The World According to Bob

by James Bowen

  I felt a mix of anger and despair. I was desperate for a change in my fortunes. I didn’t think I could take much more of this life. But, try as I might, I couldn’t see how on earth I was going to break free. Suddenly all that talk with my father of jobs and training seemed ridiculous, a complete pipe dream. Who was going to pay a recovering junkie a decent salary? Who was going to hire someone with a curriculum vitae as barren as the Australian outback where I spent part of my childhood? On that day, feeling as low as I did, the answer was as plain and bloody obvious as the nose on my face: no one.

  Chapter 11

  Two Cool Cats

  One lunchtime in September 2010, I arrived at Angel tube to be greeted by Davika. She was a ticket attendant and had been one of our most loyal friends since Bob and I had started working in Islington. She often brought Bob a little treat or something to drink, especially during hot weather. Today, however, she simply wanted to deliver a message.

  ‘Hi James, there was someone here looking for you and Bob,’ she said. ‘He was a reporter from one of the local papers. He asked me to call him back if you were willing to talk to him.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I guess I don’t mind. Tell him he can come and see us during our regular hours.’

  It wasn’t the first time someone had paid us attention. There were a couple of films on the internet about Bob and I that had been viewed by a few thousand people and a couple of London bloggers had written nice things about us, but no one from the newspapers had shown any interest. To be honest, I took it with a pinch of salt. I’d had all sorts of weird and wonderful approaches over the years, 99 per cent of which came to nought.

  A couple of days later, however, I arrived at Angel to find this guy outside the tube station waiting for us.

  ‘Hi James, my name is Peter,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if I could do an interview with you for the Islington Tribune?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  He proceeded to take a picture of Bob perched on my shoulder with the Angel tube station sign behind us. I felt a bit self-conscious. I hadn’t exactly dressed up for the occasion and was wearing a thick, early winter’s beard, but he seemed happy enough with the results.

  We then had a bit of a chat about my past and how we’d met. It wasn’t quite the Spanish inquisition, but it clearly gave him enough ammunition for his piece which he said would appear in the next edition of the Tribune. Again, I didn’t really take it too seriously. I worked on the principle that I’d believe it when I saw it. It was easier that way.

  It was a few days later on a Thursday morning, that Rita and Lee, the co-ordinators at The Big Issue stall on Islington Green called me over.

  ‘Hey James, you and Bob are in the paper today,’ Rita said, producing a copy of the Tribune.

  ‘Are we?’ I asked.

  Sure enough there was a half-page article on us written by Peter Gruner. The headline read:

  TWO COOL CATS . . .

  THE BIG ISSUE SELLER

  AND A STRAY CALLED BOB.

  The story began:

  Not since the legendary Dick Whittington has a man and his cat become such unlikely celebrities on the streets of Islington. The Big Issue seller James Bowen and his docile ginger cat Bob, who go everywhere together, have been attracting comments since they first appeared outside Angel Tube station. The story of how they met – widely reported in blogs on the internet – is one of such extraordinary pathos that it seems only a matter of time before we get a Hollywood film.

  I had to laugh out loud at some of the journalistic licence. Dick Whittington? Hollywood film? And I wasn’t terribly pleased with the way I looked in the photo, sporting that thick beard. But it was a lovely piece, I had to admit.

  I popped into the newsagent and grabbed a few copies to take home. Bob saw me looking at the piece again on the bus that evening and did a kind of double take. It didn’t happen very often, but for a split second he had this slightly baffled expression on his face. It was as if he was saying: ‘No, it can’t be. Can it? Really?’

  Plenty of people knew it was really us though. And the publicity was soon reaping dividends, if only small ones. I’d agreed to do the interview mainly because I thought it would be good for sales of my magazines. I thought that by raising my profile it might encourage a few more customers to stop and talk to me at Angel tube station. And it did. In the days that followed, more and more people started saying hello to us not only at Angel, but on the bus and on the street.

  One morning I was taking Bob to do his business on Islington Green when a group of schoolchildren appeared in front of us. They could only have been about nine or ten-years-old and were in very smart, blue uniforms.

  ‘Look, it’s Bob,’ one of them, a little boy, said, pointing excitedly.

  It was clear the rest of the class didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  ‘Who’s Bob?’ a voice asked.

  ‘That cat there on that man’s shoulders. He’s famous. My mum says he looks like Garfield,’ the boy said.

  I was touched that we were being recognised by young children but I wasn’t quite so sure I was happy about the comparison with the world’s best-known cartoon cat. Garfield was famous for being obese, obsessed with eating, lazy and slightly obnoxious. He also hated any form of exercise or hard work. Bob had always been in fine fettle, ate pretty sensibly and had the friendliest, most laid back attitude of any cat I’d ever come across. And no one could ever call him work-shy.

  There were lots of similar encounters during the days after the piece was published, but the most significant came from someone I’d spoken to once before.

  I’d already been approached one evening by an American lady who said she was a literary agent. Her name was Mary. She told me she lived nearby and had noticed Bob and I outside the tube station many times.

