by James Bowen
I didn’t bathe him. Cats wash themselves, and he was a typical cat in that respect, regularly licking and washing himself. In fact, Bob was one of the most meticulous cats I’d ever seen. I’d watch him go through the ritual, methodically licking his paws. It fascinated me, especially the fact that it was linked so strongly to his ancient ancestors.
Bob’s distant relatives originated from hot climates and didn’t sweat, so licking themselves was their way of releasing saliva and cooling themselves down. It was also their version of the invisibility cloak.
Smell is bad for cats from a hunting point of view. Cats are stealth hunters and ambush their prey, so they have to be as unobtrusive as possible. Cat saliva contains a natural deodorant which is why they lick themselves a lot. It’s been proven by zoologists that cats that lick the smell off themselves survive longer and have more successful offspring. It’s also their way of hiding themselves from predators like large snakes, lizards and other larger carnivorous mammals.
Of course, the most important reason that Bob and his ancestors had always licked themselves was to establish and maintain good health. Cats effectively self-medicate. Licking cuts down the number of parasites, such as lice, mites and ticks that can potentially damage the cat. It also stops infection in any open wounds, as cats’ saliva also contains an antiseptic agent. As I watched him one day, it occurred to me that this might be why Bob was licking himself so regularly. He knew his body had been in a bad way. This was his way of helping the healing process.
The other funny habit he’d developed was watching television. I first noticed that he watched things on screens one day when I was playing around on a computer in the local library. I often popped in there on the way to Covent Garden or when I wasn’t busking. I’d taken Bob along for a walk. He had decided to sit on my lap and was staring at the screen with me. I noticed that as I was moving the mouse around he was trying to swat the cursor with his paw. So back at the flat, as an experiment one day, I’d just put the TV on and left the room to go and do something in the bedroom. I came back to find Bob ensconced on the sofa, watching.
I’d heard about cats watching TV from a friend whose cat loved Star Trek: The Next Generation. Whenever it heard that familiar music - Dah-Dah Dah Dah Dah-Dah Dah Dah - he’d come running into the room and jump on the sofa. I saw it happen a few times and it was hilarious. No joke.
Pretty soon, Bob had become a bit of a telly addict as well. If something caught his eye, then he suddenly was glued to the screen. I found it really funny watching him watching Channel Four racing. He really liked the horses. It wasn’t something I watched but I got a real kick from watching him sitting there fascinated by it.
Chapter 8
Making It Official
One Thursday morning, a few weeks after we had started our busking partnership in Covent Garden, I got up earlier than usual, made us both some breakfast and headed out of the door with Bob. Rather than heading for central London as usual, we got off the bus near Islington Green.
I’d made a decision. With him accompanying me almost every day on the streets now, I needed to do the responsible thing and get Bob microchipped.
Microchipping cats and dogs used to be a complicated business but now it’s simple. All it requires is a simple surgical procedure in which a vet injects a tiny chip into the cat’s neck. The chip contains a serial number, which is then logged against their owner’s details. That way if a stray cat is found people can scan the chip and find out where it belongs.
Given the life Bob and I led, I figured it was a good idea to get it done. If, God forbid, we ever got separated, we’d be able to find each other. If worse came to worst and something happened to me, at least the records would show that Bob wasn’t a completely feral street cat; he had once been in a loving home.
When I’d first begun researching the microchipping process in the library I had quickly come to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford it. Most vets were charging an extortionate sixty to eighty pounds to insert a chip. I just didn’t have that kind of money and, even if I did, I wouldn’t have paid that much on principle.
But then one day I got talking to the cat lady across the street.
‘You should go along to the Blue Cross van in Islington Green on a Thursday,’ she said. ‘They just charge for the cost of the chip. But make sure you get there early. There’s always a big queue.’
So I’d set off today nice and early to get to that morning’s clinic, which I knew ran from 10a.m. to noon.
As the cat lady had predicted, we discovered a lengthy queue when we got to Islington Green. A long line stretched down towards the big Waterstone’s bookshop. Luckily it was a bright, clear morning so it wasn’t a problem hanging around.
There was the usual collection you find in a situation like that; people with their cats in posh carriers, dogs trying to sniff each other and being a general nuisance. But it was quite sociable and it was certainly a smarter, more caring crowd than at the RSPCA where I’d first taken Bob to be checked out.
What was funny was that Bob was the only cat that wasn’t in a carrier, so he attracted a lot of attention - as usual. There were a couple of elderly ladies who were absolutely smitten and kept fussing over him.
After about an hour and a half queuing, Bob and I reached the front of the line where we were greeted by a young veterinary nurse with short bobbed hair.
‘How much will it cost to get him microchipped?’ I asked her.
‘It’s fifteen pounds,’ she replied.
It was pretty obvious from my appearance that I wasn’t exactly rolling in money. So she quickly added, ‘But you don’t have to pay it all up front. You can pay it off over a few weeks. Say two pounds a week, how’s that?’
‘Cool,’ I said, pleasantly surprised. ‘I can do that.’
