As the heartwood of a tree sings to you of thousands of sunlit days and rainy hours—specific symphonies of soil and the seasons of weathering and revival that will grant you the structural strength to reach for your share of the light—the rotten core of Dorothy’s house is a whispered scream that hurtles you backwards through decades of pitch darkness.
Dorothy’s house is located around the corner from a cafe that makes its own raw almond milk and a boutique that sells a 280-dollar grey sweatshirt. Sandra and I and four of her cleaners arrived just before 9 a.m., and the first thing the cleaners did was take the front door off its hinges. This was because it would open only partially before it hit a solid, sloping mass comprising empty champagne bottles, newspapers, fast-food wrappers and small grocery bags of rubbish that reached a metre and a half up the walls and surged down the hallway like a great and frozen river.
The next thing the cleaners did was quickly don their face masks and thick rubber gloves, bend low at the waist and start scooping the rubbish into industrial-sized black plastic bags. This technique soon proved extremely inefficient. All the discrete items of rubbish had fused together over the years—partly as a result of drowning in and drying after the rain that poured unimpeded through holes in the roof; partly by being constantly compacted by Dorothy walking over it to fetch an item balanced on top (a pair of white sneakers, reading glasses, a magazine) or to settle on whatever softer part of it she used as a bed. So the cleaners used rakes to chip away at the mass, and a shovel was wielded like a pickaxe, and Joanne called out to Sandra at one point asking her to please pass the crowbar.
‘See, people think “cleaning” and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,’ Sandra said as she went to fetch it. ‘We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer…’
It was 2016 when I entered through the kitchen window, my fingers digging into both sides of the peeling white frame and my sneakers scrambling ridiculously for purchase against the crumbling bricks. It was 2016, and I could hear the drone of the talkback radio station Sandra had tuned in to on her portable radio. But when I lowered myself into the kitchen, my feet landing not on the floor but on a deep and shifting layer of cheap champagne bottles, it was 1977. Or so said the calendar on the wall and the His Master’s Voice refrigerator and the brown newspapers folded neatly on the kitchen table amid huge piles of rubbish and rubble from the collapsing roof.
Outside, Sandra, arboreal in the morning light that fell across the overgrown garden, was picking her way over the broken beer bottles glinting in the grass. In a new pair of blindingly white canvas sneakers worn, as always, without socks, and a blue and white silk blouse fluttering in the breeze, Sandra should have been setting off from her Santorini hotel to buy souvenirs. Instead she leaned in through the kitchen window and took in that boneyard of empties with one hard look. ‘The only thing that happened here after 1977 was the bottles,’ she said.
This is the home of Dorothy Desmond, who slept here like a stillborn until yesterday, and of her mother before her. Dorothy, who has lived here for at least thirty-five years, probably longer, who is in her early seventies and who very recently came to the attention of the community organisation that contacted Sandra to clean her home. Dorothy, who is the subject of concern, definitely curiosity, also pity, maybe affection and possibly fear from neighbours who have known her for as long as she has lived in this house, but who have never once been inside. Dorothy, who, like her house and like Sandra here today working on her behalf, is at once too foreign and too familiar to be easily understood.
In the way that black is the presence of all colours, silence, for Sandra, is the presence of all noise. The things that silence says to her are so oppressive and terrifying that in order to fall asleep she requires, without exception, the aid of a sleeping pill and the noise of her television, which she sets each night to turn itself off, eventually, on a timer. To avoid waking up to a silent house, the first thing she does each morning before opening her eyes is reach for the wand of her remote and conjure the television back to life. This televisual drone and the murmurmurmur of talkback radio in her car, at a worksite, in her office (whether she is in it or not), the chiming of her wall of clocks on the quarter hour and the light conversation she can coax into existence with anyone, anywhere, constitute a precondition for life.
‘I can’t do quietness. I can’t cope with quietness,’ she has told me, admitting that her need for company is ‘a bit of an Achilles heel’. But while she once surrounded herself with companions whom she supported in exchange for their company—synthetic friendships that poorly approximated the real thing—she now has a number of much healthier relationships.
