The roses growing around Marilyn’s small house are long untended, growing wild and heavy in a neighbourhood of weekend-washed cars and tidy front lawns. This is the first and only hint you get from outside: a visual dissonance so slight as to be, maybe, nothing; one string out of tune on one instrument in an orchestra. And while many of the houses that need Sandra proclaim their problems—the rusted bathtub full of bowling balls in the front yard, the door hanging off its hinges, the solid smell of cigarettes that hits you like a falling brick—there are, equally, many other houses where the signs are more subtle. The permanently drawn blinds, the uncollected mail, the car that never moves; look, now, and you will start to notice them everywhere. But sometimes all you get is a couple of overgrown rose bushes, waggling their long, thorny fingers in the breeze as if to say: you may come this close, but no closer.
After calling Sandra to request a house clean, Marilyn neither answered her phone for a few weeks nor returned Sandra’s numerous messages. But they finally managed to connect and Sandra arrived today with three of her cleaners.
Sandra is in high spirits this morning. Lately she has been concerned with a vitamin C skin serum, whether her contract for police work will be renewed, the trouble a friend is having with her teenage son, whether she might have sleep apnoea, how—if she does have sleep apnoea—the required breathing equipment would ruin the look of her bedroom, missing the early-bird registration for the annual Hoarding and Squalor Conference, how bloody infuriating it is to deal with VicRoads who threatened to hang up on her if she continued swearing, a lovely thank-you card she received from a client and what kind of psychopath laid the carpet in her new office inasmuch as it’s clearly three shades darker than the room it was supposed to blend in with. She is meticulous in this regard, as she is in her work, where the prospect of not perfectly completing a task horrifies her more than anything she could ever encounter as part of a trauma job.
‘I’m a high achiever,’ Sandra explained to me once. ‘I have to get a high result and if I don’t, that’s more damaging to me than having to deal with this crap all day.’
One time, I asked Sandra about the most disturbing job she ever did. ‘There are a few jobs that stick in your mind,’ she conceded. ‘Like, there was a guy, for example, after a Melbourne Cup a few years ago. What took him over the edge I don’t know, but it was more the way he went about killing himself. It was with tree loppers and bricks. So the pain threshold that he went through was quite mind-blowing. And you look at the slash of blood all over the room—has he cut his toes off? Has he cut his cock off? What’s he done? And he’s walked around the house as well. Then when you get to the stairwell, even though there’s no blood, there’s this sense that something isn’t right. And I didn’t know what it was. So we started to lift the carpet, and it’s full of maggots underneath. I went, ‘Oh my godfather!’ It just blew me away, the amount of maggots down the stairwell. That played on my mind. ’Cause if I didn’t have that sixth sense of something, what else would I have left to chance? And that would’ve gone badly against my name.’
Sandra likes to show me her ‘before and afters’, photos on her phone from jobs recently completed. ‘This is in Caulfield. Mould,’ she explains as we stand outside Marilyn’s house. ‘This is the stovetop; the rats and mice.’ She swipes through more photos. ‘Look at the mould. It’s pretty unreal, isn’t it?’ Swipe, swipe. ‘Ah, that’s a suicide, sorry.’ She hurriedly swipes past two photos of a black puddle. ‘That’s the end product.’ Proud swipe. ‘That’s the end product.’ Proud swipe. ‘End product, end product, end product.’ Each room is meticulously clean, shiny to the point of caricature. ‘That’s two days of work. I think that’s pretty good. Oh, I’ve gotta show you this, just so you can have a laugh,’ she says. ‘This is a little dog in a teddy bear outfit.’
Sandra’s mode is no-nonsense kindness when she walks through Marilyn’s cream-coloured front door. Marilyn does not look her age. Though she walks slowly, with the aid of a gliding walker on which is balanced a gin and tonic effervescing in the early morning light, her face is smooth and her tone is archly playful. But then you look closer and you see, before you register that she is in her mid-seventies, that she is simply not well. Her skin is as light as the white hair that shoots out in short bristles above her face. With her stomach swollen round and her pale lips and her finger left quivering in the air while she pursues a forgotten word, Marilyn looks like a dandelion whose seeds are about to blow away. But she directs Sandra and the cleaners around her kitchen with the clipped commands of someone used to being in charge. When she tells me she was a schoolteacher, I am not surprised.
‘I had to go into respite care, in the retirement village, when I was really sick,’ Marilyn explains as Sandra pats her shoulder reassuringly. ‘I basically became one of the staff,’ Marilyn snorts, raising one eyebrow, ‘the old dears didn’t know whether they were Arthur or Martha…’ Marilyn waves her hand dismissively; her nails—like Sandra’s—are artificial and supremely long. They have been recently painted a dazzling shade of purple.
Thirty years ago, Marilyn bought this house for herself and the two young children she raised on her own. She was a working single mother then, is a self-funded retiree now, and, despite being shot through with cancer and arthritis, has no plans to leave. I look around at the spacious living room and the kitchen where the fridge door is propped open. I ask whether it is broken.
‘No,’ Sandra answers breezily on Marilyn’s behalf. ‘It was too full and she didn’t have the strength to open it, so things have gone a little bit tacky in there.’
