The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster(9)

It is impossible for a parent to be an alcoholic without spreading their emotional isolation, like a disease, throughout the home. Imagine Ailsa, the girl who loves to bake, the woman whose cakes are light and high and whose dark religion tells her to fear her effeminate son. Imagine how every day she drags herself out of bed to wrestle with her dead baby and her newborn and her three other children and her husband who cannot stop drinking and beating her. Imagine her nausea rising from sheer exhaustion, the helplessness and fear and pain that bubble up to scald her and everyone she touches. Perhaps Ailsa and Bill are sufficiently hateful to deny us even the basic satisfaction of conceiving of them as villains.

And yet. Imagine the feeling of holding a six-week-old baby boy, using your arms for his bed and your hand for his blanket and your name for his name. Think of the way his heartbeat slows when you hold him close. Imagine that baby as a boy frozen in his bed, straining to read the sound of a motor in the driveway over the noise of his own racing heart. Think of the pain his father deliberately inflicts on him, think of his paralysis and how, in some universes, the Big Bang happens in reverse: an instant retraction of time and space to a point of singularity.

No longer allowed home, Peter went to stay with the McMahons, the family of his friend Mary who lived about five kilometres away. They took him in and included him as part of their family for six months until they left for a long holiday overseas. Before they went, they arranged for him to move in with their eldest son and the father connected him with his first real job.

Fitting and turning wasn’t really his bag because he hated the greasy hands, but the security the job offered was a welcome relief. For the first time, Peter felt normal, even successful, turning up to work each day at Brunton’s Bright Steel, freshly showered, always on time, a Vegemite sandwich shyly tucked in the small bag he carried with him on the train. He felt tall inside walking into the factory complex in the growing shadow of the Westgate Bridge, then being built. He was an efficient worker, too, and a quick learner and excellent with people, so he was quickly promoted to the laboratory where they started training him in metallurgy.

Peter was in the lab at 11:50 a.m. on 15 October 1970, when the steel girders on the bridge turned blue under pressure and collapsed with a roar that could be heard over twenty kilometres away, killing thirty-five construction workers. The light bulbs in the lab and on the factory floor burst out of their sockets, plunging the rooms into a darkness in which one worker became caught in a machine, screaming while the ground trembled. Over the factory’s back fence, Peter watched emergency workers arrange their cars into a square where they threw body parts away from the crowds that had gathered nearby. It was his ‘first seeing of death’. By the time construction on the bridge resumed in 1972, Peter had moved on to another job.

‘I was married by then…I’d met a girl on the way to…’cause I lived at, um, I must’ve lived at Williamstown then, over the Mars Music Store…because on the Williamstown train, going to Spotswood, that’s where I met this girl…’

Sometimes, listening to Sandra try to remember the events of her life is like watching someone reel in rubbish on a fishing line: a weird mix of surprise, perplexity and unexpected recognition. No matter how many times we go over the first three decades of her life, the timeline of places and dates is never clear. Many of her memories have a quality beyond being merely faded; they are so rusted that they have crumbled back into the soil of her origins. Others have been fossilised, frozen in time, and don’t have a personal pull until they defrost slightly in the sunlit air between us as we speak. And when that happens there is a tremor in her voice as she integrates them back into herself, not seamlessly but fully.

Sometimes, though, the smallest particulars—names and feelings and exquisite details—are so quickly recalled and finely drawn that it is like she has been holding them, all this time, in the palm of her hand. She can sketch, at any moment, the floor plan of her childhood home and explain to you how the master bedroom was near the front door, which had a glass panel running down the side. How you stepped down into the lounge room and where her mother’s display cabinets were built into the wall and how they were filled with the good crystal. Where Barbara’s bedroom was and the boys’ bedroom was. How you stepped outside into the backyard onto ‘a patio-type affair’ that eventually became the bungalow to which she was exiled. But the age at which that exile occurred changes drastically. Sometimes it is seven, then eleven, other times it is thirteen. No matter how many times we go over this and over this, it is never clear.

What I think is that there were two seismic shifts in the way Sandra was treated as a child. The first came when her younger brothers were born. From the age of seven, she was subject to significant neglect and abuse. However, she probably continued to live inside the house, sharing a room with her brothers, until she was around thirteen. I say this because the yard that she landscaped while her family was away on their Tasmanian holiday included a fishpond. The bungalow that Bill built for her to move into was placed over that fishpond. So she must have been sent to sleep out there when she was thirteen.

This might have been a practical measure to save space in a small house or maybe, like the army cadets and the crew cuts, it was the way the Collins boys were toughened up to become men, but it was also a continuation of the particular neglect and violence that she had been subjected to for most of her childhood.