A Street Cat Named Bob

by James Bowen

  I was soon saving up a bit of cash, which I kept in a little tea caddy I’d found. Slowly but surely it began to fill up. As my departure date loomed into view, I had enough to make the trip.

  I headed to Heathrow with a heavy heart. I’d said goodbye to Bob at Belle’s flat. He’d not looked too concerned, but then he had no idea I was going to be away for the best part of six weeks. I knew he’d be safe with Belle but it still didn’t stop me fretting. I really had become a paranoid parent.

  If I’d imagined the trip to Australia was going to be a nice, relaxing adventure I was sorely mistaken. The thirty-six hours or so it took me was an absolute nightmare.

  It started quietly enough. The Air China flight to Beijing took eleven hours and was uneventful. I watched the in-flight movie and had a meal but I found it hard to sleep because I wasn’t feeling fantastic. It was partly because of my medication but partly also because of the damp London weather. Maybe I’d spent too many hours selling the Big Issue in the pouring rain. I had a horrendous cold and kept sneezing all the way through the flight. I got a few funny looks from the air stewardesses and some of my fellow passengers when I had a bad attack, but thought nothing of it until we landed in Beijing.

  As we taxied towards the terminal, there was an announcement from the captain over the tannoy. It was in Chinese first but there was then an English translation. It basically said that we should stay in our seats until we were asked to leave the plane.

  ‘Odd,’ I thought.

  The next thing I saw was two uniformed Chinese officials wearing facemasks. They were walking down the aisle - straight towards me. When they got to me, one of them produced a thermometer.

  An air stewardess was standing there to translate. ‘These men are from the Chinese government. They need to take your temperature,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ I said, sensing this wasn’t the time to argue.

  I opened wide and sat there while one of the officials kept looking at his watch. After they’d muttered something in Chinese the air hostess said: ‘You need to go with these men to undergo some routine medical checks.’

  It was 2008 and we were at the height of the swine flu scare. China, in particular, was being incredibly nervous about it. I’d watched a report on the news a few days earlier in which they’d talked about the way people were being turned away from China if there was the slightest hint of them being infected. A lot of people were being placed in quarantine and held there for days.

  So I was a bit apprehensive as I walked off with them. I had visions of me being holed up in some Chinese isolation ward for a month.

  They ran all sorts of tests on me, from blood tests to swabs. They probably found all sorts of interesting things - but they found no trace of swine flu, SARS or anything else contagious. After a couple of hours, a mildly apologetic official told me that I was free to go.

  The only problem was that I now had to make my way back to my connecting flight and I was lost inside the humongous, hangar-like space that is Beijing airport.

  I had about three hours to find my luggage and my connecting flight. It had been years since I’d spent any time in an airport terminal. I’d forgotten how big and soulless they were, and this one was especially so. I had to take a train from one part of Terminal 3 to another part.

  After a few wrong turns I found my connecting flight less than an hour before it was due to take off.

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I sank into my seat on the plane and slept like a log on the flight to Melbourne, mainly through exhaustion. But then at Melbourne I hit another snag.

  As I made my way through the customs area I was suddenly aware of a Labrador dog sniffing animatedly at my luggage.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind coming this way with us,’ a customs guard said.

  ‘Oh God,’ I thought. ‘I’m never going to get to meet my mother.’

  I was taken to an inspection room where they started going through my stuff. They then ran an electric drug detector over my bag. I could tell there was a problem from the expressions on their faces.

  ‘I’m afraid your luggage has tested positive for cocaine,’ the guard said.

  I was gobsmacked. I had no idea how that was possible. I didn’t take cocaine and didn’t really know anyone who did. None of my friends could afford it.

  As it turned out, they said that it wasn’t illegal for me to have traces of it for private use.

  ‘If you are a casual user and it’s for private consumption all you have to do is tell us and you can be on your way,’ the guard said.

  I explained my situation. ‘I’m on a drug recovery programme so I don’t take anything casually,’ I said. I then showed them a letter I had from my doctor explaining why I was on Subutex.

  Eventually they had to relent. They gave me a final pat down and released me. By the time I emerged from the customs area, almost an hour had passed. I had to get another flight down to Tasmania, which took another few hours. By the time I got there, it was early evening and I was utterly exhausted.

  Seeing my mother was wonderful. She was waiting at the airport in Tasmania and gave me a couple of really long hugs. She was crying. She was pleased to see me alive, I think.

  I was really happy to see her too although I didn’t cry.

  The cottage was every bit as lovely as she’d described it in her letter. It was a big, airy bungalow with huge garden space at the back. It was surrounded by farmland with a river running by the bottom of her land. It was a very peaceful, picturesque place. Over the next month I just hung out there, relaxing, recovering and rebooting myself.

