The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  He returns to the hallway, stopping to prop the front door up from where it dangles on one hinge and shove it closed again. The nearest occupied house, another brothel, is at the end of the long street. There is no one to hear Lucifer barking. Sandra is shaking, silently crying. Jenny tries to talk Brooks down. She tells him, ‘Whatever you want, we’ll try to do it.’ He shoves his penis back into her mouth and then into Sandra’s, where he ejaculates. Her stomach lurches. ‘Keep it in your mouth,’ he warns. She is going to vomit. She grabs the towel that Jenny has been wearing and furtively spits into it. The dog is circling them, mouthing at their arms, wagging his tail; now he thinks it is all a great game.

  ‘Get into the bedroom!’ Brooks shouts at both women. He pulls up the blind so that he can look out over the front yard. He forces Sandra to kneel, and repeatedly and painfully forces his finger into her anus. ‘Lick my arse!’ Brooks says as he turns around and bends over slightly. She can see clearly how dirty he is and, revolted, grabs the towel to wipe him. He warns, ‘Do it properly. Pull the cheeks apart.’ She tries not to vomit.

  Jenny is kneeling in front of him. Suddenly he says to Sandra, ‘Now you get in front.’ The women switch places. She is too scared to notice what Jenny is doing, too scared to disobey him although she thinks he will kill them both anyway. The doorbell rings.

  ‘I’ll go and answer the door, put him in another room,’ Jenny tells Brooks.

  ‘No, tell him we’re closed,’ Sandra says, thinking maybe the man can go and get help.

  ‘If you do anything foolish I’ll kill her,’ Brooks warns Jenny as she leaves the room.

  Casually answering the door with the shit-stained towel wrapped around her, Jenny gets rid of the caller and returns to the room, where Brooks is demanding money.

  Sandra tells him the madam has already collected it. He asks where her car is.

  ‘We got dropped here, don’t have cars,’ Sandra says, thinking of her car parked out back and the keys in her purse.

  Brooks nods. ‘Get dressed, both of you. We’re going for a walk.’ Sandra reaches for her leotard but he allows them only to wear towels. He grabs their hair again and walks them out of the house and across the road into the deserted parkland. They walk for some time, deep into the park, until they come to a cyclone-wire fence and cannot go any further and become just shapes moving on the dark grass; a lion tearing into its prey in the moonlight.

  ‘Spread your towels on the ground,’ Brooks commands, releasing their hair. He makes both women alternately kiss him on the mouth and suck his penis. Nauseated from the violence and the pain and the terror and the smell of his beastbreath and his dirty skin, Sandra feels even sicker as he repeatedly shoves his fingers into her vagina. She knows from the way he is talking and behaving that her life is in danger.

  ‘Get in the sixty-nine,’ he tells them. Sandra starts crying again. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jenny whispers to her. ‘It’ll be all right.’ Sandra flinches as he shoves his finger again into her anus. ‘Lick harder! You’re not doing it properly,’ he shouts at the back of her head, which is now between Jenny’s legs. Shaking, she tries to do what he says. She doesn’t know how much time passes as he rearranges them, again and again, like dolls.

  She looks up for a moment and sees that he has just ejaculated. She does not hesitate. She punches him in the balls, as hard as she can.

  Brooks goes to hit her but she ducks, grabbing his testicles and squeezing them hard with both hands. He just looks down at her. He doesn’t even flinch. Both women start yelling for help but the sound sinks into the night like ink on paper. Brooks darts again at Sandra but this time she fights back. They are struggling now, grappling in the half-dark. He digs his nails into the skin around her right eye. She looks around wildly, sees that Jenny is gone. Barefoot and naked, Sandra struggles to stand up. She throws Brooks off her and when he stumbles, she starts to run.