‘How long have you had the trouble with the fridge?’ I ask.
‘It must be about three weeks, perhaps longer,’ Marilyn answers vaguely.
Starting at the front door, the foyer is thickly planted with white plastic bags full of groceries in various states of decomposition. For at least a few weeks, Marilyn has had the physical and mental energy to drive to the supermarket, to select from the shelves, to make small talk with the cashier who arranges someone to help load the bags into her car, to drive home and to schlep the bags from her car through her front door. But Marilyn has not had the energy to make the final transfer of the groceries from the foyer to the kitchen. And even if she could have summoned this strength, she wouldn’t have been able to fit anything new into the fridge because it was already full of rotting food which she didn’t have the energy to clear out. So Sandra’s crew are now cleaning the fridge and the kitchen, swiftly, efficiently and to the arrhythmic percussion of cutlery and crockery. Every few minutes, one of ‘the girls’ hauls a huge black plastic rubbish bag out the front door and over the lawn, where she hefts it into the trailer attached to the back of the STC van parked on the street.
Life here looks to be less in crisis than surreally interrupted. You get the feeling that someone simply pressed the pause button with the shopping just waiting to be put away and the kettle mid-boil in a house with nobody home. The problem here, then, is subtler than many Sandra normally handles. Milk has curdled and plants have died in these tastefully appointed rooms with their carefully framed photos. Though the house appears generally tidy, three cleaners are working frenetically in the kitchen, hauling bag after bag after bag of rubbish outside. This house, like Marilyn with her beautifully manicured hands, is not its surfaces.
Sandra suggests that Marilyn and I chat in the formal living room, which will let the cleaners move freely through the hallway. Marilyn rejects this suggestion, citing a problem with the height of the sofa, and leads me instead down a dim hallway to her bedroom. She snails along, chanting, ‘The more I walk, the better I’ll walk.’
Marilyn’s bedroom floor is streaked with dirt and strewn with junk mail. There are plastic laundry baskets overflowing with paper and clothes and food and random household items that you must negotiate in order to cross the room. The smell is bad but not overpowering and in this respect it is better than nearly all of the houses Sandra works in; there are top notes of dirty skin, rotting fruit, dust, industrial cleaning products, shit. Marilyn’s bed lies beneath different strata of paper (magazines, TV guides, flyers, legal documents, unopened mail) in which various items have become lodged: a Tupperware container of yellow liquid that she later explains is from a can of peaches, a milk carton standing upright, a box of crackers, a can of insect repellent, and a jumble of other stuff including a plastic bottle of cream, five boxes of paracetamol, bags of chocolate and an unopened soap and lotion gift pack. Her many pillows have no cases, and both they and the bedspread are yellow with dirt or age.
Entirely unselfconscious about the state of the room, Marilyn makes her way slowly around the bed and waves for me to open the drapes covering one wall, explaining that she always keeps them closed. I tug at the heavy orange fabric and sunlight filters over the potted gardenias sitting on the patio, through the spiderwebs layered over the dirty glass and into the room, where it washes over Marilyn stepping out of her slippers and hoisting herself back into bed. There is a large pile of slip-on shoes next to the bed: lemon yellow sandals, turquoise clogs, pristine purple sneakers. Marilyn leans over the ball of her stomach, straining to spread her lavender robe over her legs, and then settles back, Buddha-like, against her pillows. I sit, sideways, on the bed next to her.
One of the cleaners comes in and starts wiping down the walls and floor in the small en suite bathroom while Marilyn tells me about the cancer she was diagnosed with in 2014 and how the drugs she was put on exacerbated her arthritis and depleted her oestrogen, causing her to experience something like menopause for a second time, which was ‘not awful, but inconvenient and uncomfortable’. The physical sequelae of these painful and debilitating illnesses are presented as the reason why she presently requires the help of Sandra to clean her house.
‘And then, last Christmas, things started to go downhill,’ Marilyn sighs. She pulls the lavender robe up to her face where red capillaries burst across her cheeks like faint fireworks. Her eyes peer up and over the top of the fabric for a moment; they are very large and very round and for a moment they are the eyes of a child.
Marilyn has two adult children. Though quite different in personality, they are both clearly intelligent and she lists their accomplishments with pride. Equally, however, when she speaks about them it is mostly with cutting judgment and a sense of having been wounded: the warmth present when she talks about previous housecleaners is missing when she discusses her children. While Marilyn usually spends Christmas Day with her younger son and daughter-in-law and their children, they told her they would be celebrating with the wife’s family that year. This left Marilyn feeling as though she ‘didn’t really fit in’. So she arranged to go to a restaurant with her older son, who has ‘never ever married’, and who lives an hour and a half away. That son had planned to spend Christmas morning with his girlfriend, so he could only join Marilyn for lunch. He didn’t come over until 2 p.m., at which point Marilyn was feeling ‘very discontent’. Marilyn and her son were ‘the last to arrive’ at the restaurant and despite the fact that there was still a surprisingly abundant spread of both hot and cold foods on offer, ‘the damage had been sort of done’.
