STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN

Chapter Five                                                                                                       Part Four



                     Joe stood in a doorway and looked into a long, thin room  like a shoe box.  The walls were brown, a naked light bulb shone weakly from the middle of the ceiling.  At the far end was a window, a metal grid frame divided it into eight square panes.  The window was high up on the wall so that no view could be seen, only sky.  It was an evil, foreboding sky, stormy grey tinted with a sulphurous yellow.  Beneath the window there was a hospital bed.  A man wearing blue striped pyjamas sat propped up on the pillows.  The room was full of stale, cigarette smoke, the smell mixed with the strong disinfectant in the corridor.  Joe closed the door on the disinfected corridor and walked into the shoe box. He stood beside the bed and saw that the man in the blue striped pyjamas was his brother Roy. The pyjamas had struck him as odd because as kids they had gone to bed in vest, socks and pants and the habit had stayed with them, they never owned pyjamas.   But now Roy was wearing pyjamas, his brown hair was still greying but it was clean and combed and his face was shaven, his blue eyes were clear, but he looked weak and his skin was pale and waxy.  There was a low table at the side of the bed and a chair. On the table was a small tin ashtray piled high with dog ends and overflowing with ash and beside it there was a lighter and an empty cigarette box.  Joe took the box that Annie had given him from his back pocket.  He offered one to Roy and put one between his own lips, he lit them both, he put half the cigarettes in Roy's empty box and sat down.  They sat in silence.
                    Roy drew hard on his cigarette, he tipped back his head and stared at the ceiling through the rising, gently curling smoke he had exhaled.  He had lain for many long hours of many days in the dim light of the shoe box while a million broken pieces inside him had  rearranged themselves from the dull colours of chaos and fear, anger and pain to the brightly coloured patterns of  wholeness and hope.  There had been times when the colours had been so vivid and the patterns so clearly defined that his soul had left his tired, suffering body and flown to the summit of a high mountain where he stood, strong and free from the heavy chains of fear, and that freedom was like a vision of the whole of his future in one moment. And he would look down from the mountain at all the crags and crevices that were his shame and his anguish.  The landscape was himself and the summit was the understanding of himself.  Having climbed and fallen so many times he had at last reached the top of the mountain where he found an honesty and an acceptance of himself that made him whole and self-possessed so that he would never be lost again.  But these moments would fade and would fall again into darkness and fear.  Joe's presence in the shoe box made him fall and his soul returned to the ice cold suffering of his body and the burning pain in his heart. 
                    When Roy had first decided to enter the clinic he had not been sure that a cure would work until he had gone round to tell his brother that he was going to try.  It was then, when he discovered the place Joe had fallen he had realised through his horror and sadness that there was something of himself still left that could be pieced together and cured.  But Joe had fallen somewhere too deep and too dark.  There was no helping Joe. Joe was dead. Roy glanced at the man who had been Joe who sat beside his bed, but he looked away again quickly, he was unable to face his little brother's outer shell and empty eyes for fear that the delicacy of his own healing would be once again blown apart and fragmented so that he could never mend. 
                    Joe sat and looked at his brother.  There was silence but for the roar of the waterfall that was still in his head.  His cigarette smoked itself between his fingers, beside his knee.  Roy's face twitched and winced and would not look in his direction.  So Joe looked up at the window.  The storm had begun and each square pane ran with rain so that the sky became colourless and blurred.  When the cigarette had smoked itself to the filter and burnt out, Joe flicked the long tube of ash to the floor and added the butt to the pile in the ashtray.  Then he scraped back his chair and got up to leave.  Roy was very ill and needed rest and Joe wanted to get back to the Drake's Head to see Annie.
He left the shoe box and closed the door, and behind the roaring of the waterfall he heard a distant sobbing.  It was Roy's sobbing.  Joe stood in the sterile corridor and wondered if he was hearing the past or the present.