‘G’day, CeCe, ready to hit the frog – I mean, hit the road?’
I got on the back of her moped, and we set off. I recognised the airport as we drove parallel with the runway and then turned some sharp corners until we reached a dusty road that had tin-roofed shacks set back from the track. It wasn’t a shanty town, but it was obvious that the people who lived inside the huts didn’t have any spare cash to beautify their homes.
‘This is it.’ Chrissie drew the bike to a halt and held it steady for me as I climbed off. ‘I’m warning you that my grandma might seem a bit weird to you, but I promise that she’s not crazy. Ready?’
‘Ready.’
Chrissie led me up a path through what was technically a front garden but looked more like a sitting room. There was a worn brown sofa, various wooden chairs and a lounger that had a pillow and a sheet on it, like someone had been sleeping there.
‘Hi, Mimi,’ Chrissie called to a spot behind the sofa. As I followed her round it, I saw a tiny woman sitting cross-legged on the ground. Her skin was the colour of dark chocolate and her face was criss-crossed with hundreds of lines. She was the oldest person I’d ever seen, yet round her forehead she wore a trendy bandana just like her granddaughter.
‘Mimi, ngaji mingan? This is Celaeno, the girl I was telling you about,’ Chrissie said to her.
The old woman looked up at me and I saw her eyes were amazingly bright and clear, like a young girl had been put inside an ancient person’s skin by mistake. They reminded me of two hazelnuts sitting in pools of white milk.
‘Mijala juyu,’ she said, and I stood there awkwardly, having no idea what she’d just said. She patted the ground beside her and I sat down next to her, confused by the empty sofa and the chairs.
‘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 the gumanyba?’ 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 our kantrimen, Celaeno.’
‘That means our relatives,’ Chrissie put in.
‘We family, one people from same kantri.’
‘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 something mystical, 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. ‘You kantrimen.’
‘Family,’ Chrissie reminded me, then turned to her granny. ‘I knew the second I saw her that a part of her was.’
‘Most important part: heart. Soul.’ The old woman thumped her chest, her hazelnut eyes full of warmth. She reached out her hand and squeezed mine with unexpected strength. ‘You come home. Belong here.’
As she continued to hold my hand, I suddenly felt dizzy and on the verge of tears. Maybe Chrissie noticed, because she stood up and gently helped me to standing.
‘We have to go now, Mimi, ’cos CeCe’s got an appointment.’
I nodded at Chrissie gratefully, holding on to her arm for support far more than I wanted to. ‘Yeah, I have. Thanks so much for telling me the story.’
‘Tellum you much more. Come back,’ the woman encouraged me.
‘I will,’ I promised, thinking her accent was the strangest I’d ever heard – she said her few English words in a broad Australian way, but rounded them off with extra consonants, which softened them. ‘Bye.’
‘Galiya, Celaeno.’ She waved at me as Chrissie led me off along the garden/sitting room towards her moped.
‘Wanna go grab a drink? There’s a servo just round the corner.’
‘Yeah, that would be great,’ I replied, having no idea what a ‘servo’ was, but not ready to get back on the wobbly moped just yet.
It turned out to be a petrol station with a small general store attached. We both bought a Coke and went to sit on a bench outside.