To understand the nature and extent of this damage, you must also understand a number of other things. First, Marilyn devotes a room in her house to the appurtenances of Christmas and there she keeps many rolls of Christmas-themed wrapping paper, Christmas-themed rugs, strings of Christmas lights, at least one artificial Christmas tree and ‘lots of Santas’ including one who is ‘life size but with beautiful clothing’.
Second, among the various sweet treats rotting on her bed this morning is a basket fashioned out of chocolate, to which she relatively recently treated herself expressly because it was something her parents would purchase for her from Darrell Lea each Christmas of her childhood. While it still tastes the same, she laments the fact that they used to be ‘so much bigger’ and came with a tiny chick inside—inexplicably excluded from the modern iteration.
And you must understand that, aside from the two boys she raised by herself after her husband took off with his girlfriend when they were toddlers, Marilyn is alone on this rock floating in space. So the hours spent alone from, and including, Christmas Eve until 2 p.m. on Christmas Day in the year she was diagnosed with cancer felt not just long but absolutely agonising.
‘From then on I just went downhill with depression, my arthritis got worse and about three months ago I really hit rock bottom,’ Marilyn says, toying with a wooden back-scratcher she has dredged up from under a pile of magazines at her side. In Marilyn’s en suite bathroom, where the cleaner is working, there is a sloping mound of empty tonic-water bottles and cask-wine boxes that reaches from the floor to the height of the pink basin. On the bench, near Marilyn’s toothbrush and Crabtree & Evelyn talcum powder, is a jar of pickles and two cups of instant noodles with silver forks sticking out at odd angles. The cleaner is bent down, scooping rubbish into a black bag.
‘I just wanted to go to bed and stay in bed. I didn’t want to get up. I had no reason to get out of bed. I have always had pets, but not at that stage. I knew that is not the time to get a new kitten. November is the time to go looking for a kitten. Not only that, I questioned whether I was really capable of looking after anything. I was so depressed. I went to my GP, and he doubled my antidepressant medication and my anti-inflammatory for the arthritis because I was in so much pain.’
I ask Marilyn whether she has told her sons about her depression. She says no.
‘I don’t want them worrying at all. I use the word “harassing” me, but they don’t harass me. When I let things get out of hand, I don’t let anybody in the door. I just did not want to do anything. I just lost interest and enthusiasm. Some days I could sleep all day and sleep all night. I used to hide the phone so that it didn’t wake me up. You can see the magazines that I haven’t even read. I had no concentration, no enthusiasm. I would just get up and take another sleeping pill.’
I look at the empty file holders on the far bedside table and a neatly labelled box of folders from the 1990s on her floor. I wonder how many times the house has fallen into this type of neglect, whether it has been a struggle over her life or a relatively recent phenomenon. ‘When would you say that it became harder for you to be as organised as you usually are?’ I ask.
‘It gradually got worse, got to the stage where I just did not want to do anything, nothing at all, just stay in bed all day,’ she answers.
During this period, as per their usual practice, Marilyn spoke to her sons on the phone at least once or twice a week. ‘Usually about what they have been doing, what I have been doing, and if I have not been doing anything, I just say, “It’s been too cold to go out today,” which is not an untruth, I can tell you. It’s been hideous this winter.’
Sandra breezes into the room with a smile and stands with her hands on her hips, assessing what needs to be done while fighting to regain her breath from the walk down the hallway.
‘Do your sons know that Sandra is helping you today?’ I ask.
‘Not today, they don’t. They did last time and that was soon after I was diagnosed with cancer,’ Marilyn responds.
‘That’s right, yes, and your dog had just died; the love of your life,’ Sandra says gently. Marilyn wanted to have her older son over so she could break the news about her cancer.
‘I said, “I can’t let him in because the place is a mess,”’ Marilyn explains. ‘I had not had help for about twelve months, and I was starting to not be able to do things that I would have liked to have done. I did not want to let my son in because he has always threatened that if I cannot look after myself…’
‘She goes into a home,’ Sandra finishes.
‘So Sandra came in with her team for a day on the Friday, and they cleared the decks,’ Marilyn says. ‘And I had my son over on the Sunday.’ That clean involved removing from the floors a foot of rubbish and accumulated faecal matter from the dog that has since passed away. I ask Marilyn whether she experienced any depression after her husband left her with two young children.
‘I don’t remember being depressed then. That was such an upheaval in my life that I had to just keep going,’ she says.
Sandra goes to check on how the kitchen is progressing. When Marilyn talks, her eyes seem to adjust their point of focus, as though she is only sometimes looking outward. When they are out of focus, so too is her face; her mouth slackens, as does her chin, her eyebrows hang low and her breathing slows. There is then a slight delay with her speech as though she is struggling to hear or struggling to take a full breath in order to respond. This makes her appear much older.
Something else I notice about Marilyn is her sheer intelligence; it is undeniable from the breadth of her frame of reference, the size of her vocabulary and the architecture of her phrasing. Marilyn is quick, she is droll; at the height of her powers she would have been exceedingly intimidating and for much of her life she has probably been the smartest person in the room. She is so naturally authoritative that it takes me too long to recognise that Marilyn is an unreliable narrator.
