STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter two                                                                                                        Part six



               Out in the street Joe glanced inside the paper bag.  He saw a length of wire coiled round.  There was a photograph too, he picked it out.  It was a West Indian, a security guard with a full head of afro hair and a moustache.  On the back of the photograph there were some details of shift hours and a warehouse on Surrey Docks.  Joe put the bag back inside his jacket and did up the zip against the cold, grey afternoon.  The low, heavy sky threatened but the rain held off.  The pavements were full so Joe walked in the road and followed the double yellow lines to the core of Soho where music blared from peep show doorways and voices invited him in to see nude girls live on stage.  Joe kept his head down, it was too cold to think about nudity.  He doubted whether the erotic airbrush posters of girls with stars over their nipples and pubes corresponded to the bodies of blue and goosefleshed dancers.
                The sweet, smokey smell of hot chestnuts came from a street corner where an old, squat, leathery woman in a fur hat and a blanket round her shoulders, roasted them over a fire in a rusted oil drum.  Joe bought a white paper cone full.
                  A red neon light ran round and round the entrance of an adult book and video shop.  Joe walked in through a curtain of coloured streamers.  Two men were talking business at the counter.  One was the owner of the shop, a tall thin man with eyes the same blue as Joe's and short cropped, orange hair.  The other was an over the top pimp in a white suit, a wolf fur coat and carrying a silver topped cane.  Joe waited for them to finish their bartering.  He leafed through some magazines and grinned at some video titles as he ate his chestnuts.  They burned his numb fingertips as he chipped away the thin brown shells.  He threw the shells on the floor and chewed the warm, delicate , creamy kernels.  The pimp left the shop.  "Hello cousin Carrot Top! Know of any jobs going? said Joe offering him a nut.

                "I do as it 'appens" said his cousin.  Joe looked at him, startled.
                "Yeah!"
                 "Scot's geezer just came down and set up.  He needs drivers."
                "What, getaway stuff?"
                "No,just moving cars around.  He's got a garage in John's Mews off Grays Inn Road where he sprays them up and fixes the plates."
                 "Thanks Carrot Top, thanks a lot." said Joe.
                 "Pleasure. mate. How's Roy?"
                  " Oh, not too clever." Joe threw his cousin another chestnut on his way out.


               The air was heavy and the rain began to fall in big drops that spotted the cobblestones in John's Mews.  The motorised rasping sounds of soldering and spraying came fro behind a black garage door in a whitewashed wall.  One half of the door was slightly ajar.  Joe looked inside.  A man in white overalls was putting the finishing touches to a freshly sprayed cherry red porsche,its windows and windscreen covered in newspaper.  Another overalled man wearing a visor was at the far end of the workshop where hot sparks flew around him.  Joe shouted over the noise and asked where the governor could be found.  The sprayer signalled through the wall with his thumb.  So Joe went next door and pressed the buzzer.  The entry phone was answered and the door clicked open.  There was a closed in stairway and an office door at the top.  The office was tiny and stuffy with cigar smoke.  The scotsman sat back in his chair, his beer belly between him and his desk.  His shirt sleeves were rolled up to show his hairy forearms, completely blue with tatoos.  His fair hair was thinning and drink and high blood pressure had broken the veins in his flabby face.  He pierced Joe with his small piggy eyes.  Joe stood with his back against the wall because there was nowhere else to stand.


                 Morgan Alexander had soon warmed to Joe's confident smile.  A spoken contract had been suggested and then agreed on with the shaking of hands and the smoking of cigars.  Joe's trial run would be a drive down to Southampton and a train journey back.  He already had a train ticket in his pocket and would pick up the car keys at seven o' clock sharp on monday morning.  But thoughts of monday's country roads and the cherry red porsche were killed by others of Jason's wire noose and Maria's candles.  Sunday was yet to come.
                 Joe was back in the West End.  The rain washed through Berwick Street market.  Passers by were few and far between and so to were the barrow boys shouts that came out muffled and unenthusiastic.  Rotten fruit and old newspapers lay in the road, sodden and mushy, disintegrating in the rain.  Little of this came through Joe's senses.  His mind was so far away he could not bring it back to fill his blankness.  His eyes watched his feet putting one trainer in front of the other.  The laces were too long and wet with the black dirt of puddles.  He continued to turn corners of a blind route and found himself home.
                His room waseven colder without its door.  It seemed silly to put the fire on to heat the hall and stairs but he did it anyway and the electric bars burned orange in the fading light of early evening.  He took a few sips from a mug of sour coffee and threw the rest down the sink.  He undressed, climbed into a cold bed and pulled the blankets over his head.


               ............He was in a land of hills that were black like the night.  And the house was high up and far away like the moon, shining blue and white.  He walked uphill towards it.  He could feel the loose stones of the gravel road beneath his feet and could sense the frost on the grass on either side of him.  But there was no sound.  He walked on, listening to the silence and hearing only his own deafness.  He neared the house and kept to the path, wary of the garden and its wilderness.  The moonlight had gone.  The walls were grey like shadows and the windows and the door and the ivy were black and soundless.  Joe felt the darkness that as fear.  Then the door was open without being opened and light spilled out over the steps.  His movements were motionless.  He reached the doorway to everything, when the door was closed without having closed and there was nothing but the doorknocker's face and its dull gleam..........