The Trauma Cleaner Read online

  The house is dark, though some light filters in through the cracks around the window coverings. A wooden marionette dangles by the front door. Different-coloured words are written all over the walls. ‘This is the Hilton compared to what it was,’ Kim says, explaining that she’s been up cleaning for two days without sleep. She itches at one of the open sores on her arm.

  ‘What I’m thinking of doing here so that we can clean it all out for you—tell me what you think—is we’re going to bring a safe container in for all your stuff,’ Sandra explains softly, before being interrupted by her phone. She takes the call, turning herself towards the wall. The timing is agonisingly awkward but there are extremely few, perhaps no, conversations Sandra won’t interrupt to take a phone call. And it’s no use getting terribly offended over it because, in the Great Karmic Cycle of Pankhurst, there are extremely few, perhaps no, conversations that she won’t interrupt to take your call. She briskly deals with whatever it is before returning to focus on the conversation.

  Kim is waving at the outside of the house. ‘That was just my outcry. It’s done now, it’s finished,’ she says quickly, explaining how she tried to paint over the words, even though the paint wasn’t an exact match, as a gesture of goodwill towards the landlord. Inside, though, she insists that the writing on the walls is therapeutic.

  ‘I’ve got lots of trauma, right? And what I’m doing here is running what is called a domestic violence hypnotic behavioural therapy lab.’

  ‘Right,’ Sandra murmurs, encouraging.

  ‘OK, so that on the wall’—Kim motions around the room—‘is to do with shock, it’s to do with trauma. I started this myself. I was traumatised. I’m only just walking around this complete house myself, ’cause the garage burned down and set…things…off. Very bad.’ Kim’s voice quivers and she explains that the garage caught fire four years ago.

  Motioning to the makeshift splint around her shoulder, Kim says, ‘I’ve got…really…bad muscles. I think it’s to do with my tumours that’re causing bad signals in my body. This time I’ve done a lot of work and my shoulder is very sore, so it’s a reminder not to use it.’ She sets her mouth in a stoic line and looks down at the floor.

  ‘I want to get your opinion about how you want it to be here, because that’s what my goal is,’ Sandra says soothingly.

  A small dog scratches at the screen door and Kim warns Sandra not to let it in because her rats, who act as ‘door security’, are not in a cage. ‘They live in a chair,’ she explains, motioning to a large armchair with a blanket puddled on the seat. ‘And they walk around the house. But they won’t move. They’re actually shit-scared at the moment.’

  ‘How would a compromise be, if we got this cleaned up and we got you canvases that you could do the exact artwork on for your therapy treatment? I think that’s the best way, don’t you?’ Sandra looks down earnestly at Kim.

  ‘It is, it is,’ Kim agrees, sighing deeply. ‘But do you know what it is…I draw. It’s my therapy or whatever. But I’ve been locked up, institutionalised, shackled illegally. Mate, to look at white walls…’

  ‘I understand that,’ Sandra cuts in. ‘But if we could make it like a gallery, with your proper artwork, we’d be killing two birds with one stone.’

  As part of her quoting process, it is Sandra’s custom to take photos on her small camera. Kim advises against using the flash too close to the fireplace where a heater has been ripped out. ‘It’ll aggravate them,’ Kim explains, referring to the rats. Then she starts insisting that this clean cannot be like the last attempt. The previous cleaner stole her DVD player. ‘But possessions are nothing. What’s really cut me up is that I come home’—she is indignant, incredulous—‘and he’s chucked these rats out all over the backyard.’

  ‘Unacceptable,’ Sandra barks.

  ‘Yep. Not only that, I had to agree to euthanasia. The oldest rats I had—I actually spent twenty-four seven with them, I was making a Christmas video at the time, it was absolutely beautiful—I come home and they’re poisoned. And that was not the agreement. It’s not right. It’s not right.’ She is getting visibly furious.

  Sandra puts a hand on Kim’s shoulder. I wonder how long it has been since Kim has been touched in this way. ‘Let’s have a look around, shall we?’