It is not possible to judge how much the state of Marilyn’s home is to do with her current physical illness and related depression and how much may be due to a more entrenched type of mental illness. While her explanations are circumstantial, there are also strong indications of true hoarding, severe squalor, alcoholism. Marilyn is perfectly lineball. But in the end, what does it matter? Pain is pain is pain is pain.
‘I’m a bit out of breath today,’ Sandra says, coming back into the bedroom, smiling as she violently sucks in air, her chest pumping rapidly like a fish on the bottom of a boat.
‘Now don’t you do too much,’ Marilyn warns, shaking her finger at Sandra from the bed. The undersides of Marilyn’s manicured nails are grey with dirt. ‘I don’t want to have to pick you up off the floor.’
‘Oh God, leave me there, love!’ Sandra says, waving her concern away. She pushes aside a pyramid of unopened mail from the corner of the bed and plonks herself down next to Marilyn. Retrieves two pillows from under the rubbish on the bed, both of them visibly dirty, pumps each one like an accordion, flings them against the headboard and reclines against them, crossing her long legs over the side of the bed.
‘She looks better than I do,’ Marilyn says to me.
‘Full of Botox and filler,’ Sandra says with a theatrical sigh, nonchalantly picking up a sealed envelope from the top of the pile she displaced, squinting at the sender and then employing one exquisitely long French-manicured nail as a letter opener. Extracting a phone bill from two years ago, she places it on the bed next to her and throws the envelope into an empty rubbish bag near her feet.
‘Just think of Jane Fonda,’ Marilyn says solemnly.
‘She looks fantastic, doesn’t she?’ Sandra inhales reverentially. ‘I think she’s seventy-eight.’
‘And look at Joan Collins,’ Marilyn says.
‘She is plastic upon plastic; you could call her Miss Tupperware,’ Sandra says, pulling out another bill and adding it to the last.
‘If she had one more facelift, she would be wearing a beard,’ Marilyn deadpans.
‘Or talking out of her arse,’ Sandra adds, chuckling. Sandra is queen of the one-liners. She once said to me, ‘I always felt like I had to be the court jester. It’s probably an illusion or a mask that I put on to be accepted by everyone, masking myself to be comfortable with people.’
Another bill goes on the pile, another envelope gets stuffed quickly into the bag. Again and again and again. This is Sandra’s gentle genius: the trauma clean that she is at this moment both overseeing and actively progressing looks and feels completely desultory. Everything she is doing appears incidental to the schmoozing going on between her and Marilyn. Anyone who glanced in at this scene would see only two friends, completely at ease, having a natter. They would not know that Sandra has calculated a precise timeframe in which she will clear the room around Marilyn; that she intuitively knows exactly how far she can push Marilyn to throw out what is broken, useless, rotten or infested; that she is keeping one eye on the employee disinfecting the stained bathroom surfaces; and that she is aware of how much progress her other two cleaners are making in the kitchen.
As she inspects another unopened envelope, Sandra’s gift is to appear as though she is simply keeping her hands busy, the way someone would pick the label off a beer bottle on a lazy Sunday afternoon at the pub with friends, when she is, in fact, expertly negotiating a logistically complex emotional minefield. At her most effective, it will look like Sandra has completely forgotten that she is at work. And this is because part of her has.
‘Have you got a phone bill to pay? What’s the date of this?’ Sandra says, holding up a sheet of paper, alarmed.
‘No, it’s all by direct debit,’ Marilyn replies, waving it away.
‘OK. While I’m sitting here, I’m going to put these newspapers in the bin,’ Sandra says lightly, gesturing to one of the myriad stacks of gossip magazines populating the bed.
‘Hang on, have I read that one?’ Marilyn asks pointing to one of the covers.
‘Pick out which ones you have read,’ Sandra suggests, selecting a magazine and contemplating the cover. ‘What about that Jen? Finally getting married. And having twins,’ she marvels. For the next few minutes, Marilyn specifies which magazines can and cannot go into the recycling. Under one of the cleared magazine piles, Sandra finds a miniature stylus and mentions to Marilyn that it’s the same as the one she uses for her phone. Marilyn explains that she doesn’t like using it but that she has trouble operating her phone without it.
‘If your nails are too long, you can’t press the screen properly,’ I offer.
‘It’s impossible that nails are too long,’ Sandra snaps, and I adore her. ‘OK, this is an old tax receipt for something you bought at an electrical store…’
Sandra’s phone rings. ‘Good morning, Sandra speaking. Hi Jesse, how are you? I tried to ring you this morning because the Dean Street property…It has been flooded, the wood has all puffed up, so that will have to be taken out. Then it’s also got to be treated for cockroaches and you’re probably better off to get Housing to get that done because they get that at a cheaper rate than what I will, because Prozac—maybe I need Prozac—Propest, yes, they’ve got the government contract, so they get it done much cheaper…Yes, there are major holes in the walls…Right, because that girl that lived there, we’ve done her several times, I think she’s a patient at the psychiatric department…I don’t know whether the bed is damaged…All righty, I’ll work on that tonight and get that over to you tomorrow. OK darling…thank you, bye-bye.’
