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..........