Джеймс Боуэн - A Street Cat Named Bob

I’d had run-ins with the police before, mostly for petty theft.

When you are homeless or have a drug habit you try to find easy options to make money. And, to be honest, few things are easier than shoplifting. My main thing was stealing meat. I’d lift legs of lamb and expensive steaks. Jamie Oliver steaks. Lamb shanks. Gammon joints. Never chicken, chicken is too low value. What I stole was the stuff with the highest price value. What you get is half the price on the label. If you go to a pub and sell the stuff that’s what you could expect to get. Pubs are very solid ground for selling stolen goods. Everybody knows that.

The first time I did it to pay for my habit was in 2001 or 2002, something like that. Before that I’d been begging to feed my habit. Before that I’d been on a methadone course. I’d got clean but then I’d started using again because things were bad. I’d been moved into some dodgy accommodation where everyone was using and had spiralled back into bad habits.

I can still remember the first time I got busted. It was at the Marks and Spencer’s at the Angel, Islington. I used to dress up smartly and tie my hair back, dress like a postman at the end of his daily rounds popping in for a snack or a pint of milk on the way home. It was all about appearance. You had to be clever about it. If I’d walked in with a rucksack or a shopping bag I’d never have stood a chance. I carried a postman’s Royal Mail bag around with me. It’s different today but back then nobody looked twice at you if you had one of those bags slung over your shoulders.

Anyhow, I got stopped one day. I had about one hundred and twenty pounds’ worth of meat on me.

I was taken into police custody. At that time they gave me an on-the-spot fine of eight pounds for theft. I was lucky to get that because it was my first time.

Of course, it didn’t stop me. I had a habit. I had to do what I had to do. I was on heroin and an occasional bit of crack. You take the risk. You have to.

When you get nicked it sucks. But you have got to bite the bullet. Obviously, you sit there feeling sorry for yourself, but you aren’t going to fight the powers that be.

You try to get out of it, you make up lies but they don’t believe you. They never really do. It’s a vicious circle when you are down.

That was why busking had been so good for me. It was legal. It kept me straight. But now here I was back in the nick. It felt like a real kick in the stomach.

I’d been in the cell for about half an hour when the door opened suddenly and a white-shirted officer ushered me out.

‘Come on,’ he said.

‘Where are you taking me now?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said.

I was taken into a bare room with a few plastic chairs and a single table.

There were a couple of officers sitting opposite me. They looked disinterested, to be honest. But then one of them started questioning me.

‘Where were you yesterday evening at around 6.30p.m.?’ one of them asked.

‘Um, I was busking in Covent Garden,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘On the corner of James Street, opposite the entrance to the tube,’ I said, which was true.

‘Did you go into the tube station at any time that evening?’ the copper asked.

‘No, I never go in there,’ I said. ‘I travel by bus.’

‘Well, how come we’ve got at least two witnesses saying that you were in the station and that you verbally abused and spat at a female ticket attendant?’

‘I’ve got absolutely no idea,’ I said, bemused.

‘They saw you come up the escalator from the tube and try to go through the automatic barrier without a ticket.’

‘Well, as I say, that can’t have been me,’ I said.

‘When you were challenged you verbally abused a female member of staff.’

I just sat there shaking my head. This was surreal.

‘You were then led to the ticket booth and asked to buy a ticket,’ he went on. ‘When you did so, against your will, you then spat at the window of the ticket booth.’

That was it; I lost my cool.

‘Look, this is bullshit,’ I said. ‘I told you I wasn’t in the tube station last night. I’m never in there. And I never travel by tube. Me and my cat travel everywhere by bus.’

They just looked at me as if I was telling the biggest lies in the world.

They asked me if I wanted to make a statement, so I did, explaining that I’d been busking all night. I knew the CCTV footage would back this up. But at the back of my mind I was having all sorts of paranoid thoughts.

What if this was all a fit up? What if they had doctored the CCTV footage in the tube station? What if it went to court and it was my word against three or four London Underground officers?

Worst of all, I found myself anxiously wondering what would happen to Bob. Who would look after him? Would he stay with them or head back on to the street? And what would happen to him there? Thinking about it did my head in.

They kept me in for about another two or three hours. After a while I lost all track of time. There was no natural light in the room so I had no idea whether it was day or night outside. At one point a lady police officer came in, with a surly-looking male officer behind her.

‘I need to do a DNA test,’ she said as he took a position in the corner where he stood with his arms folded, glaring at me.

‘OK,’ I said, ignoring him. I figured I had nothing to lose. ‘What do I have to do?’ I asked the female officer.

‘Just sit there and I’ll take a swab of saliva from your mouth,’ she said.

She produced a little kit, with loads of swabs and test tubes.

Suddenly I felt like I was at the dentist.

‘Open wide,’ she said.

She then stuck a long, cotton bud into my mouth, gave it a bit of a scrape around the inside of my cheek and that was that.

‘All done,’ she said, putting the bud in a test tube and packing her stuff away.

Eventually, I was let out of the cell and taken back to the desk at the front of the station where I signed for my stuff. I had to sign a form saying that I was released on bail and told that I had to return a couple of days later.

‘When will I know if I am being formally charged?’ I asked the duty officer, suspecting that he couldn’t really tell me that. To my surprise he said that I’d probably know when I came back in a couple of days’ time.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘More than likely,’ he said.

That was good and bad, I decided immediately. Good in the sense that I’d not have to wait months to find out if I was going to be charged, bad in the sense that if they were going to charge me I could find myself spending time inside very soon.

I really didn’t relish that prospect.

After finally being let free, I emerged into the streets behind Warren Street in pitch darkness. There were already little groups of homeless people hunkering down for the night, hiding themselves away in alleyways.

It was approaching eleven o’clock. By the time I got back to Seven Sisters tube station it was close to midnight and the streets were full of drunks and people being turfed out of the pubs.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I got inside the flat.

Dylan was watching television with Bob curled up in his usual spot under the radiator. The minute I walked through the door, he jumped up and padded over to me, tilting his head to one side and looking up at me.

‘Hello, mate, you all right?’ I said, dropping to my knees and stroking him.

He immediately clambered up on to my knee and started rubbing against my face.

Dylan had headed off into the kitchen but soon reappeared with a cold tin of lager from the fridge.

‘That’s a life saver, thanks,’ I said, ripping the ring off the tin and taking a slug of cold beer.