Sandra opens a TV magazine from 2012 with Ronn Moss on the cover. ‘That is it. Gone with the wind. Ridge is out,’ she sighs, reflecting upon his face. ‘I watch The Bold and the Beautiful every day.’
‘Me too,’ Marilyn says.
For Sandra, watching The Bold and the Beautiful is an act of mental hygiene that provides her with the type of sanctuary others might get from taking a holiday or a walk or some deep breaths. She picks up another magazine and reads out the headline, ‘Love in the Boardroom…Huh!’ She peeks inside, momentarily losing herself, before casting it, too, into the rubbish bag.
‘Be careful what you throw out there,’ Marilyn warns.
‘OK, I will,’ Sandra promises.
‘Because there is my will and testament there,’ Marilyn says.
‘Oh, good, I’ll just change it and put my name on the bottom, shall I?’ Sandra smiles and then squints to read the small print on a receipt. ‘Now this is…As seen on TV…pure silk…Kelly’s Kloset Cold Shoulder Embellished Kaftan…Shit!’
‘Have a look at it!’ Marilyn urges with pride, pointing towards her walk-in closet opposite the bed.
‘Is it one of the Katherine Kelly Lang ones? Oh you bitch,’ Sandra says, hurrying over while explaining for my benefit that, in addition to playing the role of Brooke on The Bold and the Beautiful, Ms Lang captains her own line of kaftans. Over the sound of squeaking hangers, Sandra’s muffled voice calls out, ‘Hang on, you’ve got two!’ Sandra appears in the doorway holding two kaftans aloft. ‘They’re gorgeous and they would flow lovely over the body,’ she muses, appraising the jewel-coloured silk between her fingers.
‘This is when I was feeling good last spring,’ Marilyn says, motioning towards the kaftans.
Sandra returns the garments and settles back on her side of the bed, where she starts investigating a stack of documents. ‘That is from the lawyers; that’s your will, is it?’ Sandra asks, holding up the papers.
‘Yes, those are the ones I want,’ Marilyn replies. One corner of the bed has now been cleared and tiny mites are jumping around on the fabric.
‘You’ve got bugs on your bed,’ Sandra says matter-of-factly.
‘They don’t seem to do any harm,’ Marilyn answers, and turns to the pile of mail that Sandra has prepared for her to sort through. ‘I’ve got mail here I haven’t even bothered to open.’
Having cleared more space on the bed, Sandra now finds another silk kaftan crushed against the bedspread. She tries to smooth the deep wrinkles out with her palm, reunites it with its belt, arranges it on a hanger and swoops it back into the closet.
‘Have you got a leak in your roof?’ Sandra asks with concern as she emerges, pointing at a tea-coloured stain on the ceiling next to a fan wearing a grey wig of dust on each of its blades. ‘I reckon you’ve got a cracked tile, and you’ve got water coming through.’
‘No, it’s been that size for about three years.’
‘OK. I’d better give that fan a clean, it’s looking a bit gruesome there,’ Sandra says. She then hefts a plastic laundry basket up onto the bed and starts considering its contents. I ask Marilyn what she likes to read.
‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII—I’m a bit of an expert on Henry VIII,’ she says. ‘Elizabeth I…It just fascinates me. I used to be an avid reader, and I’ve got piled up there Bleak House by Charles Dickens, which is about that thick,’ she says, gesturing with her purple-tipped fingers, while nodding to her bedside table on which there are no books, thick or otherwise, amid the various air fresheners and alarm clocks old and new.
‘What about TV?’ I ask, gesturing to the enormous screen opposite her bed.
‘Oh yes,’ Marilyn agrees with some enthusiasm. ‘I love my television.’
‘You weren’t watching Last Tango in Halifax?’ Sandra asks, looking up from the laundry basket.
‘No. I saw Last Tango in Paris and I thought it would be a bit like that,’ Marilyn says with disappointment.
‘It’s actually quite interesting,’ Sandra replies. In addition to regularly watching a broad range of TV shows, Sandra reads the papers every day, both state and local, and also enjoys magazines about cooking and interior decorating. She is, she says, ‘not a book reader’, but if she was, she would gravitate to biography. ‘I love the Packer story; I love Bondy; I like Gina Rinehart. I like how these people think and how they get ahead,’ she told me once.
Motioning towards her bathroom, Marilyn says, ‘Once the fridge is cleaned out, there are a couple of jars of stuff in there to put in it.’ Sandra nods and asks for permission to dispose of some of the food on the bed.
Permission is denied. ‘No. Those are all things I bought at the supermarket today,’ Marilyn answers. This seems unlikely, but not impossible. Sandra accepts it and pushes on.
I once asked Sandra about how physically demanding her work was. ‘I do come home exhausted from a day of hoarding, I am absolutely wrung out,’ she answered. ‘Because there’s constant bartering and getting them to agree but trying to turn it that it’s their idea and not my idea. You’ve got to be very manipulative to a degree.’
‘So, it’s actually the people who are alive that are more problematic?’ I asked.
‘Oh, bingo. I’d rather a dead body any time.’
