The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  ‘That’s my darling dog. Jojo,’ Marilyn says.

  ‘Oh, Jojo’s ashes,’ Sandra nods.

  ‘I don’t know where they go but I want them. The ashes are being cremated with me,’ Marilyn says, rearranging her robe over her legs.

  ‘Yes, my two dogs are up in my bedroom,’ Sandra says, referring to Mr Sparkles (1 January 1995 – 17 June 2010) and Miss Tilly (5 September 2000 – 9 February 2011), resting now in their fine wood boxes with brass nameplates on a shelf across from her bed. She pauses for a moment to think. ‘I’ll put them behind the TV so they’re in the room with you.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘Now what have we got in here?’ Sandra asks, peering into another large paper bag and removing another cardboard box. ‘Christmas presents, hey?’

  ‘That’s my cat. Her name was Aurelia,’ Marilyn says. And then, peering closer: ‘Oh no…it’s a vase.’

  Sandra removes and opens a third cardboard box.

  ‘Ah, here we are, Aurelia!’ Sandra exclaims. ‘I’ll put the two animals together.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marilyn says. ‘She was a beautiful cat. She used to sleep with me every night.’ Sandra starts coughing from the dust. The cleaner comes out of the bathroom with a huge bag of rubbish. ‘Now don’t you try to lift that,’ Marilyn warns Sandra.

  ‘I won’t,’ Sandra promises as the cleaner pushes the bag into the hallway. Sandra starts sorting through another packed washing basket on the floor and Marilyn instructs her to keep a few unopened wall calendars from previous years and a broken attachment for a garden hose. The cleaner returns and asks Sandra if any of the other bathrooms will need a clean.

  ‘No, that’s OK. Only this one gets used, and it’s just, of course…the…accidents…here, so use some Amsolve to clean that up,’ she says, referring to the industrial stain remover touted by its marketing materials as equitably eliminating carpet stains caused by orange juice, soft drinks, wine, blood, and protein-based foodstuffs such as milk, egg, ice-cream and chocolate. It also successfully removes faeces, a significant quantity of which streaks the bathroom floor.

  Marilyn vigorously motions to the cleaner to hand over a plastic bag full of deliquescing apples and oranges extracted from the bathroom. ‘Thank you, my love,’ Marilyn says sweetly as the cleaner hands it over. ‘I’m going to throw these out for my possums.’ She peers inside the bag with approval and then hangs it from the handle of her walker. The smell is nauseating.

  ‘You’ve got bags and bags of paperwork here,’ Sandra says, looking around the room with her hands on her hips. ‘We’re going to have to sort all this out, rather than keep it for the sake of keeping it. We’ll go through and see what is to keep and what is not.’

  ‘All right,’ Marilyn agrees.

  ‘We will start with this pile,’ Sandra says. She peels a single sheet off the top. ‘Now that is from your lawyer, and the lawyer has got to stay, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK.’ That sheet is placed to the side and another is lifted. ‘The bank?’ Sandra asks, holding up a statement.

  ‘Yes.’

  Sandra peels off a water bill. ‘This?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know, what’s the date?’ Marilyn asks.

  ‘These are all from 2012, so they’re no good to you. I’m thinking that most of this is quite old by now,’ Sandra says, paging through the stack.

  ‘Just chuck it,’ Marilyn says.

  ‘Yes, be gone with you!’ Sandra intones, dumping the pile into a rubbish bag and swiftly pulling it into the hall before Marilyn changes her mind. ‘Gone with the wind,’ she says, returning. The cleaner emerges from the bathroom with a jumbo-sized plastic bottle of orange juice which both Marilyn and Sandra confirm needs to be thrown out. I ask Marilyn if she enjoys living alone.

  ‘Yes, I’m quite happy with my own company,’ she answers.

  ‘Did you ever want to get remarried?’ I ask.

