Trauma Clean Part One

What is the line between a coincidence and a sign? Because I can’t help but get a very strong feeling the universe is trying to tell me something.

Is the fact that I’ve been called out to this place, near a large frozen pond, on this day, a sign? Or maybe I’m just looking for one.

I’m not normally one for reading “signs”. In fact, it’s basically my job to get rid of them, to clean them up. To go through the step by step processes to eliminate visible marks of violence and tragedy. There’s a name for it: trauma cleaning.

I’ve had this job for six months, and I’m usually teamed up with my boss, Roy. We remove biohazardous materials, decontaminating and sanitising a scene of trauma, discreetly and respectfully.

In my honest opinion, though, trauma always leaves invisible traces behind somehow. I’m not sure it’s ever truly possible to clean it up entirely.

We’ve been given restricted information about the job today. It only pertains to what needs doing, not what happened. Roy has followed the press about this case. He says no body has been found yet, so police can not officially call it a murder investigation at this point. It’s the familiar pattern of blood mist and splatter on the walls that confirms for us we’re cleaning up a homicide crime scene.

Dried blood has no smell, and there are no signs of cadaver decomposition here, but you always wear a respirator mask regardless. There could be unseen pathogens.

Getting past the odour of death takes a strong stomach even in a specialised mask. It’s worst when people die lonely and alone, without anybody noticing for weeks. When their hungry pets have eaten their faces, and they leave the world largely anonymous and unremembered except for a name on a police record, and perhaps a headstone.

The woman who died here lived alone and kept to herself, so apparently nobody had noticed her disappearance for about three weeks.

Her house is filled with dead flowers. Marigolds. Even in their advanced stage of decay, I recognise them. She has put them all over her house, as least one strategically placed in each room.

My father too, was slightly obsessed with Marigolds and he cultivated a garden full of them. To help them survive the winter he would even make a kind of pop up green house around them to keep them warm, and check on their progress twice a day. My brother and I loved to tease him that he took better care of his flowers than his children, but it was completely untrue. There was never was a more loving and protective father than mine. He was just as obsessed with keeping us safe as he was with growing the Marigolds, and the really strange thing was, for him, those two things went hand in hand.

One of my father’s many eccentric beliefs was that Marigolds have the power to protect against evil and cleanse a place of unwanted energies. Perhaps this poor woman believed the very same thing. Turns out the Marigolds didn’t do much to protect either one of them in the end.

You see, my father went missing, as well. Ten years ago tomorrow. No other trace of him has been found since, for all the years of effort my family has put into searching.

My mother is still angry that the sole “witness” to his disappearance has not been taken more seriously. Some crackpot approached the police last year and said all those years ago he saw my father looking into a pond before “somebody snatched him in”, miles away from where his car was found. When they searched the pond and nothing turned up, the guy said it might have been a different pond, he wasn’t sure, finally admitting he was high as kite when it “saw it happen”.

I honestly don’t blame my poor mother for grasping at straws, I just can’t join her in doing it anymore. I believe the only peace I’m now likely to find comes from facing the brutal truth that my father may never be found. No matter how much it splits my heart to accept that.

My mother and my brother worry about me. They can’t understand why I took a job like this. It makes no sense to them at all that I force myself to see the signs of death every time I come to work, and they don’t think it’s healthy.

I’m not sure I can fully explain why it helps me to do this, but it does. For one thing, I know this job is important, I see how much the people we work for need what we do. It’s the kind of cleaning most people could not handle, especially in the canyon of their grief. In some small way I feel like I’m solving things, and putting the world back together, cleansing away as much of the trauma as possible.

Putting my focus into practical tasks also stops me from losing my mind. I think I was edging towards it before I took this job. When the witness came forward with his story about the lake I couldn’t stop thinking about the tales my father used to tell me of the Grindylows, water demons with long fingers who dragged children down to their drowning deaths. My father had sworn blind that one of them tried to take him as a boy while he played near a pond. For months I had ongoing nightmares about either my father or myself being lured to the edge of a body of water, then grabbed by the hand and dragged into it.

Those visions still haunt me while I’m awake sometimes. The frozen pond beyond the windows of this house right now could not look more idyllic and peaceful. Yet every time I glance at it I feel a chill in my spine, and imagine a dark hand reaching out of it, like one that belongs to some monstrous ghost in a horror movie.

Oddly enough, before my father disappeared I had quite an appetite for horror stories. That has changed, especially since I started trauma cleaning. Now I know there is more horror going on in the world than most people would ever want to see, and I can’t unsee it.

Roy has just walked in, dressed in head-to-toe Tyvek, like a Halloween spacesuit, just as I am. He signals for me to come see something.

“You won’t believe what I’ve just found.” he says shaking his head as we make our way towards his discovery in a room at the back of the house.

When I look inside I’m sure my heart actually stops for a moment. There, in the centre of a room filled with antique clutter, is - of all things - a mummified bull.

Coincidence be damned. This is officially a sign, and not a terribly subtle one …