The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein

Author:Sarah Krasnostein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Celestial Star

Maria Gloria Paten and Sandra, then known as Amanda Celeste Claire

Late 1970s—early 1980s

At a brothel on Hay Street, Kalgoorlie in the 1980s

Sandra and Rick

Janice

It unsettles me whenever I think about it, my too-late realisation that Janice was actually talking; so still was her jaw, with its under-bite thrusting teeth up into the air like fence palings. But when everyone held still, you could feel it more than hear it, like the ocean in a shell, the low voice that barely murmured over her lips before being swallowed back down to the darkness from which it came.

‘You know what my problem is? I’mtooslow. Why do I take so long?’ Janice was saying, smiling ruefully at Sandra while depositing a rubbish bag at the bottom of her front steps. Then she dashed back inside her house, locking the door behind her.

Sandra and her crew of cleaners have been waiting outside Janice’s house for half an hour because, although Janice agreed to a 9 a.m. start when Sandra came last week to do the quote, she is now reluctant. Speaking to Sandra from the darkness behind her screen door, Janice politely asked for an extra half-hour during which—Sandra would see!—she’d do the work herself because this really wasn’t necessary after all.

Sandra agreed to this request as a tactical measure and because the industrial-sized skip she’d ordered for Janice’s houseful of rubbish was still delayed in traffic. Two birds, one stone. She handed Janice a few jumbo black plastic rubbish bags and pulled a face mask out of the pocket of her purple parka. ‘Wear this over your mouth and nose, dear, you’ll feel better for it,’ she advised. Janice grabbed the mask and shut the front door.

Sandra is perched gingerly on the low bricks lining an empty flowerbed, under the perfect blue sky. She checks her watch and her emails and banters with her employees, most of whom are standing in a circle nearby and smoking hard. Every few minutes Janice emerges, slightly bent over and gripping a bulging rubbish bag which she hefts onto the tiny patch of dirt and weeds outside her front door. She comments too brightly on how well and fast she’s working, before disappearing back through her door.

In her garage there is a mountain of bulging rubbish bags, but this striking amount of rubbish is sufficiently concealed that, were you to stand in the driveway and face Janice’s house, there would appear on first glance to be nothing unusual. Then your keener senses would register the discord between the gorgeous morning light and the blind yanked down so hard over the single front window that its excess length has puddled up at the bottom. And, were you to approach that window, you would see the black mould creeping up the glass and the condensation dripping down like tears.

Exactly at 9:30 a.m., Sandra calls out to the cleaners to get suited up. Lizzie—calm, obese, hair slicked back into a bun—saunters over to the back of the truck where

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