Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

‘And Felix?’ Angie asked.

‘Fed,’ Billy said as he ticked off the items on his hand. He coughed abruptly, somewhat hoarsely, and then continued, ‘Watered. But not present and correct – I haven’t seen her since you signed in.’

While the team leaders had been talking in the office, Felix had vanished from view.

‘She’ll turn up,’ Angie said confidently, knowing that the cat would come back soon; she was always on duty for the morning rush hour.

‘I dare say,’ Billy replied, stifling a yawn.

They stumbled down the station steps and passed the King’s Head pub on their way to the car park. Billy could see his silver people carrier looming into view and it had never looked so inviting. He couldn’t wait to slip into the seat, click his seatbelt into place and drive straight home to bed.

But a cat-shaped someone had other ideas.

As they rounded the corner and had full view of the car, they also saw that Felix was sitting proudly on the roof, having selected it specifically from all the motors on offer. She looked as pleased as punch at her brainwave to stop him leaving the station. Perhaps she’d taken her inspiration from her hostage-taking triumphs, when she would jump up on the suitcases of those customers with food, trying to keep them on the platform for as long as she possibly could. For Felix looked pretty comfortable on top of Billy’s car – it was obvious she was not planning on moving any time soon.

Billy shook his head in disbelief.

‘Come on, cat,’ he said. ‘I want to go home.’

But Felix didn’t budge.

‘Get off, please, Felix,’ he went on. ‘I’ve just done a twelve-hour shift. I want to go home, cat. I want to go home now.’

Felix merely lifted her beautiful head just a touch higher, and every sinew of her fluffy body said, ‘I’m not moving anywhere.’ She flicked her tail back and forth, wagging it with great pleasure at the success of her scheme. Looking levelly at Billy, her big green eyes unmistakeably said, ‘Gotcha.’

‘ Please ,’ he begged.

Angie, chuckling away and not at all sympathetic to Billy’s situation, quickly snapped a photo of the stand-off between the two. There was Billy, absolutely exhausted, pleading with the cat, and facing him was Felix, sat squarely on the roof of Billy’s car, refusing to shift an inch. Angie thought it so funny that she showed the image to Billy’s wife and the team; she captioned it: ‘Preventing the team leader from going home.’ It was a ruse that Felix would try over and over again – because her heart was really in it.

As far as Felix was concerned, Billy’s home was here – with her. And with her was where he should always be.

25. Meet the Boss

Billy’s garden was now complete in terms of planting and design – but as any gardener knows, a gardener’s work is never finished, so he was still doing regular maintenance of the little patch of land on quiet shifts and on his days off, occasionally with a fluffy black-and-white shadow at his feet.

However, Billy had recently had another bright idea about who could help him with the garden maintenance – and it wasn’t Felix! Instead, Billy had wondered if he could perhaps get some of the local community involved; he had a vision that maybe a group of young people he knew, who all had learning difficulties, might be able to join him in helping with the garden. They’d then have a patch of the station they could take pride in. They could enjoy seeing the plants grow and come to appreciate how their care of those plants created real beauty. Their involvement was a way off yet – there were lots of hoops to jump through first – but when Billy had a vision for something he kept plugging away at it, and he planned to be no less dog-with-bone with this concept than he had been with so many other projects he’d turned his mind to over the years.

The station – as the team knew well – was much the better for his input. Not only was his ‘Art Station’ project still running, after a successful two years of exhibiting local artists’ work on the concourse, but Billy also won an award in 2014 for his environmental innovation (his second in five years). Over time, he had transformed the station’s green credentials, putting in place a traffic-light system for switching off plugs (to cut down on unnecessary electricity use), installing water-saving gadgets in the public toilets and revolutionising the recycling processes. Even in the garden, he’d recently devised a rainwater-capture system to keep the garden green. When new ‘young un’ Chris Bamford joined the station in 2014 – he would be doing a bit of everything: the gateline, announcing and customer service on the platforms – he found Billy’s work impressive; and the man himself very funny, even though he was incredibly blunt and direct (some might even have said rude). Mr Grumpy was still in position, but despite his best efforts he seemed to be endearing himself to more and more people by the day.

Yet Billy, the relatively important team leader, wasn’t the colleague to whom Chris was introduced first when he joined the team. That honour, naturally enough, went to Felix. In fact, the very first thing his colleagues said to him on his first day – as they did to all new recruits – was, ‘Have you met Felix yet?’

‘No,’ Chris replied, intrigued. ‘Who’s Felix?’

‘Let’s get you introduced to her,’ they told him, smiling. And they made sure those introductions were complete before they commenced any of the induction formalities. They had their priorities right: ‘Meet the Boss, and then we’ll deal with the station.’

In truth, in Felix’s three years at Huddersfield she had confidently assumed a supervisory role over every department, so perhaps it was only fair that Chris should meet the colleague who would be keeping a very close eye on his performance. When Felix wanted to be, she was immensely curious about every aspect of the station team’s work – and had the attention span to sit and watch everything she possibly could. As she did so, she seemed to take a step back from the colleague she was observing, as though she was about to scribble thoughtful and perceptive notes on a (very well concealed) clipboard.

It was like having an inspector in. She would sit for a long time watching the booking-office team serving at the windows, appraising their performance. She would balance on top of the monitors or the printers, and keep tabs as the tickets came out. When the cashing up was being done or the Securicor man was dropping off more money, Felix would be there, keeping a close eye on the cash: the multi-talented, multi-disciplined supervisor extraordinaire.

Chris laughed when he realised just who ‘Felix’ was. A friend of a friend of his had worked at Huddersfield station just before he’d joined, so he had heard on the grapevine that there was a resident cat at his new workplace – but he hadn’t known her name. Now, he did.

As it happened, Chris was allergic to cats. But it wasn’t as if he could do much about that! And, as he settled into the station, over time Felix seemed to help him build up his tolerance until he was absolutely fine in her presence.

That first week, however, he was perhaps apprehensive about working with her in more ways than one. For as Chris learned the ropes, just as his colleagues had warned him, ‘the Boss’ was on his tail. On one of his very first shifts, Felix joined him on the gateline. Yet she hardly set a good example: she sat squarely in the stream of customers coming through the gates so that they had to move around her. Worse still, she just glared, Medusa-like, at every single customer coming through.

Her grumpiness had become more pronounced as she grew older, and Chris was seeing it in action today. There were some people she liked – such as the Felix charmer, Dave Chin, into whose arms she would still leap for an upside-down cuddle – but many others whom she didn’t. If she didn’t know someone, she was likely to regard them with deep suspicion until they had proved themselves trustworthy.