Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

He slipped outside with a cigarillo between his fingers and let the door slam shut behind him.

Gareth sighed, Billy’s words of warning rattling around in his head. The old-timer had told him, ‘You’ve got to move on. If you don’t move every three or four years, people will think you’ve given up, and they’ll never entertain giving you another job.’

Was he right? Gareth didn’t know. Like Billy, during his five years at the station he had seen plenty of colleagues become set in their ways but – funnily enough – for all his years of service, Billy wasn’t one of them. Though some long-service employees could become very black and white in their view of things, Billy could not only see shades of grey but also in technicolour – sometimes literally. He liked to open things up and try out new ideas, and one of his recent innovations was to transform part of the station concourse into an art gallery; a vision that would come to fruition the following spring. He was a pioneer when it came to the environment, too, and had already won an award for his novel ways of making the station run more greenly. Billy’s philosophy was that the station didn’t just have to be a terminus, it could be a hub of the community and the team could make it really nice.

Nor was he the only one at Huddersfield with those ideas – Andy Croughan had started a library where people could leave and take books for free; later, the concourse would display local poetry and get involved in creative writing projects. It was part of what made Huddersfield so special and why Gareth loved working there so much – it wasn’t a big, impersonal station as some of the major hubs could be, but neither was it a quiet little place off the beaten track where people had given up. No, Huddersfield was a place where people made things happen.

And he was among those people, Gareth realised suddenly. He glanced down at Felix, who glowered at him from within her big white cone. He had made the station cat happen. It had given him a little bit of faith in himself. Maybe Billy is right , he thought. Maybe I should keep an eye out, see if anything comes up .

In the meantime, he had a poorly kitten to care for – and he wasn’t the only one on duty. Everyone passing through the office had a kind word – and more – for Felix on her sick bed. Poor thing, she really was very distressed. She took to wandering the office with her favourite brown bear clutched in her mouth, just walking up and down, mewing.

‘What’s up with you? Do you want to go out?’ Angie Hunte would ask her, as Felix cried plaintively. But the cat would just pick up the bear and go back to her slow, sad meandering. Both Angie and Angela thought she treated it like her baby; perhaps, they mused, it was Felix’s way of mothering now that she herself would never have her own kittens.

In the light of Felix’s fretfulness, lots of the team – independently of one another – took to giving her comfort as often as they could. As Felix turned her big green eyes on first one colleague and then another, the colleague favoured with her gaze would crouch down and slip a hand into their pocket, or their handbag or their desk drawer, from where they would retrieve a bag of treats that they had brought for her. They’d shake one out into their palm and Felix would stick out her little pink tongue and snatch it up, gratefully, as if she hadn’t been fed for a week.

‘Miaow!’ she’d say, plaintively, blinking those big green eyes.

‘OK, one more,’ the colleague would say, and another treat, or two, or three, would go the same way as the first, as Felix perfected the art of the pitiful stare.

Knowing no better, some colleagues even gave the recuperating kitten saucers of milk, thinking it would cheer her. Of course, she absolutely loved it, lapping it up eagerly and flicking tasty white droplets onto her velvety black nose.

As Felix’s post-op health gradually improved and she started going outside again, Angie discovered she was stumbling over her in the most unlikely places.

‘Why are you sitting there, Felix?’ she would ask in confusion.

But Felix was a clever little kitty. She had sussed out which colleagues – and it was most of them – kept treats for her hidden in their desk drawers or their pockets, and by now she had located all the hotspots. The only one who knew where they all were was Felix, and she’d hover in the relevant area until the magical treats arrived. Every member of the team had a little something on their person to comfort or tempt the cat – but they little realised that every single colleague on each separate shift was dishing out the same. Kittens at that age are recommended to have three meals a day, but as her multitude of carers nursed her back to health, Felix was getting fed a lot more than that …

But who could resist that lovely kitten face? Felix started to find her voice, too – and if she wanted food she would mew. Loudly. Until you’d fed her. Cats can change their miaows to manipulate humans, often imitating the cry of a newborn human baby when they want food. Felix had clearly mastered this art and was playing them all like a master puppeteer.

But even though her adoring fans readily gave in to her every whim, the kitten wasn’t averse to making her own luck too. One Sunday shift, when it was quiet, Gareth decided to nip to Tesco and pick up a bit of shopping for home, including some Go-Kat kitten biscuits for his little Cosmo, who was only a few months older than Felix. He dropped the bag in the corner of the office and went back to his announcing, thinking nothing more of it. It was only at the end of his shift, as he picked up the carrier bag in readiness to catch his train home, that he realised a cat burglar had been at work. Someone had torn through the bottom of the bag with what looked suspiciously like sharp claws, then chewed a hole in the bottom of the cardboard box and helped themselves to biscuits.

Gareth surveyed the damage and glared accusingly at Felix. She was busy washing herself, looking as innocent as anything, and simply batted her eyelashes at him when he said sternly, ‘Felix!’

She never did admit to doing it. Gareth supposed it could have been Andy …

As if coping with the aftermath of the operation wasn’t enough for poor old Felix, around this same time she also had to contend with another big change. While she had been settling into Huddersfield station and getting glamorised with her sparkly collar and fuchsia name tag and harness, the station itself had been undergoing something of a makeover too. The back offices were being entirely rebuilt and the new layout was now ready for action. The team would be moving into the swish new set-up, while the old offices would be knocked down.

The new offices were still in the same location – Platform 1 – and they were still by lost property and still had a customer-service window, but they were very different inside. Gone was the large, communal, carpeted announcer’s office; that became a tiny, tiled room just big enough for a desk and a microphone. The space behind the scenes was dedicated instead to smart staff facilities: male and female locker rooms, a shower, a mess room/kitchen, and a brand-new office for the team leaders, with enough room for two desks and a couple of filing cabinets. The shower now became a favourite Felix spot and was where her bedding (a black blanket with white paw-prints, among others) was placed permanently for her, at the foot of the towel rack. Some wag made a proprietorial ‘this is my room’ wooden sign saying ‘Felix’, which hung above her bed for a while – until she knocked it down, thinking it was a toy. All the new rooms opened off one long corridor which now became the setting for one of Felix’s favourite pastimes.