Between chairing and meeting and speaking and networking and fighting off competition from giant retailers, Sandra is also running a struggling small business seven days a week. Working under this pressure, and this closely with George, who just wants to retire already, means that they have ‘a few tumultuous times’. She has, for instance, picked up the cash register and hurled it at him at least once. For the most part, however, the centre has held.
George’s heart is dying and his liver is dying. His business is dying and his marriage is dying. His children are alienated and his house is about to burn down. But there is a time before when it is still possible to un-know most of this; when he can press a hot washcloth up to his face, rub shaving cream onto red-warm cheeks, zip the excess off his lips with one thick finger and shave in slow strokes to reveal skin that feels new; when he can thread his shrinking arms through a navy sports jacket and take his still-younger wife out to dinner; when he can drink a Scotch followed by a bottle of red and feel, for a few hours, like himself again.
They are defeated, in the end, by Goliath. North Brighton Paint & Hardware cannot compete with Bunnings. Suddenly, two people who have worked their whole lives and become used to a certain standard of living are left choked with debt. They call in liquidators but the auctioneer for the day costs them forty thousand dollars. The debt opens up like a sinkhole. It swallows their savings, their cars, their home, George’s dignity. He starts drinking more and Sandra starts cleaning houses.
The ad in the local paper says:
Sandra Pankhurst presents
We’re Absolutely Fabulous
The Specialist in Domestic Duties
The ad and the article that appear alongside it in the weekly Business Profile column are an act of friendship: her contacts at the local newspaper, who have become friends over time, give her the publicity she is unable to afford. Because ‘We’re Absolutely Fabulous’ is the name of the business it must reflect the opinion of the owner about their service! No point in hiding your light under a bushel! Or so Sandra Pankhurst believes…
Sandra is described as ‘a long-respected member of the community, working as a funeral director and shopkeeper as well as serving as President of the North Brighton Chamber of Commerce’, and quoted as saying her business is going so well that she’s seeking more employees. Within three months, she is managing a staff of twenty cleaners.
She strides through the door of their rented unit waving the new edition of the local paper. ‘They printed it!’ she calls out triumphantly. George, dozing in front of the television in his robe, looks up briefly but says nothing. The tension they have ignored for years, clinging to the edges like rising damp, is more palpable these days. Her ring clinks on the bench as she spreads opens the paper and reads her letter to the editor out loud across the room:
On Monday, I attended a prospective councillors meeting at Brighton Town Hall. It was a shame that there was such an air of aggression. We should have used the time to get to know each other because we could be working for the same cause—the welfare of Bayside citizens. Running for the council should not be a matter of power games, but of serving the community.
She looks up expectantly but George has closed his eyes again, appears to be dozing. Her cheeks burn. ‘What were you doing when you were my age, George?’ Sandra asks him. He says nothing. ‘You were wheeling and dealing and travelling the world! Let me do what I need to!’
She grabs her keys and her handbag and slams the flimsy door shut behind her, leaving behind a silence so heavy it deserves a place in the Book of Things Which Can Be Seen.
Her campaign slogan is ‘Sandra Pankhurst, Fighting for Community’ and she repeats it, on an endless loop, to everyone who walks down Bay Street as she smiles and presses her bubblegum-pink flyer into their hands. It features her photo, cut from a shot taken with George at a dinner party, a short résumé and her campaign statement:
I live and work in the Clayton Ward with my partner George who fully supports my candidature. I also currently run my own business but before this George and I were the proprietors of the North Brighton Paint & Hardware. I am an energetic, community-minded person and I understand the concerns and needs of the local area well.
After the polls close, she stays up drinking Scotch with the television turned up, trying to stay away from the phone while the votes are being counted. An early tip from the scrutineers has her in the lead, but the official call comes in at midnight. She has lost the seat by a small margin. Sinking, she makes small talk anyway, chatting for a while before hanging up.
‘Fuck. It was because of the mistake in the phone number I put on the flyer. I know it,’ she sighs, turning to George. ‘Apparently the guy who had the phone number is pissed off because his phone has not fucking stopped.’
‘You tried your best, that’s all you can do,’ George says, not managing to sound despondent.
She ignores his tone and pours another drink. On the one hand, she couldn’t really have afforded to live on a councillor’s meagre stipend of two hundred and fifty dollars a week; on the other, she’s pissed off because her pride is hurt. She takes her sleeping pill and gets up at six o’clock the next morning to run Red Cross Calling with a smile covering her face, before going to clean houses.
‘It’s a nightmare on nickels and dimes,’ she says to Craig as he parks at the drive-in, his son in the back seat in pyjamas.
‘The hourly rate isn’t bad,’ Craig says, fiddling with the speaker through the window.
