The World According to Bob

by James Bowen

  I gave myself a good talking to. I was being paranoid again. That wasn’t going to happen. There was no reason for it. I had to put those thoughts to one side.

  As I headed home that evening, however, I still had a knot of anxiety in my stomach. I had an awful feeling that this was going to hang over me for a while.

  It was about a week later when the RSPCA inspector appeared again. She was a lot friendlier and more relaxed this time. Bob responded well to her as well as she once more knelt down to check him out.

  I felt a bit more confident this time so engaged her in conversation.

  Again, she made some notes and asked me a couple of questions about what we’d been up to that week and what we had planned in the coming days.

  She sat and watched us interacting together and with the passers-by. RSPCA inspectors are obviously trained to read animal behaviours and she could see that he was perfectly content to be there and to be doing his little stunts for his audience.

  She then headed off again and said she’d be in touch very soon. As she left, she gave Bob another friendly stroke, shook my hand and smiled.

  I carried on for an hour or so, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was about to pack up when I saw a familiar face striding over. It was the housing manager of one of the blocks of flats on Neal Street. We’d clashed before, over my busking, which she objected to for some reason. She had a face like thunder. She had obviously been watching from a window and had seen the RSPCA officer shaking my hand and walking off.

  ‘People are trying to sleep upstairs,’ she said.

  ‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,’ I said, genuinely baffled.

  ‘Never mind that,’ she said as if I was some three-year-old child. ‘You shouldn’t be busking here. Can’t you read the sign?’, she said, pointing at a plaque across the road on the side of the building where she worked.

  ‘But I’m not busking there, I’m busking on the other side of the road,’ I said. ‘And I am entitled to do that if I want. The outreach workers and even the Police have told me as much.’

  Again, she wasn’t interested in having a debate about it. She just wanted to rant and rave at me.

  ‘I’ve had enough of you and that bloody cat, I’m going to call the police and have you removed,’ she said, marching off. She seemed even angrier than when she’d arrived.

  Her argument was actually ridiculous. How on earth could I disturb people from their sleep in the middle of the afternoon? I didn’t have an amplifier, so it wasn’t as if I was blasting out a huge amount of sound. And besides, this was a busy street with a lot of traffic passing through at all hours of the day and night. If anything was going to wake up her residents, it was the constant din of delivery vans and lorries and police sirens. It was crazy.

  Despite all this, however, I knew that she did have the law on her side to an extent. There were restrictions on busking in the area and I had to be very careful. So I kept an eagle eye out for the police for the rest of the afternoon.

  Sure enough, about half an hour after I’d had the confrontation with the lady, I saw a Police van drawing into the street a hundred yards or so away from our pitch.

  ‘Don’t like the look of that, Bob,’ I said, unstrapping my guitar and packing up.

  By the time two policemen had walked over, I was ready to leave.

  ‘You have to move on,’ they said.

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m off,’ I said.

  The incident had really riled me. I became convinced that this lady was the one who had reported me to the RSPCA. Now that tactic seemed to have failed, she had changed tack. She would go to any lengths to drive us away, it seemed.

  Back at the flat that evening, the RSPCA inspector rang me on my mobile and said that I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

  ‘He’s a special creature, and you’re doing a grand job,’ the lady said. ‘My advice to you is to ignore those who tell you any different.’ It was the wisest advice I’d had for a long time. And, unusually for me, I took it.

  Chapter 16

  Doctor Bob

  I was finding it harder and harder to haul myself out of bed in the morning. For the past few weeks I’d actually grown to dread the sight of the late winter sun, leaking light through my bedroom window.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get up. I wasn’t sleeping well and was usually awake by first light in any case. My reasons for wanting to hide, motionless under the duvet, were very different. I knew that the moment I got up, I would just start coughing again.

  I’d suffered from chest problems for some time, but recently they had begun to get really bad. I reasoned it was because I was always on the streets, working outside. But now, no sooner had I got up in the morning, than my lungs and chest were filling up with phlegm and I was coughing really violently almost constantly. At times it was so bad that I was doubling up in pain and I would begin retching and vomiting. It really wasn’t pleasant for me – or anyone else, to be honest. The sounds I was making were pretty horrendous. I was embarrassed to be in public places.

  I was getting really worried about it. I’d been smoking since I was a 13-year-old back in Australia and had inhaled a lot more than just plain cigarettes over the years. Also, an ex-girlfriend from way back had died of tuberculosis after smoking a lot of drugs a few years earlier. The memory of her coughing uncontrollably in her final months had remained with me. I’d heard somewhere that TB was actually contagious. Had I contracted it from her? Were my lungs collapsing? Try as I might, I couldn’t stop all sorts of crazy thoughts whizzing around in my head.

  I had tried to get rid of the coughing by dosing myself with cheap medicines from the supermarket. But it had gotten me nowhere. I’d seen a doctor, but at that stage it could easily have been a seasonal cold and he’d fobbed me off with a suggestion that I should take a few paracetamol, rest and cut down on smoking. That hadn’t achieved much at all.

  Bob had again sensed I was unwell and started paying me attention. He would wrap himself around me as if taking some kind of measurements. I’d learned the lessons of the past and didn’t dismiss him this time.

