The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  ‘Like cooking,’ I offer.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sandra agrees. She goes quiet for a moment. ‘By the same token there was one guy who blew his head off, and he put plastic up in the bathroom, just so it’d keep it quite clean. It all went way over, but the thought was there.’

  Sandra is certified by the Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification in carpet cleaning and by the National Institute of Decontamination Specialists as a crime and trauma biorecovery technician. Aside from a vast amount of technical skill that needs constant updating, I ask Sandra what else the work requires. ‘Compassion,’ she replies solemnly. ‘Great compassion, great dignity and a good sense of humour ’cause you’re gonna need it. And a really good sense of not being able to take the smell in, ’cause they stink. Putrid.’

  The team has been inside Shane’s flat for about twenty minutes when an unpleasantness arises in the form of Shane, convinced that Jarrod has been ‘staring him down’, inviting Jarrod to fight. It is extremely unlikely that Jarrod was, in fact, staring him down. Though he is tall and solid, Jarrod is shy and softly spoken and calls everyone ‘bro’. In addition, Sandra is closely supervising everyone and Shane’s flat is tiny. Nevertheless, Sandra calmly and swiftly reassigns Jarrod to clean the bedroom with Phil. When Shane saunters in there a few minutes later, Jarrod greets him with a simple ‘Hi, boss’ and all is well; the power balance has been restored. Phil, in his usual black shorts despite the winter air blessedly blowing in through the open front door, asks Shane if his folks are well. Shane replies, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ as though they’re all just catching up at a barbeque.

  Dried brown fluid drips down the yellowed walls of the bedroom. The blinds are drawn. There is a bed, a chest of drawers and a coffee table which has been pushed up against the wall. In keeping with Shane’s practice of leaving items where they fall, the brown-stained carpet is strewn with dirty clothes, plastic bags, numerous leads and wires, toilet paper rolls and broken appliances. There is no cover on the pillow or the quilt or the yellowed mattress which lies sagging and slashed at one side, grey stuffing prolapsing from the wound. This could be the result of its age and quality, the many moves to which it has probably been subjected or an inelegant effort by Shane to conceal valuable and/or illicit property in its belly. On the floor are magazines (Sexpress) and books (How to Increase Energy, Reduce Stress and Improve Hearing in 90 Days). There are three televisions in the bedroom; two are enormous and they rest, side by side, on the top of the chest of drawers, screens turned towards the wall. The third television is tiny and it sits on the coffee table next to an unplugged blender base caked with dried brown liquid. The glass of the coffee table is black with dirt and mostly concealed under random shoes, wires, broken appliances, a bong, papers and books. A digital alarm clock flashes the wrong time. A dirty brown towel is crumpled on the floor like road kill. Shane wanders off into the kitchen and Sandra quietly instructs everyone to avoid all eye contact with him because, she has been advised, he will misread it.

  ‘I’m just making sure that everyone’s paired off in different rooms to get things done, making sure that they’re safe at all times,’ she whispers to me. ‘I really don’t have to worry about the staff because the staff are perfect in handling anyone who’s mentally ill or drug and alcohol affected or whatever. And this is just another one of those jobs, really, you know.’

  Her phone rings. The caller requests a reduction in the price she quoted recently for a job. ‘As you know, rubbish is very expensive to get rid of,’ Sandra replies matter-of-factly, ‘especially when it’s covered in urine and faeces.’

  Ending the call she peeks into the bathroom, appraising the progress made by Lizzie and Cheryl. Though nothing can be done about the holes punched into the door, they’ve sprayed off the brown streaks. All of the thick brown stains are now gone, too, from the floor and the toilet and the sink and the bathtub. Standing on the white floor with her creamy pink lipstick and her crisp purple parka and her blonde hair catching the light that filters in through the frosted window, Sandra is a Monet haystack; golden, many-hued, familiar, rising up from the linoleum landscape to catch and comfort the eye. Satisfied for now, she strides out towards the kitchen.

