STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Five                                                                                              Part one




                     The mother of pearl beads gleamed faintly through the gloom of the pawn shop, a tiny string of soft whiteness in the dimness of the room.  The necklace lay on top of a tangled pile of old buttons and worthless jewellery, tarnished silver and unpolished brass, beneath the glass top of the counter.  Joe wiped away a semi-circle of grey dust with his arm.  He looked down at his granny's pearly beads.  Above them in the dull glass he saw a face he did not recognise, a pale, sharp boned face with a redness around the eyes and blue in the hollows of the thin cheeks.  Joe did not understand, he did not know where this face came from, he did not like this face.  Joe raised his arm and brought his sharp elbow fast, the face cracked and splintered.  Joe reached in through the broken glass and took back his granny's beads.
                     A door opened from the back room, Mr Samuels stood in its frame, his hand rested on the doorknob.  He wore a brown velveteen dressing gown, tied at the waist. His grey hair was mussed and his large sad eyes were wide and startled, surprised out of sleep.  He looked at the shattered counter, then he looked behind Joe at the shop door and saw the broken catch, then he looked at Joe holding the necklace possessively like a child obsessed with one treasure.  Mr Samuels looked at Joe's ghost white face and the old man's brown eyes were made sadder.  Joe's face told a story the old jew had seen before.   Forgiveness was easy but not enough, for the story was over, Mr Samuels knew that but Joe did not.  Joe knew nothing, his mind was blank and numb, no comprehension, no vision, no voice. The jew could see the blankness in Joe's face, nothing would register, be it good or evil, nothing would reflect, be it forgiving or deceiving.  Mr Samuels held out his upturned palms and shrugged his shoulders.
                                      "So what's the problem? You want your necklace? So take it !"
                His voice was kind and forgiving, his sad heart showed on his face, but his pity could not be seen by Joe whose soul was in pieces, all jumbled and crazed.
                  Joe put his granny's beads in his jacket pocket and left the shop.  The night was fading into dawn and the air was cold.  As he climbed the steps from basement to pavement Joe's mind cleared for an instant  and showed in a moment of absolute clarity that everything he had ever done , he had done without knowing why.  He had no control yet he was controlled, but by whom he did not know.  Then he saw Jason and immediately his clarity disappeared and the clue to his confusion was clouded.  The clue having left him, only his madness remained, an empty silence locked inside his willing, automated outer shell.
                      The long black car had parked behind the rusty, blue Morris Minor, bumper to bumper.  The black windows were sealed bar for the front passenger window which was open and filled with Jason Donovan's ugly , fleshy face.  His steady eyes looked out from beneath his heavy lids.  His slow monotone speech was bland but menacing.
                                                                              " Joey boy ! We didn't know where you'd gone.  We don't like it when we don't know where you are.  A whole week's gone by. "  He paused, " Never mind, you just came back in time for another little job. "
                      He held out a brown paper bag.  Joe stepped close to the car and took it.  He saw the smallness of his own hand next to Jason's titan hand and palony fingers.  Joe could see the driver and another of Jason's slant eyed, dark suited, yellow muscle men who sat in the back with a taller dark haired man who wore shades and a green gabardine, he had a thin moustache and a scar down the left side of his face.  A far off note jangled inside Joe's empty silence, but it was brief and feint and died without so much as an echo.
                   " So where did you go ?" asked Jason, disinterested as the electronic window began to whine and rise.
                   " My godmother's." said Joe brightly and truthfully.
                   " She don't feed you enough." was Jason's cynical reply before the black window closed and made the car's occupants invisible.  The sleek, silent machine backed away from the Morris Minor, pulled out slowly and drifted away.                                                      
                           Joe was alone.  The cold air had bypassed his clothes and skin and reached the centre of his bones.  His body shook and his teeth began to chatter. He looked inside the paper bag.  There was a flick knife and a photograph of an old woman with a blue rinse, and an address on the back of it;
          25 Orchard Road,
                Morden
                       Joe returned Annie's car to the back yard of the Drakes Head.  He closed the high, wire mesh gates behind him and got back into the Morris Minor to get out of the cold wind.  The early morning sky was dark grey with a heavy rain waiting to fall.  Joe looked at the plastic crates stacked close around the car, yellow, red, green and blue, all of them filled with empty bottles of brown, green and clear glass.  Then the rain began to fall.  Swollen raindrops broke and merged on the windows and windscreen and soon the shapes outside were blurred and the colours made patterns .  Joe remembered Roy's kaleidoscope many years ago when they were boys with short trousers and scabbed knees.
                            Roy used to sit for hours in the front room with the kaleidoscope to one eye and the other eye closed.  His body would be quite still but for his hands turning and shaking the coloured glass.  Everything around him would be wild and frantic.  Their mother shouting and trying to cook the tea, Bessie and Tim screaming and fighting, the radio on loud, but nothing could pierce Roy's serenity.  He would sit on the lumpy sofa, close to Joe but so far away, travelling through his one open eye and never wanting to return.  Joe remembered how lost he felt when Roy was gone.  He would sit and scowl and feel his temper rise and muddle because it had no direction.  He could not direct his anger at the kaleidoscope.  Roy would not let no one touch it, it was his own and inside it was his own world where no one else could go.
                          One day while Roy was out playing football Joe had taken the kaleidoscope and looked inside it for the place Roy went, but all he could see was church windows.  He hated church windows.  He wanted to know where Roy went but the place would not show itself to him.  Frustration seared inside him and burst out like fire.  He threw the kaleidoscope across the room and it smashed against the wall.  He ran across the room to where it had fallen and picked it up.  He put it up to his eye but there was no pattern through the end, only a white circle and in amongst the shards of coloured glass that lay useless along the bottom of the cardboard tube, there were pieces of shattered mirror.  Joe put the broken kaleidoscope in a shoe box and hid it under his bed.
                   When Roy came home he searched the flat, every corner, every cupboard, every drawer.  His search was silent and obsessive, a small whining sound came from deep inside him like a puppy searching for its mother and knowing she would never be found.
                   At  bedtime his feverish search continued in their bedroom.  The more obsessive Roy became the more helpless Joe felt.  The thought of admitting his guilt drew further and further away as fear overcame honesty until fear ruled and honesty had disappeared.
                       Roy found the shoe box. He wailed and sobbed.  He climbed into his bed where for hours his sobs shook his body in great tides of wretchedness and loss.
                       Roy said nothing to Joe, as though the deed had been too bad even for Joe to have done it.  As he lay in bed and listened to his brother's shivering and sobbing, Joe felt his guilt weigh heavy and he knew it would stay and weigh forever because Roy would never accuse, so how could he ever admit.  And he wondered why he always did bad things.  He did not want to do bad things but he was helpless and everything he did was bad.
                      And now in the car Joe tipped back his swimming head and his exhaustion drifted into sleep, made uneasy by the memory of his brother's  desolation and the knowledge that he was still helpless and bad.                      





