Margaret and Sandra have been neighbours for four years. They are similar ages and are in frequent contact. Like Sandra, Margaret married and had children early; unlike Sandra she was left to raise an infant alone at the age of twenty-two when her husband died in an accident. A couple of years later, Margaret met John, who had come to Australia from Liverpool on a dare from the boys at the pub.
When I sit down with them, it is their forty-fourth wedding anniversary and they are still delighted by each other. Margaret and John have known great pain; they are fun and sweet and brave, they are wonderful company and they think the world of Sandra, whom they met when the units they all now live in were being built.
‘She introduced herself and we just started talking,’ Margaret says. ‘She was just one of those people who you could click with straight away.
‘She’d been quite sick, I believe, when she moved in. Well, as it happened, at the same time John had cancer. And he was going to the Alfred for chemotherapy and I found out that Sandra was in hospital. When he was having his chemo, I went up to the ward to visit Sandra, I hardly knew her then, and it sort of progressed from there.
‘Going through the process of John having the cancer, she was absolutely amazing. She would ring me every day just to make sure I was OK and she was always trying to get me to come up and have a meal with her and make sure I was feeding myself properly ’cause I was running backwards and forwards to the hospital,’ Margaret says. ‘She’s got a lot going on in her own life, but she finds the time for you. She’s a very generous person with her time but also with her whole self. With everything.
‘This may sound silly but when John was in hospital, I’d just got home exhausted, and she popped in. She said, “Ah, I’ve got something for you.” In this little box she had a little green frog cake. And it seemed such a small thing but it was a big thing for me,’ Margaret says, her voice shining still with the joy of it. ‘And she would’ve probably had a really busy day doing all sorts of other things and trying to look after her own health, and then she stops on the way home and buys me this little frog cake.
‘When you look over what she’s been through, another person might say, “I can’t deal with the human race anymore.” But she’s not like that,’ Margaret says. ‘Even with everything that she’s gone through, she’s come out the other side even bigger and stronger. She just seems to bounce back. I think you must just be born with it or something. It’s in you just to be that strong.’
‘And she’s full of ideas all the time,’ John adds. ‘I honestly don’t know where she gets the energy from.’
Both Margaret and John worry that Sandra is ‘generous to a fault and people could take advantage’, and people did take advantage of this quality, for decades. Now, though, it inspires care and admiration in the small, disparate, low-maintenance group of people she keeps around her.
Margaret describes how Sandra came out to her: ‘We were just sitting there one afternoon, chatting away, and she says, “By the way, I’m not what I seem, you know.” And I said, laughing, “What are you talking about?” That came out of the blue. And she goes, “Well, you know, I was a bloke once…” I went, “Oh, get out!” And then she told me a few things and we had a bit of a cry and a bit of a laugh. I asked how accepting people had been of her and she said that there’d been a bit of problems. Until she brought it up, it wasn’t in your face, like “There’s something different going on here.” No, it wasn’t like that at all. There’s just this beautiful woman. I think she was incredibly brave to do what she did at that time. You’re talking forty-odd years ago, and back then it would have been an incredibly hard thing to do. A lot of less stronger people wouldn’t have got through it.
‘Sometimes I feel like she’s still struggling with it, even this far along. At times she does seem to be on guard. Like even going over to the shopping centre here in Frankston, she’ll very rarely go there. I do feel that she worries that people will notice. People have been really cruel, over the years, to her. I suppose she’d like to think that everyone would accept her as she is, she’s a beautiful woman, but she worries that they’ll pick it straight away. She told me that one person said to her, “Oh I told my friend and they said they’d picked it.” Well, that hurt her. I just think that’s horrible.’
Sandra has lived largely in stealth since the early 1980s. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was singular that halfway through our first interview she told me—a stranger still—that she had been assigned male at birth. I didn’t know then why she chose to be that candid with me that early; maybe I was lucky enough to ask the right questions in the right way at the right time. But knowing her now, I suspect it had less to do with me personally and more to do with the fact that I crossed paths with her at the point in her life when she was, finally, bursting at the seams with her story, with the need to tell and be truly known.
Sandra is not close with any gay women or men and she has no trans friends: ‘I don’t associate with any sex changers at all.’ This is because straight women are the people with whom she feels a genuine kinship. It is also because of something that an ex-boyfriend once said about the drag queens who used to form her social circle: ‘If you really want to be a woman, you have to disassociate yourself from them.’