‘Yeah, but see, in an eight-hour day, you can only earn six bloody hours of money, because you gotta travel between house to house. And people want general house cleaning on a nickel-and-dime budget,’ she says. She’s never slept easily but this keeps her up at night. Lately she has been thinking about something new, toying with it in her mind: a gap in the market she observed from their days in the funeral business. ‘Anyway, it’ll be all right. There’s gotta be a way around it,’ she sighs, putting a hand on Craig’s thigh as the movie starts.
When she turns her phone back on as the credits roll, she is flooded with increasingly frantic messages from George. He’s returned home to find that their house has been robbed and when he couldn’t reach Sandra for two hours, he became terrified that the same people who ransacked his home had harmed his wife.
‘I’m just out with friends,’ she reassures George when he answers halfway through the first ring.
‘Get your arse back here now!’
She turns to Craig as he starts the car, pensively putting one long nail up to her lips and trying not to smile. ‘Do you think I should go home or not?’ she asks softly, careful not to wake the child.
‘Ah, you better, you better,’ he chuckles.
The first trauma clean comes through contacts at the funeral home. She enlists a girlfriend and they work seventy-two hours straight. When she sees the state of the house, she is aghast that people can live like this. There are rats running down the hallway and empty bottles shoved deep into holes in the walls. Every cupboard is stuffed with empty beer cans and the floor is black with filth. They pull up three different layers of rotten flooring from the kitchen.
She will remember this first trauma job in granular detail. How naive she was about what the work required, physically and mentally. How poorly she estimated the cost. How the extra five hundred dollars she negotiated from the client was nothing for what they went through to get the last layer of flooring up, because not only was it stapled to the floor, it was also glued. So they had to cut the linoleum and pour boiling water over it and wedge spades underneath to try lift it. Every time they hit a rivet it jarred against their hands, leaving them red and swollen.
George opens the door for her when he hears her car pull up. She drops her purse on the kitchen counter, struggles to open a bottle of white wine.
‘How’d it go?’ he asks.
‘Hands are killing me. Clients were very happy with the end job, so they fuckin’ should be,’ she snaps. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Her hands take a long time to heal. George has never seen her so down. She still goes out every day to continue her domestic cleaning jobs. It takes months, though, for her to reconcile herself to the trauma cleaning; the fact is, it is the highest-paying option she has, and it is work that she can, yes, actually do.
Finally, she embarks on the technical research in earnest; places a large order for chemicals and equipment; registers the name All Trauma Cleaning for the new business she will run out of their garage.
When their house burns down, Sandra blames herself. She had a bad feeling about leaving the cleaning cloths in the dryer. Sorting through the wet ruin of their rooms, she finds that some things have survived in the charred cupboards and closets, though not unscathed; photos have been melted against the glass of their frames, everything stinks of smoke.
With the payout from their contents insurance, the couple move to another rental unit. And though she tries her best to make this one, too, into a proper home, there’s something wrong with George. His alcoholism. His poor health. The loss of his business and his triple-fronted brick-veneer house and his cars and his savings and his neighbourhood and his retirement and his sweet, blonde wife who used to listen out for the sound of his car. Now in his mid-seventies, George is becoming increasingly sick and small and dependent. He doesn’t want to do much—isn’t able to do much—and his need to keep his wife by his side only pushes her further away.
In the background, like music or heating or the smell of the fresh-cut flowers, there had always been Craig and the sustaining certainty that, one vague day in the future George would no longer be around and they would be together. That certainty doesn’t go away just because she hasn’t seen Craig recently. Their relationship has always been ‘on again, off again’, less because he is the type who refuses to commit and more because her gender ‘played with his head’. Regardless of that, Sandra has always told herself that she would not leave George, that she would do the right thing by him. But by fifty, something changes for her.
She feels increasingly limited and constrained; she is resentful. It is not only that George is autumnal, and she is (comparatively) vernal; that he has grown to need her more as she needs him less. She is tired and busy and stressed earning the only income that supplements his small pension, and when George tries to tell her what she should do, or what he would like them to do together, she feels this as an unjust encroachment on her autonomy. ‘You’ll never own me, George,’ she warns. And while George’s grasping for control will become, through repetition, the explanation for her leaving, it does not accurately reflect the cause. Having lived so long without the true gift of family—unconditional love—she is not equipped to take on the true burden of family—unconditional sacrifice. Ten years in a marriage of partial intimacies has not changed this. She has no desire to play ‘nursey nursey’.
George moves in with his son near Brighton Beach and Sandra moves an hour down the coast where she scrapes together enough to put a deposit on ‘a shit shack in Mornington, in the housing commission area’. When she isn’t working she knocks down walls, landscapes the small garden, decorates inside and out from ‘all the garage sales under the sun’. This is when, as she finds herself moving slower and slower, the pace as startling as it is frustrating, her health starts to fail her.
