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 she scoops up a wad of flat plastic packages, each of which contains one extra large, disposable white bodysuit. After distributing them, Lizzie hands everyone a disposable respirator mask and a pair of gloves. Soon the cleaners are ready but the door remains locked. They stand in the hot sun and smoke some more, the top halves of their bodysuits peeled down around their waists. They chat lightly, giggling and giving each other vast amounts of shit. Sandra, of course, does not get suited up.
9:50 a.m. Sandra’s bracelets jangle loudly as she answers a call from the driver telling her that her skip is nearly there. She asks Lizzie to please get a silver canister from the truck.
‘And be very careful with it, darl,’ Sandra says distractedly, typing on her phone, nails clicking on the screen with each poke. ‘It’s five hundred dollars for a litre.’
‘What is it?’ Lizzie asks, scrunching up her face.
‘Clove oil. For the mould.’ Sandra puts her phone down and palms non-existent wrinkles out of her immaculately pressed skinny jeans. ‘You add a quarter of a teaspoon to a litre of water.’
‘Why’s it so expensive?’ Lizzie asks.
‘Dunno. Gotta get the oil out of cloves. Must’ve needed a shitload of cloves.’
The truck hauling the skip now pulls up, as does a second truck with a trailer of furniture that Sandra selected from her personal collection to install in Janice’s house once she finishes the clean today: a side table, an armchair, a couch. ‘To give her a new start,’ Sandra explains, walking over to ensure that they survived the journey unscathed. I ask how she knew that Janice would need these pieces.
‘I just figured that because there’d been a flood of faecal matter here, everything’s gonna have to go,’ she answers dryly. One day in 2010 Janice’s only toilet broke and started to overflow. She couldn’t fix this herself and she didn’t call anyone for help.
10:15 a.m. Sandra strides up to the front door and raps on it briskly, saying in a warm but firm voice that it’s time to get started. No response.
‘Come on love, time to get a wriggle on,’ Sandra calls out brightly.
Silence.
‘Janice’—stronger voice—‘you asked for extra time, I gave you extra time. Now it’s time for you to let me in.’
Janice emerges clutching a full rubbish bag. She starts negotiating again. Could Sandra come back next week, maybe? That would be best, really. Janice vacillates between meekness and stubbornness. She is dressed like a librarian in a forties movie. She has the polite formality of a bygone era, which accounts also for her lipstick and long dress and the pantyhose she wears, despite the heat, with a dried liquid stain running down the front like a tear. This formality, together with her habit of hunching like a squirrel over a nut, gives the impression that she is much older than she is.
‘We’ll do it together, OK?’ Sandra says gently.
Janice looks up at Sandra. With a dirty hand, she smooths back her closely cropped hair. Then, looking at her hands, she says, ‘My nails are shocking.’
‘You’ll be able to have your children over,’ Sandra says encouragingly, harking back to a discussion they had last week when she came to do the quote.
‘And I won’t be stressed,’ Janice agrees, suddenly, with relief. Her affect changes entirely. She makes and maintains steady eye contact with Sandra. ‘Why do I do this? Why?’ she asks.
‘Because you’ve had to let go of so much in your life,’ Sandra answers.
‘There was a trauma here. There was a death here,’ Janice says quickly.
Sandra recalls how Janice previously mentioned that she would like to burn sage inside to clear the bad energy. ‘We’ve done that before, we could do that here if you like,’ Sandra offers.
Janice chortles. ‘I was half-joking,’ she says dismissively and then her smile instantly slides away and her eyes widen. ‘But, do you think we should? With the sage? Do you think it’s a good idea?’
‘We can do it if you want, love. Let’s decide later, shall we?’ Sandra says, reaching for the doorknob. Lizzie calls after Sandra to make sure she puts on her mask; the black mould is particularly dangerous for her lungs. Annoyed, Sandra stops and puts on her mask. Then she steps through the front door and flicks the light on. ‘See that?’ she whispers, staring matter-of-factly down at her finger. ‘That’s faeces on the light switch.’ She pops her head out the front door and looks around for Phil, her senior cleaner. He materialises and she hands him her car keys with her other hand, asking him to get the large bottle of hand sanitiser she keeps there.