‘That’s why I don’t have any gay, or any other sort, of friends. I don’t choose to associate with it. I live a normal, everyday life, a normal everyday existence. I might look a bit strange to some people. I might look too tall, but everyone is different,’ she once explained to me. Sandra’s lack of friendships with other members of the LGBTQI community is not active; she would not turn away from someone on those grounds. But her frame of reference regarding that community is her drag days. Her aversion is not to gay people or trans people, but to the image of herself that she associates with that period of her life. She identifies her ‘straight’ friends with a healthier, happier, safer and more productive self. This forms part of the context when she tells me, ‘I feel quite successful—I’m not financially successful—but I’m successful in my life. I’m not a prostitute or a drug addict. I have a healthy, normal lifestyle. I have fantastic neighbours who treat me like gold.’
There is also this. I once asked Sandra to write down memories and thoughts about her life whenever they struck her, so that we could discuss them later. On the back of her work calendar for 8 December 2014, among some notes about helping the nuns after school, she wrote, simply: No old friends. And also: Can’t connect to people on personal level.
From what I have observed over time, this accurately describes her ability to form empathic, two-way, secure and lasting attachments. Her ability to make friends is matched only by her ability to lose them. One former friend, someone who had been particularly close to her, told me after their rupture that, although Sandra is fun and funny and ‘would give you the shirt off her back’, although this person—still—genuinely likes Sandra, ‘rather than people leave her, Sandra pushes them away’. This is particularly true if you get too close, need her too much or, sometimes, if you cease to serve your purpose. And it is done, occasionally, in such a hurtful way that it obscures the true nature of the act, which is shield rather than sword, gaping need rather than grasping greed.
Besides the flamboyance of cheap champagne bottles, passage around Dorothy’s kitchen is blocked by a haphazard mound of wine boxes that buries, entirely, one of two chairs at the kitchen table. But you can clearly see that the room is a time capsule: the newspaper reports that Evonne Goolagong is playing in the Open and that Jimmy Carter is gloomy about the American economy. A box of Arnott’s Uneeda biscuits is on the counter, cans of Guinness and bottles of Foster’s bear their retro logos without irony. There is the bag from the McDonald’s Southern Fried Chicken that was phased out in the mid-eighties. There is no water or electricity, the toilet is outside: a board with a hole in it. Sandra finds it, using a process of deduction, behind a thick veil of foliage.
Leigh is working in the kitchen, his heavy boots balancing on the shifting surface of bottles as he wobbles back and forth under spiderwebs, thick as dreadlocks, that dangle from the light above the kitchen table. We are surprised to find out, after he inquires, that we are the same age. He says I look younger; I think he looks older. For long stretches, there is just him and me, the crowded ghosts of Dorothy’s life and their strange music, which is the clear clinking of glass on glass and abandoned cutlery and empty cans and the rustling of newspapers when wrestled up into a new plastic bag. Sandra coughs violently outside.
The scale of the squalor is striking but not as unusual as you might expect. It is similar to an apartment nearby that Sandra cleaned last year: same type of client (female, later sixties, office worker), same mountains of empty champagne bottles choking each room, same ammonia smell, same years without electricity. The neighbours at that job had complained because of the rats that started climbing up the building. It took six people, including Sandra, twelve hours to complete. It took eight people to move the three tonnes of rubbish out of the apartment. At the time, I asked Sandra what the woman looked like.
‘She just looks like an old lady,’ she replied.
‘Is she unwell?’ I asked.
‘I think she’s just lonely,’ Sandra said.
I wobble up the glacier of glass and garbage out of the kitchen and grab the lintel of the doorframe for support before descending into the lounge room. From my vantage point atop this mountain, I look down onto a gold-framed painting of gum trees hanging over the fireplace. There are two black and white TVs in one corner of the room and as I stare into the rubbish, two broken chairs emerge from the accumulated detritus like dolphins in a magic eye picture. In addition to the hundreds of empty bottles—champagne and beer and wine and gin—that reach up to the light fixture, there are also numerous empty packets and cartons of Marlboros. An ashtray overflows on the mantelpiece; a few butts have burnt themselves out in the stuffing of a pillow. Against one wall a long, low display cabinet bares its rusted nails like fangs where the wood has rotted away. On its surface, amid the rubble from the caved-in roof, are cassette tapes of classical music and dirty pennies so worn the Queen’s face has been erased. Behind its glass doors the good plates are still neatly stacked.
