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!