It is night inside Janice’s house and, while it is true that the toilet overflowed several years ago and that both the shower and bathtub drains have been clogged with wet clothes for some time, it is not true that the house was ever fully submerged under water. But that is precisely the image conveyed by these sepia-stained walls and the strangely moist furniture and the accumulation of rubbish and random items strewn everywhere: floodwaters rushing in and under the door, inexorably rising, filling drawers and cupboards and fabrics and lungs and then, gradually, muddily, receding.
Vaguely aquatic, the indoor environment also brings to mind images of fire, which are no less vivid for being paradoxical. The black mould spotting the browned walls and powdering the rug looks like soot; it is as though some naughty sprite stole ashes from the hearth and smeared them along the walls, liberally dusted them over the furniture and, in a final act of vandalism, dumped the excess in the corners. When Sandra insists on opening the blind over the large front window, the mould crowding the edges of the dirty glass makes the vista of blue sky and neighbouring houses appear burnt at the edges, like an old tintype. Flood and fire. These rooms are small but within them there is pain of biblical proportions.
Sandra picks up a flaccid rubbish bag and her eyes do a quick sweep of the living room leading into the kitchen. The extent of the damage here won’t become apparent for hours. This is because it is difficult to see anything under the layers of lesser dirt and rubbish that cover the bones of the house like skin and fur. Ungloved, Sandra starts stuffing mounds of newspapers and old magazines and crushed bottles and empty tins of catfood into the bag. She makes little progress before Janice snatches it out of her hands.
‘I’d like to finish it myself,’ Janice insists. ‘I’d like to check the bag to see if there’s anything in it.’
‘Janice, it’s obviously rubbish,’ Sandra says calmly.
‘Yeah, but you never know,’ Janice says, her head deep in the bag as she roots around in the newspapers. ‘Sometimes good things get mixed up in the rubbish…’
Having heard this assertion thousands of times over the course of her career, Sandra recognises it for what it is: the mark of the ‘true hoarder, textbook hoarder’.
‘It’s all rubbish, Janice.’ Sandra is firmer now.
Phil comes back in with hand sanitiser. Wearing a black polo T-shirt with the STC label on the pocket, Phil is a small, energetic man with a shiny bald head whose pluck and perpetual good cheer remind me of a robin. Phil wears shorts regardless of the weather and is, like Sandra, effortlessly excellent at the type of sweet small talk that puts strangers at ease. Joining Sandra, he wordlessly grabs a rubbish bag from the box by the door and starts filling it with empty bottles and the old tea bags, wrung like necks, that are strewn across the floor.
‘Yeah. But I want to do something myself!’ Janice insists and suddenly rips the bag out of Phil’s hands. ‘I can bloody well do it! Mind your Ps and Qs!’ she shouts at him with the prim rage of someone deeply uncomfortable with expressing anger. And then, like a wave breaking and receding, she is instantly apologetic. ‘I know you’re only doing your job…’
Phil stands still, looking towards Sandra for his cue. Sandra’s staff are instructed that their interaction with clients should be limited to what is absolutely necessary; they are to be respectful and as close to invisible as possible. Now Sandra has had enough. ‘This is for your own good, Janice.’ She raises her voice like an angry mother.
Shocked, Janice calms instantly. ‘I’m sorry to be angry with you,’ she says to Phil, who is entirely unaffected by her outburst and still calmly awaiting Sandra’s instructions. Then she starts again, saying loudly: ‘I don’t like this bloke here!’ Phil appears benign to me but Janice clearly sees someone altogether different, and not this man whose voicemail message implores you to ‘Have a chipper day!’
An engineer once told me that the way glass shatters hints at the cause. Janice is not saying that she doesn’t like ‘this bloke here’, in the personal sense of hating Phil. She is saying ‘this bloke here’: I believe she is having a traumatic reaction triggered by the presence of a man in her house. I quietly suggest this to Sandra and, to my surprise, she is surprised by it. But she actions it anyway, promptly reassigning Phil outside.
