TATA-HAU

Te Ao Hou, September 1963, Page 5

TATA-HAU by Enid Tapsell Tama slept in a good bed with clean sheets in his new house and was glad he was not Maori like his next door neighbours. Tama was an individualist—a ‘rugged individualist’ was what he liked to think he was. He had picked up the expression somewhere and he used it whenever he could edge it into a conversation. This was his pakeha half talking. His Maori half he carefully submerged and ignored. It worked very well. He was employed on a job where all his mates were pakehas and he lived properly and sensibly in his new house which had been built for him under the new Maori Housing scheme, on land given to him by his Maori mother. A little inconsistency like that did not worry Tama, but sometimes despite all his efforts to suppress unseemly instincts, something managed to break through, and there were occasions when the experience was truly terrifying. Now as Tama lay in his good clean bed he dreamed—and in his dream he was running. He had been running for a long time and he was frightened. Fearfully he crept down an alleyway between two dilapidated whares. He could see they were paintless, for although it was night and dark, every detail stood out clearly. Slipping weatherboards, cock-eyed window-panes, paling fences with most of the palings missing—everything decrepid, old and yet familiar. He heard movements, the sound of a man scolding, a woman replying indignantly. That was Peta's voice. He didn't want to see him. Tama crept back again along the dark shadowed alleyway to the crumbling, rotten earth that fell away to the stream below, wide shallow steam-misted and fearful. With heart beating wildly he edged along the cliff-top and turned down the next opening between two old shacks, until he reached the back of the houses; no way out here … he was back on the other side of Peta's place beside a shaky board partition. More quarrelling. He moved … the crazy sagging partition fell with a shattering sound … noise, noise everywhere … Like a bewildered rabbit he darted down the first cul-de-sac, then back again along the crumbly cliff edge, to be confronted with a cleft of soft vari-coloured earth over which he could not jump … more noises and voices everywhere. He jumped down the crumbling cliff face which gave with his weight—soundlessly—then he was on the terrifying river bed. He knew he'd been this way before. He had always known and feared this river. He recognised every stone, every contour, but when had he known it? No matter. He found safe stepping stones and was on the other side coming around a concealed bend towards another house; a long rambling place, actually two houses joined together with a sagging verandah across the front. Everything was decayed. No paint on the walls, no fences, no garden, no vegetation anywhere. The house stood high off the ground on piles and the ground around it was silica crusted. In shallow depressions filled with warm water there lay Maori mats—six or seven—maybe more. ‘My beautiful whariki—oh the carelessness of these lazy women!’ he thought. He stooped and picked one up, then another. They were damp and warm and fell away rotten in his hands. So odd, all these valuable mats had belonged to his kuia, his grandmother Titihuia—heirlooms! He recognised that one, and that one, by the patterns. One was of fine mountain kiekie and others of

tukutuku, and several were of soft white flax, intricately woven and dyed. So very odd! So careless! He dropped the mats hopelessly in little sodden bundles. A great desolation rose up in him at this wanton vandalism of such precious possessions. A girl appeared at one end of the verandah and darted into a room at the other end without noticing him. ‘That must have been Rosie’, he thought. He had never had much time for Rosie. She had always been the one for showing-off her pakeha ways. Yes, it would be Rosie with her ‘Anna May Wong’ hair-do and tight rose-pink jumper. She had always been the one to copy the latest film-star's hair-do. Now it was a straight page-boy cut with a fringe to her eyes. He didn't want to speak to Rosie. She always made him feel more Maori than he was. Haste and fear had gone now. He was going to see his dead mother. He mounted the ricketty lurching steps. Then he was in the house … it was all familiar. His mother was there, small brown and wrinkled, but she did not see him as she walked into a bedroom off the kitchen. He took in every detail of the room. The blind on the window was half-way up. Through the torn and broken stitching at its lower edge he could see the wooden slat which so many hands had clutched in the past … his mother stood, facing the window … her head was level with the edge of the old blind—but what did the old blind matter? It was his mother that he wanted to see. Yet as he stretched out his hands to grasp her shoulders to turn her to him, she glided past, face averted, and returned to the other room. Then suddenly the place was full of sound. Noise and voices—a confusion of sounds. The outer room was filled with people now … Tama's fears returned sickenly. He tried to peer through a crack in the door but at his touch the door crashed in, as Peta's fence had done. Around the kitchen table sat about a dozen people. Two of them facing him, he recognised as his pakeha Uncle Len and by his side his pakeha wife … his Uncle Len looked as he had done twenty years ago, youngish and smart, going grey at the temples. Uncle Len was a smart business man—but he had been dead a long while now … funny that they should be sitting in a Maori house, especially as his Aunt Lily had always hated her Maori in-laws and would never visit them. His eye travelled round the group identifying others, some Maori and some pakeha. His mother stood with her back to him and her hand was on a man's shoulder. As he recognised the man, even without seeing more than his back, Tama felt his nameless terro returning … he tried to shout but his throat was full of fear. ‘I'm not coming back—I'm not—I'm going … !’ shouted his brain but all he could produce was a strangled groan … Tama woke in his good bed with its clean sheets, limp, exhausted and scared. He had been hobnobbing with his dead relations and that was very bad indeed—a warning maybe—certainly a bad omen. Tama slept with his window open the sensible pakeha way. Outside the window someone laughed; revellers returning from a party. He could hear the banging and thumping which was still going on up the road at old Timi's meeting house. They always had rowdy parties there. In the next room Taita was talking in his sleep … yes it was ‘tata-hau’—nightmare weather!