A Gift From Bob

by James Bowen

  Belle handed me an envelope first, smiling as she did so.

  I opened it and pulled out a home-made card. It had a giant gold paw print on the front. The dedication inside simply said: To James, from Belle and Bob.

  ‘That’s one of the reasons why we made all that mess last weekend,’ she giggled. ‘I’d been making the card and he’d come over and deliberately placed his paw on it. It was going to be from just me, but he obviously wanted it to be from both of us.’

  I was really touched and immediately gave it pride of place next to the tree.

  Belle’s parents were always generous and had given her a gift to pass on to me. It was a collector’s edition of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a favourite movie of mine.

  I was still really apprehensive about Belle’s gift. It had been the only minor cloud hovering over my Christmas Day. I kept trying to reassure myself that it would be OK. I knew her well enough to have got it right, I told myself. But I kept thinking that it could go either way. She would either be offended – or she’d love it. There couldn’t really be a middle ground.

  I took the present out from under the tree and gave it to her.

  ‘Careful, it’s heavy,’ I said, feeling sheepish.

  ‘Oh crikey, it is, isn’t it?’ she said when she took it off me.

  She looked completely bewildered. It was an oddly shaped present. It obviously wasn’t a book or a DVD or a bottle of perfume, or any of the normal presents that you might expect to receive at this time of the year. She clearly had no idea what it might be, which made it a success in one way already. But would she appreciate the surprise when she saw what it actually was?

  I held my breath as she peeled the wrapping paper off, then took the piece of concrete in the palm of her hand and started looking at it.

  ‘Wow,’ she said.

  I still wasn’t quite sure how to take it. Did she mean Wow, that’s amazing, or Wow, what is this piece of rubbish that you’ve given me?

  She held it up and inspected it from every possible angle. I wasn’t sure whether she was deliberately taking her time so as to torture me. I couldn’t bear the tension any more.

  ‘So go on, what do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s absolutely amazing, James.’

  ‘You sure? You aren’t just saying that to make me feel better about myself.’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. It’s great, where on earth did you get it?’

  She laughed when I told her about the building site.

  I felt so relieved. But I also felt slightly silly. Yes, the earrings I’d bought her were a lovely gesture. And I was sure she would have liked them. But I’d actually missed the point. We had never really been into buying each other expensive presents. For a start, we didn’t have the money. But we also believed in giving each other things that meant something.

  Our feeling was that it was not about the price tag on a present. It was about the love and thought that went into it, which was actually priceless. This odd little object that I’d stumbled across summed that up perfectly.

  I had another present for her. I handed her an envelope marked ‘Promises’.

  Inside were half a dozen ‘Promises’ that I’d written out the previous night on pieces of coloured paper. They ranged from ‘I Promise to cook you dinner’ to ‘I Promise to take you the cinema at least once in the next twelve months’. It was something we’d done before, especially at times like this when money was so scarce. Again we felt it had more meaning than an expensive ‘bought’ item. Belle really appreciated it, especially the cinema pledge. She loved going to see movies and it had been well over a year since I’d last taken her; I simply hadn’t had the spare money.

  For a moment we sat there, chatting and watching Bob as he played with the discarded wrapping paper and bows.

  ‘He could do that for hours, couldn’t he?’ I smiled.

  ‘Oh, nearly forgot,’ Belle said, producing a small present from behind the tree. I hadn’t seen it there before; she must have slipped it in when she’d arrived, without me noticing.

  There was a tag attached. It read simply, To James from Bob.

  I smiled at Belle.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Open it and you’ll see.’

  It was a small, plastic-covered photo album. The cover had the words ‘Best Friends Forever’ printed in large letters along with a picture of me and Bob, sitting on the pavement in Angel, selling The Big Issue. It must have been taken earlier that year, I reckoned. Inside Belle had pasted about a dozen photos of us together, going back to 2007 when I’d found him downstairs. There were snaps of us in the flat, on the bus and busking around Covent Garden. I recognised about half of them as pictures that Belle had taken herself with the camera on her phone. The other half were new to me, however. She told me she’d found a lot of them on the internet. There were now dozens of us on there, taken by people from all over the world. The best one, in which I was holding Bob close to my face, had been taken by a photography student who had asked me to do a photo shoot with him. He’d paid me a small fee then I’d forgotten all about it.

  The album really touched me. Belle had obviously worked really hard on it and it contained a lot of images that made me feel quite emotional. As Boxing Day wore on, I couldn’t stop looking at it.

