Dorothy’s front door wouldn’t open. So they took it off its hinges.
“[We] were confronted immediately by a wall of garbage, decades upon decades of accumulated detritus,” says Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner. Dorothy’s impenetrable house was in a wealthy suburb, not far from a cafe that made raw almond milk. Krasnostein had arrived there with Sandra Pankhurst, the 63-year-old owner and operator of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.
“The floor wasn’t the floor, it started three or four feet up the wall, and through her rooms was the solid glacial mass of garbage fused together.”
In the four years Krasnostein spent writing and researching her book, she trailed Pankhurst to more than 20 grotesque and garbage-filled sites in suburban Melbourne. “People think ‘cleaning’ and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,” Pankhurst told her as they stood together in the midst of Dorothy’s house. “We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer.”
Pankhurst is portrayed as a remarkable woman: a goddess in white sneakers, marching through decrepit homes and commanding staff in hazmat suits on the correct chemicals for bodily fluids. Her genius lies in the kind and delicate way she speaks to her clients, bizarre characters hiding from the outside world in caves of filth.
Originally an essay published online, Krasnostein’s playful yet heartfelt debut is one of the most arresting works of biography you will read in a long time. Guardian Australia spoke to the writer about shit stains, bed bugs, cleaning and compassion.
Guardian Australia: What is a trauma cleaner?
Sarah Krasnostein: A trauma cleaner cleans crime scenes. But what I didn’t know was that they also deal with many living clients. Sandra’s business involves going to the home of hoarders. She encounters both “wet squalor” – things that you would flush down a toilet – and “dry squalor”, garbage that has collected over time.
How would you describe the smell of death?
Once it hits you, it’s both intimate and alien at the same time. An awful, awful smell. At the first job I went on, a woman who was my age at the time, 35, had died of a heroin overdose; her body was discovered after two weeks. When you reduce a human to just carbon matter decaying over time, it’s profoundly disturbing.
What sort of scenes were you going into?
In Marilyn’s house, the foyer was densely covered by about 40 grocery bags, full of rotting food. There was fruit liquefying on her bed, where she slept. The bathroom was … she couldn’t always make it to the toilet.
Marilyn was witty and well-read, but her world was falling in on her. She did have cancer, she was probably alcoholic. This was the physical manifestation of the pain and isolation in which she was living. In each of the jobs was the unsettling sense of pain and mental illness.
There was only one job where I couldn’t make it inside. When Sandra opened the door, the woman’s house was completely dark, full of rabbits and dogs, and it was very hot. The smell – I started dry retching, and Sandra gave me shit about it for the remainder of the day.
I had a very elaborate process for avoiding cross-contamination – Sandra’s terminology. In the boot of my own car I had a change of shoes, and a plastic bag to put my work shoes in before I went home. Preparing for work used to mean remembering to bring extra pens, but now it meant figuring out what clothes to wear – I had to be able to throw them out if they got particularly gross. Like one job, the toilet was continually flooded. We’re walking on carpet that had been penetrated by human faeces.
And who is Sandra, who does this work every day?
She goes into homes of people who have been broken and cleans through their pain.
Sandra had an awful childhood. She was adopted through the Catholic church to a family in West Footscray, Melbourne. The father was an extremely violent alcoholic and both parents were physically and emotionally abusive. She was forced to live in a bungalow that her father built and she was excluded from the family home. They would deny her food and access to the bathroom.
She was born male, and as a little child I believe she would have been very gentle and effeminate. As hardcore Catholics, the mother developed a hatred of her for being what she believed to be homosexual. So Sandra was stigmatised by the people who were meant to be including her.
She met Linda. They were flatmates and got married when she was 19, and they had two boys in quick succession. Sandra started exploring the gay community in Melbourne and became aware of trans people. She realised that was what she had to do – staying was not an option.
So she made a clean break and began dancing in clubs in St Kilda. That’s when she began doing street prostitution. Even though she was intelligent and had great social skills, she was locked out of professional fields because she chose to live full-time as a woman as she was transitioning, a process that took about eight years.
After surgery, Sandra was attacked when working in a brothel – but then she pressed charges.
It was remarkable [thing to do], to talk to the police as a transgender sex worker … She exercised such agency and resilience. And now she goes into homes of people who have been broken, and cleans through their pain.
You write that Sandra imposes order on the world. What does this mean?
Things that had happened to clients decades ago still had hands over their mouths. They were suffocating. These people are still at the mercy of these living, ravaging experiences.
It’s the difference between a zoo and a museum. When Sandra talks to me about her trauma, it’s like seeing a tiger in a museum. It’s not going to come out and rip your face off. It’s static behind glass.
How do we move forward and make what we can of this one life? It’s putting everything in its place, becoming more powerful than the things that hold us down. It’s what Sandra does physically – imposing order where she lives and works.