Page 66 of The Pearl Sister
‘Why is she sitting on the ground?’ I asked Chrissie.
‘Because she wants to feel the earth beneath her.’
‘Right.’
I could feel the old woman’s eyes still on me as if she was scanning my soul. She reached out a gnarled hand to stroke my cheek, her skin on mine feeling surprisingly soft. Then she pulled on one of my curls and smiled. I saw she had a big gap between her two front teeth.
‘You knowum Dreamtime story of thegumanyba?’ she said in halting English.
‘No . . .’ I looked back at her blankly.
‘She’s talking about the Seven Sisters, Cee. That’s what they’re called in our language,’ Chrissie interpreted.
‘Oh. Yeah, I do. My dad told me all about them.’
‘They ourkantrimen,Celaeno.’
‘That means our relatives,’ Chrissie put in.
‘We family, one people from samekantri.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll explain what she means another time,’ whispered Chrissie.
‘All begin in the Dreamtime,’ the old lady began.
‘What did?’
‘The Seven Sisters story,’ said Chrissie. ‘She’ll tell it to you now.’
And, with Chrissie translating, I listened to the story.
Apparently, the Seven Sisters would fly down from their place in the sky and land on a high hill, which was hollow inside, like a cave. There was a secret passageway that led inside it, and it meant that the sisters could come and go between the heavens and the earth without being seen. While they were down here with us, they’d live in the cave. One day, when they were out hunting for food, an old man saw them, but they were too busy with their hunting and didn’t notice him. He decided to follow them, because he wanted a young woman as his wife. When they rested by a creek, he jumped out and grabbed the youngest sister. The others ran back to their cave in a panic, then went along the secret passage and flew back up to the top of the hill and into the sky, leaving the poor youngest sister trying to escape from the old man.
When I heard this, I thought it was really mean of the others to leave her behind.
Anyway, the youngest sister did manage to escape and ran back to the cave. Realising the rest had already flown away and knowing the old man was still chasing her, she too climbed up the secret passageway and flew off after the rest of her sisters. Apparently this was why the youngest sister – who I’d thought was called Merope, but the old woman called something else – couldn’t often be seen, because she had lost her way back to her ‘country’.
When the old woman had finished talking, she sank into a deep silence, her eyes still on me.
‘What’s really weird,’ I said to Chrissie eventually, ‘is that there are only six of us sisters, as Pa never brought home a seventh.’
‘In our culture, everything is a mirror of up there,’ Chrissie replied.
‘I think the old man your granny talked about must be Orion, who Pa told us about in the Greek stories.’
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘There’s a heap of legends about the sisters from different traditions, but this is ours.’
How can these stories from all over the world be so similar?I thought suddenly. I mean, when they were originally told all those thousands of years ago, it wasn’t like the Greeks could send an email to the Aboriginal people, or the Mayans in Mexico could talk on the phone to the Japanese. Could there actually be a bigger link between heaven and earth than I’d thought? Maybe there was somethingmystical,as Tiggy would say, about us sisters being named after the famous ones in the sky, and the seventh being missing . . .
‘Where you-um from?’ the old woman asked me, and I switched back to reality.
‘I don’t know. I was adopted.’
‘You-um from here.’ She picked up what looked like a long pole with markings on it and banged it onto the hard dusty earth. ‘Youkantrimen.’
‘Family,’ Chrissie reminded me, then turned to her granny. ‘I knew the second I saw her that a part of her was.’