George is in and out of hospital. Though they have separated, they remain friends. Sandra occasionally drives an hour each way bringing Tilly, their dog, to visit him. And whenever George is feeling stronger, he drives down to Mornington. Usually he spends the night, he in one room and she in another. This is how I like to think of them; sitting side by side on the back deck under the stars floating in the dark bowl of the Peninsula sky, surrounded by the rose bushes she recently planted. Their livers are deteriorating—along with her lungs and his heart—but for now they are clinking glasses, they are chuckling over the dog’s antics or some funny memory or old joke. For now they are OK, despite the fact that this is so much less than either of them wanted: united, still, by all the things that separate them.
When he rings on Friday morning to tell her he’ll be coming down, Sandra makes sure that the fridge is ‘chock-a-block of alcohol’. Anything George wants to drink, she’s already bought it. Still, on that weekend, he insists on more. ‘We gotta get some more beer, and some of that new Scotch,’ he urges. Closing the fridge, running a dry hand over his white stubble.
‘George, surely I’ve got enough there,’ she says, exasperated.
He insists.
‘Well, you’ll have a skinful,’ she sighs, putting her knife down, grabbing a dishtowel and looking around the kitchen for her car keys.
The next morning, she cannot wake him. She rings an ambulance. Three days later George is dead ‘and everything goes to shit for a while’.
It is made clear that she is not welcome at the funeral. When she insists on going anyway, she is referred to—only once during the service—as George’s ‘friend’, which she finds deeply hurtful. The next week, she finds out she’s expected to contribute to the cost of the funeral.
Sandra and George were still married at the time of his death in October 2003. Their fourteen-year marriage was, however, officially ‘cancelled’ by the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in 2004. When Sandra told me this, she did not know why it had been cancelled, and she had forgotten both how and when she found out. The registry explained to me that they ‘had been advised’ in 2004 of her sex reassignment surgery and identified the unamended sex specified on her birth certificate.
The dominant legal definition then—as at the time of Sandra’s wedding in 1989 and as I write this now—provided only for marriage between a man and a woman. On this basis, the registry referred the matter to the Attorney-General’s office and were instructed to void the marriage. Though it is probable that the registry tried to contact her, Sandra does not remember this happening nor does she remember being told how this specific piece of personal information came to their attention or offered a right of reply. The registry file no longer contains this information, a fact that took nearly a year of repeat inquiries made by Sandra to ascertain.
In any case, the point was moot; it was simply not possible until 2005 to amend the sex on one’s birth certificate to reflect sex reassignment surgery. Victoria was the last Australian jurisdiction to allow this change. The legislation that would allow such an amendment—to ‘result in fairer treatment of people with transsexualism’7—was being drafted by the government in the very year in which it voided Sandra’s marriage.
It was a bureaucratic killing of sorts. When, in 2014, her doctor told her to order her affairs due to her precarious health, Sandra needed to standardise her name across her assets and identifying documents. ‘I don’t really want to go in front of the bureaucrats,’ she told me, referring to the registry. ‘They’re only going to gawk and pass judgment. So I’ve now gotta go to a lawyer and get my name changed because, as is, I don’t exist. Everything—Medicare, seniors card, drivers licence, credit cards, houses—is in Sandra Anne Pankhurst, and yet I don’t really exist. But that is what I’ve been for the last twenty-eight years! I’ve got to change my name to Pankhurst, otherwise my will can’t be settled. And yet I have paid taxes all these years…’
•
She sits safe in the blare of the television with music from the radio overlapping from her bedroom down the hall. But her shoulder muscles are tight and high and a glass of cheap white wine grows warm in her hand in her house under the dark sky. She craved this independence but now she dreads the nights alone. She can feel it, the undulating, whispering silence bearing down on the small square of roof, pushing in on the thin glass of the windows, breaking through to flatten its dry hand across her forehead and her nose and her mouth. When she finally tries to reconnect with Craig she finds out that he died, a month after George, from the cancer he refused to tell her about.
‘Yeah. So that was a bit spinny!’ she tells me with classic understatement. Be clear. When Sandra says that something was a bit spinny or freaky or eerie, or ‘a bit of a rocky road’ or ‘scary Mary’, what she means is that a pit cracked open beneath her feet, dropping her straight into the liquid centre of the earth.
‘My heart’s really still with Craig and that’s why I’ll probably never have anyone ever again in my life,’ she says with a tight smile. ‘I’ve since spoken to the mother of his child, ’cause we’ve known each other through the years. She hated my guts. I said to her, “Well, don’t be like that, Carla. At least we both have got good taste…”’
I know a little about Craig: he was ‘a health junkie’, ‘a fitness junkie’, and a devoted father to his little boy. I know that Craig ‘had all the toys’: motorbike, jet-ski, four-wheel drive. But like Rick, like George, he remains a shadow.