She gave Bob a quick check, presumably to make sure he was in decent-enough health, which he was. He was looking a lot healthier these days, especially now that he had fully shed his winter coat. He was lean and really athletic.
She led us into the surgery where the vet was waiting. He was a young guy, in his late twenties, probably.
‘Morning,’ he said to me before turning to chat to the nurse. They had a quiet confab in the corner and then started preparing for the chipping procedure. I watched as they got the stuff together. The nurse got out some paperwork while the vet produced the syringe and needle to inject the chip. The size of it slightly took my breath away. It was a big old needle. But then I realised it had to be if it was going to insert the chip, which was the size of a large grain of rice. It had to be large enough to get into the animal’s skin.
Bob didn’t like the look of it at all, and I couldn’t really blame him. So the nurse and I got hold of him and tried to turn him away from the vet so that he couldn’t see what he was doing.
Bob wasn’t stupid, however, and knew something was up. He got quite agitated and tried to wriggle his way out of my grip. ‘You’ll be OK, mate,’ I said, stroking his tummy and hind legs, while the vet closed in.
When the needle penetrated, Bob let out a loud squeal. It cut through me like a knife and for a moment I thought I was going to start blubbing when he began shaking in pain.
But the shaking soon dissipated and he calmed down. I gave him a little treat from my rucksack then carefully scooped him up and headed back to the reception area.
‘Well done, mate,’ I said.
The nurse asked me to go through a couple of complicated-looking forms. Fortunately the information she wanted was pretty straightforward.
‘OK, we need to fill in your details so that they are on the database,’ she said. ‘We will need your name, address, age, phone number all that kind of stuff,’ she smiled.
It was only as I watched the nurse filling in the form that it struck me. Did this mean that I was officially Bob’s owner?
‘So, legally speaking, does that mean I am now registered as his owner?’ I asked the girl.
She just looked
up from the paperwork and smiled. ‘Yes, is that OK?’ she said.
‘Yeah, that’s great,’ I said slightly taken aback. ‘Really great.’
By now Bob was settling down a little. I gave him a stroke on the front of the head. He was obviously still feeling the injection so I didn’t go near his neck, he’d have scratched my arm off.
‘Did you hear that, Bob?’ I said. ‘Looks like we’re officially a family.’
I’m sure I drew even more looks than usual as we walked through Islington afterwards. I must have been wearing a smile as wide as the Thames.
Having Bob with me had already made a difference to the way I was living my life. He’d made me clean up my act in more ways than one.
As well as giving me more routine and a sense of responsibility, he had also made me take a good look at myself. I didn’t like what I saw.
I wasn’t proud of the fact I was a recovering addict and I certainly wasn’t proud of the fact that I had to visit a clinic once a fortnight and collect medication from a pharmacy every day. So I made it a rule that, unless it was absolutely necessary, I wouldn’t take him with me on those trips. I know it may sound crazy, but I didn’t want him seeing that side of my past. That was something else he’d helped me with; I really did see it as my past. I saw my future as being clean, living a normal life. I just had to complete the long journey that led to that point.
There were still plenty of reminders of that past and of how far I had still to travel. A few days after I’d had him microchipped, I was rummaging around looking for the new Oyster card that had come through the post when I started emptying the contents of a cupboard in my bedroom.
There, at the back of the cupboard, under a pile of old newspapers and clothes, was a plastic Tupperware box. I recognised it immediately, although I hadn’t seen it for a while. It contained all the paraphernalia I had collected when I was doing heroin. There were syringes, needles, everything I had needed to feed my habit. It was like seeing a ghost. It brought back a lot of bad memories. I saw images of myself that I really had hoped to banish from my mind forever.
I decided immediately that I didn’t want that box in the house any more. I didn’t want it there to remind and maybe even tempt me. And I definitely didn’t want it around Bob, even though it was hidden away from view.
Bob was sitting next to the radiator as usual but got up when he saw me putting my coat on and getting ready to go downstairs. He followed me all the way down to the bin area and watched me as I threw the box into a recycling container for hazardous waste.
‘There,’ I said, turning to Bob who was now fixing me with one of his inquisitive stares. ‘Just doing something I should have done a long time ago.’
Chapter 9
The Escape Artist
Life on the streets is never straightforward. You’ve always got to expect the unexpected. I learned that early on. Social workers always use the word ‘chaotic’ when they talk about people like me. They call our lives chaotic, because they don’t conform to their idea of normality, but it is normality to us. So I wasn’t surprised when, as that first summer with Bob drew to a close and autumn began, life around Covent Garden started to get more complicated. I knew it couldn’t stay the same. Nothing ever did in my life.
Bob was still proving a real crowd-pleaser, especially with tourists. Wherever they came from, they would stop and talk to him. By now I think I’d heard every language under the sun - from Afrikaans to Welsh – and learned the word for cat in all of them. I knew the Czech name, kocka and Russian, koshka; I knew the Turkish, kedi and my favourite, the Chinese, mao. I was really surprised when I discovered their great leader had been a cat!
But no matter what weird or wonderful tongue was being spoken, the message was almost always the same. Everyone loved Bob.
