Amazing?

Them doctors should have been able to tell about Beatrice, them with all their brains and soft hands and smells.

They called us. We fixed it. Good for them that they asked us, and let us. Some of the old people went down to that hospital; Samson, Fatima, Moses...

The doctors let them stay in the room with Beatrice. They slept on mattresses on the floor, and nurses brought food to them.

They fixed her up. So, there are other ways, and other brains too, even if they may be going away, dying, these days.

Billy got hold of a newspaper, and they read it at the school. Some of the kids read it aloud to the old people:

GIRL SAVED BY BLACK RITUALS

An amazing series of rituals to rid a dying black girl of a tribal curse was carried out in one of Perth’s major hospitals.

The girl was believed to have been cursed by Aboriginal elders.

A clinical psychologist became concerned that the child had been ‘sung’ and arranged for the Aboriginal tribal elders to perform an exorcism on the comatose child in Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital.

Being ‘sung’ is a ritual similar to the so-called pointing of a bone.

The elders, from the Kimberley, visited the child three times. The child has returned to her community and is fit and well.

The old people laughed, and told them there were many things they knew and understood that other ones did not. But Stella, she was not laughing. She got her daughter back all right, but that little spirit inside her, it pass away. Finish. People could see. She was small now.