Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

But as Angela searched for her high and low, there was no sign of the cat in the locker rooms today.

‘Has anyone seen Felix?’ she asked. But no one had. ‘Where are you, cat?’ Angela wondered aloud.

‘MIAOW!’ Felix replied, as though trying to tell her. By now, the chorus of mews was impatient and demanding. Felix was quite patently saying, ‘Let me out! I’m stuck!’ but Angela had tried all the usual places and Felix was not in them.

Angela scratched her head and stood quite still, hovering by the customer-information point, always a popular place for Felix, and where, opposite the desk, the stable door of Angela’s lost-property office lay half-open.

‘MIAOW!’

Where is she? Angela wondered. She listened more closely as Felix called again.

That’s odd , she thought, as she edged towards the noise, it sounds like it’s coming from my office …

She opened the stable door and stood on the threshold of her room. There was her desk: no Felix. There were the shelves packed full of all the abandoned items: no Felix. Angela walked in and marched up and down those shelves, moving things around in case Felix had got stuck behind a suitcase or caught up in a cagoule.

‘MIAOW!’ (‘I’m right here!’ Felix seemed to be yelling.)

Angela slowly turned round and stared again at her desk. I wonder … she thought.

She walked over and pulled open the big bottom drawer, and out leapt Felix, looking ruffled and a little bit dazed to find herself freed from her dark and unexpected prison. Angela had never seen her move so fast. She was off!

As Angela shut the drawer again behind Felix, it was obvious to her what had happened. Greedy Felix, wanting more treats, had tiptoed into the big drawer, wondering if she could somehow help herself to the bag of Dreamies located teasingly in the middle drawer above. The big drawer had been roomy and looked a rather fun place from which to plot her cat burglary. But the cat criminal, having silently stepped inside, had then found herself trapped when Angela had unwittingly shut the drawer on her.

Well , thought Angela, watching Felix dart away up the platform, very glad to be free at last, that will teach her not to try and get treats on her own!

As Felix approached her third birthday, however, her plots to get more food grew more complex. Cats are very, very clever creatures. Their brains are more like ours than those of dogs – and Felix certainly had human levels of cunning when it came to the thorny question of how to hoodwink her colleagues into feeding her more.

The answer seemed an obvious one, given Felix’s experiences the year before. Diva Felix was required to make another unforgettable appearance in the limelight: acting was clearly the way for this drama queen to go. It was once more time for the railway cat to tread the boards with her white-capped paws.

The first Angie Hunte knew of the scheme was when she came on shift one morning. The team leader on the night shift was supposed to feed Felix, but as Angie bustled into the office and wished everyone a cheery good morning, the canny cat was waiting for her with a heart-rending complaint to make.

Felix staggered up onto Angie’s desk the moment the team leader sat down in her chair and boldly pushed her way into Angie’s eyeline.

‘Miaow!’ she mewed, terribly feebly, as though she could barely muster the energy to call out, so weak was she from lack of food. She fluttered her eyelashes and blinked her mournful green eyes at Angie. Out came one velvety white paw, which she pressed desperately to Angie’s skin, begging her to help her. She had been left alone all night with this other, mean team leader – and it was only Angie who could save her now.

‘Now then, what’s all this?’ Angie said in concern. She knew only too well which of Felix’s mews meant, ‘I’m hungry,’ and recognised that Felix was currently employing it at top volume.

Felix edged closer to Angie, channelling every flick of her tail into the act, placing her paws on Angie’s shoulders so she could stare straight into her eyes, pleading for mercy, for food, for this unwarranted starvation to be brought to an end – before it was too late.

‘Has he not fed my Felix?’ Angie said aloud in horror.

Dave Rooney had been on shift the night before. Unfortunately for Felix, he just happened to be passing through the office at the time she said it, and he stopped in his tracks and looked at Angie with an I-can’t-believe-you-fell-for-that face. ‘You know I have,’ he deadpanned. ‘That cat is trying it on.’

And it wasn’t the last time she did – not on your nelly. Felix had twigged that the multitude of carers she had as a railway cat, and the nature of their ever-changing shifts, meant that she could try time and again to get more food out of them whenever the changeover of team took place. Angie found that it was often she who was on the receiving end of the cat’s amateur-dramatics performances. So convincing were Felix’s interpretations of near-death hunger that Angie would find herself staring in genuine concern at the cat, when in would walk the colleague who’d been on duty the previous shift.

‘Oh, soft touch is here,’ they would say to Angie, teasing her, and only then would she realise that once again Felix had been pulling her leg.

But Felix did manage to grab an extra meal every now and again, and only after her subterfuge had been successful would the team leaders confer and realise that she had been given a double dinner. In the end, to ensure they were not hoodwinked by this master criminal, they decided to write on the noticeboard exactly when Felix had been fed, so that if they genuinely forgot on a busy shift, the team would know that she did need feeding if she cried; but if she was just trying it on (as nine-and-a-half times out of ten she was), they could send her packing with her fluffy black tail between her legs.

Of course, she never went far if her plans were foiled – only as far as the gateline team. With them, she’d twist in and out of their forest of legs to get their attention before it would start all over again.

‘Miaow!’ she’d say, making eyes at them, all the world a stage. ‘I’m so hungry …’

Felix’s family was even larger now than it had been when she’d first started working at the station. With the introduction of the ticket barriers in June 2013, a new team of staff members had been added, so that the crew at Huddersfield now numbered thirty-six humans and one black-and-white cat. Not everyone was a fan of the moggy when they met her, however – there was a new team leader called Geoff who would yell, ‘Get out!’ whenever she walked into the office while he was on shift (he may also have been guilty of rudely writing ‘Fleabag: fed’ on the team leaders’ noticeboard). Yet when he bellowed, ‘Gerraway!’ at her as she sauntered in, Felix merely turned around and strolled nonchalantly out again, the carefree wag of her tail seeming to say, ‘OK, Geoff, I’ll be back in a bit when you’ve calmed yourself down.’ Like any boss managing a crotchety employee, she just needed to work out how to deal with him. She was confident that she would succeed: after all, look at her and Billy these days.

It was plain to see from the way Felix trotted around after Billy that she simply adored him – and the feeling was mutual. In fact, Felix loved him so much that, in spring 2014, she focused that clever brain of hers on to a problem she really wanted to solve: how could she make sure Billy stayed at the station all the time and never left her? Angie was there the day she came up with the answer.

Billy had been working nights, and as usual he and Felix had spent much of the time together. It had been a twelve-hour shift, so no wonder he was exhausted as he made his slow and steady way out of the station just after 6 a.m. He and Angie walked together, chatting as they went, finishing off the last of their handover before Billy headed home for a well-deserved sleep and Angie took charge of the station.