Chapter 19
The Stationmaster
Australia had been great, it had given me a boost both physically and emotionally. Back in London, I felt stronger and more sure of myself than I’d felt in years. Being reunited with Bob had lifted my spirits even more. Without him, a little part of me had been missing down in Tasmania. Now I felt whole again.
We were soon back into the old routine, sharing every aspect of our day-to-day life. Even now, after almost two years together, he remained a constant source of surprise to me.
I’d talked endlessly about Bob while I was away, telling everyone how smart he was. There had been times, I’m sure, when people looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘A cat can’t be that smart,’ I’m sure they were thinking. A couple of weeks after I got back, however, I realised that I’d been underselling him.
Doing his business had always been a bit of a chore for Bob. He’d never taken to the litter trays that I’d bought him. I still had a few packs of them in the cupboard gathering dust. They’d been there since day one.
It was a real palaver having to go all the way down five flights of stairs and out into the grounds to do his business every single time he needed to go to the loo. I’d noticed in the past few months, before I’d gone to Australia and again now that I was back, that he wasn’t going to the toilet downstairs so often any more.
For a while I’d wondered whether it might be a medical problem and I’d taken him to the Blue Cross truck on Islington Green to have him checked out. The vets found nothing untoward and suggested that it might just be a change in his metabolism as he got older.
The explanation was actually far less scientific – and a lot more funny – than that. One morning, soon after I’d got back from Australia, I woke up really early, around 6.30a.m. My body clock was still all over the place. I hauled myself out of bed and stepped, bleary-eyed towards the toilet. The door was half open and I could hear a light, tinkling sort of noise. Weird, I thought. I half expected to find someone had sneaked into the flat to use the toilet, but when I gently nudged open the door I was greeted by a sight that left me totally speechless: Bob was squatting on the toilet seat.
It was just like that scene in the movie Meet the Parents when Robert De Niro’s cat, Mr Jinxie, does the same thing. Except in this case, it was absolutely real. Bob had obviously decided that going to the toilet downstairs was too much of a hassle. So, having seen me go to the toilet a few times in the past three years, he’d worked out what he needed to do and simply mimicked me.
When he saw me staring at him, Bob just fired me one of his withering looks, as if to say: ‘What are you looking at? I’m only going to the loo, what could be more normal than that?’ He was right of course. Why was I surprised at anything Bob did? He was capable of anything, surely I knew that already.
Our absence for a few weeks had definitely been noticed by a lot of the locals at the Angel. During our first week back on the pitch a succession of people came up to us with big smiles. They’d say things like: ‘Ah, you’re back’ or ‘I thought you’d won the lottery.’ They were almost all genuine, warm-hearted welcomes.
One lady dropped off a card with ‘We Missed You’ written on it. It felt great to be ‘home’.
As ever, of course, there were also one or two who weren’t so pleased to see us.
One evening I found myself getting into a very heated argument with a Chinese lady. I’d noticed her before, looking rather disapprovingly at me and Bob. This time she approached me, waving her finger at me as she did so.
‘This not right, this not right,’ she said angrily.
‘Sorry, what’s not right?’ I said, genuinely baffled.
‘This not normal for cat to be like this,’ she went on. ‘Him too quiet, you drug him. You drug cat.’
That was the point at which I had to take issue with her.
It was far from the first time that someone had insinuated this. Back in Covent Garden when we’d been busking, a very snotty, professorial guy had stopped one day and told me in no uncertain terms that he was ‘on to me’.
‘I know what you’re doing. And I think I know what you’re giving him to stay so docile and obedient,’ he said, a bit too pleased with himself.
‘And what would that be then, sir?’ I said.
‘Ah, that would give you the advantage and you would be able to change to something else,’ he said, a bit taken aback that I was challenging him.
‘No, come on, you’ve made an accusation, now back it up,’ I said stepping up my defence.
He had disappeared into thin air fairly quickly, probably quite wisely because I think I might have planted one on him if he’d carried on like that.
The Chinese woman was basically making the same accusation. So I gave her the same defence.
‘What do you think I am giving him that makes him like that?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But you giving him something.’
‘Well, if I was drugging him, why would he hang around with me every day? Why wouldn’t he try and make a run for it when he got the chance? I can’t drug him in front of everyone.’
‘Psssh,’ she said, waving her arms at me dismissively and turning on her heels. ‘It not right, it not right,’ she said once more as she melted into the crowd.
This was a reality that I’d accepted a long time ago. I knew there were always going to be some people who were suspicious that I was mistreating Bob, didn’t like cats or simply didn’t like the fact a Big Issue seller had a cat rather than a dog, which was far more common. A couple of weeks after the row with the Chinese lady, I had another confrontation, a very different one this time.
Since the early days in Covent Garden, I’d regularly been offered money for Bob. Every now and again someone would come up to me and ask ‘How much for your cat?’ I’d usually tell them to go forth and multiply.
Up here at the Angel I’d heard it again, from one lady in particular. She had been to see me several times, each time chatting away before getting to the point of her visit.
‘Look, James,’ she would say. ‘I don’t think Bob should be out on the streets, I think he should be in a nice, warm home living a better life.’
Each time she’d end the conversation with a question along the lines of: ‘So how much do you want for him?’
I’d rebuff her each time, at which point she’d start throwing figures at me. She’d started at one hundred pounds, then gone up to five hundred.
Most recently she’d come up to me one evening and said: ‘I’ll give you a thousand pounds for him.’
I’d just looked at her and said: ‘Do you have children?’
‘Erm, yes, as a matter of fact I do,’ she spluttered, a bit thrown.
‘You do, OK. How much for your youngest child?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘How much for your youngest child?’
‘I hardly think that’s got anything to do—’
I cut her off. ‘Actually, I think it does have a lot to do with it. As far as I’m concerned Bob is my child, he’s my baby. And for you to ask me whether I’d sell him is exactly the same as me asking you how much you want for your youngest child.’
She’d just stormed off. I never saw her again.
The attitude of the tube station staff was the complete polar opposite of this. One day I was talking to one of the ticket inspectors, Vanika. She loved Bob and was chuckling at the way countless people were stopping and talking to him and taking his picture.
‘He’s putting Angel tube station on the map, isn’t he?’ she laughed.