What can I tell you about Shane? I can tell you that it is both true and untrue that his street was like any other street, that his block of flats was like any other block of flats, that the grass in the communal lawn that spread out before his front door like a dirty blanket was as green and as brown as any other grass. It is true because it all looked unremarkable and it is also untrue because hanging over everything was the smell of living death and the sort of too-loud silence that makes small creatures run for higher ground. I can tell you that the first impression one gets from looking at Shane is of bluntness. He appears both dopey and physically edgeless; there is something in his short limbs and rounded nose and stubby fingers and the open O of his goldfish mouth that suggests he has been dulled somehow—perhaps by using himself as a hammer against the anvil of the world.
Shane is a convicted sex offender. And his eyes on this morning are charged: they are prowling, measuring, calculating. It would be wrong, therefore, to regard Shane as obtuse; his symmetry is still fearful. And while I do not think he is the type of hunter who would expertly stalk you by playing the wind, I believe he would not hesitate to act if you happened to wander off from the pack.
Shane is not allowed to be alone with Sandra, who has come today to clean the wet and dry squalor in his small flat, nor is he allowed to be alone with any other female. Although vaguely intrigued by this, Sandra is not bothered by it in the slightest. She has come with four of her cleaners: Lizzie, Cheryl, Phil and Jarrod, who is six foot five and weighs at least 120 kilograms. But Jarrod is not the reason Sandra is unruffled. Though Sandra has not been told anything about the nature of Shane’s offending, and though she is a survivor of rape herself, it is in her nature to be entirely practical. ‘Regardless of what his convictions may be, it’s really just another job,’ she tells me. This position is not ideological or altruistic. It is bound up with the fact that Sandra is driven to do each job excellently, regardless of conditions.
Sandra raps smartly at the front door. Shane stumbles out like a bear from a cave onto the cracked concrete of his small front porch and stands squinting in the morning light.
‘I need to have my breakfast, hey.’ A gravelly voice and the clumsy cunning of a toddler. ‘Can I get a few extra minutes?’
Sandra responds lightly that she’ll return in ten minutes. ‘He probably had a few pieces to put away,’ she muses. ‘Probably planted them in with his clothes in the closet.’
I ask her what she thinks he is hiding.
‘My mind boggles,’ she says, uninterested, checking her phone under a dove grey sky.
Formerly known as Crossfire, Multi-Task is a cleaning product that Sandra uses to strip surfaces of food or nicotine stains. To it she adds a hospital-grade disinfectant called SanSol when she needs to address the additional presence of human off-gases and/or bodily fluids which may carry ‘HIV or bacterial infection’. This is the admixture that Phil is currently using to mop the ceiling of Shane’s bedroom. Lizzie and Cheryl, spared the job of cleaning the carpets because Sandra has determined that they are beyond saving, will use the Multi-Task/SanSol cocktail to clean the brown stains off the door and floor of his bathroom. No one is suited up today. ‘We use the suits on extreme cases,’ Sandra explains. ‘This is a regular, run-of-the-mill job.’
Sandra’s knowledge about the process and instruments of very specific, diverse, urgent, complex and large-scale cleaning jobs is encyclopaedic. She indulges me when I hit her with hypotheticals about various types of jobs.
‘Death, no blood?’ I ask.
‘Death no blood I wouldn’t be called in for unless there were body fluids,’ she corrects me.
‘OK, say it’s been a couple of days and there is a smell,’ I say.
‘That is decomposition and that is heavy,’ Sandra sighs. ‘Decomposition: the first thing I think of is what has to be thrown out. What surfaces are there? Is it carpet or is it on lino? Because if it’s carpet, nine out of ten if it’s a decomposition, we’ll have to take the carpet out. That also guides me into whether we need a vehicle to be able to transfer the goods, because the prescribed goods handling course is quite specific,’ she explains rapidly.
‘Or it could be the mattress,’ she continues. ‘We buy huge bags that seal the mattress because the odour can be quite offensive. The first thought would be to get any soiled matter out of the property, because once the cause has gone, you can start eliminating the odour. You go through the sterilisation of cleaning everything. Everything in the house then has to be wiped down. If the body has been there for quite some time, then gases and everything would’ve impregnated the walls, the fabrics, all that sorta stuff. So, I would wash the walls down and the ceilings down, and then we would put the odour-control machines in to affect the fabrics and all that. You have to disconnect the smoke alarms because they will go off. You would open up wardrobes, cupboards and things like that because the smell would have gone into the clothes and everything there.’
‘Does that all have to be thrown out?’ I ask.