  She runs through shrubs and long grass and gravel and then out onto road; she runs back to the brothel and through the open door and down the black hallway and into the lounge room where, shaking, she feels around the sofa for the phone. Peering into it, she rings triple zero. She hears a thousand noises outside that are all Brooks coming to kill her as she frantically answers the operator’s questions. He tells her that the police are on their way. She hangs up, freezes, listens hard. Hearing nothing, she dials the madam.

  ‘Fucking get someone here, get someone here,’ she whispers when the woman answers. Hanging up, she feels in the dark towards where she left her purse. Looking, now, down the long hallway through the open door she sees Brooks loping up to the house. She runs down the hallway, towards the room they call the Dungeon, near the back of the house. Before she gets there, the lights suddenly come back on and she freezes for a second as though zapped. Turning, she sees him at the end of the hallway, hulking, enormous, framed by the gaping hole where the front door used to stand and staring right at her. ‘There you are,’ he says.

  She races into the Dungeon, throws her purse deep under the bed and grabs a towel to cover herself with and a studded leather strap with a wooden handle; runs out the back door and crouches on the gravel behind her car, looking out for his feet. Lucifer starts barking at her, giving away her location. She hits him with the strap to try to silence him. Then she hears a car pull up outside.

  She sprints around the side of the house to safety, whipping her head around wildly to check whether Brooks is onto her. She makes it out the front but it isn’t the police; it’s just another client. She calls out and pounds on the passenger door, but he drives off.

  She bolts down the middle of the road, past the factories, towards the other brothel. She is torn and bruised and bleeding, holding her towel up with one hand and fighting for the breath that her terror and her asthma are stealing from her.

  Panting, she runs up to the door of the other brothel and starts banging on it and ringing the doorbell. Through the window, she sees the women silhouetted against the yellow light inside. They can hear her pleading to be let in but they do not open the door. She starts begging, ‘Please let me in, pleaseletmein, please…’

  A police car pulls up.

  ‘You the one that called us?’ one of the two officers shouts through the car window.

  ‘Yesyesyes…’

  ‘Get inside now!’ he orders, pointing towards the door.

  ‘They won’t let me in,’ she cries.

  ‘Fuckin’ let her inside!’ he roars at the women in the window, who only now open the door.

  By 3:00 a.m. Sandra has identified Mel David Brooks from photo-graphs shown to her at the police station. By 6:10 a.m. she has given a ten-page sworn statement to the police.

  My full name is Amanda Celeste Claire. I am thirty-one years old. That’s where she starts her evidence, ageing herself by gratefully accepting the benefit of her upcoming birthday, still weeks away. The next day Brooks, a thirty-one-year-old machine operator from New Zealand, is located, arrested and charged.

  To understand how remarkable it is that Sandra pursued a case against Brooks, you must reflect on a number of things.

  The first is her relationship to the police as a transgender woman in the early eighties. At the time of her rape Sandra had witnessed and experienced years of institutionalised police violence towards transgender people. Despite this, she called on the service of the police and explicitly told them, in her statement: ‘I had better mention that I had a complete sex change at the Queen Victoria Hospital. Since then, I have lived as a normal female and have all the functions of a female.’

  Then there is her relationship to the police as a sex worker. She was aware of the culture of corruption involving some uniformed police and detectives. When she was the manager of the brothel in Footscray she had paid bribes directly to the police to be allowed to operate. She had knowledge of thousands of dollars in bribes paid to a consorting squad detective by Geoffrey Lamb, the owner of one of the brothels she worked in. Just up the road from Dream Palace,
members of the Caulfield police had been the subject of credible allegations that they attended an illegal brothel where they drank and had sex with the workers for free; one such gathering allegedly ended in shots being fired and a sex worker being raped.

  In these circumstances, to call on the police for help shows how desperately Sandra feared for her life. But to then proceed with her statement, thereby prolonging her contact with the police, was, in the particular policing environment of the early eighties, to insist with notable courage upon equal justice.