The women that Sandra is now closest to are, in the traditional sense, ‘respectable’ and ‘normal’ and they reflect those qualities back onto her through their friendship. They are very different from each other, but all are intelligent, strong and caring people in whom you can see a wicked sense of humour, a low tolerance for what they perceive to be bullshit and a mainstream, politically conservative worldview. Sandra herself is a ‘long time Liberals supporter’, a fact that initially startled me but which, on reflection, serves as a warning against the assumption that trans is an inherently radical position.
In other words, while it might not be considered consistent with her social interests or experiences, Sandra has the same right as anyone else to choose her place on the political spectrum for the reasons that make sense to her. Sandra’s girlfriends are the women she genuinely likes and they are also, in various ways, the women whom she might very well have become had she simply been born female.
Katrina has known Sandra for nearly fifteen years. She stresses, as others do, Sandra’s big heart and her thoughtfulness, and says how much she respects her ‘because I don’t know if many people would have survived that childhood’. She adds, ‘Sandra is extremely private. When she is sick or sad or hurt, she doesn’t want you around. It’s almost as if she doesn’t deserve goodness. I’ve seen her desperately sick, and she just shuts down. I remember when I took her to the doctor, and she was thinking more about me getting home and her being a burden. I could almost cry, because I just heard the little boy that nobody cared about. I left her at the hospital alone because it was too painful for her to have me there with her. Sometimes it feels as if her needs are so great, I’m talking about the lungs and the liver, and, I don’t know, just everything.’
Unlike Sandra, whose position towards ‘God-botherers’ is variously annoyed, bemused or livid, Katrina is a church-going woman. ‘I would hope that I would never judge her and just accept her for who she is,’ Katrina tells me. ‘I said to Sandra, “God sees you as a human being. He looks down on you and says, ‘Wow, you are amazing, with all you have been through, you are still smiling, caring and sharing.’” I think we get our non-judgment from how we were brought up. It’s none of our business what people do in their bedrooms.’
But as sensitive as Katrina is towards Sandra, there are moments when she exhibits an emotional astigmatism that serves to highlight the magnitude of Sandra’s larger, lifelong battle for social acceptance.
‘My husband thinks Sandra is lovely. When Sandra met him, she said to me, “He’s the sort of man that I would like, but a man like him would never look at a person like me.” Sandra is very sensible. She knows that people don’t like poofters and transsexuals, and she gets it, because she doesn’t either, that’s why she doesn’t hang around them. They are usually warped, weird, dirty and disgusting, and she doesn’t want to be like that. She is working hard to support herself so that in her old age she can just have a nice, decent life, and I really hope that she has peace.’
‘It’s making me look like a fuckin’ idiot,’ Sandra seethes into her phone, pacing in front of Dorothy’s house. ‘I’m trying to keep my cool, ’cause you know how angry I get. We can’t afford to be fucked around and I gotta get down to a double stabbing in Dromana soon. OK…So, how far away are you then?’
The bin company was supposed to deliver two skips by 9 a.m. It is now after eleven, so the cleaners have had to stack Dorothy’s open garage full with bulging rubbish bags. More bags line the fence along the front of the house. Not only does this violate local council laws, it will waste time later in double-handling the bags to load the skips when they finally arrive. Sandra, who always ensures that she shows up to appointments early or, at the very least, punctually, is incandescent. Rule of Pankhurst: do not waste Sandra’s time.
An older woman walks a small white dog towards the house. She is snow-haired, pink-scrubbed and wearing a sensible vest. As she passes, Sandra leans down to coo at the dog and the woman looks at her and the STC van and the mountain of black rubbish bags but she absolutely does not look inside the house, although the doorway is a few feet away from her sturdy white sneakers.
