TO PAM, WHO CLEANED THE MALL
It’s Pam’s birthday today. She’s dead, but it’s a family custom to keep counting her ‘heavenly birthdays’ until we eventually die ourselves and someone else takes over the count.
“Happy birthday Pam! She loved Saturdays, football and smokes”
pings a message from my father.
He didn’t want us to know my only aunt while she was alive but he’s adamant about filling in the blanks now that she’s two years in the ground.
“Loved a seafood lunch and a good bet too!”
he chimes again.
I’ll never understand men, I remark to my girlfriend under my breath. She chuckles and it’s soft with morning and lukewarm coffee. You know, I tell her, I wouldn’t know what Pam’s laugh sounds like. I’m not sure she did either.
It's later in the day now and I’m walking my dog near my old house in the tiny suburb of Jolimont. It’s pretty and quaint and clings to the shadow of the city like a nervous child. I was born in Sydney, but I grew up here, I tell my dog, as if he signed up for a free tour of the city. He doesn’t give a shit. But he’s trying - the autumn grass is crisp and still too morning-damp for him to feel comfortable relieving himself, though he keeps squatting and shivering over certain spots like a television medium overcome with a message for someone in his audience.
I didn’t know my Aunty Pam. Well, I knew she was my father’s sister. I was aware that we sent her prawns every Christmas. That she lived in Altona. I knew that when we went away to Europe and left her in charge of caring for our cat, she drew all the curtains in the house and lived off white bread and family pies for two months straight. When we came home, she was gone, Gremlin (our orange tabby) was four kilos heavier and the house was as cold as and pin-drop quiet as a mausoleum.
Some people live like ghosts before they die. Pam was one of them. When she finally passed at Altona Greater Hospital one glassy afternoon in July, I thought – well, at least she’s well-rehearsed.
For most of her life, Pam had agoraphobia. Fear of public places. This meant she was never without a blunt black fringe that descended almost the full distance over her eyes, adding an extra layer of social distance. It also meant she had a particular way of peering at you, behind a dense keratin curtain, if you happened to be one of the few people she would be forced to engage with - postmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or her niece coming to visit for the first time in 26 years.
That winter I visited Pam, the heating was off. It was six degrees in her Altona bungalow but she suspected there was asbestos in the wall heater, so she hadn’t turned it on. For four years.
Pam wasn’t used to visitors, or the small rituals of receiving a guest in one’s home. For the occasion of my visit, she’d bought a Woolworths packet cake, some whipping cream and a foundation that was three full shades paler than her skin, spread like a batter on a cheap cut of fish.
Because of her fear of people who were alive, Pam took a job cleaning the local Altona Gate Shopping Centre at night, in the dead quiet. At night, there were no hungry customers, screaming children or keen employees. It was just Pam, her cleaning trolley, a mince pie for the tea break, and the cool hum of the overnight air conditioning.
Her house was a 20m direct route to the shopping centre itself but every evening, she would leave a half hour before her shift to drive her croaking light blue Toyota Corolla on a 10km detour around the suburb, to avoid the traffic lights. No traffic lights meant no chance of having to interact with anyone who might stop alongside her. She might have been frightened of a carjacking, a freak accident or mechanical fault that force her to miss out on her already minimum wage for the night. But part of me knows she would rather be kidnapped, killed or bankrupted than withstand the incredible heat of eye contact, strung and simmering in the red light of a suspended traffic moment. The part of me that feels almost exactly the same way.
Altona is a great place to die on purpose. It’s built around a dark sewage inlet and a chrome-cast oil refinery, recognisable from the air for its eternal flame that burns without giving off any heat. This seems particularly cruel, given that Altona’s residents turn theirs off mid-winter just to afford to continue living by a literal lake of shit. Beyond that, there’s a train line that tears through everybody’s backyards, tossing perching birds to the sky like handfuls of screaming dust every ten to fifteen minutes. Pam loved those birds. You couldn’t find a single nutritious item in the pantry that was intended for herself, but guaranteed there’d be a six month supply of grain for Altona’s pigeon population. They enjoyed all the care she couldn’t seem to deserve for herself. When she died, Pam only had $12 to her name in a hamstrung savings account. She asked that it be spent on a bag of Bill’s Birdseed.
I hope whoever bought that bag turned her backyard into a cornucopia of seed - a feast that would be talked about on powerlines perches, shopfront awnings and gutters for years to come. I hope grain was given to every corner of her pauper’s garden, scattered in every pore of the soil, gorged and regurgitated, and that when it next rained water instead of ash or oil, that the seeds bloomed into rugged daisies and bush poppies. I hope the flowers that swarmed the garden in Pam’s absence were the most resistant to mowing and other attempts on their lives. The flowers most like Pam herself.
After that initial visit to Pam’s house, I returned the following weekend to drop over an oil heater I’d bought from the Kmart at Altona Gate Shopping Centre. This would be the second visit I ever made to Pam, and the last time I would see her alive. She wasn’t expecting me so she didn’t answer the door, but rather spoke through the slit in the door meant for incoming mail, apologising for not having the foresight to buy another packet cake or reinstall the thick slabs of makeup on her cheeks. She thanked me for the heater and announced that Pat was coming home that day, sifting equal parts quivering excitement and particular metallic fear into her voice that meant I could taste blood for the next week. At 65, Pat was Pam’s boyfriend. He was also a drunk, misogynist and incredibly violent. Pat had started to lose his mind in recent years, so spent most of his time in a care home having his arse wiped by student nurses. He gave four of them black eyes for their trouble. Pam couldn’t wait to have him home.
We chatted through the letterbox for another half hour before Pam let me in to the house. She now had a full face of makeup on, which she must have been applying on the other side of the door as we spoke. Inside, we decided to take a photo together to send to my family group chat. I sent it off to pings of approval and jovial messages of love that felt unfamiliar and forced. It was only after I left that I noticed Pam had made sure we were posing by the dead wall heater, as if to argue any claims that she’d needed me to buy the radiator in the first place. She was like my father after all. I texted my girlfriend the news.
The 11:46 train tore through our last goodbye, sending the birds into a ceremonious flap, like they’d just been released at a wedding after being caged for hours by the princess wishes of a very particular bride.
The next time I would see Pam would be at her funeral, on Zoom.
It was a small room, crudely dressed in fake flowers and wincing fluorescent lighting.
She died during COVID, meaning nobody could attend her funeral in person.
I smiled the whole way through the static ceremony, considering how much she would have appreciated that.
TN