  The sound of his fridge does not please Shane. There is something about the pitch that upsets him, and so he unplugged it some time ago, allowing the contents to rot. Flies buzz out of the fridge when the door is opened, and it must now be emptied, disinfected and taped open to air out the smell. Cheryl addresses this while Lizzie tackles the various plates scattered around the flat from weeks of one-man dinners, abandoned with their piles of discarded bones and solidified grease puddles. These plates are balanced at odd angles on the kitchen bench and on top of the items crowding the bench; each bears a fork and knife, crossed like the diner is just taking a breather. All the kitchen surfaces are streaked brown with dirt. Brown fluid drips down the front of the cupboards and the oven. The stovetop is tiny, but on it rest two huge stainless steel cooking pots, and on one of the pots a frying pan is balanced, black with burnt food. Flies cover everything. Rat shit is sprinkled like seeds inside the oven.

  Despite the state of his house generally and his kitchen specifically, Shane is meticulous about the type and quality of the food he eats. The numerous health food products in his kitchen include: organic coconut oil, puffed millet, a fifteen-dollar bag of grain-free muesli, camu powder, fasting tea, maca powder and a large variety of vitamins, supplements and protein powders. Sandra is bending down to pick up orange peels strewn across the lounge-room carpet.

  ‘I don’t drink milk,’ Shane announces to her. ‘I’m going off meat, I’m going more pure. More pure lifestyle. And no prostitutes. Just kidding.’ Sandra remains focused on the orange peels.

  Shane has been strolling around the small rooms, watching the cleaners at work. He now goes and parks himself in the front doorway where the female cleaners have to brush past him when they take bags of his rubbish outside to the trailer behind the STC van. When he exits the living room, Sandra looks down at the enormous barbell plonked in the middle of the floor and wonders, quietly, if the purpose of this equipment is ‘to keep his strength up for what he likes to do in his “playtime”’. Shane also goes to the gym often and takes daily walks. ‘Maybe he’s on the lookout,’ she says grimly. ‘You can only surmise…’

  Sandra starts picking up larger pieces of rubbish that are intermixed with Shane’s possessions in random heaps on the furniture and floor. Shane re-enters the room now and stands too close to her with his arms dangling down by his sides.

  ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately,’ he says without moving. ‘You might think that it’s disgusting in here but I’ve been under a lot of stress. That’s why I can’t clean.’

  ‘What’s that, darl?’ Sandra asks him, standing up from where she has been squatting to scoop rubbish into a plastic bag.

  ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately,’ Shane repeats louder. He then coughs up into her face.

  Blinking down at him, Sandra points to a TV on a low, dirty coffee table. She suggests transferring it to the bookshelf. ‘This way, you would use the table for your coffee,’ she says.

  Shane smiles. ‘But I don’t drink coffee.’

  Sandra turns and places her hand on a small wicker bookshelf, piled with slightly soiled magazines and books (The Lazy Way to Success: How to Do Nothing and Accomplish Everything, Chicken Soup for the Soul, T’ai Chi Chi Kung: 15 Ways to a Happier You). A porn magazine is balanced on top of the books; a woman smiles out from the cover, a yellow star shielding her vagina.

  ‘Is there anything here you want to keep?’ Sandra asks pleasantly.

  ‘All of it,’ he replies. So she starts tidying the books and Shane wanders off again, arms at his sides. It is possible to see, just, the shape of the boy that he was.

  ‘Regardless of what the situation is with him, I see past that. I see, really, just mental illness. Just another day at the shop,’ she sighs. She
finishes up an hour later and walks down the street to say a quick hello to another client she helped a few weeks ago.

  12

  It’s not the first time she’s had crippling pain that she pushes into a tight little marble and drops down through the grates of her mind, somewhere deep below. It’s also not the first time she has had to instantly change everything. But that doesn’t make it easier.

  After the rape she is unable to work at all. Then, when she recovers physically, she finds that she is unable to do the sex work that has constituted her income for the last decade. She has Rick, and Rick has work, but that doesn’t mean much; Rick’s money is Rick’s money and her money is Rick’s money. In addition to food, shelter and transport, her needs include the drugs and alcohol she requires to deaden her mind enough to live and to sleep, the ability to supplement Rick’s lifestyle so that he hangs around, and the cosmetics and hormones which are not merely aesthetic but vital to her dignity. She has few savings, no one to ask for help; no safety net.

