It was the stampede, the myriad footstep patter from the passengers of an early express that woke Brown-Teddy from his peaceful slumber,
beneath the iron girders that yawned towards a cold clear sky. Howling hunger demons were running around in his insides and forced him into
the thin winter sun. One of the bull ring's residents was also awake,drinking coffee from a polystyrene cup and murmuring an internal prayer
which escaped from his cracked lips with the Nescafe steam. Passing commuters would from time to time toss him a coin but never a gaze. No
human look had locked his watery blue eyes for years. He'd shed pride long ago, now curled in coldness this human husk sat bled and arid.
Somebody had donated a sandwich along with the now drained coffee and when this vagrant gave an especially deep, especially despairing sigh
into the pavement, Brown-Teddy swiped it and retreated back under his box in the shadows. The sandwich was filled with nondescript cheddar
and some limp onion, which slid down his throat like dead leeches. He was used to better. Thatched roof ancient wooden beams formed the
skeleton of the house where Judith had grown up, Brow-Teddy permanently in tow. Dreams of wings and magical days lost in the bubble-gum haze of
eighties youth. Eyes closed he remembered it all, the small hands reaching screeching from the lunatic mother and the cruel man. Their world of pure fantasy was not carpeted purely in grass and flowers.
Hours of sorrow and hollow violation has laid the purity of a white communion dress, pearly white and sacramental, beneath the feet of
brutality. To a surburban clockwork world of greysuited bourgeois banality theirs was a good family. Brown-Teddy had known what noises
split the air like the sick thud of a war gun, what blows had been dealt like the loss of breath on a hot day. He remembered what she had
felt in a rent heart, in choked sobs, in a cold bed.