  She’d asked me if I had considered writing a book about my life with Bob. I said I would think about it, but, truth be told, I hadn’t really taken her seriously. How could I? I was a recovering drug addict who was struggling to survive selling The Big Issue. I didn’t write a diary. I didn’t even write texts on my mobile phone. Yes, I loved to read and consumed all the books I could lay my hands on. But, as far as I could see, at least, writing a book was about as realistic as building myself a space rocket or running for Parliament. In other words, it was a complete and utter non-starter.

  Fortunately, she’d persisted and we’d spoken again. She had anticipated my concerns and suggested that I meet a writer who was experienced at helping people tell their stories. She told me he was busy at the time, but that he would be free towards the end of the year and would come and see me. After the Islington Tribune piece she contacted me again to confirm that I was happy to meet him.

  If he thought there was a book in Bob and me, he would spend time with me, getting me to tell my story then helping to shape it up and write it. She would then try and sell it to a publisher. Again, it sounded too far-fetched for words.

  I didn’t hear anything for a while, but then, towards the end of November, I got a call from this writer guy. His name was Garry.

  I agreed to meet him and he took me for a coffee in the Design Centre across the road from my pitch. We had Bob with us, so we had to sit outdoors in the biting cold. Bob was a better judge of character than me, so I made a point of going to the toilet and leaving them alone a couple of times. They got on famously, which I took to be a good omen.

  I could tell he was trying to work out whether my story was suitable for a book and was as open as I felt was possible.

  As far as I was concerned, I really didn’t want to have to go into the dark side of my life. But as we spoke, he said something that struck a chord. He could see that Bob and I were both broken souls. We’d come together when we were both at rock bottom. We’d helped mend each other’s lives.

  ‘That’s the story you have to tell,’ he told me.

  I had never thought of it in those terms. Instinctively, I knew that Bob
had been a hugely positive force in my life. I’d even seen me on a video on YouTube saying that he’d saved my life. I guessed that, to some extent, it was true. But I just couldn’t imagine that being a story that would interest anyone.

  Even when I had seen Garry again for another, longer chat, it all seemed a bit of a pipe dream. There were so many ifs and maybes. If Garry and Mary were willing to work with me, maybe a publisher would be interested in releasing a book. I really couldn’t see all three of those things happening. The obstacles seemed too great. As the festive season and the end of the year loomed into view, I told myself there was more chance of Father Christmas being real. Bob and I had grown to love Christmas together. The first year we’d been together we’d spent it alone in the flat, sharing a couple of ready meals and watching TV. Given that I’d spent several of the past ten Christmases on my own, in a hostel or off my face on heroin, it had felt like the happiest holiday ever.

  I’d missed the second one by travelling to Australia, but ever since then we’d been together.

  During the run up to Christmas, we had, as usual, been given a host of presents, from scarves for Bob to gift certificates for both of us at shops like Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and H&M. There was no question about which was Bob’s favourite: an advent calendar filled with his favourite treats. He’d fallen in love with it instantly, naturally, and had quickly learned to make a fuss first thing in the morning when it was time to produce the latest snack on the countdown to Christmas.

  We also got a fantastic Santa Paws outfit. Belle had made me one for our very first Christmas together but it had somehow got lost. This one had a snug red jacket and a very striking red hat for Bob to wear during the festive season. Passers-by at Angel were besotted by it.

  When it came to Christmas Day itself Bob spent more time playing with the wrapping paper than the actual present itself. He rolled around on the carpet, nibbling at it. I left him to it and spent the afternoon watching television and playing video games. Belle popped round for a few hours. It felt like a real family Christmas to me.

  It was a couple of weeks into the New Year when I got a phone call from Mary telling me that a major London publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, wanted to meet me – and Bob, of course.

  A few days later, I went along to their offices in a rather grand tower block near Tottenham Court Road. At first, the security people weren’t going to let Bob into the building. They looked baffled when we said he was going to be the subject of a book. I could see their point. Hodder’s other authors included people like John Grisham and Gordon Ramsay. What on earth would they be doing publishing a book about a scruffy-looking bloke and his ginger tom cat?

  Someone from the publishers came down to sort it out, however, and after that Bob and I were both made to feel very welcome. In fact Bob was treated like visiting royalty. He was given a little goodie bag with some little snacks and catnip toys and allowed to wander around the offices exploring. Wherever he went he was greeted like some kind of celebrity. People were snapping away on their phones and cooing over him. I knew he had star quality but I didn’t realise it was this potent.

  I, on the other hand, had to sit in on a meeting in which a long line of people popped in to talk about their different specialities, from marketing and publicity to production and sales. There was all sorts of business talk about publishing dates and production schedules. They might as well have been talking Serbo-Croat or Mandarin. But the long and the short of it was that they had seen some of the material Garry and I had worked on and they wanted to publish a book based on it. Between them, they’d even come up with a title: A Street Cat Named Bob. Tennessee Williams may have been spinning in his grave, but I thought it was very clever.