  There is also the consideration that she participated in prosecuting her attacker at a time when the equal protection of the law was not afforded to sex workers. Her case was processed three years after Victoria’s highest court held that the rape of a prostitute was less serious than the rape of a ‘chaste woman’. Years before this position was expressly disavowed—and despite being well aware of these prejudices from a cultural, if not a legal, position—Sandra nevertheless insisted on showing up at the County Court and giving evidence at the trial of her rapist.

  As countless other rape survivors have found, choosing to make and proceed with a statement means choosing to relive the violence of the rape again and again. Now, there are at least some protections designed to safeguard the mental health and wellbeing of survivors who walk this path. Such measures were unheard of at this time. In addition, Sandra chose to expose herself to this process knowing that she would have to withstand the additional disrespect and embarrassment of having her gender publicly scrutinised, questioned and misunderstood. This was the strange and hateful cost of the basic respect that she insisted upon for herself.

  The last remarkable thing about Sandra’s response to her rape was the result. She provided sufficient evidence for her rapist to be apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced: six years, with the possibility of parole after four. It was a breathtakingly short sentence given the context of his offending, the prolonged duration of the assault, the infliction of additional violence and humiliation, and his record of similar sexual offending.

  But it was relatively heavy when you consider that, between 2010 and 2015, the median prison sentence for a rape conviction was five years and that thirty years ago public attitudes held that raping a prostitute was only slightly more possible than raping your wife. So, yes: Sandra was not only spectacularly courageous, she was also remarkably successful.

  Shane

  What can I tell you about Shane? I can tell you that it is both true and untrue that his street was like any other street, that his block of flats was like any other block of flats, that the grass in the communal lawn that spread out before his front door like a dirty blanket was as green and as brown as any other grass. It is true because it all looked unremarkable and it is also untrue because hanging over everything was the smell of living death and the sort of too-loud silence that makes small creatures run for higher ground. I can tell you that the first impression one gets from looking at Shane is of bluntness. He appears both dopey and physically edgeless; there is something in his short limbs and rounded nose and stubby fingers and the open O of his goldfish mouth that suggests he has been dulled somehow—perhaps by using himself as a hammer against the anvil of the world.

  Shane is a convicted sex offender. And his eyes on this morning are charged: they are prowling, measuring, calculating. It would be wrong, therefore, to regard Shane as obtuse; his symmetry is still fearful. And while I do not think he is the type of hunter who would expertly stalk you by playing the wind, I believe he would not hesitate to act if you happened to wander off from the pack.

  Shane is not allowed to be alone with Sandra, who has come today to clean the wet and dry squalor in his small flat, nor is he allowed to be alone with any other female. Although vaguely intrigued by this, Sandra is not bothered by it in the slightest. She has come with four of her cleaners: Lizzie, Cheryl, Phil and Jarrod, who is six foot five and weighs at least 120 kilograms. But Jarrod is not the reason Sandra is unruffled. Though Sandra has not been told anything about the nature of Shane’s offending, and though she is a survivor of rape herself, it is in her nature to be entirely practical. ‘Regardless of what his convictions may be, it’s really just another job,’ she tells me. This position is not ideological or altruistic. It is bound up with the fact that Sandra is driven to do each job excellently, regardless of conditions.

  Sandra raps smartly at the front door. Shane stumbles out like a bear from a cave onto the cracked concrete of his small front porch and stands squinting in the morning light.

  ‘I need to have my breakfast, hey.’ A gravelly voice and the clumsy cunning of a toddler. ‘Can I get a few extra minutes?’

  Sandra responds lightly that she’ll return in ten minutes. ‘He probably had a few pieces to put away,’ she muses. ‘Probably planted them in with his clothes in the closet.’

  I ask her what she thinks he is hiding.

  ‘My mind boggles,’ she says, uninterested, checking her phone under a dove grey sky.

