The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster(10)

So I tell the story here as Sandra remembers it most often—as an exile from the table and the home and the family at seven years old—because all memory is a particular metaphysics in which our experiences of reality constitute our only reality. Regarding the question of historical truth, the answer is both that there must be one and that there is none. When it comes to Sandra’s history, this problem is compounded: her reality is as conflicted as it is real.





Girl, interrupted

I pull up in front of a complex of endless Soviet-style apartments and walk over to the immaculate travelling hardware store that is the STC van, where I am handed a white disposable jumpsuit. The package specifies the garment’s ‘application’ as follows: Asbestos Removal, Abattoirs, Painting, Forensics, Insulation, Laboratories, Factories, Food Processing, Waste Control, Medical, Law Enforcement, Pesticide Spraying. I am also given a disposable respirator mask and a pair of blue rubber gloves. Four of Sandra’s cleaners are there: Tania, Cheryl, Lizzie and Dylan, everyone reduced to a small cheery face sticking out of a white disposable hood. Dylan, tall and still baby-faced, hands me two flat white things that look like chefs hats but turn out to be shoe covers. I glance at the others to figure out how to put them on.

With our hoods up and our blue gloves on we stand there looking like something between Smurfs and astronauts. Except for Sandra. Sandra is wearing a slim-line purple parka—ironed—with jeans and spotless white canvas sneakers. Sandra looks like she should be enjoying a Pimm’s after a walk along the beach. Instead she leads us through the security gates, into an elevator and up one floor to a flat where a young woman died of a heroin overdose and lay undiscovered for two and a half weeks in the summer heat. Sandra will collect the deceased’s personal items for the family, appraise what needs to be done to rent the apartment again and supervise the cleaning.

A man on the ground floor looks up and asks what we are doing.

‘Just some maintenance, darl,’ Sandra reassures him, which, in its way, is the truth.

One of the cleaners unlocks the door. Sandra has a quick look inside. ‘Ugh. Stinks,’ she says. ‘Right. Masks on, breathe through your mouth!’ She warns everyone to watch out for syringes while helping Tania don her mask. Tightening it, Sandra says to her wryly, ‘You may never breathe again, but don’t worry about it.’

Cheryl takes out a small jar of Tiger Balm and rubs it into each nostril before slipping on her mask.

Sandra remains unmasked. ‘Been doing it for so long, I don’t bother…Grin and bear it!’ she sings.

It is not her most visible trait—you would miss it altogether if you did not know her well, if she had not let you in sufficiently to welcome your calls with a sweetly rasping, ‘Good morning my little dove’—but that is what makes it her strongest: a bodily fortitude so incredible that it cannot be ascribed to mere biology. Aside from carrying around with her a lime-coloured leather handbag of fine quality in which she keeps an electric-blue tin of mints, six lipsticks, three jail-sized key rings, tissues, a camera, a little black diary for notes, a pen to write them with, a Ventolin inhaler, a mascara, a bottle of water, her iPhone and a cord with which to recharge it, Sandra also carries the burden of lung disease so severe that she cannot take more than a few steps, however slowly, without fighting for breath. And though you will hear this struggle, and though the sound of it is excruciating (even if it doesn’t descend into one of the frequent coughing fits so powerful it seems like it will turn her inside out), she will get on top of it as quickly as possible, accept no concern or special treatment, and resume whatever activity or conversation was interrupted with such competent dexterity that, if you remember it at all, the interruption will seem as significant as one sneeze in a cold.

It is, of course, not a cold. It is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with lung fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension. It can be managed with daily oxygen use, rest and the avoidance of environmental threats, but it is incurable.

Sandra uses her oxygen tank sparingly because she believes that the more she uses it, the more she will need it and it is one of the Golden Rules of Pankhurst ‘not to be reliant on any person or any thing’. So while she keeps the tank at the ready, it is more in the spirit of a safety net (‘If I end up getting pneumonia, then I’m fucked.’) rather than as a tool for daily living. As regards rest, she does not. She works at least six days per week and while she might make it home, some days, by four o’clock to watch The Bold and the Beautiful, it is not unusual for her to leave home at 6:30 a.m. and return at 7:30 p.m. She averages twelve hundred kilometres per week, driving to and between jobs across the state.

She will sometimes take perfunctory precautions against the environmental threats she encounters numerous times each day (sick clients, black mould spores, pathogens in accumulated biological material) by wearing a mask or gloves. But these are quickly cast off because they impede her ability to work efficiently, and because she does not want to alienate her already-distressed clients.

‘I’m meeting someone there, quite often a family member, I don’t want them to go into shock, like, “This person from outer space has come here.” I grin and bear it and I go in,’ she explained to me once.

In addition to severe pulmonary disease, Sandra also has cirrhosis of the liver. The causes of her conditions are various and not susceptible to confident isolation. The chemicals she used in the early years of her cleaning business may play a role; so too her decades of double-dosing female hormones. Then there are viruses and biology and a factor euphemistically known as ‘lifestyle’, which carries with it specious overtones of culpability. Her drinking, and her years of heavy drug use earlier in her life, conform with the fact that trans people have higher rates of self-medication.