We also had a group of ‘regulars’, people who worked in the area and passed by on their way home in the evening. A few of them would always stop to say hello. One or two had even started giving Bob little presents.
It was the other ‘locals’ who were causing the problems.
To begin with I’d been getting a bit of hassle over at James Street from the Covent Guardians. I’d been continuing to play next to the tube station. On a couple of occasions a Guardian had come over and spoken to me. He’d laid down the law, explaining that the area was for painted statues. The fact that there didn’t seem to be any around at that moment didn’t bother him. ‘You know the rules,’ he kept telling me. I did. But I also knew rules were there to be bent a little when they could be. Again, that was life on the streets. If we were the kind of people who stuck to the rules, we wouldn’t have been there.
So each time the Guardian moved me on, I’d head off elsewhere for a few hours then quietly slip back into James Street. It was a risk worth taking as far as I was concerned. I’d never heard of them calling in the police to deal with someone performing in the wrong place.
The people who were bothering me much more were the staff at the tube station who also now seemed to object to me busking outside their workplace. There were a couple of ticket inspectors in particular who had begun giving me a hard time. It had begun as dirty looks and the odd casual comment when I set myself up against the wall of the tube station. But then one really unpleasant inspector, a big, sweaty guy in a blue uniform, had come over to me one day and been quite threatening.
By now I had come to realise that Bob was a great reader of people. He could spot someone who wasn’t quite right from a distance. He had spotted this guy the minute he started walking in our direction and had started squeezing himself closer to me as he approached.
‘All right, mate?’ I said.
‘Not really. No. You had better piss off - or else,’ he said.
‘Or else what?’ I said, standing my ground.
‘You’ll see,’ he said obviously trying to intimidate me. ‘I’m warning you.’
I knew he had no power outside the tube station and was just trying to spook me. But afterwards I’d made the decision that it might be smart to stay away for a while.
So at first I’d moved to the top of Neal Street, near the junction with Long Acre, still no more than a healthy stone’s throw from the tube station but far enough to be out of sight of the staff. The volume of people passing there wasn’t as great – or always as well-meaning – as the people around Covent Garden. Most times I worked there I’d get some idiot kicking my bag or trying to scare Bob. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable there: he’d curl up in a defensive ball and narrow his eyes to a thin slit whenever I set up there. It was his way of saying: ‘I don’t like it here.’
So after a few days, rather than heading towards Covent Garden as usual, Bob and I climbed off the bus and walked through Soho in the direction of Piccadilly Circus instead.
Of course, we hadn’t left central London - and the borough of Westminster - so there were still rules and regulations. Piccadilly worked in a similar way to Covent Garden; there were certain areas that were designated for buskers. This time I decided to stick to the rules. I knew that the area to the east of Piccadilly Circus on the road leading to Leicester Square was a good spot, specifically for buskers. So I headed there.
Arriving there with Bob, I picked a spot only a few yards away from one of the main entrances to the Piccadilly Circus tube station, outside the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not exhibition.
It was a really busy late afternoon and evening with hundreds of tourists on the street, heading to the West End’s cinemas and theatres. We were soon doing all right, despite the fact that people move so fast around that area, running down the tube entrance. As usual, they slowed down and sometimes stopped when they saw Bob.
I could tell Bob was a little nervous because he curled himself up even tighter than usual around the bridge of my guitar. It was probably the number of people and the fact that he was in unfamiliar surroundings. He was definitely more comfortable when he was in a place that he recognised.
As usual, people from
all over the world were milling around, taking in the sights of central London. There were a lot of Japanese tourists in particular, a lot of whom were fascinated by Bob. I’d soon learned another new word for cat: neko. Everything was fine until around six in the evening, when the crowds really thickened with the beginning of the rush hour. It was at that point that a promotions guy from Ripley’s came out on to the street. He was wearing a big, inflatable outfit that made him look three times his normal size and was making big arm gestures encouraging people to visit Ripley’s. I had no idea how it related to the exhibits inside the building. Maybe they had something on the world’s fattest man? Or the world’s most ridiculous job?
But I could tell immediately that Bob didn’t like the look of him. I sensed him drawing in even closer to me when he first appeared. He was really unsure of the bloke and was staring at him with a look of slight trepidation. I knew exactly where he was coming from; he did look a bit freaky.
To my relief, after a while Bob settled down and seemed to forget about the man. For a while we just ignored him as he carried on trying to persuade people to step into Ripley’s. He was having some success, so he stayed away from us. I was singing a Johnny Cash song, ‘Ring of Fire’, when, for no particular reason, the promotions guy suddenly approached us, pointing at Bob as if he wanted to come and stroke him. I didn’t spot him until he was almost upon us, leaning down in his weird inflatable suit. And by then it was too late.
Bob’s reaction was instantaneous. He just sprung up and bolted, running into the crowds with his new lead trailing behind him. Before I could even react, he’d disappeared, heading towards the entrance to the tube station.
Oh shit, I said to myself, my heart pumping. He’s gone. I’ve lost him.
My instincts took over at once. I jumped up straight away and ran after him. I just left the guitar. I was much more worried about Bob than an instrument. I could find one of those anywhere.