The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  She is back the next week after another fall breaks her wrist. Though she hides it under jokes, she develops a phobia of walking. She cannot go too far without steadying herself against a wall, clinging on to the back of a chair, a sofa, the edge of a table, whatever is immediately to hand. Then comes the pneumonia that hits her like a meteor and hollows her out like a crater.

  Though her impulse is to hide herself away, to heal or die, in her cold caravan like a sick animal, stronger still is her desire to make it home: her unit is, finally, ready. With no other choice, and though it makes her stomach cramp with discomfort, she allows a couple of her friends to see her weakness and accepts their offer of help. The women drive down to Frankston from Melbourne. They clean the mess left behind by the builders. They retrieve her boxes and furniture from storage. They unpack everything and put it away, neatly, in her new closets and drawers.

  This ‘wild fucking year’ culminates, finally, in the loss of her big toe while wrestling a large fern into a stone urn in her ‘al fresco area’. Again she wraps herself up, again she drives herself to the hospital. Down the highway she has driven a thousand times before, without ever realising that while everyone is moving at the same speed the trucks hauling the heaviest loads have the most momentum.

  ‘Chop the fucking thing off,’ she instructs the doctor.

  Mr and Mrs Pankhurst

  Craig

  The President of the North Brighton Chamber of Commerce, 1990s

  Sandra with members of the STC team, 2007 PHOTO: DAVID CAIRD / NEWSPIX

  Sandra Pankhurst at home, Frankston, 2016 PHOTO: DAVID KRASNOSTEIN

  Glenda

  ‘Her name is Nefertiti,’ Glenda tells me as we stare down at a cat carrier in the overgrown grass of her front lawn. Behind us, on a busted navy sofa on Glenda’s porch, four other cat carriers holding four other cats are lined up in a row. It is 9:50 a.m. on the type of grey morning that does Glenda’s neighbourhood no favours. It’s not really a neighbourhood. It’s a strip of houses on one side of a highway facing a strip of fast food places and service stations on the other.

  After driving over an hour to get here, I walked through a high wooden fence and into a smell so strong it felt like a slap. On the lawn are about fifteen black bags full of the rubbish that Sandra has already talked Glenda into throwing out this morning. Sandra will be here, working with Glenda, one day a week for the next five weeks.

  Glenda is short, maybe sixty. Her hair is white at the roots and the rest of it is the same neon pink as her T-shirt. She is European and when she speaks she sounds like one of my relatives. She should be pink-cheeked, smelling like powder. Stuffing everyone full of cookies. Instead she is completely alone and living in a house full of books and yellowed newspapers and cats and their shit, which for years she has been unable to clean or unwilling to acknowledge so she presses newspaper on top like a layer cake.

  The cleaners are working in Glenda’s kitchen/living room. It is full of books, plastic tubs of more books, office supplies, appliance boxes, old newspapers and other items, such as a child’s polka-dot suitcase, all floating on top of each other like flotsam on a choppy sea. My eyes water from the smell. Sandra leads me to the threshold of Glenda’s bedroom where I am immediately confronted by a great wall of similar debris that almost sweeps the ceiling. It is dark and there is only room to peer sideways and down at Glenda’s nest—a tiny mattress on the floor not long enough for her to stretch out on. A stack of reading material rests beside it; books, the Economist, the Quarterly Essay, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses folded neatly on top. The small clearing is in danger of being filled in by the precarious fence of stuff that surrounds it.

  Glenda invites me outside for a chat. She leads me past the mewing peanut gallery on the porch and out onto the lawn, near a small tin shed, where she sets up two wooden chairs and introduces me to Nefertiti, lolling in her cage.

  Glenda qualified as a dentist and also has a degree with honours in psychology. She worked for years as a grief counsellor. In addition to a plethora of short courses and certificates, she has completed a professional writing and editing class and she has pursued, as I have, a postgraduate degree in law. She was involved for many years on a television program that interviewed people ‘who had a personal and professional vision for a better future’.

  She tells me, ‘You are those people I used to interview.’

