James Bowen - A Street Cat Named Bob

‘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.’

I’d just looked at her and said: ‘Do you have children?’

‘Erm, yes, as a matter of fact I do,’ she spluttered, a bit thrown.

‘You do, OK. How much for your youngest child?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘How much for your youngest child?’

‘I hardly think that’s got anything to do—’

I cut her off. ‘Actually, I think it does have a lot to do with it. As far as I’m concerned Bob is my child, he’s my baby. And for you to ask me whether I’d sell him is exactly the same as me asking you how much you want for your youngest child.’

She’d just stormed off. I never saw her again.

The attitude of the tube station staff was the complete polar opposite of this. One day I was talking to one of the ticket inspectors, Vanika. She loved Bob and was chuckling at the way countless people were stopping and talking to him and taking his picture.

‘He’s putting Angel tube station on the map, isn’t he?’ she laughed.

‘He is, you should put him on the staff, like that cat in Japan who is a stationmaster. He even wears a hat,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure we’ve got any vacancies,’ she giggled.

‘Well, you should at least give him an ID card or something,’ I joked.

She looked at me with a thoughtful look on her face and went away. I thought nothing more about it.

A couple of weeks later Bob and I were sitting outside the station one evening when Vanika appeared again. She had a big grin on her face. I was immediately suspicious.

‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘Nothing, I just wanted to give Bob this,’ she smiled. She then produced a laminated travel card with Bob’s photograph on it.

‘That’s fantastic,’ I said.

‘I got the picture off the Internet,’ she said to my slight amazement. What the hell was Bob doing on the Internet?

‘So what does it actually mean?’ I said.

‘It means that he can travel as a passenger for free on the underground,’ she laughed.

‘I thought that cats went free anyway?’ I smiled.

‘Well, it actually means we are all very fond of him. We think of him as part of the family.’

It took a lot of willpower to stop myself from bursting into tears.

The spring of 2009 should have been on its way, but the evenings remained dark and dismal. By the time I finished selling the Big Issue at Angel around seven o’clock most evenings, dusk was already descending and the streetlights were blazing into life, as were the pavements.

After being quiet during the early months of the year when there were fewer tourists around, the Angel had suddenly come alive. The early evening rush hour was as busy as I’d ever seen it with what seemed like hundreds of thousands of people pouring in and out of the tube station.

Maybe it was the well-heeled crowds. The change had attracted other people to the area as well – unfortunately.

Living on the streets of London gives you really well-developed radar when it comes to sussing out people whom you want to avoid at all costs. It was around 6.30 or 7p.m., during the busiest part of the day for me, when a guy who had set off that radar a few times loomed into view.

I’d seen him once or twice before, luckily from a distance. He was a really rough-looking character. I know I wasn’t exactly the most well-groomed guy on the streets of London, but this guy was really scraggy. He looked like he was sleeping rough. His skin was all red and blotchy and his clothes were smeared in dirt. What really stuck out about him, however, was his dog, a giant Rottweiler. It was black with brown markings and from the moment I first saw it I could tell immediately that it was aggressive. The sight of them walking around together reminded me of an old drawing of Bill Sikes and his dog Bull’s Eye in Oliver Twist . You could tell they were never far away from trouble.

The dog was with him this evening as he arrived near the tube station entrance and sat down to talk to some other shifty-looking characters, who had been sitting there drinking lager for an hour or more. I didn’t like the look of them at all.

Almost immediately I could see that the Rottweiler had spotted Bob and was straining at the lead, dying to come and have a go at him. The guy seemed to have the big dog under control, but it was by no means certain that it would stay that way. He seemed more interested in talking to these other guys – and getting stuck into their lager.

As it happened, I was in the process of packing up for the evening in any case. The gang’s arrival only cemented that decision in my mind. I had a bad feeling about them – and the dog. I wanted to get myself and Bob as far away from them as possible.

I began gathering up my Big Issue s and placing my other bits and pieces in my rucksack. All of a sudden I heard this really loud, piercing bark. What happened next seemed like it was in slow motion, a bad action scene from a bad action movie.

I turned round to see a flash of black and brown heading towards me and Bob. The guy had obviously not tethered the lead correctly. The Rottweiler was on the loose. My first instinctive reaction was to protect Bob, so I just jumped in front of the dog. Before I knew it he’d run into me, bowling me over. As I fell I managed to wrap my arms around the dog and we ended up on the floor, wrestling. I was shouting and swearing, trying to get a good grip on its head so that it couldn’t bite me, but the dog was simply too strong.

Rottweilers are powerful dogs and I have no doubt that if the fight had gone on a few seconds longer, I’d have come off second best. God only knows what sorts of wounds it would have inflicted. Fortunately I was suddenly aware of another voice shouting and I felt the power of the dog waning as it was pulled in another direction.