A bird sings outside the bedroom window. A cleaner from the kitchen comes in to ask Sandra a quiet question. ‘We are slowly getting there,’ Sandra nods, turning her attention back to the papers on the bed. ‘I’m just making sure there’s nothing in there, but I think it’s just bullshit letters,’ she says, moulding the pile into a neat brick and then flipping through it. ‘Standard letters…urgent action, shareholders, payment dividends…do you need that?’
‘Yes,’ Marilyn responds and picks up another flyer. ‘Community conversations…spotlight on mental health. That’s me!’ she smiles.
‘Yes, me too, I get a guernsey,’ Sandra says wryly. She picks up a grey plastic lid lying on the bed.
‘That goes on my NutriBullet, that is not to go in the dishwasher,’ Marilyn instructs regally.
‘They’re doing everything by hand in the kitchen,’ Sandra reassures her.
Marilyn finds a letter from a social group of ‘professional business people’ she used to regularly attend. ‘At the moment, I’ve put my membership on hold because to go and sit in an unreasonably cold church hall…’ she explains. ‘When the weather gets warmer, I will think about pulling myself up by the bootstraps. We always have Christmas in July.’
‘And she’s a Christmas junkie here,’ Sandra says.
‘I’m a Christmas tragic,’ Marilyn allows.
‘This year her aim is to have all the family here for Christmas, because she missed last Christmas,’ Sandra explains lightly. ‘Yes, that’s her goal. We are setting goals to keep us on the go.’ Rule of Pankhurst: small, achievable goals.
‘Even if we don’t have lunch here, or even if everybody brings something,’ Marilyn adds and then urges me to go get a good look at her Christmas room. This is the other bedroom, into which it is impossible to walk because of the sheer volume of items stored there. While it is true that Christmas decorations and various rolls of wrapping paper are visible from the doorway, Christmas is not readily identifiable as the distinguishing theme. There are just piles of appliances and electronic items and pet products and cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other, entirely obscuring the floor and forming a swampy situation that reaches halfway up the walls.
‘Isn’t it a Christmas extravaganza?’ Sandra bubbles when I return. I can’t tell if she’s humouring Marilyn or if, from her higher vantage point, she saw more than I could. She moves around to Marilyn’s side of the bed, stopping to transfer a large Ziploc bag full of brightly beaded jewellery from the floor to a shelf in the closet. She then drags out a pink shopping bag from behind one of the drapes, removes from it a small cardboard box and briskly swipes a layer of dust off the lid and into my hair.
‘That’s my darling dog. Jojo,’ Marilyn says.
‘Oh, Jojo’s ashes,’ Sandra nods.
‘I don’t know where they go but I want them. The ashes are being cremated with me,’ Marilyn says, rearranging her robe over her legs.
‘Yes, my two dogs are up in my bedroom,’ Sandra says, referring to Mr Sparkles (1 January 1995 – 17 June 2010) and Miss Tilly (5 September 2000 – 9 February 2011), resting now in their fine wood boxes with brass nameplates on a shelf across from her bed. She pauses for a moment to think. ‘I’ll put them behind the TV so they’re in the room with you.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Now what have we got in here?’ Sandra asks, peering into another large paper bag and removing another cardboard box. ‘Christmas presents, hey?’
‘That’s my cat. Her name was Aurelia,’ Marilyn says. And then, peering closer: ‘Oh no…it’s a vase.’
Sandra removes and opens a third cardboard box.
‘Ah, here we are, Aurelia!’ Sandra exclaims. ‘I’ll put the two animals together.’
‘Thank you,’ Marilyn says. ‘She was a beautiful cat. She used to sleep with me every night.’ Sandra starts coughing from the dust. The cleaner comes out of the bathroom with a huge bag of rubbish. ‘Now don’t you try to lift that,’ Marilyn warns Sandra.
‘I won’t,’ Sandra promises as the cleaner pushes the bag into the hallway. Sandra starts sorting through another packed washing basket on the floor and Marilyn instructs her to keep a few unopened wall calendars from previous years and a broken attachment for a garden hose. The cleaner returns and asks Sandra if any of the other bathrooms will need a clean.
‘No, that’s OK. Only this one gets used, and it’s just, of course…the…accidents…here, so use some Amsolve to clean that up,’ she says, referring to the industrial stain remover touted by its marketing materials as equitably eliminating carpet stains caused by orange juice, soft drinks, wine, blood, and protein-based foodstuffs such as milk, egg, ice-cream and chocolate. It also successfully removes faeces, a significant quantity of which streaks the bathroom floor.
Marilyn vigorously motions to the cleaner to hand over a plastic bag full of deliquescing apples and oranges extracted from the bathroom. ‘Thank you, my love,’ Marilyn says sweetly as the cleaner hands it over. ‘I’m going to throw these out for my possums.’ She peers inside the bag with approval and then hangs it from the handle of her walker. The smell is nauseating.
‘You’ve got bags and bags of paperwork here,’ Sandra says, looking around the room with her hands on her hips. ‘We’re going to have to sort all this out, rather than keep it for the sake of keeping it. We’ll go through and see what is to keep and what is not.’
‘All right,’ Marilyn agrees.
‘We will start with this pile,’ Sandra says. She peels a single sheet off the top. ‘Now that is from your lawyer, and the lawyer has got to stay, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’ That sheet is placed to the side and another is lifted. ‘The bank?’ Sandra asks, holding up a statement.
