The Trauma Cleaner Read online

  Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some names—along with details of character, incident and place—have been changed. Those changes were kept to the minimum required to protect the privacy of certain individuals in this book.

  The challenges posed by Sandra’s memory loss mean that parts of her biographical story have required imaginative reconstruction. All dialogue and characters are, however, based on what she does remember and, where possible, interviews with third parties or historical records.

  Nothing has been exaggerated.

  This is what it says on the back of Sandra Pankhurst’s business card:

  ‘Excellence is no Accident’

  Hoarding and Pet Hoarding Clean Up * Squalor/Trashed

  Properties * Preparing the Home for Home Help Agencies

  to Attend * Odour Control * Homicide, Suicide and

  Death Scenes * Deceased Estates * Mould, Flood and Fire

  Remediation * Methamphetamine Lab Clean Up

  * Industrial Accidents * Cell Cleaning

  I first saw Sandra at a conference for forensic support services. A gaggle of public servants, lawyers and academics had just emerged from a session on offenders with acquired brain injuries to descend on urns of crappy coffee and plates of sweating cheese. I passed a card table in the lobby where brochures were spread out next to a sign inviting you to drop your business card into an ice bucket for a chance to win a bottle of shiraz. Next to the ice bucket—silver, with a stag’s head on either side—a tiny TV played scenes of before and after trauma-cleaning jobs (which brought to mind the words ‘faeces’ and ‘explosion’). Sitting behind the table a very tall woman, perfectly coiffed and tethered to an oxygen tank, fanned her hand out and invited me to enter my card. Hypnotised by her smile and her large blue eyes and the oxygen mask she wore like jewellery and the images on her TV, I haltingly explained that I don’t have business cards. I did, however, pick up one of her brochures, which I read compulsively for the remainder of the day.

  Sandra is the founder of Specialised Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty Ltd. Each day for the past twenty years, her job has led her into dark homes where death, sickness and madness have suddenly abbreviated the lives inside.

  Most people will never turn their mind to the notion of ‘trauma cleaning’. But once they realise that it exists—that it obviously has to—they will probably be surprised to learn that the police do not do trauma clean-up. Neither do firefighters or ambulances or other emergency services. This is why Sandra’s trauma work is varied and includes crime scenes, floods and fires. In addition, government housing and mental health agencies, real estate agents, community organisations, executors of deceased estates and private individuals all call on Sandra to deal with unattended deaths, suicides or cases of long-term property neglect where homes have, in her words, ‘fallen into disrepute’ due to the occupier’s mental illness, ageing or physical disability. Grieving families also hire Sandra to help them sort, disperse and dispose of their loved ones’ belongings.

  Her work, in short, is a catalogue of the ways we die physically and emotionally, and the strength and delicacy needed to lift the things we leave behind.

  We specialise in the unpleasant tasks that you need to have taken care of. Performing a public service as vital as it is gruesome, Sandra is one of the world’s unofficial experts on the living aspects of death. So much is clear from her brochure, which also showcases her intense practicality. Quoth the Brochure of Pankhurst:

  People do not understand about body fluids. Bodily fluids are like acids. They have all the same enzymes that break down our food. When these powerful enzymes come into contact with furnishings and the like, deterioration is rapid. I have known enzymes to soak through a sofa and to eat at the springs, mould growing throughout a piece of furniture, and I have witnessed the rapid deterioration of a contaminated mattress.

  Most of us will never realise how many of these places there are or that they can be found in every neighbourhood, regardless of socio-economics. We will never see them or smell them or touch them. We will not know these places or lament them. But this is the milieu in which Sandra spends much of her time; it is where she works and takes phone calls and sends emails, where she laughs and makes the office small talk most of the rest of us roll out in the office elevator; it is where she passed into early and then late middle age.

  STC services have the compassion to deal with the residents, a very underestimated and valued requirement by its customers.

  Her advertising materials emphasise compassion, but that goes far deeper than the emotional-intelligence equivalent of her technical skill in neutralising blood-borne pathogens. Sandra knows her clients as well as they know themselves; she airs out their smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes. She does not, however, erase these people. She couldn’t. She has experienced their same sorrows.

  •

  ‘Hi Sarah, it’s Sandra. I believe you contacted me for an interview. If you could call me back on [number] it would be appreciated, but possibly not today as I’m just inundated at the moment and I’m on my way to a suicide. So if you could just call me back tomorrow, maybe, on [number], thank you. Bye for now.’

  When I return her call, I learn that Sandra has a warm laugh and that she needs a lung transplant. She asks me when I would like to meet. I tell her that I can work around her schedule. So she says, ‘Okey dokey,’ and flips open her diary. ‘How about the cafe at the Alfred Hospital?’ she suggests, explaining parenthetically that she has a couple of hours next week before she sees her lung specialist.

  It struck me then that, for Sandra Pankhurst, death and sickness are a part of life. Not in a Buddhist koan sort of way, but in a voicemail and lunch-meeting sort of way. Over the next few years, she would reveal to me how this unrelenting forward orientation, fundamental to her character, has saved her life.