‘I’m sorry,’ Janice says, calmer now. ‘He didn’t say a word but I got upset. He looks like someone else. I don’t want to have a meltdown. I just wanted to do it myself.’
‘That is physically impossible,’ Sandra says looking towards the big couch that takes up much of the living room, and the side table, barely visible under accumulated detritus, next to it.
‘My children should be here,’ Janice says.
‘They should,’ Sandra agrees. ‘Please call them if it’ll make you feel more supported. Here, use my phone. What’s the number?’
Janice doesn’t want to say in case Phil hears.
‘So type it in yourself.’ Sandra hands her phone to Janice, who takes it and dials the number with her blackened fingers. Speaking with her son makes Janice calmer. She hands Sandra the phone and, after speaking with him as well, Sandra slides the phone, its screen filthy, into her back pocket. The son will be here in an hour.
Lizzie and Cheryl quietly start cleaning, bending low and coaxing armfuls of empty bottles and cans into black bags. Soon a different stratum of filth, closer to the carpet, is exposed. This one comprises small scraps of paper—magazines and newspapers and junk mail—some of which contain sufficient text that they can be dated like pottery shards (2012, 2009, 2008), indicating how long human life has existed here like this. Moving on from their first pass at the living room, the cleaners go into the kitchen. As they fill more bags, more of the floor there becomes visible too; rust circles on the linoleum betray how long empty cans have been left there. The cleaners continue into the bathroom and bedroom that lie in the darkness beyond the kitchen.
In the living room, Sandra painstakingly checks each item with Janice before dropping it into a rubbish bag. She is working on clearing a small space of floor where the living room leads into the kitchen. When the last magazines and newspapers are lifted away, one page of an old TV Week remains plastered onto the wall like papier-mache.
Aside from the large couch and a side table, there are two TVs in Janice’s living room. The first sits in a wooden entertainment unit covered in sooty black mould, thick dust and spiderwebs. The second sits askew on a chair directly in front of the first and is currently showing a woman demonstrating how to make a green smoothie. Though this is the sum of the furniture in the relatively large living area, the space feels claustrophobically small due to the piles of undifferentiated household paraphernalia and rubbish which populate the couch and which are spread around the room in diverticulitic pockets.
There is the box that a space heater came in and the box that a water filter came in and the box that one of the TVs came in and the box that its antenna came in and the boxes that the DVD player and the fan and each of Janice’s last three kettles came in. There is a nest of spent tea bags behind the first TV and a stash of empty water bottles and cat-food boxes behind the second one. Among the items strewn across the floor are: a jar of fresh cream, a packet of sliced white bread, a puddle of flannel pyjamas; flies, moths, spiders.
There is no room to sit comfortably on the couch but this is where Janice sleeps, under a thin blanket, in a space so tiny it does not take up one full cushion. The couch floats in a galaxy of gossip magazines, clothing, empty cat-food tins, loose change, personal care products and boxes of dry biscuits. On the couch there is also a plaster angel statue, a pair of sunglasses, a box of tissues, an unplugged telephone, a shoeshine brush and a tub of cream cheese. Small spiders scurry for new cover whenever one of these items is disturbed.
As a person, Janice is of course more than her house; but it is also true that her house is an indicator of what it feels like to be Janice. And what it feels like to be Janice is to be asphyxiating, slowly and helplessly, under the crushing and ever-multiplying weight of the past and the present. I picture her here on this couch, curled into herself like a fern at 4 a.m. And though it must feel like a catacomb in that dark hour, and though every hour behind these blinds has been dark, the house is spinning with movement: mould is travelling up and down the walls, food is rotting, cans are rusting, water is dripping, insects are being born and they are living and dying, Janice’s hair is growing, her heart is beating, she is breathing. Which is to say that this, too, is life. Like the creatures that swim in the perfect blackness of the ocean floor, the ecosystem here would be unrecognisable to most people but this, too, is our world. The Order of Things includes those who are excluded.
