Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

But the team couldn’t always keep tabs on her. It was a busy station, and a big one, and they all had jobs to do. Felix was an independent woman; at any time of day or night she might be off exploring round the bushes at the southern end of Platform 1 near the King’s Head pub, or up at the other end, watching those tasty little wild rabbits. She was becoming more and more fearless – though her hatred of the black crows still saw her running for cover. Sometimes she’d try to style it out on the platform, looking at one of them and striking an ‘I own this joint’ pose, but the moment the crow started walking or flying towards her, she would leg it – back home if possible, or up to safety on a windowsill.

But then she’d be stuck there, marooned, and the crow would know it. It would caw at her, a cackling kind of call that sounded like a mocking laugh. Angela Dunn, working in the lost-property office, came to recognise that sound. Soon she knew that if the crows started making that noise, Felix would be stuck on a windowsill outside somewhere, too terrified to move. Angela would have to come out onto the platform and shoo the crows off, so that Felix could get down from her little island and run home to safety.

So although the kitten was making great leaps forwards, she was still a vulnerable creature at heart: new to the world and still finding her way, working out what was a terror and what was a toy; who was a friend and who an enemy. As with all parents watching their children grow, the station team were both delighted and chilled by her growing independence. But Felix was a loyal little thing. Almost as if she knew they might be fretting, her explorations never lasted for any length of time, and she never wandered far from Platform 1. Every few hours, several times a shift, the team would spot her hanging out by the bike racks or leaping up onto the customer-service desk to put in her time on the frontline. She gave them no cause for concern.

But then came a day Angie would never forget. The day when she signed on for her shift and Billy had to take her to one side.

‘Now, I don’t want you to panic, Ang …’ the gruff team leader began.

These words, of course, were destined to set her heart hammering hard and fast within her chest.

‘I don’t want you to panic,’ he went on, ‘but we can’t find Felix.’

Angie looked at him blankly. So Billy said it again, more plainly, more worryingly, and in words that left no room for doubt.

‘Felix has gone.’

13. Missing

‘What do you mean, you can’t find Felix?’ Angie asked.

Billy ushered her into the team leaders’ office and sat her down in a chair.

‘She’s disappeared,’ he said gently. ‘She’s been gone all day. Nobody’s seen her.’

‘What do you mean?’ Angie said again, the panic rising in her voice. ‘She can’t have just gone . She must be somewhere!’

But as Billy told her the whole story, Angie realised, with a sinking feeling, that the kitten was well and truly lost.

It had been Dave Rooney who’d first raised the alarm. He’d been the team leader on duty on the early-morning shift, and he’d suddenly realised mid-morning that he hadn’t seen Felix since he’d clocked on. That was highly unusual.

‘Have you seen Felix?’ he casually asked the team, strolling through the station.

But they all said ‘no’.

Dave wasn’t too worried. He sauntered down to the bike racks, checked in the shower room in case she was sleeping on her fleecy black blanket, and ducked his head into the lost-property office, asking Angela Dunn if Felix had popped by that morning. But the little kitten was nowhere to be found.

Dave walked back up Platform 1, wracking his brains. Felix sometimes liked to hang around the King’s Head at the southern end of the station, the boozy little thing, attracted by the thick brambled bushes at the very edge of the station’s plot. Could she have gone into the bushes and got stuck, unable to fight her way out? He hurried down there, but he could neither see nor hear the kitten amid the dense, knotted briars.

It was time to call in reinforcements. He radioed Dave Chin, the TPE maintenance man, and asked him to pop by as soon as he could.

Dave Chin wasn’t based permanently at Huddersfield, but worked all over the railway network, doing whatever odds and sods needed doing, turning up whenever he was summoned, like a sort of railway fairy godfather. He worked at Dewsbury, Stalybridge, Leeds and Manchester as well, but was often at Huddersfield. The first time he’d met Felix, she was sitting in a watering can on Platform 1 with her head poking out of the top – and it had been a mutual case of love at first sight. From that moment on, whenever Dave Chin came to Huddersfield, he made it his first duty to visit Felix, and it turned out that he was the ultimate Felix charmer. Though she was an affectionate cat with many people, her relationship with Dave was something else. He would pick her up and she would roll over instantly on to her back and loll there in his arms, her head hanging off one side and her legs dangling down the other, so that he could rub her belly or tickle her front paws. He’d walk all around the station with her like that: Felix splayed out in his arms, so loved up and easy and she didn’t care who saw it.

‘Felix,’ Angie Hunte used to tut when she saw her, shaking her head in mock-shame, ‘you’re an absolute disgrace.’

So when Dave Rooney told Dave Chin that Felix was missing, the maintenance man wanted to do everything in his power to find her. The team leader relayed his concern that the kitten might have got trapped in the overgrown bushes, and Dave Chin clapped his hands together decisively and sprang into action.

‘Right,’ he said firmly, ‘let’s get that cleared.’

Dave was a down-to-earth, well-muscled man with a weathered face and copious blond hair. He put every one of those muscles to use that day as he cautiously chopped down all the overgrown bushes on the station, looking under every briar for a little black-and-white cat. But when he had finished there was still no sign of her.

The clock ticked on, and Dave Rooney completed his shift. As he handed over to Billy in the afternoon, he gave him an update – and top of the agenda was that Felix was missing. The old-timer had shaken his head incredulously at all this fuss over the kitten; he was sure that the cat would turn up.

Yet as the hours passed by and Billy did his own searches of the station, and completed his own security checks, he realised he had been wrong. For there was not a hint of a whisker to be seen.

The sun set, and cold night settled like a blanket on the station. Billy, despite himself, began to worry. He often moaned about the cat, as he did everything else, calling her a ‘fleabag’ or a ‘waste of space’ or simply ‘urgh, that cat!’, but despite his mean-sounding words there was always a warmth to his tone. He really hoped she was all right.

The station clock kept time as accurately as always, and all too soon the digits turned to 8 p.m. and Angie arrived for her night shift. Billy knew she would be worried sick at the news he had to share which is why he had tried to break it to her gently by saying, ‘Now, I don’t want you to panic, Ang …’

Sitting in the team leaders’ office, having now heard the full account of the drama from Billy, Angie was panicking.

‘Have you searched ?’ she grilled Billy, leaping to her feet and pacing the office. ‘I mean, properly ?’

‘I’ve searched, Ang,’ he told her.

‘But have you checked underneath that disused carriage, on Platform 2? Because she likes it under there, she sometimes goes and hides there …’

‘I know, Ang,’ Billy said. Everybody on the station knew the kitten’s favourite places better than the backs of their own hands. ‘I’ve searched.’