  I hang back, sapped for a moment by the smell. Hanging over everything is one of two smells (the other being death) that I will discover and come to know during the time I spend watching Sandra at work: human dirt at close quarters over time. We have no single word for it, this smell. We have no adjective to describe how profoundly repulsive and unsettling it is. It’s not just human effluence or rot, nor is it a simple matter of filth or grime or feculence or unwashedness. It’s not merely nasty or gross or disgusting, or the ‘FEH!’ of my grandmother. I wonder if, in less hygienic times, we did have a word for it or whether there is one in other languages. Or whether, in fact, the absence of this word communicates something more effectively than language ever could—that such a smell is verboten because it signifies a fundamentally destabilising taboo: a level of disconnection and self-neglect that is, essentially, a living death.

  Standing in the hallway, I imagine the smell settling like snow on my hair and my skin, breathing it like smoke into my nose and mouth; how it curls its way into the fibres of my clothing and the hollows of my ears. Like death, it is an old smell; so fundamentally human that it can only be disavowed. You avoid this smell each time you take a shower and each time you wash your hands. Each time you brush your teeth or flush the toilet, or launder your sheets and towels. With every plate you scrub clean, every spill you mop up and every bag of rubbish you tie up and throw out. Every time you open a window or walk outside, breathing deeply, to stretch your legs and stand in sunlight. This smell is the lingering presence of all the physical things we put into and wash off ourselves. But it is equally the ineffable smell of defeat, of isolation, of self-hate. Or, more simply, it is the smell of pain.

  Instructively, however, over our time here Sandra whispers to me that ‘this house doesn’t smell’ and also that it ‘smells strongly of rats’; a startling and only superficially paradoxical observation that tells you much about the things she encounters in her work on a daily basis.

  I walk out of the living room and into a smaller room that feels like a closet due to the fact that most of the walls and ceiling have been painted black. There is a naked mattress propped up against one wall and a couple of wooden chairs, but most of the space is taken up by piles of random items tied together to form strange teepees or stacked like kindling around the room: knotted shirts, ropes, pipes, a ukulele, a lawn torch, hats, wires, sticks.

  I stop and stand, transfixed, before a mural in crayon and chalk and paper that dominates one of the black walls. It is vital, beautiful. It depicts the night sky, thick lines of psychedelic colour swirling in on themselves and around a young girl holding a flaming torch. The girl has been torn from a book, pasted to the wall and seamlessly integrated into the larger cosmos of this image. She stands there, staunchly balanced between a lemon yellow dagger and the word ‘Knowledge’. Perfectly primitive, the image is, at the same time, powerfully allegorical and somehow, though of course this seems insane, it appears to thrum on the dark wall with some talismanic promise of power. Also, it conveys as starkly as a road sign the thousand, thousand miles between where Kim is now and where she should have been. With all the appliances ripped out, it takes me a while to realise that this room was once the kitchen.

  Sandra enters the room with Kim and compliments the mural while thinking aloud how she can advocate on Kim’s behalf to preserve it under the terms of the tenancy. Perhaps, she muses, they can mount a frame around it, directly on the wall. Kim immediately tries to have another painting in a different room thrown into the deal. I follow them slowly down the hall, passing a graffitied bookshelf stocked with VHS tapes and DVDs. Bugs Bunny. Peter Pan. Aladdin. Mary Poppins. Propped up against the tapes is a photo of twin boys in their schoo
l uniforms, maybe ten years old. The same face as Kim except lovely and full of life.

  I listen as Kim explains another large image on the wall to Sandra.

  Executed with the same talent as the first image, it is chilling and predominantly black. It depicts a dark figure, the type a child would draw, with spiky hair and uneven limbs, but it has been elongated, distorted as though seen in a fun-house mirror. It stands in sharp relief against an indigo sky in which float numbers and letters. There is a roiling hole or bright burning furnace in the centre of the figure. And scratched into the black paint, over and over and over again, are the lines of another figure: the shadow of this shadow man. This is a perfectly realised human world of crisis and isolation as effective as any Giacometti or Bacon or Munch. Except that it is not hanging in the Tate or MoMA, it is painted on a dirty wall next to a freestanding wardrobe with the doors ripped off.

