The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster(8)

As she turns the dial back and forth between her long red nails, tinny voices swell and fade in the space around us and I remember reading that all static is radiation, still, from the Big Bang; a living memory, an echo.

Ailsa is at her cake-decorating class and it is raining on the night Peter is finally exiled from his family. Bill is barking at him, forcing him to get his hair shaved into a crew cut. This time Peter refuses and Bill throws him out. Seventeen years old. Peter will only see his father three or four more times before Bill dies of heart problems at the age of fifty-five. On one of these occasions Bill tries to run him over in the street with his car. And then there will be Peter’s eighteenth birthday party, when Bill turns up drunk and wielding a knife to the tiny flat where Peter is living. Peter will have no idea what sparked his father’s rage that particular night but will be forever grateful to his neighbour, a Hungarian single mother, who intervenes and drives the man away.

As an adult, Sandra knows nothing about her biological parents. Only that she was meant to die in her first weeks, sick perhaps, and that she was adopted through the Catholic Church, which sent her home with a florid and violent alcoholic. She has no desire to find out more information about her biological family. ‘Especially now, ’cause like, how’d you be? Rocking up at the door and going: “Hi, I’m your son!” They’d have a fucking heart attack!’ She laughs. ‘You’ve gotta take the good with the bad, you know what I mean?’

Her younger brother, Simon, is the only family member she has maintained contact with throughout her life. But Simon, who was not spared Bill’s violence by virtue of being his biological son—or less effeminate—would never talk about their childhood, cutting Sandra off when she tried. She did, however, go back to their old street when she was in her forties, to visit Aunty Dot, who still lived next door.

Sandra called her up and told her ‘what the situation was’ (that she was now living as a woman) and that she would love to pay her a visit. Aunty Dot invited her over. Sandra was emotional on the drive back to her old neighbourhood. She was trying not to cry because she had applied her make-up with extra special care that day and didn’t want to look ‘like a shitbox’ by the time she arrived. Her desire to look respectable and successful and feminine magnified the silent struggle for dignity and autonomy faced by all adult children trying to go back home on their own terms. She knocked on the door and Aunty Dot welcomed her in.

‘I always thought there was something different about you, Sandra, because you loved frilly curtains and you loved girlie things,’ Aunty Dot said to the graceful woman sitting on her couch. They had a cup of tea and spoke lightly of easy things and for long moments Sandra let herself feel the impossible warmth of if this were her childhood home and Dot were her mother; wrapped herself in the feeling like a fur coat in a store and then cast it off before she got too comfortable.

Finally, Sandra said, ‘I’ve got to ask you Aunty Dot, no one will validate that anything ever happened to me. I don’t know whether I dreamed all this or I was imagining it ’cause no one would talk about it. Can you tell me, was it all in my mind or did things really happen, was I bashed like that…’

And Aunty Dot was probably speared by the question. She probably felt a maternal urge to protect Sandra by not pressing on the wound, felt her tongue falter under the golden rule against mixing in but also a justified anger at Bill’s criminal violence. So she said to this lovely blonde lady, in whom she clearly saw the sweet face of the gentle boy she had known, ‘Well, let me put it to you this way, my dear. It wasn’t a very good life for you.’

Sandra walked back to her car in her good shoes, past her old house with the bungalow out the back and drove away. Not long after that, Aunty Dot died.

?

Sandra touches on a number of theories about her parents.

‘I always thought that my mother was my mother, but my father wasn’t my real father and that’s why he hated me,’ she says. But that theory went out the window when they told her she was adopted. So it led to a different idea.

‘I can always remember being in the kitchen with my mother before I was seven and hanging on to her leg because I think all I ever wanted was to be loved by somebody and, by being an adopted child, there wasn’t that love there,’ she says, her voice quivering very slightly.

An aunt once told her that Bill was her biological father, and that her real mother was in fact Ailsa’s sister Sheila, with whom Bill had been having an affair and who died in childbirth. She doesn’t know what to believe.

‘My father hated my guts. He made no bones about it. Look, they knew I was different but they just thought I was a gay person, I think. But I didn’t know what I was myself! I just always knew…well…I don’t really know.’ She pauses to think. ‘I just sort of felt different. I didn’t feel normal.’

The key question in Sandra’s cosmology is not to do with sexuality or gender or adoption or Catholicism or alcoholism. It is how a parent can shepherd any newborn through infancy and childhood into adolescence, and cease entirely to care about that child’s way in the world.

You want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Imagine Bill and his self-loathing or trauma or mental illness; imagine his helplessness and rage every time he decides to raise another glass and throw another punch. Did he blame himself for the death of his brother all those years before? And find an echo in the death of his newborn son? Did he meet something in the army that ate away at him like mould, turning him dark and soft on the inside until he could not hold himself upright without a drink?