it was gone by the time the shops shut at 5.30. Then there she was on the pavement in the middle of Taihape, strung with a giant teddy bear, dolls and toy guns, a plastic policeman's helmet perched on her head for nowhere else to put it, and trailing a tiny midget-sized trike. Absurdly, crazily happy—Look Tai, look what I've bought—just wait till my kids see this lot—. She didn't go to the party. After a couple of drinks at the hotel, a stock truck driver came in, a nice bloke. Tai chatted him up, said ‘Why don't you go up to Hamilton with this joker? He's going through that way tonight.’ Good old Tai, he knew. The truckie was okay, no nonsense, he had a girl in Hamilton. They swapped yarns and cigarettes on the way, stopped at the piecart on the way through Taupo, and set off again with the steam of coffee and hamburgers just about coming out of their ears. ‘Regular geysers,’ she joked to him as they headed across to Atiamuri. A good night, like the old days. He let her sleep in the cab when they got to Hamilton, provided she promised to be off at first light. She took a taxi out to the suburb where the family lived, when she reckoned Robbie would have left for work. She got the driver to set her down a little way off from the house. Not quite ready yet, and she needed some time to look the place over. Anyway, Mrs Allen wasn't ‘at her best’ in the mornings and the kids would take time to be dressed and fed. Daniel, the baby, would be all right. He'd always been easy going, but Debbie, three, going four now, and a year older than him, was a different box of tricks. A proper monkey, and ‘a difficult child’ as Mrs Allen would say. Roimata's face changed. Hard bitter lines shaped around her mouth. They hadn't been gone so long that they didn't come back easy when she started to think. Yes, Mrs Allen would be doing her Christian duty by the kids. Though it hadn't been obvious to Roimata at the outset that she was a woman of such principle, she'd been elevated to Christianity by her neighbours as the trials of her daughter-in-law mounted and beset her. Not that she had said much when Robbie took his wife there. Oh no, the neighbours just said, ‘Well, you are a Christian (or a Briton, depending on their persuasions), I mean mothers and daughters-in-law don't always get on, do they?’ Which was a roundabout way of saying what was in their minds, and placing the credit squarely with Mrs Allen, a stance they never forsook. That might have seemed fair enough in the light of how things turned out, but Roimata doubted it. After all, she tried for a long time too. She started wearing tweedy looking skirts and sensible flat lace-up shoes, a good quality that Mrs Allen had helped her buy during her pregnancy. Her hair was still long but worn back in a ponytail, and though she still smoked she changed to tailor-mades. Even harder, she went to Plunket instead of the District Nurse with the baby, and when the nurse suggested she join the Plunket mothers' club she went along to that too. The women were all over-effusive, but no one invited her to pop in for coffee after the meetings, like the others all did of each other. When about a year had passed, the penny dropped that Robbie didn't find her as fascinating as he once did. She guessed it was because she was no longer the old Roimata he knew, and a rather poor imitation of being anybody else. ‘Let's go live somewhere else, Robbie,’ she whispered to him in the night. ‘Get our own place. eh.’ But Daniel was on the way, places were dear to rent, and what was the point when his mother had all that space to herself. She didn't know who to be any more. The decision was made for her by the Plunket people when they sold clothes to the Maoris at a pa out of town on Family Benefit Day. Every good fund raiser knew that you had to catch the Family Benefit before it was thrown away on booze. Mind you, my dear, just close your eyes next time you're passing there, really demoralises you to see your old clothes being worn that way, even if they were ready for the jumble sale. When Roimata turned up at the meeting