Teddy

Teddy walked down to the canal. That bitch. That spoilt bitch. The
thought had lost almost all trace of prickly malice, had worn smooth
with overuse, a reflex. He took another sip from his can of Special
Brew. There was nothing special about it except the elevated alcohol
content, not enough flavour in the beer itself to mask the chemical
taste. It was cheap.

Far off in the distance, occluded by a pair of shoddy tower blocks he
could see the London Eye. The giant ferris wheel attempted to make the
city into a fairground attraction. Nobody's going to win me today, he
thought, sullenly. A train went past, the rattle and fumes of a diesel
engine. Diesel. Fossil fuel, who thinks about the fossils? For a moment
Teddy projected his fate into the future. No, not his fate, merely the
fate of his constituent parts, his molecules and atoms. First death,
then decomposition, followed by much later by mineralisation, and
then...? Pollution. Just a meagre smudge of soot, a puff of greenhouse
gas, a dribble of toxic benzene derivatives.

There it was then, he thought, even in death there could be no
dignity.

It wasn't the first can of the morning. He'd started before breakfast,
then skipped breakfast. Just as soon as the off-license had opened. The
smiling muslim man behind the counter hadn't batted an eyelid at his
purchase, nor had he offered any pleasantries.

The water sat limp and flat in its canal. It looked thicker perhaps
than it really was, an opaque blue-grey greenish brown un-colour. There
was a raft of weed and crisp packets snagged against the opposite bank.
Teddy walked down to the edge and looked at his reflection, looking for
signs of life. The reflection's beady eyes met his own but the place it
stared back from was barely real, phasing in and out from behind a
plastic membrane. The reflection stared down out of the sky, up at him.
Teddy smoothed out a patch of matted fur on his belly. Once snowy white
it was now a dirty grey, and the orange on his back was looking more
like the dark grimy bricks of the railway bridge.

If only... He took another swig from the can. Nearly empty. It was hard
to focus on his reflection. It was hard to focus on anything, as one
image dissociated into a blur of two. Feeling himself swaying
backwards, he put a foot forward, overcompensated, swung pendulously,
took a couple of woozy steps, eventually steadying himself again. He
was standing in the water. The coolness surprised him... it felt, not
cold, but simply like the absence of heat. A negation. The water was
dirty, but this coolness... it was pure. Teddy stood for a while like
that. The breeze ruffled his fur a little. So full of energy was the
air, all its chaotic restless movement came from its heat. It was
corrupt. The air was corrupt, he was corrupt. Everything around him was
corrupt. Except the cool water, devoid of heat it alone was pure. Teddy
reached his foot out a little further.

The canal had steep sides. Teddy stepped out. His foot didn't find the
bottom. He tipped forward off the other foot, let himself slip into the
water. Lying face down he felt almost submerged, almost completely
enveloped in the soothing coolness. It didn't sting, but he wished he
could close his eyes. He felt the corrupt warmth slowly, slowly, ebbing
out of him as the cool bath of the canal conducted it away, never
seeming to grow warmer itself. It was an absolute, a vacuum,
untouchable. He let go of the beer can and for a while was dimly aware
that it floated beside him in the still water, until all the spurious
impurities of thought had been conducted away into the vacuum
too.

Teddy lay like that for an hour. He did not try to ponder or assess his
state of mind at all. He simply let all thoughts, all energy, dissipate
out into the purity of the void until he had achieved something of the
contentment of a rock.

Night fell. Dawn broke. Neither affected him in his peace now. Trains
passed by. Two days later one of these trains passed by and I looked
out from its window and saw him there. With his mildew fur and the can
still floating by his side.