There is a drumbeat of light thuds from the bathroom where Lizzie is throwing numerous empty shampoo bottles into her rubbish bag. As Sandra makes her way around the living room, Janice talks about how it wasn’t like this when she first moved here. ‘It was quite nice,’ she says.
‘That poor man,’ she says, referring to Phil, who is now working outside loading bags of rubbish into the trailer. ‘I should’ve done all this last weekend.’
‘Love, you should’ve done it years ago!’ Sandra says warmly, as if this was all a matter of a simple chore put off too long. The normalising effect buoys Janice as though the tide has just come in. Lizzie passes through on her way from the bathroom to the trailer, two swollen rubbish bags in each hand.
‘Have you ever seen as bad at that?’ Janice asks her with a high, nervous laugh.
‘Yes, actually, I have,’ Lizzie replies sweetly, and also truthfully—despite the fact that she has just spent a significant amount of time clearing a hallway full of grey shopping bags containing the human faeces she is now carrying.
Sandra motions towards the dark bathroom where wet clothes are splayed on the floor and floating in the bathtub amid centipedes. ‘Those clothes have gotta go, darl,’ she says resignedly.
‘No,’ Janice says.
‘They’ve been in sewage, love. Stay focused,’ Sandra coaches.
Janice grabs a bag out of Sandra’s hands.
‘This is obviously rubbish,’ Sandra sighs.
‘I know that,’ Janice says and emits a high giggle.
‘Then why are you going through it?’ Sandra asks calmly, pointing to an empty food tin that Janice has extricated from the bag.
‘I’m worried that something good may be mixed in with something bad. I mean, you know, there’s not a million dollars here, I suppose…My folks don’t know about this. They’d faint on the spot! Is that bad?’ Janice asks, looking up at Sandra with wide eyes. ‘Should I spray around some Glen-20?’
‘Go ahead,’ Sandra says.
The mould creeps up the walls. It rests in ashy black piles on and under everything. It streaks Janice’s top and her face and her hands, which she thrusts, again and again, into the rubbish bags, desperately clawing out each item, sorting through everything for something valuable to save because she believes, if not in the absolute value of every item under her roof, in the possibility at least that something infinitely precious may be left forgotten in the curl of a cat-food can or in the folds of an old newspaper, which to discard irretrievably would be to experience a small death.
‘Nothing good there?’ she calls out to Lizzie and Cheryl, working in the kitchen.
‘No, nothing,’ comes the answer, amid the clank of cutlery and dishes.
‘Oh,’ Janice says softly.
‘You’ve got to relax a bit,’ Sandra soothes. ‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’
In a dream I sometimes have, I am frantically trying to save as much as I can from my childhood home before I am forced to leave forever because of some disaster. In this dream, from which I awake with my jaw clenched like a fist, I grab whatever I can reach, take whatever I can carry. Always my childhood books and our family photo albums, but sometimes also the silver candlesticks, the things on my father’s desk, the paintings on the walls. Maybe it comes from the speed with which my family changed shape one day, maybe it comes from moving, maybe it comes from my grandmother’s hinted horror of losing everything in the Holocaust, but I cannot part with the dented pot that I remember my mother putting on the stove each week. Or the sofa my father bought with his first pay cheque, which was never comfortable when I was growing up and is not comfortable now. I cannot part with the lipstick I found softly rolling in an empty drawer months after my mother left. Or a shopping list on an envelope in her handwriting. In a world that changes so quickly, and where everyone eventually leaves, our stuff is the one thing we can trust. It testifies, through the mute medium of Things, that we were part of something greater than ourselves.
Janice’s house is more than a question of homey clutter, of tiny shelves and the things we place there. But pain is a sacred puzzle, where any piece, however misshapen, fits seamlessly. In the context of facing her fears alone, Janice’s fortress of shit makes sense.
Janice starts sorting through the piles on her couch, tossing things into the rubbish bag that Sandra is holding open for her. She holds up a photo from her teens; in it she is young and beautiful, sitting in the sun with friends. Then she holds up a frame but the photo inside looks like black scribbles on brown cardboard.