  ‘I didn’t have time for that,’ Marilyn answers quickly. ‘I just did not want to. Anyway, once bitten, twice shy…’

  ‘You see, I like to live on my own,’ Sandra agrees. ‘I couldn’t stand to have to cook or clean or do anything for anyone. There is an independence to living on your own. You can shit the bed if you want or you can live it up on the town!’ She nudges a bunch of reusable bags into a large, fluffy pile and nods at the cleaner who has emerged from the bathroom with another two bursting bags. ‘So what is the next thing on your agenda? What are you going to do between now and Christmas? What is your next goal?’

  ‘When I get some nice warm days, I am going to gradually walk around the block, taking it bit by bit,’ Marilyn says.

  ‘Bit by bit, slowly.’ Sandra nods.

  I ask Marilyn if she feels OK with driving herself to the supermarket or to get her nails done.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Marilyn says. ‘I’m slowing down a bit, though.’

  ‘That’s the fear, when you feel you cannot drive anymore, that you’ll lose your total independence, and that would be freaky,’ Sandra commiserates, touching on Marilyn’s great fear, which is also her own.

  I ask Marilyn if she’s starting to feel a bit like her old self again.

  ‘Yes, and I know I will feel even better tomorrow because Sandra has been here,’ she replies. Despite excavating these rooms, and seeing that many of the layers predate Marilyn’s cancer diagnosis, Sandra remains faithful to the view that Marilyn’s situation was caused by her recent physical ill health.

  ‘We need to change the way we look after the elderly people who have worked all their lives,’ Sandra says as she sorts through another basket. ‘I think people who’ve worked and paid taxes all their lives should be getting some sort of dispensation from the government, so that someone comes in, checks on them or makes sure that their needs and things are met.’

  Whereas Sandra’s only family is her sister-in-law, who lives in another state and whom she sees only rarely, Marilyn has two adult children. Marilyn’s relationship with her children, however, is such that this level of squalor has, on at least two occasions, built up gradually, like a mountain range, without their knowledge. She can stay in bed for a week or more without that fact coming to their attention. A phone service calls her each morning between 8.00 and 8:30 a.m. to check that she is alive. (‘My son organised that for me.’)

  I do not know what happened in this house over the past thirty years. I do not know when Marilyn started drinking. Though Marilyn takes control of her isolation by putting a protective spin on it, I do know that disconnection on this scale has long antecedents, that it metastasises over time. So perhaps the surprise isn’t that her sons are here so little; the surprise may be that they are still around at all. But regarding the question of whether Marilyn has been abandoned with or without justification—and the true meaning of the white grocery bags carpeting the foyer like unmarked graves—the most satisfying resolution may lie in Sandra’s complete lack of interest in the answers.

  ‘Now tell me, how long are you going to stay here?’ she asks, adding some letters to the pile that Marilyn has promised to go through later. ‘As long as you can?’

  ‘As long as I can,’ Marilyn says.

  ‘What would make you move?’

  ‘A stroke, but even then I’d be screaming all the way out of the door.’

  ‘Would you consider one of those retirement villages?’ Sandra asks.

  ‘Yes, if I feel I am not coping.’

  ‘You’d have to downsize,’ Sandra says.

  ‘But how do I choose what I don’t need?’ Marilyn asks. And despite the weight of the question, which is the weight of the world, Sandra is, as always, breezily pragmatic.

  ‘Well, how many lounge suites do you need? You’d still have a guest room, but your Christmas decorations would be buggered…’ Sandra examines a photocopy of an official record. ‘The Australian Imperial Horse…’ she reads.

  ‘That was my great uncle. I thought he was killed at Gallipoli. It turned
out he was killed on the Western Front after they left Gallipoli,’ Marilyn explains. She mentions also that her father fought in the Second World War.

  ‘Did he survive?’ Sandra asks.

  ‘Yes, minus one big toe. He dropped a drum of petrol on it and ended up in Alice Springs Hospital for six months,’ Marilyn replies.

  The cleaner joins in from the bathroom. ‘My husband’s grandfather was the same. He chopped off three fingers when he came back. Isn’t it funny? They go to war and nothing happens to them until they come home.’

