The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster(6)

By then the family had moved to Birchill Street, which shows itself as a tiny T on the map of West Footscray; an oddly shaped street possessed of not one but two dead ends. It was, however, agreeably nestled within easy walking distance of Sims grocery store and St John’s Primary School as well as the chemist, the post office, the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and, were she to deny one’s pleas for intercession, as she did regularly but through no fault of her own, Footscray Hospital. Seven years later, Robert was still living at home—now with his wife, Ailsa—and making a living as a grocer while she worked as a saleswoman.

By 1954 the couple had finally struck out on their own, at least as far as the small white cottage immediately opposite his parents. From here Robert, whom people inexplicably called Bill, would set out each day for his clerical role at the Royal Australian Air Force Base in Braybrook, followed by an evening shift at the Plough Hotel during which he would drink himself into a rage and then drive sloppily home to beat his wife and children. This was Peter’s home, where he was brought after he was adopted through the Catholic Church in the early fifties. Six weeks old.

In the taxonomy of pain there is only the pain inflicted by touching and the pain inflicted by not touching. Peter grew up an expert in both. Malnourished, the skin on his thin neck perpetually covered in boils, he was as scarred as the surface of Mercury; a planet lacking atmospheric protection, exposed to the hurtling debris of space and wearing its history of collision and battery on its face.

The second child and the oldest son, he was adopted after Bill and Ailsa lost a son in childbirth and were told that they could have no more biological children. For about five years it was just Peter and his older sister, Barbara. But then Ailsa fell pregnant, first with Simon and two years later, Christopher. That’s when they told Peter that he had been adopted as a replacement for the son they had lost. And that they had made a mistake because they now had not just Simon but also Christopher, you see? This was stated clinically, as a matter of fact, ‘nothing bitter and twisted or anything’.

A few years later, they moved Peter out of the room he shared with his brothers, with its bunk beds and black walls and bright red bedspreads, and into a low shed his father built in the backyard.

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Ailsa is the ‘prima donna of sponges’. She loves to bake, and Peter’s first memory is of hugging her leg in the kitchen. When he grows too tall for that, he never stops trying to be close to her. His eyes follow her around the kitchen, around the house, out the door. His eyes map her face. Is she angry? Is she sad? What can he do to make it better? To feel the weight of her hand pressing gently on the back of his shoulders; maybe even her warm cheek on his ear? Is there something he can help her with after his father leaves for work in the morning? Something he can do for her after school? He would give anything to sit quietly next to her while she talks on the telephone with her sister or flips through a magazine. If he is lucky enough to eat dinner with the rest of the family, he will check her face during the meal and again while he is cleaning up. When that is done, he will check once more just to be sure that nothing has changed, that there’s nothing he might have missed. And then he will look at her, silently saying goodnight, willing her to come tuck him in, to stay next to his bed where he can see her outline in the dark and hear her breath while he falls asleep.

But though sometimes she seems less angry, or at least more distracted, he never finds what he is looking for. Instead, she busies herself with the house and the shopping and the cooking and cleaning and her church, and her other children as Bill beats Peter for their misdeeds.

‘See? See what you’ll get if you do it again?’ his father, breathless and sweating, warns the other kids after he gets through with Peter. And then he locks his son outside to watch from his room in the yard as the house lights glow yellow and then go out.

Because Peter is not allowed into the family home after 4:30 p.m. each day he lives delicately, like lace, just at the edges. This presents a range of practical problems. First there is the food issue: he is always hungry. How does a starving child feed himself? If he is smart, he steals canned fruit or baked beans from the pantry when no one is looking. And that will work until he accidentally burns part of the house down.

One of Peter’s chores is to light the hot water system and one day he forgets. He panics. He tries to fill it up with the petrol that goes in the lawnmower, and the laundry room catches fire. Strangely, he doesn’t get beaten for the fire; he gets beaten for stealing food after his stash of crushed, empty cans is discovered hidden behind one of the walls that burns down.

The ‘whole street is family’—both blood relatives and ‘your close people’ whom you would also call aunty and uncle. Aunty Dot lives right next door. Aunty Rosemary lives next door to Dot. Peter’s paternal grandparents still live across the street; Grandma grows lilies in the front garden. His grandparents come over on Sundays for dinner and, while they know Peter has his own room out the back, to them it is just a practical measure in a small house. What they do not know, as they sit there at the table with their son and daughter-in-law and four grandchildren eating ‘a roast and three veggies overcooked to the shithouse’, is that this is the only night of the week that Peter is allowed inside the house, the only time he is given a meal.

Throughout the year, everyone carries their hard rubbish to the vacant patch of land at the end of the street. Here, as the seasons change, rises an increasingly sprawling pile: the chair missing a leg, nubs of brooms worn down with sweeping, wooden crates missing planks like teeth; all the broken things mixed together to form a jagged accumulation that is monstrous against the night sky, though its parts are as familiar as breathing. And then, on Guy Fawkes Day, it is lit and the children cheer.