The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster(5)

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.

Back on the footpath, I look up and down the street. The neighbourhood is shabbier than it first appeared and the smell with no name is here too, high on the breeze, its meaning as public and as private as a song. I ask Kim how she got into puppeteering. She answers that it was a way of working through the things she couldn’t speak about. How does she manage to work that marionette hanging inside without hopelessly twisting all the different strings like everyone else?

‘It’s like playing an instrument. It’s like dancing,’ she says simply.

Her house looks like the aftermath of a personalised earthquake visited by a vengeful god but even here, in the midst of such disturbing chaos, what Kim has elegantly just confirmed is the profound power of sequence; the beauty of order. Heartbeat, breath, ebb tide, flood tide, the movements of the earth, the phases of the moon, seasons, ritual, call and response, notes in a scale, words in a sentence. Human connection and security lie here. Sandra will start work at Kim’s house next week.





2

It didn’t start at the twenty-buck fuck shops. It didn’t start in the barnlike brothel where the girls roosted like hens, wire on the windows and around the light bulbs to prevent the men from ripping them out of the ceiling. It didn’t start with the boyfriends who stuck around only as long as her money lasted, or with the beatings from the cops who hated boys dressed like girls or with the women who wouldn’t open the door when she stood outside pleading in the dark, naked and bleeding. It didn’t start with any of that. It started when she was a little boy in a small house with a dirt driveway running up along the side.

Maybe his name was Glen. Maybe it was Daniel. Or John or Mark or Tim. The actual name matters only because it is a piece of information that Sandra chooses to keep for herself. Statistically, it’s most likely to have been Peter. And although that was not his actual name, it is what he’ll be called. Not for lack of imagination, but because he had the right to be treated like any other boy born that year, and he was not.

If his father drove in a straight line up the driveway, Peter knew he wouldn’t be beaten. But if the car rolled in crooked, it meant his father had been drinking, which meant that he would wobble with purpose to the detached room out the back where his son lay, tensed, in whalemouth darkness. Then he would grab the boy and beat his thin body with the copper stick his wife used for stirring laundry.

‘He’s at it again, Pammy,’ the neighbour would say to her daughter, drying her hands on a dishtowel before turning around to shut the kitchen window gently on the boy’s cries. ‘Better go and turn up your radio.’

Sandra’s father, Robert, was born in 1923 and raised in Footscray. When my father-in-law talks about growing up in Footscray, he talks about the rope walk, long and narrow under its corrugated iron roof, and how the boys who worked at the rope factory became men who died early, their lungs full of resin and dust. Footscray is gentrifying fast now but this inner-city neighbourhood was a major industrial zone from the mid-1800s until the 1960s, when manufacturing began to decline, and a part of town where no one had it easy.

The Collins family lived on Droop Street initially, a road that drops obliquely, if not with melancholic defeat, away from West Footscray and sags towards Footscray proper as if gradually shoved out of place over time by forces beyond its control. Robert was eleven when his fourteen-year-old brother, Harold, died in 1934. In 1939, sixteen-year-old Robert Griffith Parker Collins carried his four names across state lines to Greta, New South Wales, to enlist in the Second Australian Forces, but by 1942 he was back home living with his parents and working as a labourer.