  Formerly known as Crossfire, Multi-Task is a cleaning product that Sandra uses to strip surfaces of food or nicotine stains. To it she adds a hospital-grade disinfectant called SanSol when she needs to address the additional presence of human off-gases and/or bodily fluids which may carry ‘HIV or bacterial infection’. This is the admixture that Phil is currently using to mop the ceiling of Shane’s bedroom. Lizzie and Cheryl, spared the job of cleaning the carpets because Sandra has determined that they are beyond saving, will use the Multi-Task/SanSol cocktail to clean the brown stains off the door and floor of his bathroom. No one is suited up today. ‘We use the suits on extreme cases,’ Sandra explains. ‘This is a regular, run-of-the-mill job.’

  Sandra’s knowledge about the process and instruments of very specific, diverse, urgent, complex and large-scale cleaning jobs is encyclopaedic. She indulges me when I hit her with hypotheticals about various types of jobs.

  ‘Death, no blood?’ I ask.

  ‘Death no blood I wouldn’t be called in for unless there were body fluids,’ she corrects me.

  ‘OK, say it’s been a couple of days and there is a smell,’ I say.

  ‘That is decomposition and that is heavy,’ Sandra sighs. ‘Decomposition: the first thing I think of is what has to be thrown out. What surfaces are there? Is it carpet or is it on lino? Because if it’s carpet, nine out of ten if it’s a decomposition, we’ll have to take the carpet out. That also guides me into whether we need a vehicle to be able to transfer the goods, because the prescribed goods handling course is quite specific,’ she explains rapidly.

  ‘Or it could be the mattress,’ she continues. ‘We buy huge bags that seal the mattress because the odour can be quite offensive. The first thought would be to get any soiled matter out of the property, because once the cause has gone, you can start eliminating the odour. You go through the sterilisation of cleaning everything. Everything in the house then has to be wiped down. If the body has been there for quite some time, then gases and everything would’ve impregnated the walls, the fabrics, all that sorta stuff. So, I would wash the walls down and the ceilings down, and then we would put the odour-control machines in to affect the fabrics and all that. You have to disconnect the smoke alarms because they will go off. You would open up wardrobes, cupboards and things like that because the smell would have gone into the clothes and everything there.’

  ‘Does that all have to be thrown out?’ I ask.

  ‘No, we’ll fumigate it with the odour control,’ she replies. ‘It just sprays into the room. It’s almost impossible to breathe and it’s supposed to be natural.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Ho hum, but you go with it. You let it fog up the house. You leave the house locked up for twenty-four hours, and then it should be hunky dory. In extreme cases, we have to put machinery on that’ll go for three days and three nights. You could have to remove flooring or whatever, if it’s soaked into the timber flooring.’

  I ask whether she has had to do that.

&nbs
p; ‘We have, on one occasion only,’ she replies. ‘It was dripping down into the apartment downstairs, so we had two apartments to clean. The guy downstairs had noticed this steady drip coming into his lounge room and the smell was in his place downstairs, so it was pretty bad.’

  ‘What would you do if there was a death with blood?’ I ask.

  ‘First you would know by the colour how deeply it has gone into the carpet,’ she explains. ‘If it’s light, you can usually get that out of the carpet without it affecting the underlay. We would spray solution over all the carpets to see whether there are droplets of blood, it illuminates the blood. This tells us where we’ve got to work and what we’ve got to work on. When we’re taught these skills, they say that if there’s an armchair that’s contaminated, you cut out the contaminated piece. To me, that’s a no-no. I would just take the whole piece of furniture away, because if you were the family coming back and having to deal with that chair, it’s going to be forever in your mind: that is where Dad died, if you know what I mean. Whereas, to me, you’ve got to be very particular about how you set the house up. It’s got to be as close to being back to normal as possible, but there might be some things missing. To me, you do not mark X as the spot.’

  Sandra tells me that male suicides are generally bigger jobs than females. ‘Men are dirty killers whereas the women are very tidy in the way they do it,’ Sandra says.