The more I ask about these men, the smaller they become, compressing gradually into a point of singularity until they simply blink out. Like her ex-wife and her ex-girlfriend, like her siblings and her sons and her drag friends, like Rick’s daughter and Craig’s son and her stepchildren and her step-grandchildren, like her friends and her employees, these men existed only in relation to Sandra. Their inner lives unseen, their feelings unfelt, their additional dimensions irrelevant; too exquisitely beautiful and dangerous to notice or hold dear or remember.
Though friends sometimes make the long drive to visit, though they fling their buttery leather handbags onto her secondhand dining table and look out of the doors opening onto the deck with its roses and ornamental pear trees, exclaiming, too brightly, ‘You wouldn’t even know where you are! You’d think you were in Brighton, sitting there!’ she is frantically lonely and increasingly unwell and desperate to move.
She is trapped down in Mornington, where she runs the business, now called Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services, from home. The only way she can afford to move anywhere else is to make a decent profit on the sale of the house. But a number of real estate agents have told her that she simply won’t get that sort of money. Each time she hears this, she responds, ‘Fuckin’ oath I will get that money.’ She spends all her free time camouflaging the house’s flaws. It is ‘a house of cards’ but she has to work with what she has.
‘I’ve got the photographer turning up at noon tomorrow,’ the real estate agent tells Sandra. A ‘real fucking bitch’, she’s added no value so far.
‘You’d better fucking cancel him,’ Sandra replies tartly, squeezing the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she drives back from a trauma clean in the inner city. ‘I told you I wanted twilight photography. The house looks best under lights, when it’s wet. That makes it look good. That’s what I paid for and that is what I’m having.’
An hour later the agent calls back to say that she’s managed to move the session to later that evening.
‘OK, I might be there a little bit late because I’m getting the last of the plants,’ Sandra replies. She is pushing a trolley through the gardening section at Bunnings, looking for the most attractive of the plants on sale.
‘You’re going a little bit overboard,’ the agent laughs.
‘If I do anything, I do it properly,’ Sandra replies, deciding on the larger of two peace lilies.
When the agent brings the photographer to the house that evening it is as though they are the first guests at a chic, though silent and freezing, cocktail party. Out on the deck the lights are on, candles are lit, plants are arranged tastefully in brightly glazed pots. Sandra is pouring champagne into glasses that surround platters of cheese and smoked salmon, styled with care on the large outdoor table.
Seeing their expressions, Sandra explains curtly, ‘This is only for the photographer. The photos need to show that you can entertain out here, they need to plant the seed.’ Struggling to take a full breath, she finishes folding the napkins into crisp white sails. ‘This is what will sell the property.’ She is entirely unconcerned that they think she is insane.
The house sells the first weekend on the market for more than double the purchase price. She can now afford to buy a unit in Frankston off the plan; just enough left over for the adjustments to the layout that will make the space perfect. With no extra money and no financial safety net, the last thing she needs is for construction on the house to start running behind schedule.
She starts ‘ringing around the world to try to find somewhere to live’. Nothing is available. No one steps forward to help.
The caravan park that is, eventually, the best she can find, is cold and run-down. It is unsafe at night. At five hundred dollars a week, it costs more than a mortgage for the privilege of staying there, but it is her only option. She figures that she can put up with anything for a while. Visiting her house and assessing the progress on its construction is her one joy. But it is there that she trips on a piece of lumber and slices her leg open, down to the bone. Skin dangling like a banana peel, she wraps herself up and drives herself to the hospital, where she parks at an odd angle and walks into the emergency room, bleeding on the floor. ‘I’ve got ambulance cover and here I am, driving myself to hospital,’ she laughs to the nurse who signs her in.
She is back the next week after another fall breaks her wrist. Though she hides it under jokes, she develops a phobia of walking. She cannot go too far without steadying herself against a wall, clinging on to the back of a chair, a sofa, the edge of a table, whatever is immediately to hand. Then comes the pneumonia that hits her like a meteor and hollows her out like a crater.
Though her impulse is to hide herself away, to heal or die, in her cold caravan like a sick animal, stronger still is her desire to make it home: her unit is, finally, ready. With no other choice, and though it makes her stomach cramp with discomfort, she allows a couple of her friends to see her weakness and accepts their offer of help. The women drive down to Frankston from Melbourne. They clean the mess left behind by the builders. They retrieve her boxes and furniture from storage. They unpack everything and put it away, neatly, in her new closets and drawers.
This ‘wild fucking year’ culminates, finally, in the loss of her big toe while wrestling a large fern into a stone urn in her ‘al fresco area’. Again she wraps herself up, again she drives herself to the hospital. Down the highway she has driven a thousand times before, without ever realising that while everyone is moving at the same speed the trucks hauling the heaviest loads have the most momentum.
‘Chop the fucking thing off,’ she instructs the doctor.