‘Yes.’
Sandra peels off a water bill. ‘This?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know, what’s the date?’ Marilyn asks.
‘These are all from 2012, so they’re no good to you. I’m thinking that most of this is quite old by now,’ Sandra says, paging through the stack.
‘Just chuck it,’ Marilyn says.
‘Yes, be gone with you!’ Sandra intones, dumping the pile into a rubbish bag and swiftly pulling it into the hall before Marilyn changes her mind. ‘Gone with the wind,’ she says, returning. The cleaner emerges from the bathroom with a jumbo-sized plastic bottle of orange juice which both Marilyn and Sandra confirm needs to be thrown out. I ask Marilyn if she enjoys living alone.
‘Yes, I’m quite happy with my own company,’ she answers.
‘Did you ever want to get remarried?’ I ask.
‘I didn’t have time for that,’ Marilyn answers quickly. ‘I just did not want to. Anyway, once bitten, twice shy…’
‘You see, I like to live on my own,’ Sandra agrees. ‘I couldn’t stand to have to cook or clean or do anything for anyone. There is an independence to living on your own. You can shit the bed if you want or you can live it up on the town!’ She nudges a bunch of reusable bags into a large, fluffy pile and nods at the cleaner who has emerged from the bathroom with another two bursting bags. ‘So what is the next thing on your agenda? What are you going to do between now and Christmas? What is your next goal?’
‘When I get some nice warm days, I am going to gradually walk around the block, taking it bit by bit,’ Marilyn says.
‘Bit by bit, slowly.’ Sandra nods.
I ask Marilyn if she feels OK with driving herself to the supermarket or to get her nails done.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Marilyn says. ‘I’m slowing down a bit, though.’
‘That’s the fear, when you feel you cannot drive anymore, that you’ll lose your total independence, and that would be freaky,’ Sandra commiserates, touching on Marilyn’s great fear, which is also her own.
I ask Marilyn if she’s starting to feel a bit like her old self again.
‘Yes, and I know I will feel even better tomorrow because Sandra has been here,’ she replies. Despite excavating these rooms, and seeing that many of the layers predate Marilyn’s cancer diagnosis, Sandra remains faithful to the view that Marilyn’s situation was caused by her recent physical ill health.
‘We need to change the way we look after the elderly people who have worked all their lives,’ Sandra says as she sorts through another basket. ‘I think people who’ve worked and paid taxes all their lives should be getting some sort of dispensation from the government, so that someone comes in, checks on them or makes sure that their needs and things are met.’
Whereas Sandra’s only family is her sister-in-law, who lives in another state and whom she sees only rarely, Marilyn has two adult children. Marilyn’s relationship with her children, however, is such that this level of squalor has, on at least two occasions, built up gradually, like a mountain range, without their knowledge. She can stay in bed for a week or more without that fact coming to their attention. A phone service calls her each morning between 8.00 and 8:30 a.m. to check that she is alive. (‘My son organised that for me.’)
I do not know what happened in this house over the past thirty years. I do not know when Marilyn started drinking. Though Marilyn takes control of her isolation by putting a protective spin on it, I do know that disconnection on this scale has long antecedents, that it metastasises over time. So perhaps the surprise isn’t that her sons are here so little; the surprise may be that they are still around at all. But regarding the question of whether Marilyn has been abandoned with or without justification—and the true meaning of the white grocery bags carpeting the foyer like unmarked graves—the most satisfying resolution may lie in Sandra’s complete lack of interest in the answers.
‘Now tell me, how long are you going to stay here?’ she asks, adding some letters to the pile that Marilyn has promised to go through later. ‘As long as you can?’
‘As long as I can,’ Marilyn says.
‘What would make you move?’
‘A stroke, but even then I’d be screaming all the way out of the door.’
‘Would you consider one of those retirement villages?’ Sandra asks.
‘Yes, if I feel I am not coping.’
‘You’d have to downsize,’ Sandra says.
‘But how do I choose what I don’t need?’ Marilyn asks. And despite the weight of the question, which is the weight of the world, Sandra is, as always, breezily pragmatic.
‘Well, how many lounge suites do you need? You’d still have a guest room, but your Christmas decorations would be buggered…’ Sandra examines a photocopy of an official record. ‘The Australian Imperial Horse…’ she reads.
‘That was my great uncle. I thought he was killed at Gallipoli. It turned out he was killed on the Western Front after they left Gallipoli,’ Marilyn explains. She mentions also that her father fought in the Second World War.
‘Did he survive?’ Sandra asks.
‘Yes, minus one big toe. He dropped a drum of petrol on it and ended up in Alice Springs Hospital for six months,’ Marilyn replies.
The cleaner joins in from the bathroom. ‘My husband’s grandfather was the same. He chopped off three fingers when he came back. Isn’t it funny? They go to war and nothing happens to them until they come home.’
I think of Marilyn’s years of being a single working mother raising two children by herself. Of the unrelenting pace and of her endurance, and of what happened, eventually, as the pressure eased off. I ask Marilyn whether she had a happy childhood and she tells me that she did. ‘We weren’t very rich, but I didn’t know the difference,’ she says.