  Heavily made up and fizzing with self-doubt, she goes out each morning to apply for work. She picks up some hours behind the counter at Shield’s Drycleaners, her ‘very first straight job’ as a woman. The money is abysmal compared with what she is used to earning and it is anaesthetically boring, but it is a stepping stone. Soon she looks elsewhere and when she gets a call in response to her application to Black Cabs, she wilts with relief; it’s her ‘very first break’.

  Sandra works the radio at the taxi company. She doesn’t mind the nightshift—she’s worked nights for a decade—and she tolerates the awful salary, but the restrictions on what she can say to the drivers over the radio are unbearable. ‘Mac one, mac two, fucking rah rah rah,’ she jokes quietly in a robot voice to the other girls, after the first time she is disciplined by management. She is only supposed to pass on information about pick-ups and traffic, using a formal and impersonal tone.

  Instead, she knows all the drivers’ names, tells them jokes, discusses the day’s news with them, flirts, gives them shit, gives them nicknames, asks about their wives. The drivers like it because she keeps them awake, keeps them entertained and, in these days before mobile phones, keeps them safe. She calls the police a few times for drivers in trouble, and they send her flowers which she displays on her small desk. ‘The drivers love me, but you’ve gotta conform all the time,’ she protests as she packs up her things on the day she is fired. ‘Not everything fits into a box, though.’

  To be honest, she’s not too cut up about it. The experience has built up her confidence about holding down a straight job. Which is good—she’ll need to find another one pretty soon, because Rick’s not going to be any bloody help.

  She moves into a smaller flat to save money. Spends long days driving around the city, filling out job applications with a smile on her face. Weeks pass and she hears nothing back. She starts taking the bus to save petrol money. Then she starts walking, to save bus fare. She returns home in the early evening, her feet beating with fatigue, to sit alone at the table and stare at, and then through, the job classifieds. Waits for the phone to ring or for Rick to come home, maybe. The power bill is overdue, the rent is overdue. Her throat feels too tight, her chest too small; she starts yawning frequently just to feel like she’s getting enough air. She is aware, every second, that she could solve everything on the street or at any of the brothels where she still has connections, but that work is simply no longer possible for her. So she turns up the radio and drinks in the dark and when she starts thinking about ways to kill herself, she gets up and she walks. She spends whole nights pacing around her coffee table like a lion in a cage, this tall woman in a tiny flat too full of old furniture.

  Hungover, she yanks the local paper out of the mailbox and flips automatically to the back pages as she climbs the concrete stairs back to her flat. Something inside her stands to attention. Funeral conductor/arranger. She spends the day doing her hair and putting together her outfit and only has three drinks that night. She gets up early the next morning to do her make-up and go down to the WD Rose & Son Funeral Home to apply in person.

  There, in the soft breeze of the air-conditioning, her desperation is masked under her charm and small talk and knowing nods and cute one-liners; she pushes down the hunger inside her and gives only the impression of sweet proficiency. She shakes hands and smiles goodbye and then returns to the sarcophagus of her flat to wait with a hope that sinks and dies slowly over the next two weeks. So when the telegram finally arrives, it soars in as if it were the Annunciation itself: congratulations on becoming one of the first female funeral conductors in the state.

  The funeral home will give her self-confidence, a legitimate and ample salary, friends, a husband, a lover and the contacts she will use to start over, a decade later, when everything falls apart again.

  They dress like bruises, the old women clutching felted balls of moist tissue; the old dears with their interchangeable hats and griefs and polyester-clad elbows. Sandra crosses her legs under her desk, quickly yanks her skirt back down to her knees, taps a silver pen on a blank pad of paper, and begins: ‘As your funeral conductor, I make every member of the funeral party become involved in it so that they become very emotional.’

  Perplexed, the women on the other side of her desk remain silent.