  During my time with Sandra, I met a bookbinder, a sex offender, a puppeteer, a cookbook hoarder, a cat hoarder, a wood hoarder and a silent woman whose home was unfit for her many rabbits and whose skin was so swollen that I thought at any moment it would burst like a water balloon. I heard Sandra bend and flex language into words and idioms she made her own: ‘supposably’, ‘sposmatically’, ‘hands down pat!’. I had the rapturous experience, many times, of simply listening to her swear. I saw wonders of the dark world, as true of our collective human life as radio stations and birthday cards: walls that had turned soft from mould, food that had liquefied, drinks that had solidified, flies raised on human blood, the pink soap of the recently deceased and eighteen-year-old chicken bones lying like runes at the bottom of a pot.

  I listened to Sandra’s news like it was the middle of the Han dynasty and she had just returned west from the Silk Road, except that she was really just telling me about her morning or her afternoon—about waiting for the psych team to collect the man who killed his dog so that she could clean its blood off his floors; about a ‘love triangle stabbing’; about the man who died in the ceiling of his home while spying on his family; about the dead hermit eaten by his dog; about the 240-litre container of syringes she filled and removed from a drug house; about the man who threw himself on a table saw and the mess he left for his family to find.

  I learned the many sides of Sandra: the social commentator (‘We’ve s
ome areas where no life skills are taught; we are getting generation after generation that are slovenly.’); the bawdy (‘I’ve had more cock than I’ve had hot dinners.’); the confident (‘If I had better health I’d run for government and I’d be a kick-arse person.’); the self-compassionate (‘I have no shame of what I had to do to get to where I needed to go.’); the philosophical (‘Everything happens for a reason and it’s really hard to say why it happens at the time.’); the perfectionist (‘I’ve always set tough standards. As a prostitute, I was a great prostitute. As a cleaner, I’m a great cleaner. Whatever I do, I do to the best of my ability.’) and the positive (‘This year is going to be my best year ever.’).

  Which is all to say, I learned that Sandra is at once exactly like you or me or anyone we know and, at the same time, she is utterly peerless.

  One thing Sandra is not, however, is a flawlessly reliable narrator. She is in her early sixties and simply not old enough for that to be the reason why she is so bad with the basic sequence of her life, particularly her early life. Many facts of Sandra’s past are either entirely forgotten, endlessly interchangeable, neurotically ordered, conflicting or loosely tethered to reality. She is open about the fact that drugs have impacted her memory (‘I don’t know, I can’t remember. The lesson to be learnt is this: Do not take drugs, it fucks your brain.’). It is also my belief that her memory loss is trauma-induced.

  But there is something else of which I have become convinced over my years of speaking with her. Most people Sandra’s age can tell you in detail about how they came up, about the excitements and tragedies of being a young adult out in the world for the first time. This isn’t because their brains are any better than Sandra’s or because they did less drugs or drank less or had kinder childhoods. It is because they’ve told their stories more often. Because they were consistently surrounded by friends or parents or partners or children who were interested in seeing them as a whole person.

  This is how true connection occurs. This is how events become stories and stories become memories and memories become narratives of self and of family from which we derive identity and strength. Part of the reason the timeline is never clear for Sandra, no matter how many times we go over it, is that, until now, she has never had any reason to repeat it honestly or in full.

  ‘A lot of people know some of the story, but they do not know all of the story.’ And here it hits me what it is we are doing by telling this story. It is something at once utterly familiar and completely alien to Sandra: we are clearing away the clutter of her life out of basic respect for the inherent value of the person beneath.

  Using words as disinfectants, we are trauma cleaning. Word by word, sentence by sentence, we are reuniting fragments scattered by chaos to create heat and light. We cannot always eliminate what is bad or broken or lost but we can do our best to put everything in its place, such Order being the true opposite of Trauma.

  And so your story is imperfect, Sandra, but it is here, made complete, and it is my love letter to you.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE TRAUMA CLEANER

  KIM

  2

  GIRL, INTERRUPTED

  4

  DOROTHY

  6

  DRIVER

  8

  JANICE

  10

  SHANE

  12

  MARILYN

  14

  GLENDA

  16

  17

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Kim

  A short drive north from Geelong, a woman lives in a house with broken windows and dark words sprayed across its exterior in writing that looks like it came from the hand of a giant. It says I HATE YOU and BRAIN and WELL BEING? and HUMANITY and THE SHAME. The windows facing the street are covered, variously, with blankets, a battered blind held in place by a blue plastic flute and a sheet of cardboard. On the lawn, random mounds of large rocks, bricks, wooden planks, metal grilles and wires dot the dying grass. A large handwritten sign that says HYPACRITES is balanced across two of the mounds. There are a couple of sun-bleached garden gnomes and an industrial-sized bag of mulch on which more words have been scrawled in black paint: SAME SONG, SWORDS, HOMELESS.

