this language repeatedly, returning to it like a refrain over the course of her day or days spent working with them. And it is based on a practice she follows herself.

  I once asked Sandra whether, given what she deals with each day, she was a pessimist or an optimist. She replied without hesitating: ‘I’m an optimist, yep, I’m an optimist. Always look on the bright side of life. You can achieve whatever you want and do whatever you want as long as you apply yourself and have a positive outlook.’

  Janice unfurls for a moment, but the peace passes quickly as a new worry comes slicing down. ‘You’re not throwing anything out?’ she calls out to the cleaners through the screen door.

  ‘No,’ comes the answer, and she is released to try to make small talk with Sandra for the few seconds of her respite. But almost immediately she wonders aloud where a small box with some photos went, and when she cannot find it, starts frantically pulling rubbish bags out of the trailer.

  One of Janice’s kids arrives and hurries up the driveway. ‘I’m here, Mum,’ he says and starts rubbing Janice’s back. Janice, still bent over the rubbish bags, immediately enlists him in the search for the photos.

  Sandra calls the son over and tells him that his mother should drink some fluids because she’s been working hard all morning and that, while he’s welcome to go inside of course, if he does, he’ll need to wear a mask because of the mould. The young man nods like Sandra has just read him the instruction manual for a device he has never seen before. He takes a mask, disappears inside for a few minutes and when he emerges it is obvious that he is struggling to inhabit the rol
e of his parent’s parent that has just been thrust upon him completely and irrevocably. Shell-shocked, he says in a low voice to Sandra that he hadn’t realised how bad the house had got. It didn’t look like this, with all the mould, last time he was here.

  ‘When was that, darl?’ Sandra asks.

  ‘Five years ago,’ he answers. ‘She won’t let us inside anymore.’

  Lizzie emerges with the box Janice thought had been thrown out. The son, embarrassed, starts tying up the rubbish bags they’ve disturbed. ‘Just go comfort your mum, love,’ Sandra says.

  Phil and Leigh are instructed by Sandra to go inside and remove the couch so that it can be replaced with the one waiting in the second trailer. The men shift the couch away from the wall, revealing a thick pile of dirt and ashy mould studded with rubbish and lost items so diverse I wonder about the circumstances that brought them here: three shoes, a Disney clock, a full bottle of mouthwash, empty packets and boxes, a bottle of vitamins, air fresheners, spiders.

  ‘I couldn’t get behind the couch, obviously,’ Janice says wanly, staring down at the mess. And then she drops to the floor and starts hunting feverishly through the pile. As the men push the old couch out the door, Sandra turns and—despite not wearing a mask herself and the particular vulnerability of her lungs—shouts angrily at Leigh to put his mask on. ‘You get a mould spore on your lungs and that’s it!’

  Phil pulls Sandra aside. He tells her what he noticed when he was crouching down to lift the couch; the walls have ‘gone soft’ from the mould. Sandra checks to confirm this; they are spongy. Her face falls as she realises the implications.

  ‘There’s more to do here than what a clean’s gonna fix,’ she sighs quietly.

  The house needs to be immediately shut down for health and safety reasons. Everyone out. Stepping over the random mosaic of rubbish that is still thick on the ground and spilling into the holes in the walls, the cleaners and Janice and her son and Sandra file out one by one, defeated, leaving the house to its mossy darkness and small forest noises as the door closes behind them with a dry thud.

  Everyone gathers around the old couch in the middle of the driveway. Janice huddles close to Sandra like a rabbit sheltering under a tree. Sandra daintily spreads a white bodysuit over the arm of the couch and sits down. She takes out her phone and starts tapping, perfect nails flying across the filthy screen. Janice sits with her son’s arm around her shoulders. She will go back to his house tonight.

  ‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘stuff doesn’t replace what you’ve lost. You can’t put a price on what I’ve lost.’ Her lips are set in a line and she stares ahead. ‘Did we get my hairbrush?’ she asks suddenly. Sandra replies that it’s in her purse. ‘OK. Should I go get the tea bags and the milk I bought yesterday?’

  ‘Leave it, love, the mould gets in everything,’ Sandra advises.

  ‘I feel like I’m in another world,’ Janice says, unblinking.

  Sandra sails smoothly on. Speaking calmly, she remains insistently chatty, leading Janice by example: everything is all right.

  ‘I like your perfume,’ Janice says to Sandra.

  ‘Chanel, love,’ she answers while motioning to Phil to lock the door before going into a soothing commentary on how different fragrances smell different on different people, throughout which Janice murmurs in agreement.

  The furniture that Sandra brought lies untouched in the trailer out front. She would have given Janice ‘a new start’ had conditions allowed. She would have removed all the rubbish and contaminated furnishings from the house and disinfected the floors, walls and ceilings. From her own stores, she would have installed for Janice new furniture and sheets and towels, perhaps not matching (as is always Sandra’s strong preference) but clean, and folded with military precision. She would have organised Janice’s closets and cupboards, fanned out a few of the most recent gossip magazines on Janice’s coffee table and fluffed the new pillows on the couch. ‘I have a bit of a thing for lifestyle programs on housing, designing, and all that,’ Sandra once told me. ‘I utilise a lot of that in how I present houses for people, especially with hoarding. I have a firm belief that we change the concept of the house from what it was, so that they have in their mind that things are different now. It helps with their processes of dealing with the change and then it’s a constant reminder that they’re not following the same patterns and things need to be different.’

