STARSHINE THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
                                    Chapter Two

                        Joe could not feel the cold.  There was nothing he wanted to feel, there was nowhere he wanted to go, there was nowhere he wanted to be.  So he stood in the middle of Lambeth bridge, watching the Thames, his elbows resting on the painted  iron.  Cars drove past behind him, their engines loud and throbbing against the freezing air.  It was a winter rush hour, a cold, black evening filled with the fuzzed  lights of white headlamps and yellow streetlamps.  The water's heavy, dark movement preoccupied Joe's mind.  There was nothing else he wanted to think of.


                         The amusement arcade was a large room with purple strip lighting  shining dimly from the edges of a low ceiling and carpet tiles on the floor.  Each machine owned a person, a cool dude, or a junked up punk or a piss soaked tramp, all of them stoned on flashing lights and electronic bleeps.  A crash of coins and tokens occasionally broke the sequence, but then one of them would be put back into the machine and the spell remained unbroken.  Joe stepped into the warm air that blew around the entrance to entice people in out of the cold.  He chanced his last thirty pence.  Chance  decided to be lucky and after ten minutes he ad five pounds.  Joe scooped it all up and made his way to the centre of the arcade where a fat, moon faced man sat crammed into a glass cubicle.  He changed the coins for a crisp blue note.  A little man with a mousey face, a flat hat and a dirty anorak nudged Joe out of the way and put his face up against the gap in the glass " Seen Bernie anywhere?     Only he's meant to be in a poker game and no ones seen 'im."
         "Not 'ere." said the fat man as he shook his slow, heavy head.
                          The little man scampered out again to go on looking.  Joe put away his  money  and turned his collar up to hide himself and his guilt.  His eyes were smarting. All he could see was Bernie's face with its grotesque, swollen tongue and plastic covering.  He started for the exit, controlling his urge to run.  There was no pied piper for the kids on the estate.  The apple man was dead and it was he who had administered the suffocation.  Life sucked out and death sucked in.


                       Joe climbed the stairway in the early hours.  A night of alcohol had failed to melt away visions of Bernie.  Intoxication had only put more turmoil through his mind and brought vivid recollections of the past's confusion that had led to this and the thought that the future held more of the same.
                       He felt for the door but it was not there, Pinto had removed it.  Joe could feel the splintered wood of the frame.  He could just see the little cloud of his own breath in front of him against the black.  He felt for the light switch, he found it.  It shed nothing but more darkness and he had nothing for the meter so he fell into bed and slept.


                       ...... Loose earth dragged at his feet and branches caught at his clothes, barring his way from the house and its moonlight.  He was in the darkness and the darkness was fear.  This fear filled his soul and warned that if he did not enter the house, then there would only ever be this fear.  He broke loose and leapt at the stone steps, screaming.  His screams made no sound.  The brass door knocker glinted at him and then the night's black clouds covered the moon, leaving Joe in the darkness that was fear........


                       The nightmare had woken him and he had left his blankets and returned to the cold where he wandered the streets in the pink light of dawn.  He felt rough after so little sleep.  He watched the drunks roll aside from their places in the gutter to make way for the road sweepers and he knew he must go back to his doorless room, wash and shave in freezing water and continue his efforts in seeking his fortune, honestly or dishonestly.  He turned homeward and wondered briefly where his brother had got to and how he was faring.