  Roles are starting to blur; I am losing altitude and things are getting messy. Which is, yes, the whole point of sitting in her yard. Sandra has pointed out to me many times that hoarding does not discriminate on the basis of income or intellect.

  ‘You look on the wall, Director of this Hospital or Head of this Company, and you think, “What incident happened in your life? Or did someone leave you and leave you emotionally scarred, and you couldn’t deal with it?” Like, there’s so many fragile things can just twist you and turn you,’ Sandra once said to me. ‘By the grace of God, it could be me. So I’m not going to judge anyone. These people were mentally strong, they were high achievers. So, you don’t know. None of us know what tomorrow’s got in store.’

  Glenda mentions her honours thesis and I ask what it was about.

  ‘Ah, back then, it’s not me anymore but that’s your journey…’ she replies, swatting the question away. And I commiserate, mentioning sheepishly how irrelevant my own honours thesis seems in retrospect.

  She elaborates, dismissively, ‘It was about how anxiety affects your attitudes and your being able to perform. I can’t remember more…’

  Sandra walks up to Glenda holding a wicker basket overflowing with miscellanea: a shower cap, a free anti-virus CD, a contraption to give a dog a pill.

  ‘I’ve made an executive decision,’ Sandra announces. ‘This is shit.’

  They giggle. ‘But some of them are not shit,’ Glenda says, still laughing.

  ‘Oh, tell me what,’ says Sandra.

  Glenda holds up the CD. ‘This is not shit.’

  ‘Are you gonna use it, really?’ Sandra coaxes.

  Glenda nods. ‘Yes. Tonight.’

  ‘Oh, you liar,’ Sandra scolds, causing Glenda to break out again into giggles. ‘This thing’s going to the shithouse, I’m telling you now, this is going to buggery.’

  ‘This is going to the neighbour,’ Glenda counters.

  ‘Well, tell her she can jump in a lake,’ Sandra smiles, backing away with the basket, hoping to add it to the pile on the lawn that is big but not nearly big enough.

  ‘She might, really, because she has brain injuries. So I cannot tell her that. You can tell her,’ Glenda says, before explaining how the dog-pill machine works.

  ‘Hmm,’ Sandra says and then asks what the CD is.

  ‘Free software!’ says Glenda.

  ‘Oh, bugger, throw it out!’ says Sandra, ‘You’ve got more than you can poke a stick at.’

  I point out that you can download it for free. Glenda says she doesn’t know how to do that, which I don’t believe even before she asks me if I know the Linux operating system.

  Glenda mentions how much she and Sandra laughed last week, ‘You know how you are tired and you crack up? We couldn’t stop bloody laughing. That is much better—laughing than crying. And sometimes you do both at the same time!’

  After a period of estrangement from her husband, Glenda spent his final days with him while he was dying in hospital. Then she developed a flu ‘like a big kick’ in the chest. For three months she couldn’t cry. ‘I became wooden,’ she says. A few months later she started to feel a ‘delayed grief reaction’, but it was too painful. So she went to school. ‘I did so many short courses,’ she laughs. ‘That’s my way of calming down and staying focused. This is my drug, this is how I survive. It didn’t affect my ability to study.’

  I think back to my own delayed grief response, after my mother left. When it became clear she was not coming back. I think back to the years when I barely left my room, when the pills I took each day for anxiety and depressio
n made the light hurt my skin and my hands tremble too hard to hold a pen. How I devoured books, lying in the foetal position in the dark until my hips hurt against the mattress. How much I needed the desolate predictability, the safeties of stillness and solitude. Beyond distraction or entertainment was just the perfect permanence of the written word and the camaraderie embroidered in its silence.

  Eventually Glenda gave herself permission to grieve. ‘I got a little kitten, she’s twelve years old now, and I put it next to me on her blanket. I slept, I woke up, I started crying, I’d stretch out and there was her warm, purring body and I’d fall asleep again.’ That cat now has ten siblings. ‘I was able to integrate the grief in my life. But it’s amazing to come out the other end. That’s why I’m surviving this situation too, otherwise I wouldn’t be here,’ Glenda says.