  Belle had brought a couple of DVDs over in case there was nothing we wanted to watch on television – neither of us were fans of the standard fare that tended to be shown at Christmas time. So after flicking through the channels and unsurprisingly finding nothing, we opted for one of the DVDs, Scrooged with Bill Murray. I wasn’t a huge fan of the traditional versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but loved this twisted take on the story of Scrooge in which Murray played a cynical television executive who is shown the error of his ways on Christmas Eve.

  ‘It feels like my life this week,’ I said as we watched his character visited by three ghosts, each representing his past, present and future.

  Belle just laughed.

  ‘Yeah right, James.’

  Of course it was too corny to compare the past week of my life to Scrooge’s Christmas Eve. Yes I used to be pretty miserable at this time of the year, with good reason. But since I’d met Bob that had begun to alter. Thanks to him and Belle, I was learning to enjoy this time of year more and more.

  There were some parallels though. There was no getting away from the fact that I’d had some thought-provoking encounters in the past few days, not just with the more charitable souls who approached me and Bob on the street, but with the other, darker figures who had crossed our paths.

  There had been the drug dealer over in Soho, for instance. What was he? The Ghost of Christmas Past or the spirit of the present? As a recovering addict, the temptation of drugs was a part of my present and would be a part of my future too. And what about the young guy I’d seen sleeping in Monmouth Street? Was he the ghost of my past? I looked outside at the blackness and couldn’t help wondering where he was right now. I hoped he had found somewhere safe and warm for the night.

  I flicked back to the photo album that Belle had given me. She was sitting next to me on the sofa and Bob was draped across the pair of us. He was looking at the album too, as if he recognised himself.

  Belle had arranged the photographs in chronological order, with the first in spring 2007 and the most recent just a few weeks ago, on Neal Street as we busked one evening. Flicking through the album, I could see what a different person I had been three years ago. I had been making real progress in my recovery at that point, but you could still tell that I had some way to go. My hair and skin looked different and I looked a lot less healthy. I looked a little lost, as if I wasn’t quite with it all the time, which was probably true, even then, when I was a year or so into a methadone programme. I looked like a rather tortured and lonely soul, which is exactly what I was, of course. As I turned the pages, however, it was obvious that I was slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, getting healthier. You could see it in my eyes
. I became more engaged, less haunted. But there was something else, something even more significant about me. I looked a happier, more stable person. And you could tell that from one simple detail in all the images. I was smiling.

  It hit me when I looked at a photograph of me with Bob on my shoulder, posing for some tourists in Covent Garden. The tourists had big grins on their faces, but none of them were as big as mine. I was positively beaming, with what I recognised as a mixture of pride and simple joy. There were several photos where I was wearing the same expression. It was such a contrast.

  If you’d made a photo album of my life during the previous ten years, you would have struggled to find many images like that. There probably weren’t any. And a grin was the last thing you’d have seen. I didn’t do much smiling during that lost decade.

  The sequence of photos in the album was proof of something I’d known instinctively for a long time. These last three years had seen my life take such a change for the better, spiritually and emotionally. I had become a much lighter, more contented soul. There was no doubt that the steps I’d taken in my recovery from addiction were a huge element in that. But there was also no doubt that my world had improved because of the character sitting alongside me in all those photographs.

  Until Bob had come along I’d been a hopeless cause. I’d wasted so many chances it was ridiculous. I was probably extremely lucky to be alive, such was the abuse I subjected my body to during my darkest days. The fact that I could now appreciate and enjoy a Christmas like this was just one of the blessings Bob had bestowed upon me. It was part of the even greater gift he had given me, probably the most wonderful one I’d ever received. Bob had given me a new life, a new life that was full of happiness and hope. As he, Belle and I curled up on the sofa that cold December night, I made another promise. I was going to treasure that gift, not just this Christmas, but for as long as we remained together.

  Acknowledgements

  To all of the wonderful hard-working charities we support, we hope each step of our journey continues to help you further.

  Thank you to everyone involved in the making of the Bob books, without the behind-the-scenes ‘Bobby Team’ none of this would be possible. We would like to say thank you to Garry and Mary for making this a reality and bringing our story to life. To everybody at Hodder & Stoughton, Rowena, Kerry, Emma, Ciara, Maddy and Emily, you took a chance on us and for that we are eternally thankful. To my crucial and steadfast best friend and fundraising partner, Belle, Bob and I wouldn’t be able to function without you in our lives!

  And finally, there is one more huge thank you to Bob. Bob will always be my constant companion through life. He taught me what no other could and I am indebted to him in this life and the next. But, of course, Bob and I have many more tales to tell before then.

  Lots of love and hugs

  James Bowen & Street Cat Bob

  Bob Information Page

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