‘This got wet,’ Janice says woodenly, before explaining that it was an old family photo. She then picks up a nail buffer; scrutinises it for a while. ‘This is just a nail buffer. I don’t really have nails anyway,’ she says, placing it in the bag. And then, speaking to herself, sharp and low, ‘Why do you do this? You know what rubbish is.’
‘Because you see yourself as rubbish,’ Sandra says. ‘Time to start seeing the good in life. You deserve it.’ The angel statue suddenly slips off the couch and bounces on the carpet; a wing snaps off.
‘Is that a bad omen?’ Janice asks, looking up at Sandra frantically.
‘You know what it’s saying?’ Sandra answers with a smile. ‘I’m broken, but I’m not dead.’
Though Sandra’s older sister Barbara and her youngest brother Christopher are alive, she hasn’t had contact with them in decades and so it is more accurate to say that her only remaining family consists of Kerrie, her brother Simon’s widow, who lives in Queensland. Kerrie has known Sandra for thirty-three years. Their relationship is amiable and, while not intimate, it is a significant one in Sandra’s life in that it is the only one that she has consistently maintained from the period following her sex reassignment surgery through her last years as a sex worker, through the time Sandra ‘was heavy on drugs, alcohol and things like that’, through her various relationships, businesses and health issues. Sandra describes her relationship with her brother and her sister-in-law as fond, but not particularly close: ‘there was an admiration but also a distance’.
Kerrie and Simon met in 1982 and were together for twenty-six years. Very early on, and without fuss, Simon explained to Kerrie that he had ‘one brother, one sister, and a brother-sister’. Despite the five-year age gap and Simon’s signature quietness, the two siblings were similar in significant ways. Both were beaten by Bill as children and kicked out of home by seventeen. Kerrie describes Simon’s ability to handle painful memories or events as ‘making it water off a duck’s back. He left it behind. He didn’t carry things with him to make him a nasty person’. The corollary of this particular type of forward-focus, shared by Sandra, was that ‘if you crossed him, he did not care about you anymore. He would just wipe you out of his life’.
Sandra loved Simon early and long. She named her first child after him. In turn, Simon ‘loved his sister. He was very accepting of her and her decision. He never, ever turned his back on her’. On trips back to Melbourne, he and Kerrie would always visit Sandra. But they did not tell Ailsa. Back at Birchill Street, Sandra was verboten. ‘I did try to talk to Ailsa, one time, about it,’ Kerrie told me. ‘I said, “Ailsa, sometimes people are just born with the wrong genes, and they can’t help how they feel.” But they were a generation that did not accept that sort of stuff. She would never forgive her.’
Once, Sandra asked Kerrie to see if Ailsa would speak with her on the phone. ‘Ailsa said, “No, I don’t want him ringing here. I don’t want him to come here.” Sandra never got the opportunity to make peace with it and that’s why I think her sister was very wrong about the funeral.’ Kerrie is referring to the fact that when Ailsa died, Sandra tried to attend her mother’s funeral. ‘Her sister went off her scone, so Simon, for the peace of it, just said to Sandra, “Barbara doesn’t want you there, she is carrying on a treat.” He didn’t care if Sandra came and sat in the back of the church. But she didn’t come.’
One of Sandra’s prized possessions is a guest book in which her past houseguests have left notes and in which, in 2001, Simon wrote: Certainly worth the trip for your fabulous cooking and company. After the obligatory crap—just remember that you are much loved, and that Kerrie and I think of you often. No matter what, always your brother, Simon.
Simon, that little boy whose older brother Peter bought him a chemistry set with his first pay cheque, was awarded an Order of Australia for his army service in the field of engineering ten years before he died suddenly in Papua New Guinea, where he had been doing consulting work. Besides having photos from Simon’s award ceremony around her house, Sandra will speak proudly of her little brother’s achievements and show photos of him on her phone whenever it is near-relevant in conversation.
No one is quite sure what became of Barbara after she ‘married some Asian gentleman’ but Christopher is an executive at one of Australia’s top private companies. In Kerrie’s opinion, ‘Sandra has sort of reached a point in her life where she is, I wouldn’t say “happy”, I would say “content with herself” and how her life has panned out.’