  She is referring to the reason Sandra is here today. The narrative is as messy as her house but it appears that Glenda has been on a downward spiral, at least since losing her husband in 2001. She bounced between private rentals and public housing, until five years ago she ended up in the unit she currently occupies, which is intended as temporary housing for women in crisis.

  ‘All the nightmare started since my husband passed away ’cause I was by myself and then I had to go onto the disability pension because of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, all this, osteoarthritis and because of the ongoing trauma of being up in the air for years. I had to find support on my own, there’s no one I can ask to talk on my behalf. And post-traumatic stress now…’

  Her eyes well up. And then it starts to rain, so she drags our chairs inside her minuscule tin shed and arranges them between plastic boxes of books and piles of bulging rubbish bags. We resettle ourselves over a thin puddle of cat vomit. Case workers from the housing organisation work with the tenants, stabilising them so that they can move on to longer-term housing, for which they are fast-tracked.

  However Glenda perceives this therapeutic approach as a siege. She has used her intelligence to fight every step of the process. Of the first attempt to move her on, she says: ‘I ended up in the foetal position for months. Disgusting, evicting someone…they knew from day one that I am a widow, and all my medical conditions, and I’ve got no one, no family…’

  At first I feel indignant on Glenda’s behalf. Then, as her narrative expands, so too does my awareness of the bags bursting with yellowed newspapers around us and the cat vomit pooled at our feet and the smell of shit everywhere, and I realise that my feeling is more accurately empathy for the pain.

  There are two Glendas. There is the Glenda who tells me, ‘You don’t really stay in a transitional property for five years…’ And there is the Glenda who cites perceived technical violations by the housing organisation as justifying her continued occupancy. There is Glenda the grief counsellor and psychology graduate, who finds it ‘interesting when you can observe yourself as disassociated from what you are feeling’. And there is the Glenda who tells me that the explanation for her current state is structural: ‘If you haven’t got space to put your stuff in, what are you going to do?’ When she calls her house a ‘third-world slum’ she is referring to the lack of built-in wardrobes, not the faeces on the floor.

  I cannot diagnose Glenda, but she is just ill enough and just autonomous enough to be the type of client that housing services—with the best of intentions—do not have a solution for. Glenda was simply refusing access to anyone who visited, leaving the organisation with a choice between breaching her and rendering her homeless, or letting the property persist as a threat to public safety. This is why Sandra is vital: not merely the work she is doing here today, but the way she is doing it.

  I can’t prove that anything Glenda has told me is correct. You can make up your qualifications and you can tell a story through the lens of fear and pain until it is distorted beyond reality. But you cannot make up the fact that you own a copy of Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman because I can see it lying in a plastic bin beside me. And because books, certain books, are a shibboleth, I feel more proximity to Glenda than distance.

  I change the conversation to the books around us. ‘I think this is a normal, admirable, amount of books,’ I confide, knowing that Sandra would have my head. I see Papillon by Henri Charrière. Of it, and Victor Frankl and her reading preferences generally, Glenda says, ‘Anything which shows the human strength under the most appalling circumstances helps me to survive.’ And I want to say, ‘Me too!’ I want to explain about my dark room and shaking hands and how the road back starts in thick forest. But I realise that such a conversation will not be possible because we are dwarfed by this gargantuan smell of shit and because, to one of us, it is a question of inadequate storage.

  We exit the shed and head back to the house and I think of how a documentary I once saw used landscapes on earth to explain different planetary environments. How this stunned me, that the Arizona desert looked so like the surface of Mars.

  As Sandra walks me back to my car, Dylan hurries out after her. He whispers to her that Glenda has started reopening bags on the lawn. The smell made Cheryl vomit and Glenda is getting upset. Sandra hurries back inside to return to the necessary business of cauterising. ‘That’s what happens when you open the bags that you agreed to throw out,’ she sighs as she goes.