‘No, we’ll fumigate it with the odour control,’ she replies. ‘It just sprays into the room. It’s almost impossible to breathe and it’s supposed to be natural.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Ho hum, but you go with it. You let it fog up the house. You leave the house locked up for twenty-four hours, and then it should be hunky dory. In extreme cases, we have to put machinery on that’ll go for three days and three nights. You could have to remove flooring or whatever, if it’s soaked into the timber flooring.’
I ask whether she has had to do that.
‘We have, on one occasion only,’ she replies. ‘It was dripping down into the apartment downstairs, so we had two apartments to clean. The guy downstairs had noticed this steady drip coming into his lounge room and the smell was in his place downstairs, so it was pretty bad.’
‘What would you do if there was a death with blood?’ I ask.
‘First you would know by the colour how deeply it has gone into the carpet,’ she explains. ‘If it’s light, you can usually get that out of the carpet without it affecting the underlay. We would spray solution over all the carpets to see whether there are droplets of blood, it illuminates the blood. This tells us where we’ve got to work and what we’ve got to work on. When we’re taught these skills, they say that if there’s an armchair that’s contaminated, you cut out the contaminated piece. To me, that’s a no-no. I would just take the whole piece of furniture away, because if you were the family coming back and having to deal with that chair, it’s going to be forever in your mind: that is where Dad died, if you know what I mean. Whereas, to me, you’ve got to be very particular about how you set the house up. It’s got to be as close to being back to normal as possible, but there might be some things missing. To me, you do not mark X as the spot.’
Sandra tells me that male suicides are generally bigger jobs than females. ‘Men are dirty killers whereas the women are very tidy in the way they do it,’ Sandra says.
‘Like cooking,’ I offer.
‘Yeah,’ Sandra agrees. She goes quiet for a moment. ‘By the same token there was one guy who blew his head off, and he put plastic up in the bathroom, just so it’d keep it quite clean. It all went way over, but the thought was there.’
Sandra is certified by the Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification in carpet cleaning and by the National Institute of Decontamination Specialists as a crime and trauma biorecovery technician. Aside from a vast amount of technical skill that needs constant updating, I ask Sandra what else the work requires. ‘Compassion,’ she replies solemnly. ‘Great compassion, great dignity and a good sense of humour ’cause you’re gonna need it. And a really good sense of not being able to take the smell in, ’cause they stink. Putrid.’
The team has been inside Shane’s flat for about twenty minutes when an unpleasantness arises in the form of Shane, convinced that Jarrod has been ‘staring him down’, inviting Jarrod to fight. It is extremely unlikely that Jarrod was, in fact, staring him down. Though he is tall and solid, Jarrod is shy and softly spoken and calls everyone ‘bro’. In addition, Sandra is closely supervising everyone and Shane’s flat is tiny. Nevertheless, Sandra calmly and swiftly reassigns Jarrod to clean the bedroom with Phil. When Shane saunters in there a few minutes later, Jarrod greets him with a simple ‘Hi, boss’ and all is well; the power balance has been restored. Phil, in his usual black shorts despite the winter air blessedly blowing in through the open front door, asks Shane if his folks are well. Shane replies, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ as though they’re all just catching up at a barbeque.
Dried brown fluid drips down the yellowed walls of the bedroom. The blinds are drawn. There is a bed, a chest of drawers and a coffee table which has been pushed up against the wall. In keeping with Shane’s practice of leaving items where they fall, the brown-stained carpet is strewn with dirty clothes, plastic bags, numerous leads and wires, toilet paper rolls and broken appliances. There is no cover on the pillow or the quilt or the yellowed mattress which lies sagging and slashed at one side, grey stuffing prolapsing from the wound. This could be the result of its age and quality, the many moves to which it has probably been subjected or an inelegant effort by Shane to conceal valuable and/or illicit property in its belly. On the floor are magazines (Sexpress) and books (How to Increase Energy, Reduce Stress and Improve Hearing in 90 Days). There are three televisions in the bedroom; two are enormous and they rest, side by side, on the top of the chest of drawers, screens turned towards the wall. The third television is tiny and it sits on the coffee table next to an unplugged blender base caked with dried brown liquid. The glass of the coffee table is black with dirt and mostly concealed under random shoes, wires, broken appliances, a bong, papers and books. A digital alarm clock flashes the wrong time. A dirty brown towel is crumpled on the floor like road kill. Shane wanders off into the kitchen and Sandra quietly instructs everyone to avoid all eye contact with him because, she has been advised, he will misread it.