  ‘This is from when my mother was involved in a murder–suicide. I was five years old,’ Kim explains, leaning against a door on which are scrawled the words TRAUMA and PUNISH and MIND/COST in pea-green crayon. (In different handwriting, a child’s handwriting, are the words ‘incy wincy’ in careful orange script.) ‘I don’t need medication. It’s trauma. It needs to come out. My brain has nightmares which are horrific.’ She explains how she woke up from a nightmare and just started drawing on the wall, because she had to, and I think of her alone in this dark house in the dark night. Exorcising this image onto the nearest wall.

  The bedroom. Kim sleeps on the top level of a bunk bed next to a broken chest freezer with the word CUNT scrawled on it in large brown letters. There is an accordion in the middle of her bed. A web of cellophane and rope has been twisted around the bed posts; various funeral booklets are stuck here, suspended like flies. Upstairs, in the other two bedrooms, piles of clothes and sheets, everything the colour of newsprint. Also, an electric guitar with strings missing and a toy helicopter, its blades smeared with crayon.

  ‘I can get you a fridge,’ Sandra says casually to Kim as they descend the stairs. ‘And a washing machine, a fancy new one. And a dryer.’ When Sandra does a deceased estate and there is no next of kin to take the bed linen or TV or furniture, she stores these orphaned items and waits for the right fit, then she installs them for free into the freshly cleaned homes of her hoarding and squalor clients.

  With an autistic client who had been sleeping on the cement floor of his bare apartment, she once explained, ‘The TV came from a murder, I stored it so it was aired out and ready to go, there was a lounge and I had a table, so I gave him that.’ She gave another client, going through a divorce, ‘a proper lounge suite with a recliner, a foldout bed, a vacuum cleaner, kitchen stuff, a whole range of linen, and I’ve got pillows for him. This is going to be a major transformation for this guy.’

  She does this because she is deeply generous but that’s not the entire explanation. There’s also her drive to execute each job as perfectly as possible, which sets her apart from the other industrial cleaners who are happy with doing adequate work. But that’s not the whole story either. She has been intuitively righting her environment—cleaning it, organising it, coordinating it, filling in gaps where she can, hiding them where she can’t—since she was a child. It is her way of imposing order on her world and it brings her profound satisfaction.

  Kim walks out of her bedroom and into the small laundry room which leads outside. She is volatile, emitting instability like radio waves, and I too feel jumpy, nervous. While the type of high energy that Sandra gives off always feels warm, like a car engine that’s been driving for hours, Kim crackles. Suddenly, she shoots back out of the room and runs circles around us, bent low at the waist. I startle and, without thinking, grab Sandra’s arm.

  ‘It’s the dog,’ Sandra says lightly. Kim’s dog managed to get inside and she is chasing it back out so that it doesn’t attack the rats. We continue into the laundry room where a screen door leads to the backyard. There is no washing machine, no dryer. Just taps on the wall. There is a low table covered in a bedsheet with a velour pillow in the centre, on which various items are stored in boxes that once held tea-light candles and rolling papers. There is a crayon-streaked kettle and toaster, empty packets of chips, bread, tea bags. A small picture of the Virgin Mary hangs high on the wall of this makeshift kitchen. Also, a small postcard of Einstein. The dirty floor is carpeted with a brown blanket on which pink-handled cutlery appears to have been deliberately positioned. There is a toilet in a tiny room off to the side; the floor there is strewn with ten volumes of the World Book and the walls are painted bright blue and covered in green writing: OOH PUNCH & JUDY SHOW!, SUICIDE TAB 111 11, MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB. A frying pan lies at the base of the toilet, a crucifix dangles from the toilet-paper holder.

  Surveying the dining situation, Sandra asks Kim if she would like a microwave. ‘I, uh, I…uh…I would do that…’ Kim replies quietly, then pins a coffee can between her feet and hops it to the other side of the room.

  The backyard is vast. A Hills hoist is stuck like a cocktail umbrella in the dead centre of the dead lawn; debris everywhere in the spongy yellow grass. Despite it being the end of summer, the bushes and trees along the fence line are devoid of leaves. An entropic mound of trash and broken furniture oozes towards the house from the far corner of the yard. This is where Kim deposited the stuff that was crowded up to the ceiling inside the house during the last inspection.