  
                     

                                   STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four                                                                                              Part Sixteen




                  Joe sat cross-legged on the floor in the round tower.  It was night.  Many moons had risen and many glasses of brandy had been drunk since Clare's story had begun.  Joe looked through the window and saw that the moon had waned to a half circle.  He drank back another glass of brandy, it burned through his empty body.
                   As he had listened to Clare he had wanted to reach out and touch her, to hold and be held by her.   But he could not, because he was not George.  He had listened to her story and had understood, but now that the telling was done he understood nothing.  Clare had taken him into her world, he had seen and heard her world but now she was sleeping, she had left him alone in his own world where it seemed to him that nothing could be seen or heard.  His understanding of Clare's world made the confusion of his own more dark.  He sat in a dark room with a black void in his mind and all he had was a sadness that trickled from his eyes because he did not understand.
                   In the feint light of the half moon he looked at the outlines of all the strange objects in the room and he left his blankness to be drawn back through Clare's words.  He knew about the punch bowl filed with earth, he knew about the broken china bride and the dead daughters from the two emptied halves of the barren Russian doll.  He knew about the shells and the wooden Noah's ark and about the picture on the wall.  But he did not know about the school desk beneath the window or the puzzle at his side.  He made up the sides of the jigsaw puzzle and joined them to the four corners, but there was nothing in between.  Nothing but the blackness of the void.  Then a cloud covered the half moon and the black void darkened and in it Joe forgot Clare's world and lost his mind. He saw pearls sinking in black water.  They were white and pure and perfect.  He wanted them. They were beautiful.  They were precious.  They were jewels.  Their loss terrified him.  To watch them sink was like death.  He grasped and clutched at the black water but the pearls had disappeared.