  Soon I was being asked to visit the literary agency where Mary worked over in Chelsea. Again, it was a very grand and slightly intimidating place. They were more used to welcoming Nobel and Booker prize winners so there were a few odd looks when people realised that a Big Issue seller and his cat had walked into their rarefied atmosphere. While Bob explored the offices, Mary ran me through the contract that I’d been offered by the publishers. She told me it was a good deal, especially given I was an ‘unknown author’. I placed my trust in her and signed all the paperwork.

  Over the course of the last ten years I’d been more used to signing drug prescriptions and police release forms. It felt weird scrawling my name, but also, I had to confess, very, very exciting.

  There were times when I woke up in the morning thinking it was all a figment of my imagination. This couldn’t really be happening. Not to me.

  I didn’t want Garry coming round to my flat at that point. So I began meeting him once or twice a week in Islington. There were pros and cons to the arrangement. On the plus side, it meant that I could top up my money and spend a few hours working afterwards. But it also meant that I had Bob with me, which meant that finding somewhere to sit and talk was a challenge, especially when the weather was bad. The local cafés wouldn’t let a cat on the premises and there wasn’t a library nearby. So we had to find alternatives.

  The first people to invite us in from the cold, ironically, were Waterstones, the bookshop on Islington Green. They knew me in there. I’d often pop in with Bob to look through the Science Fiction section. The manager there, Alan, was on duty and we asked him if he minded us working upstairs in a quiet corner. He not only said yes, he got a member of staff to organise two chairs for us in the history section. He even brought a couple of coffees in.

  When the sun was out, we used a place on the Essex Road that had tables outside. I could smoke there as well, which was a bonus for me.

  Garry and I were determined that the book wouldn’t just be about my life with Bob. We wanted it to offer people some insights into life on the streets. I wanted to get across to people how easy it was for people like me to fall through the cracks, to become forgotten and overlooked by society. Of course, in order to do that, I had to tell my ‘backstory’ as well.

  I really wasn’t looking forward to that part of the exercise. Talking about myself wasn’t something that came easily to me, especially when it came to the darker stuff. And there was a lot of that. There were aspects of my life as an addict that I had buried away in the farthest corners of my mind. I’d made choices that I was deeply ashamed about, done things that I didn’t want to share with anyone, let alone put in a book. But once we began talking, to my surprise, it was less painful than I’d feared. I couldn’t afford to see a psychologist or a psycho-analyst but there were times when talking to Garry was as good as talking to a shrink. It forced me to confront some painful truths and was strangely cathartic, helping me to understand myself a little better.

  I knew I wasn’t the easiest person to deal with. I had a defiant, self-destructive streak that had consistently got me into trouble. It was pretty obvious that I’d had a childhood that had messed me up. My parents’ divorce and my peripatetic years, flitting between the UK and Australia, hadn’t exactly been stabilising forces. I’d always tried really hard to fit in and be popular as a kid, but it had never worked. I’d ended up trying too hard – and become a misfit and an outcast as a result.

  By the time I was an adolescent my behavioural problems had begun. I was angry and rebellious and fell out with my mother and stepfather. For a period of around two years, between the ages of 11 and 13, I’d been constantly in and out of the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children outside Perth. At one point I’d been diagnosed as either bi-polar or manic depressive. I can’t remember exactly which it was. They seemed to come up with a new diagnosis every week. Either way, the upshot was that I was prescribed various medications, including lithium.

  The memories from that time were mixed.

  One vivid memory that sprung to mind was of going into the surgery at the Princess Margaret for a weekly blood test. The walls of the surgery were plastered in posters of pop and rock stars so I had the blood tests done while staring at a picture of Gladys Knight and the
Pips.

  Each time the doctor assured me that the injection he was about to give me wouldn’t hurt. ‘It will only feel like a scratch,’ he’d say, but it was always more than that. It was kind of ironic, I suppose, but I’d had a phobia about needles for years after that. It was a measure of how deep my drug addiction had been that I’d somehow forgotten this and happily injected myself on a daily basis.

  On a happier note, I remembered how, after leaving the hospital, I had wanted to give something back and had begun donating boxes of comic books. I’d managed to get myself some work experience in a comic book shop nearby and had persuaded the boss to let me take boxes of unsold magazines for the kids at the hospital. I’d spent many hours playing air hockey and watching video games in the activity room they had in the children’s ward so I knew they’d all appreciate something decent to read.

  In the main, however, the memories of that time were pretty grim. They opened my eyes to aspects of my youth that I’d never really examined before.

  At one point, for instance, we were working on the book on the day after I’d watched a film by the documentary-maker Louis Theroux about how parents in America were using more and more psychoactive medication to treat their kids for disorders like ADHD, Asperger’s and bipolar disorders.

  It occurred to me suddenly that this was exactly what had happened to me. And it struck me that being treated like this must have had a huge impact on me when I was young. It made me wonder what had come first. It was a chicken and egg question: had I been given the drugs because I was acting up? Or did I start acting up because of all the visits to doctors who convinced me that there must be something wrong with me? Perhaps most scary of all, what effect did all that medication have on me and my young personality? As a young kid I’d considered myself quite a happy-go-lucky character, but since that time I had been what I suppose you’d call ‘troubled’. I’d struggled to fit into society and suffered from depression and mood swings. Was there a link? I had no idea.