  A change in domestic topography is, sometimes, enough to set the interior life of a client on an improved course. Not so much (and here I differ with Sandra) due to the power exerted by one’s environment—although that, of course, has significant influence—but rather because of the fact that someone cared enough for them to actually do this. This transfer of lamps and microwaves, of sofas and pillowcases, is not a panacea for deep-seated illness or dysfunction, but it is good for the heart.

  And it goes both ways. By making a home for her clients, Sandra has made a home for herself. Despite having experienced worse blows than many of her clients, she is the one who comes in to make order out of their chaos. The undeniable boost this gives her is not a simple question of schadenfreude or, at the other end of the spectrum, altruism. It is the product of meaningful work: the sense of purpose we create by cultivating our gifts and sharing them with the world.6 And yet, it is often not enough to imbue those clients with the type of wellbeing that Sandra enjoys. It would have taken more than a new sofa to give Janice what she needs.

  What happens to Janice next is out of Sandra’s hands. She will relocate, which will not stem the flow of rubbish that will follow her like a polluted river if she is allowed the great swathes of solitude she insists upon.

  Soon the couch will be lifted into the skip and everyone will pack up and disperse and Sandra’s brief hours of helping Janice will be over. But for now she is here, looking Janice in the eyes and chatting casually to her in the sun, actively eliciting her responses, calling on her opinions, calling her out from wherever it is she longs to be left: if just for these moments, calling her back.

  10

  If anything was going to make her regret reporting it to the cops it was this little man arguing before the court that the whole case was a joke because, as you could clearly see, the victim was no trembling flower, she was a big burly bloke who would have fought him off if it had happened the way she—or is it he? Apologies, your Honour, I’m confused, I think we all are, what was it again?—claims it did.

  Sandra returns exhausted from her first day of giving evidence. Rick is lying on the couch watching TV.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he asks without looking up.

  ‘Shithouse,’ she replies, fixing them both a drink. And then she says more to herself, in a defeated tone he hasn’t heard from her before, ‘What am I gonna do?’

  He peels himself away from the screen. ‘Look, just tell ’em to check out the photographic evidence,’ he says.

  ‘They have all that already,’ she replies in a monotone.

  ‘Nah, you know, the photos that the cops took. The ones of the door, you know, where he tore it all off in one piece.’

  She tilts her head to one side, waiting.

  ‘Just tell ’em. “It was solid wood, mate. If he did that to the door, what do you reckon he done to me?”’ And then he turns back to the TV.

  For once, he has earnt his keep. The next day she makes Rick’s point in court. The defence requests a brief recess. When court reconvenes, a guilty plea is entered.

  ‘This guy come bangin’ on the door.’ That’s where she’ll start the story when she tells it thirty years later, her voice absolutely steady: with bone and muscle and flesh on wood and how she knew he was strong from the volume of it. A fist like a horse’s hoof.

  The Dream Palace is just another brothel, a small house down a poorly lit street in an industrial suburban neighbourhood ‘away from everywhere’, where she has worked for about three months. It is a Saturday night, mid-May, and the day has gone just like any other Saturday. She
started around 10:30 a.m., intending to work a double shift, finishing when they close at 4 a.m. Sunday. By 8 p.m., she has seen six or seven clients. It is just her and Jenny, the other girl working that night. Lucifer, the madam’s large black guard dog, is asleep out the back.

  She is between jobs, wearing a full leotard and stockings, sipping tea with Jenny in the lounge room and trying to ignore that banging on the front door. Though her sobs have turned into infrequent sniffs, Jenny is still distraught from her last client, a huge man who choked her. Hearing Jenny scream, Sandra enlisted her client to throw the man out, and he left, carrying his shoes in his hand. But now here he is again, pounding on the door.

  ‘It’ll be right, hon,’ Sandra says absently to Jenny, huddled at the end of the sofa with her hands wrapped around a teacup. Any type of violence causes Sandra to panic, so the whole thing’s thrown her off a bit, but she’s sure if they ignore him he’ll get bored and piss off like all the other drunk fuckheads. ‘God, we get all sorts in this job, hey?’ she says lightly, looking up briefly from the joint she’s rolling. She is about to lick the paper closed when there is an almighty crash, which is the sound of wood ripping as the front door splinters open. And they both scream, she and Jenny, these women who do not scare easily, and suddenly the man at the door is in the lounge room, so large that he blocks out the light. He grabs Sandra and then Jenny by their hair and at first the pain doesn’t register over the fear as he drags them like rubbish bags down the hallway, growling, ‘If you do what you’re told, you won’t get hurt.’

  The improbable name of this man is Mel David Brooks. On this night, he is on bail for previous charges of burglary and aggravated rape. Brooks pauses near the front door where he makes both women kneel low to the ground. He forces them to remove all their clothing. He unzips his fly and removes his flaccid penis. He forces it, again and again, into the mouth of each woman. After a while, he decides that he wants to turn the porch light off. Though she is terrified, Sandra tries to preserve the possibility that a client might come along and inadvertently scare Brooks away. ‘You can’t turn the light off—it’s on a timer,’ she tells him. So he steps onto the porch and looks around for the fuse box. Jenny stands up and he barks, ‘Get back down on your knees!’ Then he turns the power off at the main switch and the house disappears into darkness.