                                     STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four                                                                                              Part Fifteen


                             We travelled down through Italy together and two weeks later we boarded a ship for Naples, a liner that was England bound.  George had been to a barber, a tailor and a cobbler, but still the captain was wary of our simply cut clothes and missing luggage.  We stood on the quay, me with my one small carpet bag and George with his muslin bundle.  The captain stood on the ship with his blue, gold buttoned uniform.  He leant heavily on the rail of the deck, his arms and hands spread wide to support his enormous, sagging weight.  He looked at us over the bulk of his chest and belly and his long white moustache drooped and pointed down towards us, like a walrus amazed at our impertinence in wanting to join his floating menagerie of fashion and luxury.  But when I produced the last of my money, the walrus took it without flinching and George and I were provided with the smallest cabin and a passage home.
                             That night the liner docked at a small Sardinian fishing port.  George and I sat down to dinner in the ship's grand dining room  The diners were dressed in evening dress.  The women were powdered, feathered and jewelled and the men were cumerbunded and Dickie bowed.  I could feel their eyes on me, scorning my blue, cotton dress my single string of pearls and my pale, ungloved arms.  The light glittered falsely from  crystal chandeliers on to the white, starched tablecloths and napkins.  Food was placed in front of me and my glass was filled.  I froze, I stared at my plate without seeing what was on it and all I could hear was the fizz of champagne close to my ear.  I was angry. 
                             Their scorning eyes were the eyes of crocodiles and snakes. They looked down from their high pinnacles, awaiting my answer. It was a trap.  To answer their scorn was to admit humility.  Though I had journeyed and found all my answers I did not speak, for they had no ears to hear my words.
                I looked around at my fellow voyagers. I saw thick skinned rhinoceri, their horned arrogance, accusing and ready to charge.  I saw the savage mouths and hungry eyes of big cats ready to kill.  I saw stupid, self important ostriches and I saw camels with tall, haughty necks, lowered eyelids and mouth's filled with the bitter taste of old pennies. Their wealth surrounded them but encased nothing and their possession of nothing drove them to destroy.  They sought power in destruction.  Those who broke their rules were humbled and so too were those who obeyed them.  Their disdain was unrestrained, while their eyes had never turned inward to see their own vile piety.  I hated them, I hated their hatred.
                   I looked at George, he was serene.  We looked into each other.  My anger looked at his serenity and his serenity looked at my anger.  I remembered the way he had looked in the woods and I tried to imagine how I had looked to him.  I remembered being lost and having no sense of belonging, whereas George had belonged but was dissatisfied and sad.  Only then did I realise that my being lost had meant that my journey was predestined, whereas George's was inspired by me and as I had stumbled at the very beginning of mine, so I had opened the gateway to his. Now our paths had met.  George had lost his anger on the way, but I still carried mine.  As he looked at me over our table of uneaten food and undrunk champagne, he could see that my anger would not go, that I needed his help. He took my hand and whispered,
                                                                               " Let's get off the Ark and go and find the Unicorn."
                   We walked along the harbour wall and down onto the beach.  The dusk sky turned through mauve and indigo.  The village lay quiet in its shadows, shying away from the liner's painted  metal bulk and fairy lights.  We took off our shoes, the sand was chilly and silken on the soles of our feet.  We found a little wooden boat, it looked sad, upside down and stranded, so we turned it over and dragged it down the beach to the sea's first beckoning waves that washed up around our legs.  We jumped into the boat and George began to row.  Only when we were far out into the ocean did he ship the oars and we drifted like a tiny shadow in the night.
                               There were a million stars in sky and ocean.  There were no horizons.  The night was timeless and silent.  Water lapped quietly against the sides of the boat as we rocked gently over the push and pull of the waves. 
                      George told me of his beautiful, lonely house and of his money sealed in a leaden box and buried deep in a bank vault.  We decided to live in the beautiful house with our love, and the fire it sparked would build walls of flame that would keep us warm and the rest of the world at bay.  We didn't want his money, we would keep that sealed and safe in the vault for the Unicorn.
                       We made our lover's pact.  When death comes to one, the other would fast and follow.  George unclasped the string of pearls from around my neck.  He broke them and threw them one by one into the ocean.  They floated awhile amongst the mirrored stars and then disappeared beneath the water.  The immortal tears had at last been shed, their anger and their bitterness were no longer mine, the ocean had reclaimed them.
                         So Starshine and the Ocean were one, they were reflections of each other.  There was an energy in our souls that burned like another spirit, a third presence, a ghost we both felt. We knew that the ghost was love and that it would remain with us for the rest of our lives.
                          We were no longer looking for the Unicorn.  Everything was complete. 

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