  ‘Here comes Doctor Bob,’ I joked one day.

  There was no question in my mind that he was performing some kind of diagnosis. When I was lying on the sofa or on the bed, he would often spread himself out on my chest, purring gently.

  I’d read about cats having the power to heal bones with their purring. Apparently there’s something about the frequency at which they vibrate that somehow strengthens bones. I wondered whether he was trying to somehow heal my chest. More worryingly, I wondered whether he knew something I didn’t?

  In a way, that was the scariest thing of all. I knew how intuitive cats are when it comes to sniffing out illness in humans. There’s evidence that they can predict epileptic fits, seizures and other illnesses. One cat I read about, from Yorkshire, would give its male owner ‘strange looks’ before he was about to have a fit. Famously, there was a cat called Oscar who lived in an old people’s home in America and would come and sit with residents who were in their final hours. No one was quite sure whether he was picking up on something visual or whether he was able to tune into the smells produced by the bio-chemical changes in a person’s body when they die. What was in no doubt, however, was the fact that Oscar’s ability to anticipate people’s passing was uncanny, so much so that people dreaded seeing him sidling up to them. It was as if the cat was some kind of Angel of Death. I did hope Bob wasn’t the same.

  After a while I made another appointment, this time with a young doctor that a friend had recommended as being very good. He certainly seemed a little more sympathetic. I told him about the coughing and the vomiting.

  ‘I’d better take a listen to your lungs,’ he said. After checking me out with a stethoscope he made me do a peak-flow check, testing the strength of my breathing and chest. I’d had childhood asthma so I knew my chest wasn’t the strongest.

  He didn’t say too much. He just sat there maki
ng notes, rather too many of them for my liking.

  ‘OK, Mr Bowen, I’d like you to have a chest X-ray,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said, worried already.

  He then printed out a form which he handed to me.

  ‘Take this along to Homerton Hospital and they’ll know what to do,’ he said.

  I knew he was being careful in his language. But there was something about his face that spooked me a little. I didn’t like it.

  I took the form home and stuck it on the sideboard in the front room. I then quietly forgot about it. A small part of me couldn’t face the hassle. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d been hospitalised with DVT. What if I had to be admitted again? What if it was something even worse? I really didn’t like hospitals.

  On top of this, I’d been to Homerton Hospital before and I knew it was a nightmare. I pictured in my mind one of those long days waiting in a queue and just getting frustrated. I told myself that I couldn’t afford to waste a day there not earning money.

  Of course, these were all rather limp excuses. The truth was that I was terrified of what an X-ray might find. It was pure, ostrich-like stubbornness. I assumed that if I stuck my head in the sand and forgot all about it, the coughing and vomiting and all the other unpleasantness would simply go away. Of course it didn’t. It only got worse.

  I reached breaking point one day when I visited the publishers. I had, at last, begun to believe that the book was finally happening. They’d mocked up a cover, with Bob sitting Zen-like on my rucksack. On the back was a picture of me, while inside was a brief note on ‘the author’. I still had to pinch myself to believe it was happening. Unfortunately, I’d had a coughing fit in the middle of the meeting. I’d began retching and could feel like I was ready to throw up. So I’d made an excuse about needing the toilet and dashed off there. I’m sure they had their suspicions that I was up to no good and I wouldn’t have blamed them if they did. I was a recovering drug addict, after all.

  I knew it must have looked pretty bad, and that I couldn’t repeat it in March. The publication of the book was looming into view and I’d been told that I might be doing a few media interviews, even an appearance on television. There was also talk of book signings where I’d meet members of the public. It all seemed pretty far-fetched, but to be on the safe side I decided I had to get to the bottom of this and go for the X-ray.

  By now I’d lost the form, so I went back to the surgery to see the same doctor.

  ‘You don’t seem to have had your X-ray,’ he said, scrolling through the records on his computer.

  ‘No, erm, I didn’t go. I haven’t had time. I’d lose a day if I went there,’ I said, slightly embarrassed. ‘I’ve been writing a book.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, looking at me disbelievingly then tapping away and then printing out another form.

  ‘This is for an emergency appointment. It’s a walk-in service. You won’t have to hang around for long.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, a little reluctantly.

  I knew that, this time, I couldn’t really duck out of it.

  I went along to Homerton and was led into a large room by a couple of nurses, one of whom asked me to take off my shirt and stand in a contraption. She then proceeded to place a big metal plate on my chest before retiring behind a screen.

  Again, it could have been paranoia on my part but I was disconcerted by the fact that she wrote a lot of notes afterwards.

  ‘How did it look?’ I asked her, fishing for a clue.

  ‘Fine, but we will send a full report to your doctor. Should be there in a few days.’

  I took some solace from her reassurance, but was still a bundle of nerves for the next 72 hours.

  I went along to see the doctor with a real sense of foreboding.

  I have a tendency to think the worst so I was braced to hear something terrible. I was slightly taken aback when the doctor looked at the notes attached to his copy of the X-ray images and said: ‘Your lungs are completely clear, Mr Bowen.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. There’s not a single black spot, which is frankly remarkable given that you tell me you’ve been smoking since you were 13.’

  ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘I would go so far as to say that you seem to have super healthy lungs,’ he added.

  ‘So why am I coughing my guts up all the time?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘I suspect you’ve got an infection of some kind. Nothing has shown up in the tests we’ve done. But I think your lungs are simply trying to expel all the rubbish that they are accumulating there. So let’s try and treat the infection,’ he said, prescribing me some heavy duty antibiotics.

  ‘That’s it? Antibiotics,’ I said, relieved but slightly shocked to discover it was that simple.

  ‘Well, let’s see if they work,’ he said. ‘If not we will have to explore things a bit more.’

  I was sceptical. It couldn’t be that simple, I told myself. But it was. Within days my chest was feeling much better and the coughing was easing off.

  My agent, Mary, had been worried about my health. She’d been anxious that the publicity and the signings that would soon be coming up might be too much for me. She had my best interests at heart, I knew that.

  ‘You seem a lot better,’ she told me when we met for a chat about the publication of the book which was now just weeks away.

  But it was when I got another opinion that I really knew I was in the clear.

  I was lying on the bed reading a comic book. Out of nowhere, Bob appeared and jumped up. He slid up to me in the same way he had done over the previous few weeks, placing himself on my chest and purring quietly away. After a moment or two, he put his ear to my chest, doing his feline stethoscope act. He lay there for a moment, listening intently. And then, as quickly as he’d arrived, he’d gone. He just picked himself up and hopped off the bed in the direction of his favourite radiator. I couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘Thanks, Doctor Bob,’ I said.

  Chapter 17

  Basic Instincts

  They say that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. The month had barely begun but the weather was already living up to its reputation. There were days when the wind blowing down the alleyways of Soho and the West End made such a raw, rasping noise it could almost have been a lion’s roar. Some days I struggled to feel the tips of my fingers as I played my guitar. Fortunately, Bob was a little better insulated than me.

  Even now with spring around the corner, he was still sporting his rather luxurious winter coat. His midriff was also still carrying some of the extra weight he’d put on over Christmas. The cold hardly seemed to bother him at all.

  Bob and I missed Angel, but if I was honest, we were enjoying life more in Covent Garden.

  We’d become a double act and seemed somehow more at home amongst the jugglers and fire-eaters, human statues and other street performers that roamed the Piazza and surrounding streets. It was a competitive place, of course, so, as we settled back into daily life in central London, we polished up our act.

  Sometimes I would play my guitar while sitting cross-legged on the pavement with him. He’d always loved that and would drape himself across the body of my guitar, just like he’d done during our early days together, years earlier. We shook hands and he’d stand on his hind legs to collect treats. We also had a new party piece.

  It had been born back at the flat one day while he had been playing with Belle. As usual, he was tossing his shabby old scraggedy mouse around. Belle wanted to take it off him so that she could give it a decent wash.

  ‘God knows what germs it’s collecting, Bob,’ I heard her telling him. ‘It needs a good scrubbing.’

  He was reluctant to surrender his precious plaything. He always was. So she offered him a treat. Choosing between the two was a real dilemma and he dithered for a second before going for the treat. He released the mouse from his jaws long enough to receive the little snack – and for Belle to whisk the toy from under hi
s nose.

  ‘Well done, Bob,’ she said afterwards.

  ‘Give me five,’ she said, putting her hand in the air like an American footballer or basketball player, inviting his team-mates to celebrate a score.

  I was sitting there and saw him raise his paw to give her an acknowledegment. ‘That was cool,’ I laughed. ‘Bet you can’t get him to do it again.’

  ‘Bet I can,’ Belle said, before proceeding to do exactly that.

  Since then he’d come to associate it with receiving a treat. On Neal Street it had pulled in all sorts of admirers, including some rather famous ones.

  It was around 4pm on a Saturday afternoon and a couple of little girls had stopped to admire Bob. They were about nine or ten years old and were accompanied by a small group of adults, including a couple of big, burly bouncer-like guys in dark glasses. To judge by the way they were anxiously surveying the scene while the girls stroked Bob they must have been security minders.

  ‘Daddy, look at this,’ one of the girls said excitedly.

  ‘Oh yeah. That’s a cool cat,’ a voice said.

  I froze to the spot. I recognised the voice immediately.

  ‘It can’t be,’ I said. But it was.

  I turned round and standing behind me was the unmistakeable figure of Sir Paul McCartney.

  I wouldn’t have expected one of the greatest figures in popular music of all time to engage with a lowly street performer. He was, after all, in a slightly different league to me when it came to knocking out a tune. But he seemed charming.

  I had my early edition of the book alongside me on the floor and saw it catch his eye. I also had a wad of flyers advertising the first book signing the publishers had organised. It was now just three days away.

  The event was going to mark the beginning – and probably the end – of my career as a published author. I was feeling apprehensive about it already and had been frantically handing the flyers out to anyone who showed an interest, in the hope that I’d at least avoid the embarrassment of sitting in an empty bookshop the following week. I felt sure if I fished around in the bins of Covent Garden I’d find most of them there.