  ‘A funeral should be like a play. You get it up to a crescendo,’ she explains, drawing a hill in the air. ‘You get everyone’s emotions there,’ she pokes the top of the hill with a long red nail, ‘they bubble over, then they boil down, and they get on with their life. Otherwise they’re up and down trying to deal with it for years. So, it’s just like conducting a play and getting everyone involved in the scenario.’

  The women nod, then smile.

  ‘I’ll ask everyone to take a flower as they walk in and then they can go put it on the coffin. They become involved like that,’ she says, pouring out two glasses of water, urging the women to take them. She explains the running order and asks a few questions about music and flower preferences. ‘I think Pachelbel instead of Bach—more soothing, don’t you think?’ she says. ‘But if you have a song that was special to him, you just let me know and I’ll work it right in.’

  Rising now, her bangles crash as she readjusts her shoulder pads and holds out her hand to help the widow up. ‘I know you’ll do a wonderful job, dear,’ the old woman says. Her daughter nods as Sandra herds them gently towards the reception area.

  Despite the implications of the name, an undertaker’s skill does not reside principally in the physical business of putting a body in the ground—although competence in that regard is non-negotiable—but rather in the satisfaction with which the living remember the experience. In the words of Mr Eric G. Walters, manager of the Milne Funeral Group and for the past few months Sandra’s big boss: ‘We should all feel proud of our association with an industry which holds an essential place in the lofty pattern of human loyalty, dignity and high ideals.’ No one has ever spoken to Sandra like this before. Of course she comes alive in this house of death.

  The funeral homes of Joseph Allison, Drayton & Garson, WD Rose & Son and Graham O. Crawley were united under the Milne Funeral Group umbrella through the corporate colours of magenta and light grey, a penchant for ‘coloured flood-lighting’ and a morbid strain of the sense of humour best characterised as Office Ecstatic.

  The cover of the 1987 newsletter in Sandra’s hands informs employees:

  • Joseph Allison’s convincingly beat Drayton & Garson’s in the inaugural table-tennis tournament

  • More than 500 attend memorial service for still births at Fawkner Cemetery

  • Odd spot—five wives and two stepdaughters do not know each other!!

  • Eric’s World, Keith’s Book Reviews, Birthdays, Grave Humour and more…

  And there she is, one of the featured employees in the section called ‘Around the Branches: New Faces and Old’, elegantly resting her chin on the back of her right hand, smiling slightly, lips c
losed and looking into the camera with a steady gaze under a hairstyle that would have sat comfortably on the head of Princess Di. She lingers on the page while finishing her lunch, licks the crumbs from her fingers with gusto and then carefully tucks the newsletter in her bag to show Rick.

  Standing in her kitchen that evening, she reads aloud from the page, even though she knows it by heart now: Sandra’s previous work experience included supervising Black Cab Taxi schedules and supervising tourists in holiday resorts. She looks up to check that he’s listening. Her energy and enthusiasm have quickly endeared her to the team. Her interests lie in all musical forms, dress and house designing and interior decorating. Sandra has two teenage children.

  Though her previous work experience ‘supervising tourists in holiday resorts’ is a euphemism worthy of veneration and the ‘two teenage children’ are in fact Rick’s kids and not her own teenage sons, this is—more or less—an accurate portrait of Sandra Vaughan, funeral arranger/conductor, four months old. And she has already started to thrive, in this quirky environment of light and shade where death is the daily business of life and where her air of kindly authority is so appreciated by the mourners who pass through the doors.

  A celebrant performs the funeral, but Sandra produces it, creates it, puts all the oddly shaped pieces into place. She helps prepare the body, blending make-up into cold skin until it resembles the face in the photo provided by the family. She shepherds the mourners through every stage of the funeral’s organisation and execution; keeps a watchful eye from the back of the room where she solemnly stands by the door like a lighthouse; leads the procession over soft grass to the new-cut grave. She brings the full force of her perfectionism to every detail of the funerals she conducts like symphonies. With the money she is earning, she pays for Rick’s daughter to go to a private school.

  Carefully placing the newsletter in a drawer, she turns to open a bottle of wine and tells Rick, ‘I adore this job, love it with a passion.’