My Girragundji...an excerpt

There's a bad spirit in our house. The Hairyman.

Aunty Lil's got a good hairyman in her house. He plays tricks on her like pinching her cup of tea and that, but it's all in fun. The hairyman in our house is bad, real bad.
He's as ugly as ugly gets and he stinks. You touch this kind of hairyman and you lose your voice or choke to death or just die.
That can happen. You do the wrong thing by these spirits and you can just drop dead. My cousins' uncle's brother did.
The Hairyman grabbed one of my sisters, you know. I've got seven of them. How unlucky is that? Seven sisters! He could have grabbed half a dozen of them for all I care. They sleep in the next room.
'You cant come in here. It's the girls room!'
So what! We've got our own room. My brother Nicky sleeps across that side, and Paul and Rocco sleep head to toe in the bed on the wall.
One end of my bed is next to the louvre windows. I never sleep with my head up there. Too scared a hand will come through and grab me in my sleep.
I'm the oldest of us boys.
The rest of them wouldnt be any good if the Hairyman had me. They'd be jammin' up, falling over each other trying to get out the door.
Anyway, one night the Hairyman - that's what us mob call these spirits - he grabbed my big sister by the throat. We were all chasing through the house. My big sister, Sue, thought she was gonna scare the rest of us, so she hid in the darkest room and kept real quiet. None of us could find her. Then all of a sudden we heard her screaming her lungs out. We raced in to see what had happened. She was still screaming, with her hands rubbing at her neck. Nearly turned white she had, white as a migaloo, a whitefulla.
She was crying and cursing and saying it must have been one of us boys muckin' around. But she knew it wasn't any of us. She felt those hands around her neck and they were hairy, wrinkly, yucky, old hands, like Quinkin hands - that's what the old people call those spirits.
With her screaming and us running, that Hairyman took off, but we knew he'd be back.

 

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copyright meme mcdonald 2002