Someone else was watching Felix that summer with concern. And as he yelled at her to get out of his office, playfully stamping his foot like a starting gun to launch a new game, Geoff, the team leader, was worried to note that Felix did not respond to him at all. Before now, she had loved her ‘banter’ with him. Usually, her interaction with Geoff would get her going – she would leg it down the corridor with delighted skips at his raised voice, before returning to do it all over again. She loved to tease Geoff playfully, scampering back and forth as he criticised her, clearly egging him on, as though she was charmed that someone would still stand up to her despite her fame. She liked to taunt him, too, by peering in through the low window in the office door. Knowing he had banned her from the team leaders’ room while he was on shift, she would nevertheless prop her snow-capped paws up on the window ledge and gaze in longingly, like a child at a sweetshop window dreaming of sherbet lemons and chocolate limes. Geoff could shout all he liked – she was sticking to the rules yet reminding him who was really in charge. But these days, when he put on his cross voice and shouted out her name, she just blinked lazily at him and didn’t move a muscle.
‘She’s not right,’ he fretted to Angie. ‘She’s not like she used to be. I think she’s overweight again. I promise you, she’s not right well.’
Due to the dynamic nature of their games, Geoff was often the first one among the team to notice if Felix wasn’t well, so Angie listened when he raised the alarm. And on 19 June 2018, his dire predictions came true.
Luckily, Angie was on shift when it happened. Midway through the day, word reached her that Felix had vomited in the back-office corridor. It was Terry from the platform team who drew the short straw and went to mop up the mess.
Soon after, he came to see Angie with an ashen face. ‘Angie,’ he said. ‘Do you know …?’
‘Know what?’ she asked lightly.
‘Do you know there’s a bit of blood in Felix’s sick?’
‘You what!’ Angie cried. She abruptly sat up straight, all thoughts of work forgotten.
Terry explained gently that the little cat’s vomit had been red with blood – and not just a fleck of it. It had been very, very red. Felix, it seemed, was very, very sick.
Angie felt the bottom fall out of her world. Surely nothing could happen to her Felix; she couldn’t even compute the idea of harm befalling her. Without missing a beat, she marched straight into action, running quickly to the station manager’s office.
‘Andy!’ she hollered at the top of her voice.
The station manager glanced up from his paperwork in alarm. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
Angie felt her panic trying to overwhelm her, but she swallowed it down. ‘It’s Felix,’ she burst out. ‘She’s not well, Andy. She needs to go to the vet’s at once. There’s blood in her sick, Andy. Oh my gosh, there’s blood in her sick …!’
Andy raised a calming hand to stop the anxious flow of words. ‘Just do what you’ve got to do!’ he exclaimed. Felix always came first.
Angie, released from duty, rushed Felix off to the vet’s. They fitted her in straight away, even though she didn’t have an appointment. The vet carefully examined her and soon called Angie back in to discuss his diagnosis. Angie crept into the sterile room, which was lit with fluorescent lights, and felt as though her own heart was on the operating table. Was the vet about to slice it open with his scalpel – or bring her back to life?
‘First things first,’ he said. ‘She’s fine. She’s going to be OK.’
Angie felt the breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding release from her lungs in a rush of air. Thank God for that.
‘It’s not internal bleeding,’ the vet went on. ‘If she keeps vomiting, we should get her back in to do some scans, but I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.’
‘What was it?’ Angie asked in trepidation. ‘What made her so sick?’
‘Well, we can’t be certain,’ replied the vet. ‘I think it could well be that she ate something that was bad for her – perhaps something left out on the station that she shouldn’t have had?’
Angie nodded, remembering open tins of tuna and bright orange Wotsits …
‘Or it could have been a mouse she caught, that perhaps had some poison in its system,’ he went on. ‘It basically could have been anything that disagreed with her, but there’s nothing specific I can tell you, I’m afraid.’
‘What can we do? How can I make her well again?’
‘Well,’ said the vet, ‘I’m going to prescribe some medicine to help her recover, and I want you to put her on some special food. She really mustn’t eat anything else for the next two weeks at least, so I recommend that you keep her indoors. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Angie, feeling relieved it was not too serious. But at the back of her mind she was thinking: Felix is not going to be happy about this.
Angie was right. Felix was not happy about it one bit. Against character, she actually coped with the change in diet quite well. The vet had prescribed some special gastro biscuits, which were crunchy brown balls. Felix sniffed at them cautiously when they were first served to her. Previously, she would never have touched biscuits in a million years – she had always insisted on a moist meal – but Angie was amazed to see that, after some initial reticence, Felix was soon eagerly gobbling down the biscuits from her white china dish, her little pink tongue regularly flicking out to lick her lips with satisfaction. Her demonstrably good appetite undeniably gave the dry biscuits her royal seal of approval. Perhaps, with a more mature palate, she was developing more refined tastes.
She was not a fan, however, of the medicine itself. It was a liquid that had to be administered from a syringe into a special wet food the vet had also prescribed. And her dislike of taking her medicine quickly led to the biggest problem of alclass="underline" trying to keep Felix confined to barracks.
In some ways, one wouldn’t have thought that she would have been too bothered by the new rule to stay indoors, given she now slept most of the day in her radiator bed. But, as with all of us, the moment Felix was told she couldn’t go outside, there was nothing she wanted to do more in the world. Kept indoors, Felix’s only option was taking her medicine. Outdoors, on the other hand, was a whole new world of opportunities and forbidden treats from passers-by. Felix soon became determined to win her freedom.
It was a battle of wits between her and Angie Hunte. Felix made the first move. She would lie in wait in the back-office corridor, biding her time until a colleague came along and unwittingly opened the door.
But Angie was one step ahead. She put up eye-catching posters on both sides of the door that led out to platform one, which featured two huge eyes urging people to look out for the station cat. The message exclaimed: ‘Please be careful and watch out for Felix as you come in. She is trying to escape because she doesn’t like her medicine, so please be very careful. DO NOT LET FELIX OUT!’
In response, Felix upped her game. Rather than loitering in plain sight, she took to concealing herself behind the hulking structure of the reservation printer close to the exit, where she could cleverly camouflage her ebony fur against its firm black sides. Thus concealed, she would then make a mad dash from her hiding place as soon as the door was opened.
She also tried a brand-new tack. So Angie thought she was going to exit via platform one, yes? Well then, in that case, Felix would go a different route. She took to loitering ‘innocently’ close to the kitchen, whose door, as it happened, was right next to that of the booking office. When the office was open to the public, Felix knew only too well that the shutters would be up – and she would have a clear path through to the concourse. So, as soon as the booking-office door was opened, she made a beeline for the narrow gap that had just appeared, dashing through it with more speed than she’d displayed in months. Angie therefore found herself fighting a battle on two fronts.