Sandra nods in agreement. ‘We were all pretty well equal then. There weren’t the multi-rich, and if there were, you didn’t really know about it because there wasn’t the media presence that we have now. Everyone was the same.’
‘Our town had one car,’ Marilyn recalls.
‘They still had the shit-carters in those days, because you didn’t have sewerage,’ Sandra adds. ‘That’s where the old saying comes from: as flat as a shit-carter’s hat.’
‘I think ours used to carry it on his shoulder,’ Marilyn muses. ‘The baker delivered every day. The milkman came in the wee small hours and we used to leave the bottles out with the money, in front.’
Sandra nods. ‘We didn’t have refrigerators. Everything was either in brine or in the meat safe.’
‘No, we had an ice chest,’ Marilyn says.
‘Oh, you were rich,’ Sandra teases as she stretches out her legs full length on the bed, turns to lie on her side and rests her head in her hand like she’s at a sleepover party.
‘We used to have a little Asian man who would come along with a wagon that was drawn by a horse. He sold fruit and vegetables,’ Marilyn explains. ‘Every now and again he would get a little jar of ginger from China and give it to Mother. She thought that was just wonderful.’
‘The simple things in life,’ Sandra murmurs in a strange, soft voice, gazing dreamily now up at the ceiling, staring through it and back in time. But while Marilyn is participating in a shared reminiscence between two women of a similar age, Sandra is merely borrowing the warmth of someone else’s memories. Feeling their softness for a few moments, like the expensive silk dresses in the closet. At the age when Marilyn was taking a curious look at a jar of Chinese ginger, Sandra was stealing food and wrestling to open the can as her teeth rotted. But the age difference and the geographical difference and the economic difference and the emotional difference all fall away before Sandra’s social dexterity, and this is not a trick, it is a wish.
‘But that’s just chitchat,’ Marilyn says and the spell is broken. ‘How are my clothes going? The ones I want picked up?’
‘Have not got there yet,’ Sandra answers. ‘We are doing the other fridge as well. I thought we might as well get both fridges out of the way and then you’ll have a clean slate.’
‘OK, you’re the boss,’ Marilyn says. ‘I’m planning on having you back again.’
Sandra goes to check on the kitchen. I stand for a moment to stretch my legs and reposition myself in my small clearing on the bed. The pile of magazines and food boxes that I had pushed aside to make room for myself shifts precipitously, revealing a few bugs that look like millipedes crawling around on the quilt. Sandra returns. ‘We’ve sorted out all the shopping,’ she says, referring to the bags by the front door. ‘A lot of it was past its use-by date, so we’ve given that the flick.’
‘I feel as though everything is not revolting and out of hand, and beyond my coping with it. All I have to do is be determined to never let that happen again,’ Marilyn says.
And while we all know that is not the solution to this problem, I wonder whether having Sandra here today is a sign that Marilyn is out of control, or a sign maybe that she is actually still very much in control: living her life exactly the way she wants—eating pickles in the bathroom and drinking gin in the morning, watching TV in bed and calling in Sandra to clean up when the mess gets too great; in control even of losing control. And yet.
‘What was the reaction from your sons when you told them about your diagnosis last year?’ I ask.
‘The younger one was quite upset about it. I told him over the phone. The older one…after Sandra had been out the first time, I had him around here, instead of me going to his place. I said, “Look, I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of bad news for you, I’ve been diagnosed with cancer.” His immediate reaction was “We’ll get through this together, Mum.”’
I think about Marilyn’s eyes going out of focus as she drives to the supermarket, how she steers the shopping trolley down the bright aisles, clutching the handle like her walker. How she supervises the employee who carries the white plastic bags to her car, carefully drives those bags back home, carries them inside and leaves them by the door to rot. I think of the dull popping noise a tranquilliser makes as you fumble it out of a near-empty bottle, the pasty bitterness it leaves on the tongue when swallowed in haste without water. I think of how a body with cancer maintains itself on a fuel of alcohol and sugar. Of a phone ringing and ringing and Marilyn’s voice saying that it’s been too cold to leave the house. The moths that spiral up into air like ash from embers when the quilt is adjusted. The odd sensation of rolling over onto a can of insect repellent; whether that discomfort is something you might try to ignore, like a full bladder on a cold night. I think of Marilyn closing herself into herself and willing herself to sleep as the sky purples, drains clear and darkens, eventually, again.
Sandra takes a call, then announces that she’s off to do a quote for another job. She will be back soon to make sure everything is finished correctly. Marilyn nods and fares her well. Then she hefts herself up from her bed and walks me out slowly, inching her way down the hallway, which is lined, on both sides, with photographs of her forebears—her great-grandfather in shirtsleeves, her parents on their wedding day.
I search in vain for a photo of Marilyn in full flight; an iron-tongued warrior in silken finery and bold beads. But such a photo would just be another proof, like the faces looking down from these walls or the pets in their funeral boxes, that the staggering difference between what we were once and what we are now is, sometimes, as true as it is false. I leave down the front path, past the STC trailer overflowing with garbage, and the roses—bright, still, under their wild tangle of leaf and thorn.