‘I’m just making sure that everyone’s paired off in different rooms to get things done, making sure that they’re safe at all times,’ she whispers to me. ‘I really don’t have to worry about the staff because the staff are perfect in handling anyone who’s mentally ill or drug and alcohol affected or whatever. And this is just another one of those jobs, really, you know.’
Her phone rings. The caller requests a reduction in the price she quoted recently for a job. ‘As you know, rubbish is very expensive to get rid of,’ Sandra replies matter-of-factly, ‘especially when it’s covered in urine and faeces.’
Ending the call she peeks into the bathroom, appraising the progress made by Lizzie and Cheryl. Though nothing can be done about the holes punched into the door, they’ve sprayed off the brown streaks. All of the thick brown stains are now gone, too, from the floor and the toilet and the sink and the bathtub. Standing on the white floor with her creamy pink lipstick and her crisp purple parka and her blonde hair catching the light that filters in through the frosted window, Sandra is a Monet haystack; golden, many-hued, familiar, rising up from the linoleum landscape to catch and comfort the eye. Satisfied for now, she strides out towards the kitchen.
The sound of his fridge does not please Shane. There is something about the pitch that upsets him, and so he unplugged it some time ago, allowing the contents to rot. Flies buzz out of the fridge when the door is opened, and it must now be emptied, disinfected and taped open to air out the smell. Cheryl addresses this while Lizzie tackles the various plates scattered around the flat from weeks of one-man dinners, abandoned with their piles of discarded bones and solidified grease puddles. These plates are balanced at odd angles on the kitchen bench and on top of the items crowding the bench; each bears a fork and knife, crossed like the diner is just taking a breather. All the kitchen surfaces are streaked brown with dirt. Brown fluid drips down the front of the cupboards and the oven. The stovetop is tiny, but on it rest two huge stainless steel cooking pots, and on one of the pots a frying pan is balanced, black with burnt food. Flies cover everything. Rat shit is sprinkled like seeds inside the oven.
Despite the state of his house generally and his kitchen specifically, Shane is meticulous about the type and quality of the food he eats. The numerous health food products in his kitchen include: organic coconut oil, puffed millet, a fifteen-dollar bag of grain-free muesli, camu powder, fasting tea, maca powder and a large variety of vitamins, supplements and protein powders. Sandra is bending down to pick up orange peels strewn across the lounge-room carpet.
‘I don’t drink milk,’ Shane announces to her. ‘I’m going off meat, I’m going more pure. More pure lifestyle. And no prostitutes. Just kidding.’ Sandra remains focused on the orange peels.
Shane has been strolling around the small rooms, watching the cleaners at work. He now goes and parks himself in the front doorway where the female cleaners have to brush past him when they take bags of his rubbish outside to the trailer behind the STC van. When he exits the living room, Sandra looks down at the enormous barbell plonked in the middle of the floor and wonders, quietly, if the purpose of this equipment is ‘to keep his strength up for what he likes to do in his “playtime”’. Shane also goes to the gym often and takes daily walks. ‘Maybe he’s on the lookout,’ she says grimly. ‘You can only surmise…’
Sandra starts picking up larger pieces of rubbish that are intermixed with Shane’s possessions in random heaps on the furniture and floor. Shane re-enters the room now and stands too close to her with his arms dangling down by his sides.
‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately,’ he says without moving. ‘You might think that it’s disgusting in here but I’ve been under a lot of stress. That’s why I can’t clean.’
‘What’s that, darl?’ Sandra asks him, standing up from where she has been squatting to scoop rubbish into a plastic bag.
‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately,’ Shane repeats louder. He then coughs up into her face.
Blinking down at him, Sandra points to a TV on a low, dirty coffee table. She suggests transferring it to the bookshelf. ‘This way, you would use the table for your coffee,’ she says.
Shane smiles. ‘But I don’t drink coffee.’
Sandra turns and places her hand on a small wicker bookshelf, piled with slightly soiled magazines and books (The Lazy Way to Success: How to Do Nothing and Accomplish Everything, Chicken Soup for the Soul, T’ai Chi Chi Kung: 15 Ways to a Happier You). A porn magazine is balanced on top of the books; a woman smiles out from the cover, a yellow star shielding her vagina.
‘Is there anything here you want to keep?’ Sandra asks pleasantly.
‘All of it,’ he replies. So she starts tidying the books and Shane wanders off again, arms at his sides. It is possible to see, just, the shape of the boy that he was.
‘Regardless of what the situation is with him, I see past that. I see, really, just mental illness. Just another day at the shop,’ she sighs. She finishes up an hour later and walks down the street to say a quick hello to another client she helped a few weeks ago.