  I think of Marilyn’s years of being a single working mother raising two children by herself. Of the unrelenting pace and of her endurance, and of what happened, eventually, as the pressure eased off. I ask Marilyn whether she had a happy childhood and she tells me that she did. ‘We weren’t very rich, but I didn’t know the difference,’ she says.

  Sandra nods in agreement. ‘We were all pretty well equal then. There weren’t the multi-rich, and if there were, you didn’t really know about it because there wasn’t the media presence that we have now. Everyone was the same.’

  ‘Our town had one car,’ Marilyn recalls.

  ‘They still had the shit-carters in those days, because you didn’t have sewerage,’ Sandra adds. ‘That’s where the old saying comes from: as flat as a shit-carter’s hat.’

  ‘I think ours used to carry it on his shoulder,’ Marilyn muses. ‘The baker delivered every day. The milkman came in the wee small hours and we used to leave the bottles out with the money, in front.’

  Sandra nods. ‘We didn’t have refrigerators. Everything was either in brine or in the meat safe.’

  ‘No, we had an ice chest,’ Marilyn says.

  ‘Oh, you were rich,’ Sandra teases as she stretches out her legs full length on the bed, turns to lie on her side and rests her head in her hand like she’s at a sleepover party.

  ‘We used to have a little Asian man who would come along with a wagon that was drawn by a horse. He sold fruit and vegetables,’ Marilyn explains. ‘Every now and again he would get a little jar of ginger from China and give it to Mother. She thought that was just wonderful.’

  ‘The simple things in life,’ Sandra murmurs in a strange, soft voice, gazing dreamily now up at the ceiling, staring through it and back in time. But while Marilyn is participating in a shared reminiscence between two women of a similar age, Sandra is merely borrowing the warmth of someone else’s memories. Feeling their softness for a few moments, like the expensive silk dresses in the closet. At the age when Marilyn was taking a curious look at a jar of Chinese ginger, Sandra was stealing food and wrestling to open the can as her teeth rotted. But the age difference and the geographical difference and the economic difference and the emotional difference all fall away before Sandra’s social dexterity, and this is not a trick, it is a wish.

  ‘But that’s just chitchat,’ Marilyn says and the spell is broken. ‘How are my clothes going? The ones I want picked up?’

  ‘Have not got there yet,’ Sandra answers. ‘We are doing the other fridge as well. I thought we might as well get both fridges out of the way and then you’ll have a clean slate.’

  ‘OK, you’re the boss,’ Marilyn says. ‘I’m planning on having you back again.’

  Sandra goes to check on the kitchen. I stand for a moment to stretch my legs and reposition myself in my small clearing on the bed. The pile of magazines and food boxes that I had pushed aside to make room for myself shifts precipitously, revealing a few bugs that look like millipedes crawling around on the quilt. Sandra returns. ‘We’ve sorted out all the shopping,’ she says, referring to the bags by the front door. ‘A lot of it was past its use-by date, so we’ve given that the flick.’

  ‘I feel as though everything is not revolting and out of hand, and beyond my coping with it. All I have to do is be determined to never let that happen again,’ Marilyn says.

  And while we all know that is not the solution to this problem, I wonder whether having Sandra here today is a sign that Marilyn is out of control, or a sign maybe that she is actually still very much in control: living her life exactly the way she wants—eating pickles in the bathroom and drinking gin in the morning, watching TV in bed and calling in Sandra to clean up when the mess gets too great; in control even of losing control. And yet.

  ‘What was the reaction from your sons when you told them about your diagnosis last year?’ I ask.

  ‘The younger one was quite upset about it. I told him over the phone. The older one…after Sandra had been out the first time, I had him around here, instead of me going to his place. I said, “Look, I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of bad news for you, I’ve been diagnosed with cancer.” His immediate reaction was “We’ll get through this together, Mum.”’

