STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN


Chapter Four                                                                                                            Part One
                                                                    STARSHINE




                 So Clare sat and Joe stood and they were silent.
" I'm not dead yet.  You'll have to come back another day. "  Her voice was penetrating.
" That's not why I came. " said Joe, but he was unsure why he had come.  He knew he did not want her to die.  But to have driven there without knowing he would arrive there.  And to arrive there without knowing what it was he wanted.  He wanted some kind of response, a recognition by Clare of him that would be solid and real and something like love.  But all she had was bitterness and Joe was lost again. 
" Why did you say that ? " he wanted Clare to apologise, he wanted her to see some other reason why he might be there.  She turned her head to look at him.
" I thought maybe you were someone else, but you weren't."  She spoke quietly, her voice was weary, her words were sad.
" Who ?"
" George, I thought you were George. " Her disappointment filled the room.  Joe stood motionless, unable to move away from her rejection.  There was more silence and Clare's eyes did not move away from his.  Then she broke the spell, she was suddenly brusque and demanding like a tired, twisted old lady that needed his help.
" Build up the fire !  I'm cold. "
     Joe obeyed, there was a pile of logs next to the hearth, chunks of rich,fresh wood coated in a grey brown bark that crumbled on his hands as he lifted them and balanced them carefully over the lightly burning ashes.  There was a spitting and a crackling as the fire met the moistness of the logs and pale flames licked around their edges.  Joe watched a while as the flames ran further over the logs, rose and darkened to a deep orange.  He turned to Clare wanting her thanks but the old woman had fallen asleep, her hands relaxed over the curled ends of the chair arms and her head to one side.  Joe looked at her sleeping face in the late sun.  Her hair was like thick silver drawn back, her veined eyelids were closed on dreams of the past and her face was peaceful and beautiful beneath the dry lines of the many years she had seen.  He wished he had seen all her years and could know the peace she felt, but his young life seemed to be destroyed as fast as it was lived in a chaos and fear he could not control.  He left her sleeping.
                Joe sat for many hours in the round turret room.  He sat in the middle of the floor facing the window where night had fallen and a full moon had risen.  Joe faced the moon and the moon faced Joe.  And Joe tried hard to think about his life, but all his thoughts and all his life came to nothing and his mind was blank but for the many scars from many wounds whose unclear memories still haunted him.  He looked at the grey scars on the moon and they too were fuzzed and unclear, but the moon was full and bright and a strong blue white light shone from it.  Joe had no light.  The moon sat high in its kingdom of black velvet and a million stars.  Joe had no kingdom.  He was empty and sitting cross legged on a floor.  The light of the moon fell over him and he bowed his head to it, closed his eyes and listened to the moon's deep silence.  Then he opened his eyes again and the shadows and shapes of everything in the room stood out in the blue white light and he looked at them all and was filled with their strangeness and the mystery of the round room took away his emptiness.
                  He saw the opened Russian doll and all her toppled daughters, the blue and white willow patterned punch bowl filled with dark earth, and the broken faced, hollow china bride.  He saw the old school desk under the window and the shells, elaborate and beautiful, looking lost on the floorboards where there should have been the soft sand of the sea bed.  It was too dark to make out the painting on the wall but Joe remembered the dark waves and the stars that shone from both the sky and the ocean.  He saw the Noah's Ark and all the wooden animals around it two by two.  Last of all his mind fixed on the jigsaw puzzle and he recognised himself and his life in the thousand pieces piled and scattered on the floor, unlinked and disordered and making no sense.  He spread the pile with the flat of his hand, turned all the pieces picture side up and made a separate pile of the edged ones.  He found the four corners and held them in the palm of his hand.
























     
                   


























    




























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