  I hear Kim telling a story inside like she’s at a bar with friends; Sandra breaks out into long laughter with her. Then they come outside and Kim, frowning, squats and lights a cigarette butt. Sandra’s phone rings. ‘Good morning, Sandra speaking,’ she answers pertly while sitting down on a milk crate and majestically crossing her legs. Balancing her clipboard on her lap, she listens while making notes. The little dog trots over and places its front paws on her leg.

  ‘We might have to take up the carpet,’ Sandra says, staring into the middle distance and stroking the dog’s head. Her perfectly manicured nails are extra-long acrylics, sufficiently durable for her to participate (ungloved, as is her preference) in an all-day trauma clean and emerge looking as though she has just been at the manicurist. At least, if you don’t peer too closely at the undersides. She favours juicy bright shades of cherry red or apricot or watermelon, or a glazed glitter baby pink. Intensely practical about her appearance, as she is about most things, she has opted for permanent eyeliner, lip liner and eyebrow liner so that she can throw on minimal make-up and be ready for the day. Her eyelashes and eyebrows, like her hair, are white blonde and her eyes are very blue, slightly wide-set and enormous. Regardless of what she is doing that day or how long she has been doing it for, she looks immaculate and smells lovely.

  The dog jumps onto Sandra’s clipboard, leaving brown paw prints on the paper. She reaches around it to continue making notes. ‘See, that’s because body fluids go through to the underlay. It can be the size of a coin, but spread out underneath,’ she explains into the phone. ‘You can surface clean it but if you have children crawl over it at some stage, you’re likely to be sued later on. In my mind, I’m not happy with that. I’d rather you be safe, sound and it’s sterilised. We can certainly look at that for you. That’s the trauma side of things but there may be an industrial clean needed, like if the walls need to be washed down because the body fluids have evaporated in the heat or if there was gas in the room, I’m not sure how they killed themselves.’ The dog launches itself off Sandra’s arm, ripping two puncture holes in her skin. They start to bleed more than you would think. ‘It’s my paper skin,’ she whispers, covering the phone and then wiping at the blood. Her cortisone inhalers cause skin atrophy; just now it tore like wet tissue. ‘Where’s the house?’ she asks. ‘Ah, that’s just a hop, skip and a jump for us.’ Pleased, she finishes the call.

  The dog nestles between Kim’s knees. ‘Aw, god, you want love,’ she laments theatrically as she ties her black scarf around her head like a turban. And then, quietly, ‘You
want breakfast…’ She leans her head back, the burnt-out butt dangling from her lip.

  Staring at the mountain of junk in the back corner of the yard, I think of the photos on the bookshelf of the boys with Kim’s face and the Disney VHS tapes and the two unused dark bedrooms. I watch as the old sink and the battered washing machine rise up from the pile and right themselves, the two tiny headboards snap back onto the two small bed bases and all the clothes shake themselves off, fold themselves up and assemble in piles. I watch as everything floats up across the lawn and back inside and back through time to before the garage burned, when the walls were white and blankets covered the beds instead of being worn as skirts or used as carpets. But I know that, while Mary Poppins may have sung out from the TV and clothes may have dried on the line, things were not OK. Things here were never OK.

  We walk around to the front of the house on our way out. Sandra is professional and obsessively efficient in her work but she cannot stay entirely serious for too long without indulging a playful flirtiness which she fans out like a peacock’s tail. When she does this her eyes gleam and she is very beautiful and very hilarious and I cannot help, always, just to be delighted by her. She points to Kim’s headgear and says, ‘You look like Taliban.’

  ‘I can be,’ Kim smiles shyly and then they both giggle.

  Despite seeing the same old shit each day for twenty-one years, Sandra treats each client as unique in their circumstance and equal in their dignity. I asked her, once, how she manages to maintain that attitude of compassion and absolute non-judgment. ‘I think it’s a drive for me that everyone deserves it because I deserve it as well,’ she explained.