  I think about Marilyn’s eyes going out of focus as she drives to the supermarket, how she steers the shopping trolley down the bright aisles, clutching the handle like her walker. How she supervises the employee who carries the white plastic bags to her car, carefully drives those bags back home, carries them inside and leaves them by the door to rot. I think of the dull popping noise a tranquilliser makes as you fumble it out of a near-empty bottle, the pasty bitterness it leaves on the tongue when swallowed in haste without water. I think of how a body with cancer maintains itself on a fuel of alcohol and sugar. Of a phone ringing and ringing and Marilyn’s voice saying that it’s been too cold to leave the house. The moths that spiral up into air like ash from embers when the quilt is adjusted. The odd sensation of rolling over onto a can of insect repellent; whether that discomfort is something you might try to ignore, like a full bladder on a cold night. I think of Marilyn closing herself into herself and willing herself to sleep as the sky purples, drains clear and darkens, eventually, again.

  Sandra takes a call, then announces that she’s off to do a quote for another job. She will be back soon to make sure everything is finished correctly. Marilyn nods and fares her well. Then she hefts herself up from her bed and walks me out slowly, inching her way down the hallway, which is lined, on both sides, with photographs of her forebears—her great-grandfather in shirtsleeves, her parents on their wedding day.

  I search in vain for a photo of Marilyn in full flight; an iron-tongued warrior in silken finery and bold beads. But such a photo would just be another proof, like the faces looking down from these walls or the pets in their funeral boxes, that the staggering difference between what we were once and what we are now is, sometimes, as true as it is false. I leave down the front path, past the STC trailer overflowing with garbage, and the roses—bright, still, under their wild tangle of leaf and thorn.

  14

  Between chairing and meeting and speaking and networking and fighting off competition from giant retailers, Sandra is also running a struggling small business seven days a week. Working under this pressure, and this closely with George, who just wants to retire already, means that they have ‘a few tumultuous times’. She has, for instance, picked up the cash register and hurled it at him at least once. For the most part, however, the centre has held.

  George’s heart is dying and his liver is dying. His business is dying and his marriage is dying. His children are alienated and his house is about to burn down. But there is a time before when it is still possible to un-know most of this; when he can press a hot washcloth up to his face, rub shaving cream onto red-warm cheeks, zip the excess off his lips with one thick finger and shave in slow strokes to reveal skin that feels new; when he can thread his shrinking arms through a navy sports jacket and take his still-younger wife out to dinner; when he can drink a Scotch followed by a bottle of red and feel, for a few hours, like himself again.

  They are defeated, in the end, by Goliath. North Brighton Paint & Hardware cannot compete with Bunnings. Suddenly, two people who have worked their whole lives and become used to a certain standard of living are left choked with debt. They call in liquidators but the auctioneer for the day costs them forty thousand dollars. The debt opens up like a
sinkhole. It swallows their savings, their cars, their home, George’s dignity. He starts drinking more and Sandra starts cleaning houses.

  The ad in the local paper says:

  Sandra Pankhurst presents

  We’re Absolutely Fabulous

  The Specialist in Domestic Duties

  The ad and the article that appear alongside it in the weekly Business Profile column are an act of friendship: her contacts at the local newspaper, who have become friends over time, give her the publicity she is unable to afford. Because ‘We’re Absolutely Fabulous’ is the name of the business it must reflect the opinion of the owner about their service! No point in hiding your light under a bushel! Or so Sandra Pankhurst believes…

  Sandra is described as ‘a long-respected member of the community, working as a funeral director and shopkeeper as well as serving as President of the North Brighton Chamber of Commerce’, and quoted as saying her business is going so well that she’s seeking more employees. Within three months, she is managing a staff of twenty cleaners.

  She strides through the door of their rented unit waving the new edition of the local paper. ‘They printed it!’ she calls out triumphantly. George, dozing in front of the television in his robe, looks up briefly but says nothing. The tension they have ignored for years, clinging to the edges like rising damp, is more palpable these days. Her ring clinks on the bench as she spreads opens the paper and reads her letter to the editor out loud across the room:

  On Monday, I attended a prospective councillors meeting at Brighton Town Hall. It was a shame that there was such an air of aggression. We should have used the time to get to know each other because we could be working for the same cause—the welfare of Bayside citizens. Running for the council should not be a matter of power games, but of serving the community.