Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

‘It’s got to be him!’ exclaimed Chris.

But Martin was coming up for retirement in January 2016, and the others thought it highly unlikely that he’d be at the cutting edge of social media, creating a Facebook page for his feline friend, no matter how cosy the two of them might get in the announcer’s office during Martin’s long shifts. No: they had to think again.

As they investigated the page updates further, they stumbled upon a crucial piece of evidence: every single picture on the Facebook page appeared to have been taken around 6.30 a.m. Whoever was running the page had to be someone who was always on the platform at that time.

The conclusion was clear: it wasn’t a colleague, it was a commuter .

Suddenly, every bleary-eyed customer who passed through the gates was a suspect. With the commuters having season tickets, Chris and his colleagues barely saw each one for longer than ten seconds as the steady stream of early-morning customers flowed through the doors. It was hardly long enough to make an assessment. Most of them walked slowly, somewhat miserably: not yet woken up properly and none too pleased to be there, on their way to work. Others darted through the gates and ran at full tilt towards a train scheduled to depart. They clutched takeaway coffee cups and newspapers, and headphone cables trailed from their ears as they tried to tune out the reality of another working day. There were people in suits, overalls, uniforms and chemists’ smocks; the cyclists arrived like new breeds of human, with orange Lycra skin and angular helmets reshaping their heads. It could be any one of them: it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Could it be the middle-aged woman in the windbreaker who always had a kind word for Felix? Or might it be the hipster who wore media glasses and moleskin shoes and brought the cat treats in a Tupperware box? There was a man with a full beard and long, greying hair who had potential; or what about the redhead with the art portfolio and the sketching pad? The options were literally endless; the mystery seemingly unsolvable.

They never did guess. In the end, a few members of the team messaged the page and offered to help support it by sending through some behind-the-scenes pictures of the station cat hard at work in the back offices, and a channel of communication was opened with the mystery Felix fan.

‘Here,’ Chris said to whoever it was. ‘Make sure you introduce yourself next time you come through. We’ll have a drink or something, get to know each other.’

And that was exactly what happened. It was an ordinary morning, the day the mystery commuter finally walked up and introduced himself. Chris was busy assisting customers when he felt a polite tap on his shoulder at 6.30 a.m. He turned around to see a tall, bespectacled gentleman dressed in a dark-grey suit and carrying a black laptop bag.

‘Hello,’ he said, meekly. ‘I’m Mark Allan. I run Felix’s Facebook page.’

The mystery was solved.

Mark had been commuting from Huddersfield since the summer of 2014. He’d lived in Huddersfield all his life, nearly fifty-five years now, but he’d always driven to work before, being based all over West Yorkshire: Wakefield, Bradford, Leeds … But when he’d got a new job in an office in Manchester, he’d decided to get the train. Every day now, he caught the 6.40 a.m. service from Platform 1.

He hadn’t noticed Felix at first. Many commuters didn’t, being too engrossed in their smartphones or their Metro s to spot the railway cat. Mark himself was usually plugged into his headphones, dressed in his dark-grey suit, which, he thought, was the exact same shade as the skies above Huddersfield in winter.

It could be grim, commuting through the Yorkshire winter – but it felt a little like spring had come early at the start of 2015, when Mark had been introduced by the station team to a special little someone.

He’d been walking down the platform that morning, thinking it was just another day, when he’d seen one of the customer-service guys in a yellow hi-vis vest holding and stroking a cat. A cat? Mark did a double take. This must be the station cat. He was famous in Huddersfield (Mark thought she was a boy), but Mark had never seen him.

‘Who’s this, then?’ he asked the attendant in a friendly fashion, pulling the headphones out of his ears and engaging in conversation for once.

‘This is Felix,’ announced Glenn, introducing the cat.

‘Hello there, Felix!’ said Mark cheerily. He reached out a hand and gave Felix a nice stroke. She gazed at him thoughtfully from the safety of Glenn’s arms. ‘My, he’s a grand-looking cat, isn’t he? Very handsome.’

‘Actually, she’s a girl …’

And then the whole story of Felix the station cat was told to him: how she had come to be employed there, and how the team had nicknamed her ‘the pest controller’. In reality, though Felix did still catch the odd mouse, leaving her ‘presents’ for Angie to find, the name was more of a joke than a job description. They didn’t tell Felix that, of course.

Mark wasn’t much of a cat lover, in all honesty. He’d never had cats himself and, frankly, everything he’d seen of cats’ behaviour in his friends’ houses made him think they were a bit of a nuisance. One moggy had completely shredded a mate’s sofa just a month after they’d got it; crikey , he’d thought at the time, my wife would go absolutely up the wall if that happened to us. It’s bad enough having kids, but a cat? No, thanks .

Nonetheless, there was something about the railway cat that he found rather endearing. The feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual – Felix initially viewed him with suspicion, as she did most people she didn’t know, but that was only because her very real experiences with ‘stranger danger’ had made her naturally cautious.

As the months passed and winter at last turned into spring, it became Mark’s habit to walk down to the bike racks and the Head of Steam while he waited for his train; this was also Felix’s favourite spot. The regular sight of the beautiful fluffy cat on a typically grey Yorkshire day – when it was so misty and cloudy you could see only a silhouette of the distant hills and none of the detail – cheered him greatly. So much so that one day he found himself snapping a couple of pictures of her on his smartphone.

Felix, as had become her way over the years, posed for them with the good-natured acceptance of a celebrity who is constantly being stopped and asked to be part of a selfie. She positioned her head handsomely and waited patiently for the shutter to close. As Mark travelled on the train to Manchester that morning, he casually flicked through the snaps he’d taken. She really was a fine-looking cat: that fluffy fur, those enigmatic green eyes, the striking white bib. He uploaded the images to his personal Facebook page – to say, simply, ‘I see this cat at Huddersfield station’ – and thought nothing more of it. But when he next logged in, he was astonished to see that the pictures had got loads of likes; more than he’d had before on any other photo.

Crikey , he’d thought, there’s something going on here.

He’d imagined there must already be a Facebook page for Felix herself – she had been at the station for four years, after all, and within Huddersfield she was a bit of a superstar – yet when he’d searched for one in the early summer of 2015 nothing had come up. That surprised him. Other railway cats had blogs – Quaker, the Kirkby Stephen East moggy, had one called ‘The Secret Life of a Station Cat’ – and they were undeniably popular. In June 2015, meanwhile, there was enormous interest when Tama, the famous Japanese feline stationmaster, sadly passed away at the age of sixteen after years of dedicated service; she was so beloved that 3,000 people attended her funeral. With that level of interest in station cats it seemed only right that Felix should be on Facebook. Consequently, when Mark discovered she didn’t yet have her own page, he decided to create one