STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four                                                                                                          Part Thirteen




                            Morning came and the train ran on.  A tiny flame was burning inside me, a spirit was growing, I was carrying the enormity of everything it would know and be.  It ran through my veins, took my heart and settled in my womb.  As if a child were growing there, but it was not a child, it was me.
                 I saw the sunlight crown the hills and in the valley at their feet, a white mist lay over a sleeping town, a mystery from which church spires and a gothic abbey rose like pale gold in the early sun.
                  The train drew into Bath Spa station.  I stepped down to the platform and stopped running from my past.  I had found a place of beauty beneath the mist, a place that would nurture me so that I could grow.  I had at last accepted my life and myself.  Humiliation and despair stayed on board the train, went down the line and disappeared.
                  




                              Bath Spa was a town built with a view to pleasure.  It was a town of warmth where time lay in suspension, like a foetus in its life giving waters.  The town's unashamed beauty, its calm smile, its unrepressed joy engendered itself within me.  Its indefined peace excited my spirit.  Bath was a womb in which I attached myself, safe within its seven surrounding hills.  Time no longer pushed and pulled me, it lay quiet and I lay quiet alongside it.
                        I lived in a Georgian terrace, in a second floor room.  My room was my world, its colours comforted me, it gave me balm and succour and kept my thoughts and secrets safe.  My willow pattern punchbowl was set in the window on a stand and the apricot seed lived with me , alongside my dreams.  When the sun shone in its outside world, it would flood through my windows to touch me in my world, like a mother touches a child.
               I worked in the library, in the silence of books being passed from hand to hand, their thoughts being revealed time after time, but always in the privacy of one reader's mind and imagination.  I stamped the books in and out, from one mind to another, like a messenger carrying sealed secrets to one person at a time.
                When I wasn't working I would walk for miles and miles around the parks, admiring their pruned trees and velvet greens and the vivid colours of their carefully tended floral art, or I would walk down the toe paths by the river or the canal and out into the country, or just wander through the town, delighting in its Georgian charm built in the soft gold of Bath stone.
                 My soul was so contented it had little need of rest, so at night I would sit in my room at an easel with a gas lamp at my side and a palette in my hand.  I would wait for the flame inside me to flare and when it did the oils would spread themselves over the canvas, choosing their own colours while the brush strokes were guided by the flame's hand, like a good demon that took its light from the stars, to look inside me and search out my past.  My painting was a journey of the soul, a laying down of the subconscious.  If the demon flame did not come to me, then I would gaze at the stars and think of George.  I would see his clear blue eyes and the jet black curls of his hair.  I would watch his lips and wait for him to speak and while I waited to hear his voice his image would always fade, then the demon would come back and the journey would continue, as though George's voice was being purposely withheld until my journey had reached its end.
                     I painted dark landscapes inside the broken heads of pale china dolls.  I painted barren landscapes inside the hollowed out halves of Russian dolls.  I painted evil crocodiles of black slate in rivers of sour milk.  I painted snakes coiled around the slender forearms of weeping women.  I painted George as he had appeared to me in the woods, and seeing his face I cried because I did not know his voice and there were no words for him to say to me while my heart craved his love.  I painted lush, fruit bearing apricot trees growing from the palms of women's gently cupped hands and I painted dreamscapes of love inside a china willow pattern punch bowl that told its own blue and white story of reunited love.
                         My last painting was of the ocean beneath a night sky.  The dark waters reflected back a million stars into space where they shone like the bright white flames of distant candles and in the ocean's movement their images floated and danced like pearls.  In the midst of the pearls was a simple, wooden boat, rocking gently over the waves, empty and waiting, for who I did not know.
                        I knew that my journey had ended with this vision of the next.  I kept the painting of this one vision while all the rest, their roads well travelled and their destinations found, I exhibited and sold.  The money bought me a ticket to Europe.  I had grown and it was time to leave the womb.