STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
                                                   Chapter One         Part Four


               


          The early hours of the morning and the cold night sky was turning a lighter shade of black.  Joe waited outside the back entrance of the club, a small yard deep beneath the pavement, all hickledy-pickledy with crates and empty bottles and lidless dustbins and litter scattered and rustled by a sharp breeze.
          The door opened and she was framed in yellow light for a second.  She wore a leather jacket.  Her jet black hair was cut and spiked, urchin style.  Her eyes were deep brown.  She closed the door on the light and Joe stepped forward in the gloom.  "Hello Rosy !"  He felt her eyes harden and her whole body tighten.
          "Mandy is the name."  She turned and quickly climbed the stone steps to the pavement.  She walked briskly down the street.  Joe was not disheartened.  Charm got him any place he wanted to go,in the end. He stood at the top of the steps and watched her slender pencil skirt and her seamed stockinged legs disappear into the foggy avenue of blurred street lamps.  He let the clatter and echo of her stilettos fade a little.  Then he ran like hell down a dead end alley, jumped up and hauled himself over a wall at the end and covered three back yards using dustbins to help him over each wall.  Dustbin lids clanged to the ground and dogs woke and barked.  In the last back yard Joe walked through a door he knew would be open and into the kitchen of an Italian restaurant where a solitary, wizened, gray old man plodded on through the early hours, his arms deep in steamy, soapy water, a stack of gleaming white plates to one side of him and a pile of tomato sauce encrusted ones to the other.  He stopped, bewildered as Joe padded swiftly past.  Joe let himself out at the front and waited on the doorstep.  It was on a corner, under a street lamp.  Mandy's faded footsteps still resounded but they came from another direction and were getting louder.  Joe recovered his breath and stood relaxed, his arms folded and one foot against the wall, already smiling at his own cheek.  He waited for Mandy to step into the lamplight.
" Hello Mandy."
         She turned and looked into his blue eyes and their sense of fun.  Her body began to shake and it was laughter that was shaking it.




          Mandy's room was small and cosy.  It was full of trinkets and pierrot dolls, spanish fans. castanets and other holiday souvenirs.  The gas fire was full on and the room was hot.  Joe looked at the orange glow "Do you keep that on all the time?"
           "I hate coming back to a cold room."
            " Doesn't that meter ever run out while you're out at work?"
            "  I don't have a meter.  I pay a bill.  Do you want coffee?"
            "  No thanks. "
            Mandy didn't want coffee either.  She started to undress and hang up her clothes matter of factly.  Joe watched her.  She was beautiful.




          Joe took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor.  He found his brother Roy at the foot of the door.  Roy was curled up, blue with cold and asleep like a starved foetus that continues to age.  Joe was too full of life's rewards and memories of Mandy's warmth to see anything but just his older brother.  He nudged Roy's shoulder with a foot while he unlocked the door.  "Wake up Roy!"  Roy woke, got shakily to his feet, moved inside and slumped on an old sofa while Joe put some money in the electric meter and turned on the fire.
           The night air seeped through the loose window frame and made the room cold and damp.  The dust lay thick over the shrunken lino floor and on the rickety, musty furniture that landlords take  from scrap heaps to furnish furnished accommodation.  Joe filled a kettle at a yellow stained sink.  The tap spurted and coughed out water.  " Coffee?"  Roy did not answer.  Joe took two mugs from the draining board, leaving behind two more brown rings.  " I saw Jason tonight" said Joe, careful to leave out any details.  " I've got to do 'im a few little favours."  He poured the boiling water into the mugs.  " It'll have to be black, got no milk."  He put a coffee down beside Roy and saw him properly for the first time.
           Roy looked thirty years too old.  He had a five day growth, the bristles were coming out grey.  His brown hair was too long, greasy and matted.  Joe's heart sank.  Roy had not heard a word and probably remembered nothing of the last few months.  Roy had cut out memories, he no longer distinguished time and events, only fear.  Joe looked at him and spoke softly with his own hurt.  "Why shoot that piss up your arm?  Its evil fucking stuff."
            There was no answer.  Roy did not touch his coffee, he curled up on the sofa, helpless.  Joe took a couple of blankets from the bed and tucked them around his brother.  " Don't worry Roy.  Just let me get this business for Jason out of the way and I'll get hold of some money and get you to a clinic.  Then we'll go some place nice for a holiday.  Soon O.K.!"  He looked into Roy's blue eyes and they stared back like blind china.
          Roy was a downer and Joe suddenly regretted not staying in Mandy's warm little room with her warm little body beside him.  He remembered the way she had looked at him as he started to dress and how he had made some weak excuse about having things to do.  She had turned away and let him leave.  Joe always loved them and left them.  Love was just another missing space with a warm glow around it.  Even Mandy's glow was fading now and his worries began to burn.  He had a sick brother and no money.  He had bent a case clip eighteen hours ago and in doing so had landed himself an unpaid job to kill or be killed, because of some game involving monopoly money and sand.  It all belonged to somebody else, somebody else with a grey trousered leg, tan shoe and green gabardine.  Joe drank his coffee, turned out the light and climbed into bed with all his happiness, sadness, relief and fear turning through him.  He lay still and waited for sleep to cure his confusion with the confusions of his dreams.