All four siblings came from the same small house in West Footscray but if the metrics could be standardised, Sandra may be seen to have come the furthest. ‘Sandra has achieved quite a bit in coming from nothing and she has done it all on her own. She is an amazing woman, she really is, an absolutely amazing woman.’
Sandra guides Janice outside for a rest. Overdressed for the day’s heat as though bundled against the memory of cold, Janice sips a little water and stands sweating in the sun. She cannot remain outside for more than a few seconds before she is compelled to run back inside and check that the cleaners haven’t thrown out anything of value. You can see the compulsion overtaking her, strangling her like a vine. At first she makes little excuses each time she darts back inside: she forgot her phone, her keys, she just needs to check on something, needs to check one last thing, oops, forgot one little thing, just one moment, be right back. But then, despite assuring Sandra that now she’ll really have a good rest out here, Janice gives in to the pressure mounting up inside her and dashes back in to claw through the rubbish bags. I can see it and I can feel it: intrusive thoughts are circling Janice like sharks, they are snapping at her, giving her less and less time between assaults, before dragging her under. Janice is drowning, she is being eaten alive.
Seeing this, Sandra reminds her about the goal they are working towards. ‘Come on darl, remember the vision we discussed? You and your kids and a cup of tea on the couch?’ This is a Pankhurst trademark: encouraging her clients to think in terms of small, achievable goals. Where a client is even moderately receptive, Sandra will use this language repeatedly, returning to it like a refrain over the course of her day or days spent working with them. And it is based on a practice she follows herself.
I once asked Sandra whether, given what she deals with each day, she was a pessimist or an optimist. She replied without hesitating: ‘I’m an optimist, yep, I’m an optimist. Always look on the bright side of life. You can achieve whatever you want and do whatever you want as long as you apply yourself and have a positive outlook.’
Janice unfurls for a moment, but the peace passes quickly as a new worry comes slicing down. ‘You’re not throwing anything out?’ she calls out to the cleaners through the screen door.
‘No,’ comes the answer, and she is released to try to make small talk with Sandra for the few seconds of her respite. But almost immediately she wonders aloud where a small box with some photos went, and when she cannot find it, starts frantically pulling rubbish bags out of the trailer.
One of Janice’s kids arrives and hurries up the driveway. ‘I’m here, Mum,’ he says and starts rubbing Janice’s back. Janice, still bent over the rubbish bags, immediately enlists him in the search for the photos.
Sandra calls the son over and tells him that his mother should drink some fluids because she’s been working hard all morning and that, while he’s welcome to go inside of course, if he does, he’ll need to wear a mask because of the mould. The young man nods like Sandra has just read him the instruction manual for a device he has never seen before. He takes a mask, disappears inside for a few minutes and when he emerges it is obvious that he is struggling to inhabit the role of his parent’s parent that has just been thrust upon him completely and irrevocably. Shell-shocked, he says in a low voice to Sandra that he hadn’t realised how bad the house had got. It didn’t look like this, with all the mould, last time he was here.
‘When was that, darl?’ Sandra asks.
‘Five years ago,’ he answers. ‘She won’t let us inside anymore.’
Lizzie emerges with the box Janice thought had been thrown out. The son, embarrassed, starts tying up the rubbish bags they’ve disturbed. ‘Just go comfort your mum, love,’ Sandra says.
Phil and Leigh are instructed by Sandra to go inside and remove the couch so that it can be replaced with the one waiting in the second trailer. The men shift the couch away from the wall, revealing a thick pile of dirt and ashy mould studded with rubbish and lost items so diverse I wonder about the circumstances that brought them here: three shoes, a Disney clock, a full bottle of mouthwash, empty packets and boxes, a bottle of vitamins, air fresheners, spiders.
‘I couldn’t get behind the couch, obviously,’ Janice says wanly, staring down at the mess. And then she drops to the floor and starts hunting feverishly through the pile. As the men push the old couch out the door, Sandra turns and—despite not wearing a mask herself and the particular vulnerability of her lungs—shouts angrily at Leigh to put his mask on. ‘You get a mould spore on your lungs and that’s it!’
