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.