  On the long drive home in the rain I think about Glenda’s books and the wingspan of Marilyn’s beautiful sentences and the bewilderment of Dorothy’s neighbour with her soft protest: ‘But she’s such an intelligent person…’

  I think, again, about my own lost decade, the darkness that swallowed me whole, not when my mother left but when it became clear just how much she had taken with her. I think about my tremors, my migraines, my years of days asleep; years of minutes as infinite as they were unbearable. The weight loss that turned my spine into an abacus and my clavicles into bowls. The unrelenting intrusive thoughts that everyone else would now leave too and the thousand ways in which I was worth leaving. I think how, in a world keeling like a ship, there was also my father. My father, who I saw when he popped his head into my dark room before he left for work in the morning, and when he checked in during the day and when he returned home at night. And before he cooked dinner, and after it was cooked, and then once again when he invited me to watch some TV or to have a cup of tea with a cookie or to go on a small walk with him, maybe?

  I call him from the car and ask him about his morning, tell him about mine.

  ‘What kind of hoarder was she?’ he asks.

  ‘Books and cats, mainly,’ I tell the man who loves his cats and who I know is now actively considering his extensive book collection.

  ‘What’s the difference between a private library and a book hoarder?’ he wonders.

  We are both silent before chuckling and answering in unison: ‘Faeces.’

  But the difference is this phone call. And the others like it I could make. And how strong we are when we are loved.

  I’m not sure I will ever be able to tell you, exactly, how Sandra has made it through. It is true that there is no Table of Maims when it comes to trauma; what chips some people like a mug cracks others like an egg. But that’s an observation, not an explanation. I believe it has something to do with her innate calibration: an inherent and unbreakable conviction that she, too, is entitled to live her one best life. I believe it has much to do with the emotional machinery she has jettisoned in order to stay afloat. That is the buoying wonder and the sinking sadness of the particular resilience of Sandra.

  Sandra who, even after three years, I fall in love with anew each time I listen to her speak; Sandra who makes me laugh until my cheeks hurt; Sandra who called me her angel. Sandra who takes my breath away with her great kindness towards those she works with so fleetingly; Sandra who cannot notice me in a photograph of two people or ask after me when I’m ill or say my last name. Sandra who wrote it down for me clearly in her notes, ‘No old friends’, and, also, ‘Can’t connect to people on personal level
’. Sandra who agonises; who won’t reconcile, and who then, sadly, does.

  16

  To return to her childhood home, Sandra drives her sleek white ‘Missibitchi’ past the Footscray drill hall where she was forced to participate in cadet training with the other young boys. It is now a performance space used by a women’s circus. She drives past St John’s Primary School, where she was routinely caned across the knuckles and where ninety-five per cent of the students now speak a language other than English at home; past a green footy oval that used to be just a big hole in the ground. She drives past meticulously renovated Edwardian homes that are selling now for close to one million dollars until she crosses a date line where the cottages get a little shabbier and the streets get a little narrower and, by the time she pulls into the dead end of her childhood street, it feels like we have driven back through time.

  The house facing Sandra’s childhood home, the one her grandparents lived in, is as immaculately cared for now as it was then: freshly painted and blooming and neatly clipped. But Bill and Ailsa’s old house slumps on its small plot of dirt like a body exhumed, recognisable but rotting.

  There it is, behind a low brick fence that has cracked into three separate sections and which threatens, at any moment, to tumble over: a single-fronted weatherboard cottage. Under the drooping porch roof, a large window with the curtain drawn looks blindly out onto the street, a milky cataract beneath a paralysed eyelid. Ailsa’s beloved front garden is all brown weeds that come up to my knees. The glass of the thin window running down the side of the front door is broken; boxes and rags have been piled high inside in a poor attempt to stop the gap.

  We try knocking. No one is home. So we walk down the long driveway where Bill would struggle sloppily with his car each night and, as we pass along the length of the house, Sandra looks over the tall fence. ‘That was Barbara’s room. That was the boys’ room. That was my room.’ The top half of ‘the bungalow’ is visible, just, from where I stand. Back near the front of the house, we peek around the other side. We see only one window, broken; a hole into the house in the middle of winter.