  Sandra is sitting in an immaculate white SUV with a large white sticker stretched across the back window that says MISSIBITCHI. She is scheduled to do a cleaning quote at 9 a.m. As always, she is early and she is on her phone. Someone from the Salvation Army inquiring about laundry costs for a client with bedbugs. Sandra replies that it’s thirty-five dollars per bag, plus pick-up and delivery. She covers the phone and whispers guiltily, ‘I just started charging for that.’ Wrapping up the call, she pops her door open and unfolds her long, slim legs from the car. Sandra is wearing bright pink lipstick, a navy blouse, dark skinny jeans and pristine white ballet flats. As always, her platinum blonde hair is perfectly blow-dried and it floats slowly around her as she turns in the morning light.

  The tenant at this morning’s job is named Kim. Sandra has been briefed that Kim describes herself as a puppeteer, a magician and a pet trainer and that, though she is ‘a smart woman’, she becomes extremely suspicious of those trying to help. She will talk about her self-diagnosed conditions which include bipolar disorder and a tumour in her head. Kim is ‘very angry’ because the previous cleaner got rid of her pets, ‘thirty rats, all dead’. I’m still processing the image of thirty dead rats as we walk towards the house. Sandra starts explaining that the goal is to make Kim sufficiently comfortable with the cleaning process so that the job causes her minimal distress.

  To reach the short flight of stairs leading up to Kim’s front door, Sandra walks down a cracked concrete driveway, around the colossal bag of mulch, past a red sombrero and under a low-slung makeshift hammock full of water. Though Kim opens her front door, she remains hidden deep inside while Sandra explains that she is here to help but first needs to have a look around.

  ‘I’m from a private enterprise,’ Sandra explains, breathless from the strain the small climb has placed on her deteriorating lungs. ‘We do organisation. We work with you, looking after your stuff and making sure it’s safe and sound. We do it in conjunction with you, we work together.’ She is fighting for breath, audibly sucking it in where she can between words. After a beat, peering up at Sandra, Kim seems to accept this and steps back, allowing her in.

  You could easily mistake Kim for a young boy but she is a mother in her early forties. She is short, she is fine featured and small boned and bloated. She has pale skin and blue eyes that are darting and swooping like swallows. She is wearing heavy black work boots, baggy khaki pants, a big black T-shirt and a long black scarf; also a fingerless black glove on one hand. There is an old black blanket wrapped around her waist like a skirt. Her blonde hair has been hacked into a bob and a white road of scalp shines out where a strip has been randomly shaved through it. She has homemade tattoos on one arm. A long wooden spoon has been tied with rope around her shoulders. Standing in her doorway, emerging from the cavernous darkness of her home, she would present as some type of troglodytic warrior but for the fact that she is radiating fear so vibrantly that it is contagious.

  ‘Can you just watch where you walk?’ Kim asks. ‘I’ve made it as safe as possible.’ Her voice, too, is that of a young boy, piping but gruff, trying to be brave. She gestures towards a box and says in an off-handed way, ‘I study magician stuff, not that I’ll ever do it.’

  Stepping inside, Sandra puts her hand on Kim’s shoulder and says, ‘I hear that you’re an animal trainer. I need help with a dog. Here, look at this.’ She starts swiping through photos on her phone, her long red nail clicking crisply on the screen until she gets to a shot of her Lana, small and white, staring at the camera mid-shiver. ‘She’s Lana Turner and I’m Bette Davis,’ Sandra explained the first time I met that damaged and diminutive creature, who b
arked continuously at a pitch that made me squint. ‘She’s my security girl. I got her from the animal shelter, but she rescued me.’

  Sandra explains to Kim how Lana was probably abused because she cowers at any quick movement, how the dog still refuses to be picked up and runs off, which is real rough because of her lung problem, you see? Kim cracks a half-smile and drops suddenly onto all fours before explaining from down there that Sandra simply needs to adopt a ‘submissive permissive physical language’ with the dog. Sandra nods at the words with vague interest, not conscious of the fact that she has just intuitively executed that same move with Kim, who—even in explaining this—is mirroring it right back at Sandra.

  ‘Right. You can help me, I can help you,’ Sandra says. ‘We’ll work together.’ She looks at her surrounds, raring to begin.

  What Sandra does here is magnificent. Beautiful. If we all talked to each other in this way, with warm camaraderie and complete non-judgment, much pain would be spared and happiness generated. And though I will not say that it is entirely altruistic—that so unselfconsciously does she handle her wounded clients that she appears, from where I stand, like Saint Francis of Assisi cooing at an anguished dove—it is still absolutely heartening to watch.

  One of Sandra’s talents is that she is superb at—I won’t call it small talk because, though that too is true, it is the form rather than the function—she is superb at instantly conveying a bespoke blend of respect, warmth, humour and interest that establishes a basic human equity and makes nearly everyone comfortable enough to immediately return the favour. This gesture is the opposite of the shaming to which she has been subjected consistently throughout her life, and it is lovely to witness its salutary effect on the whole spectrum of humanity.

  Of course, Sandra’s skill at making others feel secure also eliminates a whole host of threats to herself and optimises her ability to move forward with her work and with her life, because Sandra is a virtuoso at survival. As she said to me once, ‘What I feel that I’m good at is that I can talk to Mrs Rich Bitch, Mr Penny Pauper. I can put myself on any level, because I’m probably an actress, you know what I mean? I can then deal with who I need to deal with and how I need to deal with.’