The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster(3)

‘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 school 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.