Phil pulls Sandra aside. He tells her what he noticed when he was crouching down to lift the couch; the walls have ‘gone soft’ from the mould. Sandra checks to confirm this; they are spongy. Her face falls as she realises the implications.
‘There’s more to do here than what a clean’s gonna fix,’ she sighs quietly.
The house needs to be immediately shut down for health and safety reasons. Everyone out. Stepping over the random mosaic of rubbish that is still thick on the ground and spilling into the holes in the walls, the cleaners and Janice and her son and Sandra file out one by one, defeated, leaving the house to its mossy darkness and small forest noises as the door closes behind them with a dry thud.
Everyone gathers around the old couch in the middle of the driveway. Janice huddles close to Sandra like a rabbit sheltering under a tree. Sandra daintily spreads a white bodysuit over the arm of the couch and sits down. She takes out her phone and starts tapping, perfect nails flying across the filthy screen. Janice sits with her son’s arm around her shoulders. She will go back to his house tonight.
‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘stuff doesn’t replace what you’ve lost. You can’t put a price on what I’ve lost.’ Her lips are set in a line and she stares ahead. ‘Did we get my hairbrush?’ she asks suddenly. Sandra replies that it’s in her purse. ‘OK. Should I go get the tea bags and the milk I bought yesterday?’
‘Leave it, love, the mould gets in everything,’ Sandra advises.
‘I feel like I’m in another world,’ Janice says, unblinking.
Sandra sails smoothly on. Speaking calmly, she remains insistently chatty, leading Janice by example: everything is all right.
‘I like your perfume,’ Janice says to Sandra.
‘Chanel, love,’ she answers while motioning to Phil to lock the door before going into a soothing commentary on how different fragrances smell different on different people, throughout which Janice murmurs in agreement.
The furniture that Sandra brought lies untouched in the trailer out front. She would have given Janice ‘a new start’ had conditions allowed. She would have removed all the rubbish and contaminated furnishings from the house and disinfected the floors, walls and ceilings. From her own stores, she would have installed for Janice new furniture and sheets and towels, perhaps not matching (as is always Sandra’s strong preference) but clean, and folded with military precision. She would have organised Janice’s closets and cupboards, fanned out a few of the most recent gossip magazines on Janice’s coffee table and fluffed the new pillows on the couch. ‘I have a bit of a thing for lifestyle programs on housing, designing, and all that,’ Sandra once told me. ‘I utilise a lot of that in how I present houses for people, especially with hoarding. I have a firm belief that we change the concept of the house from what it was, so that they have in their mind that things are different now. It helps with their processes of dealing with the change and then it’s a constant reminder that they’re not following the same patterns and things need to be different.’
A change in domestic topography is, sometimes, enough to set the interior life of a client on an improved course. Not so much (and here I differ with Sandra) due to the power exerted by one’s environment—although that, of course, has significant influence—but rather because of the fact that someone cared enough for them to actually do this. This transfer of lamps and microwaves, of sofas and pillowcases, is not a panacea for deep-seated illness or dysfunction, but it is good for the heart.
And it goes both ways. By making a home for her clients, Sandra has made a home for herself. Despite having experienced worse blows than many of her clients, she is the one who comes in to make order out of their chaos. The undeniable boost this gives her is not a simple question of schadenfreude or, at the other end of the spectrum, altruism. It is the product of meaningful work: the sense of purpose we create by cultivating our gifts and sharing them with the world.6 And yet, it is often not enough to imbue those clients with the type of wellbeing that Sandra enjoys. It would have taken more than a new sofa to give Janice what she needs.
What happens to Janice next is out of Sandra’s hands. She will relocate, which will not stem the flow of rubbish that will follow her like a polluted river if she is allowed the great swathes of solitude she insists upon.
Soon the couch will be lifted into the skip and everyone will pack up and disperse and Sandra’s brief hours of helping Janice will be over. But for now she is here, looking Janice in the eyes and chatting casually to her in the sun, actively eliciting her responses, calling on her opinions, calling her out from wherever it is she longs to be left: if just for these moments, calling her back.