Dorothy’s front door wouldn’t open. So they took it off its hinges.
“[We] were confronted immediately by a wall of garbage, decades upon decades of accumulated detritus,” says Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner. Dorothy’s impenetrable house was in a wealthy suburb, not far from a cafe that made raw almond milk. Krasnostein had arrived there with Sandra Pankhurst, the 63-year-old owner and operator of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.
“The floor wasn’t the floor, it started three or four feet up the wall, and through her rooms was the solid glacial mass of garbage fused together.”
In the four years Krasnostein spent writing and researching her book, she trailed Pankhurst to more than 20 grotesque and garbage-filled sites in suburban Melbourne. “People think ‘cleaning’ and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,” Pankhurst told her as they stood together in the midst of Dorothy’s house. “We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer.”
Pankhurst is portrayed as a remarkable woman: a goddess in white sneakers, marching through decrepit homes and commanding staff in hazmat suits on the correct chemicals for bodily fluids. Her genius lies in the kind and delicate way she speaks to her clients, bizarre characters hiding from the outside world in caves of filth.
Originally an essay published online, Krasnostein’s playful yet heartfelt debut is one of the most arresting works of biography you will read in a long time. Guardian Australia spoke to the writer about shit stains, bed bugs, cleaning and compassion.
Guardian Australia: What is a trauma cleaner?
Sarah Krasnostein: A trauma cleaner cleans crime scenes. But what I didn’t know was that they also deal with many living clients. Sandra’s business involves going to the home of hoarders. She encounters both “wet squalor” – things that you would flush down a toilet – and “dry squalor”, garbage that has collected over time.
How would you describe the smell of death?
Once it hits you, it’s both intimate and alien at the same time. An awful, awful smell. At the first job I went on, a woman who was my age at the time, 35, had died of a heroin overdose; her body was discovered after two weeks. When you reduce a human to just carbon matter decaying over time, it’s profoundly disturbing.
What sort of scenes were you going into?
In Marilyn’s house, the foyer was densely covered by about 40 grocery bags, full of rotting food. There was fruit liquefying on her bed, where she slept. The bathroom was … she couldn’t always make it to the toilet.
Marilyn was witty and well-read, but her world was falling in on her. She did have cancer, she was probably alcoholic. This was the physical manifestation of the pain and isolation in which she was living. In each of the jobs was the unsettling sense of pain and mental illness.
by Lou Heinrich and Sarah Krasnostein , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Caird/Newspix
[ed. Do read the essay, The Secret Life of a Crime Scene Cleaner.]
“[We] were confronted immediately by a wall of garbage, decades upon decades of accumulated detritus,” says Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner. Dorothy’s impenetrable house was in a wealthy suburb, not far from a cafe that made raw almond milk. Krasnostein had arrived there with Sandra Pankhurst, the 63-year-old owner and operator of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.
“The floor wasn’t the floor, it started three or four feet up the wall, and through her rooms was the solid glacial mass of garbage fused together.”In the four years Krasnostein spent writing and researching her book, she trailed Pankhurst to more than 20 grotesque and garbage-filled sites in suburban Melbourne. “People think ‘cleaning’ and that you need a bucket of water and a cloth,” Pankhurst told her as they stood together in the midst of Dorothy’s house. “We need crowbars, spades, rakes, a sledgehammer.”
Pankhurst is portrayed as a remarkable woman: a goddess in white sneakers, marching through decrepit homes and commanding staff in hazmat suits on the correct chemicals for bodily fluids. Her genius lies in the kind and delicate way she speaks to her clients, bizarre characters hiding from the outside world in caves of filth.
Originally an essay published online, Krasnostein’s playful yet heartfelt debut is one of the most arresting works of biography you will read in a long time. Guardian Australia spoke to the writer about shit stains, bed bugs, cleaning and compassion.
Guardian Australia: What is a trauma cleaner?
Sarah Krasnostein: A trauma cleaner cleans crime scenes. But what I didn’t know was that they also deal with many living clients. Sandra’s business involves going to the home of hoarders. She encounters both “wet squalor” – things that you would flush down a toilet – and “dry squalor”, garbage that has collected over time.
How would you describe the smell of death?
Once it hits you, it’s both intimate and alien at the same time. An awful, awful smell. At the first job I went on, a woman who was my age at the time, 35, had died of a heroin overdose; her body was discovered after two weeks. When you reduce a human to just carbon matter decaying over time, it’s profoundly disturbing.
What sort of scenes were you going into?
In Marilyn’s house, the foyer was densely covered by about 40 grocery bags, full of rotting food. There was fruit liquefying on her bed, where she slept. The bathroom was … she couldn’t always make it to the toilet.
Marilyn was witty and well-read, but her world was falling in on her. She did have cancer, she was probably alcoholic. This was the physical manifestation of the pain and isolation in which she was living. In each of the jobs was the unsettling sense of pain and mental illness.
by Lou Heinrich and Sarah Krasnostein , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Caird/Newspix
[ed. Do read the essay, The Secret Life of a Crime Scene Cleaner.]
