STARSHINE THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN

Chapter Five                                                                                                        Part Six



               ......He stood before Clare's crazy, ramshackle house.  The white light of the moon shone down on the turrets and lichened roof.  He saw Clare standing in the front window.  She looked at him but would not invite him in. The door was once again closed to him and the brass door knocker leered at him disdainfully.  He looked at the curved staircase that led to the door, he tried to move towards it but his feet were bound and held fast to the ground by thorny creepers.  He looked back at Clare, he held out his hand to her and across his palm lay his granny's pearls shining in the moonlight.  Clare looked at the pearls sadly.  Joe wondered at her sadness.  Why did she not want the pearls he offered her ?  Why did she not want his love ? His ignorance frustrated him.  He felt hot tears running down his cheeks and his eyes pleaded with her to let him in.  But Clare did not move and her gaze was stony. Once again Joe felt himself barred from the riches inside the house.  The warmth and depth of its treasures were not for him to know or understand, its hidden secrets were not for him to hold.  There was something inside the house he had to reach and know, but Clare's eyes told him of his unworthiness and the door was locked and his entrance forbidden.  His desperation grew and in the chaos of dreamtime and dream space he found himself far away from the house at the bottom of the hill.  He looked up to where the house stood in its veil of moonlight and he began to run towards it.  Loose gravel scattered beneath his feet as he trudged up the steep pathway but the faster he ran forward the further he was from the house until it receded into nothing and all that was left was his outstretched hand holding a necklace of pearly white beads.
                   Then the beads were gone and he had a rifle in his hands.  He was standing in a mud ditch, his feet in black water.  On either side of him there were soldiers in a long line as far as he could see down the winding ditch.  They were silent, tense and waiting, so he waited too.  He looked up at the sky and there were a million stars.  Then the order came and he scrambled up the side of the ditch and ran toward the enemy, crouching low, his bayonet out in front.  He ran through the rattle of gunfire and the whines and screams of shells.  Barbed wire dragged at his ankles and once again his feet were bound to the ground and he could not move.  But this time he felt no fear or despair but welcomed the explosion that buried him beneath a wave of mud, deep down in a beautiful silence and he praised the great weight of the earth as it crushed his body and pressed the last breath from his lungs..............