     .........He stood in the night's deepest black, in a garden, looking up at a house covered in white light pulled down from the moon.  It was a crazy, ramshackle house with fairyland turrets and ivy over the walls.  There was a curved, stone stairway leading to the door.  The house was a folly but there was something real inside.  Joe stood rooted in darkness, knowing that inside was all he had ever known.  He moved around the house, touching window frames, looking for openings but the house was closed to him. A cold fortress holding its secrets and the more Joe could not reach them the more he wanted them.  Only the front door was left for him to try.  A gargoyle door knocker leered at him, its sick mouth daring him to even touch.  Joe feared it but in madness he grabbed the brass face and hit hard at the door.   But it made no sound..........


  

                                  STARSHINE THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
                                   Chapter One          Part Three




          Alone again Joe lay still,shrouded in the quiet fog.  Each long, careful breath ran through his body.  He felt the cold, roughness of the brick wall that propped up his head, the hardness of the pavement penetrated his flesh and found his bones.  His guts were bruised, his shoulders ached and his neck was locked off centre.  These sensations felt good.  He was alive.  His brain slowly crept around the fact that his life had been spared but the deal he had been offered had been pushed to the brain's farthest recesses where it would not have to be thought about.  This had always been Joe's way, to cling to the good and enjoy it and forget the bad until it comes to look you in the face, then look for a way out, there was always a way out.
          Joe got up, easing his muscles and loosening his cramps.  He shook the sand from his jacket and his shirt and turned back down the alley towards the heart of Soho, moving faster as he went, regaining a jaunty bounce in his step.  His excitement pulled his face into a smile and his blue eyes laughed.  He turned into Old Compton Street.  Red, blue and yellow lights shone into the fog like motionless coloured smoke.  Huddles of customers collected around the doors of strip clubs and topless bars, eager to get out of the cold and into the heat.  Joe had turned these tired streets inside out, but tonight they were new to him, they promised undiscovered secrets to a stranger in his native land.
          He slipped into a narrow doorway.  The thin corridor hinted at the club's sleazy intimacy, with its subtle glow of pink light.  Inside it was small, just room enough for a bar and a few tables.  The same pink glow made the cracks in the low ceiling and the peeling paint less obvious.  Music blared, the bass vibrated across the floor and up through the furniture.  A stripper had just started her act at the far end of the room.  Nobody bothered to watch.  Her body had seen firmer days and she was only there to keep up Soho appearances.  This was a local's club, not a visitors club, a favourite haunt of Soho's smaller villains and spivs who came there to drink after hours, discuss a little business or play a little poker in one of the back rooms.  Tourists and unknown faces were discouraged.  Joe sat at the bar and ordered a double scotch.  The barmaid was new.  He thought she looked pretty but it was hard to tell in the pink distorting light.  Joe looked around the room for faces he knew.  There were several.  One came towards him braking into a big smile.  Joe let the whisky slip down through his body and relax his soul.
             The smiler was Ned.  Ned  is the name given to a donkey and Ned could talk the hind legs off one.  He would talk of Ireland his native land like it was a picture postcard of gentle hills and farmhouses where the shone gold like Jameson's and the peat was black like Guiness.  His drunken tongue would roll and slur and lilt on and on to whoever would listen.  Change would come out of his pockets and drinks would be bought for whoever was listening.  So Joe listened and drank and wondered where a drunk like Ned found so much money.  Ned was a greasy mess who wore a five o' clock shadow all day long, he dragged his feet and let his shirt sleeves dangle.  But he always had money.  Joe drank double after double of the clear amber liquid provided while Ned spoke of a place too magical to exist, which is why, Joe supposed Ned never managed to get himself back there, because Ned's land was a place too beautiful to ever be found.  All Joe could see was the never ending supply of coins coming from Ned's trouser pockets and all Joe could picture was a small, dingy room somewhere in Soho, Ned's room and everywhere there were jars and vases and bowls full of change, coins of copper, silver and gold and in his tooth mug and his teapot.  Maybe Ned was a meter man, gas, electric, parking, and fruit machines and phone boxes.  Or maybe there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and Ned had found it.  But pots of gold made people happy and Ned was lonely, but Joe asked him anyway "Where do you come by all the money Ned?"  Ned did not understand.  "The money" Joe repeated but he knew there would be no answer because he had asked before and so had others.  Ned denied any awareness of money while he pulled more coins from his pocket and bought another round.
          Joe had no money but he did not want to worry about that now.  He let Ned's voice fade and turned his attention to the barmaid.  She was beautiful.Her legs were long and her lips were full.  Joe interrupted Ned.
"She's new 'ere,isn't she?"
"Yes."
"What's her name?"
Ned focused his bleary eyes on the girl and chose a name "Rosy.  Rosy is her name.