In a small voice, the woman asks after Dorothy by name, with quiet alarm. Sandra reassures her that Dorothy is being cared for. Telling Sandra how she has lived in the neighbourhood for forty-seven years, the woman recalls when Dorothy lived here with her parents and how Dorothy’s mother died forty years ago. Moulding the dog’s lead in her soft, white hands, the woman explains that Dorothy has no family now.
‘She lives in her own world…’ the woman says, her eyes drifting across the many rubbish bags, in search of somewhere familiar to rest. Finding none, she walks on saying, mystified, ‘But she’s such an intelligent person…’
Dust billows out like smoke from the front doorway as Rodney and Jade chip into the solid glacial mass, calving large icebergs and smaller loaves that can be thrown into bags and carried away. Two hours have passed since they started and, through this back-breaking effort, they have cleared about a metre into the foyer, excavating, in the process, the ancient mosaic of the carpet, worn down to white thread except for a few patches where the deep reds and blues of the original design are just visible. Swaths of exposed brick run along the walls where the paint and plaster have crumbled away. Windows of blue sky appear through the missing slats in the ceiling and the holes in the roof.
Sandra walks back around the house and leans through the kitchen window to check Leigh’s progress. Through nonstop labour, his morning’s achievement has been to clear one small patch of kitchen floor—the linoleum is black and slightly moist, a clearing in the forest. He shows her where he just fell through the floor, also the other spots where the supporting boards have rotted away from the rains which poured through the roof, filtered through newspaper and bottles, pooled for a time and slowly seeped away. Sighing, Sandra zips one long, apricot-coloured nail across the screen of her phone and dials the job contact. ‘I think there might be a bit of a problem if she wants to come back here because the floors are rotted through…’
Another neighbour stops out front. She has lived in the neighbourhood for thirty-five years and asks with concern after Dorothy. Sandra says lightly that she’s just here today to help. ‘I can’t believe it,’ the woman says, dazed. ‘I was just speaking to her last night. She was sitting right outside here. She’s clever, very clever. She travelled the world when she was younger, had a good job…’ She starts wringing her hands in a way that makes the sunlight flare on her Fitbit. ‘You know when the gas went off?’ she asks, referring to a two-week outage in 1998. ‘It never came back on here.’
I think of the pot of bleached chicken bones on the gas stove in the kitchen, the holes in the roof, the razorwinds of eighteen winters. I think of how Dorothy passed dark time here surrounded by everything and nothing while the deluge of rubbish inexorably submerged her life like a village drowned. Though she remained inside her childhood home, changing nothing for forty years, that place was as far from her as the moon.
‘We all live our own lives, you don’t pry,’ the neighbour says haltingly. From the footpath, I look up at the corroded gutters lining the roof; they have deteriorated so badly they look like lace. ‘Sorry, my heart is hurting at the moment,’ the woman says, palming her chest before walking on.
It’s all still here. The tin mail organiser on the kitchen wall with neatly folded gas bills from 1971 ($3.51, PAID), the Australian Women’s Weekly reporting how Jane Priest stole a kiss from Prince Charles, the polystyrene Big Mac containers, the neatly wrapped brown paper packages on the shelves in the fridge, the good dishes, the rubbish that hasn’t been taken out for decades. But despite the food wrappers and the alcohol dregs and the pyramids of cigarette butts, you smell none of these things.
‘Newspapers are broken down, furniture’s broken down, everything’s broken down,’ Rodney mutters, hefting a bulging rubbish bag out the door. ‘As soon as you start movin’ it, it falls apart.’
An elderly Greek neighbour in an adorable pink cardigan wanders over eating an ice-cream, despite the early hour. Rule of Pankhurst: ‘There’s always a stickybeak.’ She smiles at everyone and then her face folds down like an umbrella as she peers for the first time in thirty years into the house six metres from where she sleeps. ‘What happened?’ is all she can say.
Gripping my arm like a bird on a branch, she insists on leading me through her front garden and into her house, where she takes me on a tour. The layout is exactly the same as Dorothy’s. Except the floors are mirror shiny and sunlight fills the rooms like music and there are photos, everywhere, of her children and their children. ‘I see her, sometime, up there.’ She motions towards the main road at the end of the street, shaking her head and looking bereft. ‘I say, “Why don’t you go home?”’ Then she starts speaking only in Greek, which I do not understand.