  Within a couple of weeks I felt like a different person. The anxieties of London were - literally – thousands of miles away, just over ten thousand, to be precise. My mum’s maternal instincts kicked in and she made sure I was fed well. I could feel my strength returning. I could also sense me and my mother were repairing our relationship.

  At first we didn’t talk in great depth about things, but in time I began to open up. Then one night as we sat on the veranda, watching the sun go down, I had a couple of drinks and suddenly it all came out. It wasn’t a big confession, there was no Hollywood drama. I just talked . . . and talked.

  The emotional floodgates had been waiting to burst open for a while now. For years I had used drugs to escape from my emotions, in fact to make sure I didn’t have any. Slowly but surely I’d changed that. And now my emotions were coming back.

  As I explained some of the lows I’d been through over the last ten years, my mother looked horrified, as any parent would have done.

  ‘I guessed you weren’t doing so great when I saw you, but I never guessed it was that bad,’ she said, close to tears.

  At times she just sat there with her head in her hands muttering the word ‘why’ every now and again.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your passport?’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me and ask for help?’

  ‘Why didn’t you contact your father?’

  Inevitably, she blamed herself for it. She said she felt like she’d let me down, but I told her I didn’t blame her. The reality was that I had left myself down. Ultimately, there was no one else to blame.

  ‘You didn’t decide to sleep in cardboard boxes and get off your face on smack every night. I did,’ I said at one point. That set her off crying as well.

  Once we’d broken the ice, so to speak, we talked much more easily. We talked a little about the past and my childhood in Australia and England. I felt comfortable being honest with her. I said that I’d felt she’d been a distant figure when I’d been younger and that being raised by nannies and moving around a lot had had an impact on me.

  Naturally that upset her, but she argued that she’d been trying to provide an income for us, to keep a roof over our heads. I took her point, but I still wished she’d been there more for me.

  We laughed a lot too; it wasn’t all dark conversation. We admitted how similar we were and chuckled at some o
f the arguments we used to have when I was a teenager.

  She admitted that there had been a big conflict of personality there.

  ‘I’m a strong personality and so are you. That’s where you get it from,’ she said.

  But we spent most of the time talking about the present rather than the past. She asked me all sorts of questions about the rehab process I’d been through and what I was hoping to achieve now that I was almost clean. I explained that it was still a case of taking one step at a time, but that, with luck, I’d be totally clean within a year or so. Sometimes she just simply listened, which was something she hadn’t always done. And so did I. I think we both learned a lot more about each other, not least the fact that deep down we were very similar, which is why we clashed so much when I was younger.

  During those long chats, I often talked about Bob. I’d brought a photo of him with me, which I showed everyone and anyone who took an interest.

  ‘He looks a smart cookie,’ my mother smiled when she saw it.

  ‘Oh, he is,’ I said, beaming with pride. ‘I don’t know where I’d been now if it wasn’t for Bob.’

  Spending time in Australia was great. It allowed me to clear my mind. It also allowed me to take stock of where I was - and where I wanted to go from here.

  There was a part of me that hankered to move back. I had family here. There was more of a support network than I had in London, certainly. But I kept thinking about Bob and the fact that he’d be as lost without me as I’d be without him. I didn’t take the idea seriously for very long. By the time I’d started my sixth week in Australia, I was mentally already on the plane back to England.

  I said goodbye to my mother properly this time. She came to the airport with me and waved me off on my way to Melbourne, where I was going to spend some time with my godparents. They had been quite significant figures in my youth. They had owned what was then the biggest private telecom company in Australia and were the first to form a radio pager company in the country so had a lot of money at one point. As a boy, naturally, I used to love spending time at the mansion they’d built in Melbourne. I even lived with them for a while when me and my mother weren’t getting on very well.

  Their reaction to my story was the same as my mother’s - they were shocked.

  They offered to help me out financially and even to find me work in Australia. But again I had to explain that I had responsibilities back in London.

  The journey back was much less eventful than the outward trip. I felt much better, fitter and healthier and probably looked it so I didn’t attract so much attention at customs or immigration control. I was so rested and revived by my time in Australia that I slept for most of the trip.

  I was dying to see Bob again, although a part of me was concerned that he might have changed or even forgotten me. I needn’t have had any concerns.

  The minute I walked into Belle’s flat his tail popped up and he bounced off her sofa and ran up to me. I’d brought him back a few little presents, a couple of stuffed kangaroo toys. He was soon clawing away at one of them. As we headed home that evening, he immediately scampered up my arm and on to my shoulders as usual. In an instant the emotional and physical journey I’d made to the other side of the world was forgotten. It was me and Bob against the world once more. It was as if I’d never been away.

  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 carrie
d 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.’