Джеймс Боуэн - A Street Cat Named Bob

Bob and I sat there for about twenty minutes before we got to see someone. A youngish guy and an older woman led me into a non-descript office and asked me to shut the door behind me. I held my breath and waited for the worst.

They gave me a real dressing down. They claimed I’d broken a couple of the cardinal rules.

‘We’ve had complaints that you’ve been floating and begging,’ they said.

I knew who had made the complaints but didn’t let on. I knew I mustn’t turn it into a personality clash. Big Issue vendors were supposed to get on with each other and if I sat there slagging off a list of other vendors it wasn’t going to do me any good. Instead I tried to explain to them how difficult it was to walk around Covent Garden with Bob without being offered money for the magazine.

I gave them a couple of examples, one involving some blokes outside a pub who had stopped to admire Bob and offered me a fiver for three copies. There was an interview in there with an actress they all fancied, they told me.

‘Things like that happen all the time,’ I told them. ‘If someone stops me outside a pub, to refuse to sell them a paper would just be rude.’

They listened sympathetically and nodded at some of the points I made.

‘We can see that Bob attracts attention. We’ve spoken to a few vendors who have confirmed that he’s a bit of a crowd puller,’ the young guy said, with more than a hint of sympathy in his voice.

But when I’d finished defending myself, he leaned forward and broke the bad(ish) news. ‘Well, we’re still going to have to give you a verbal warning.’

‘Oh, OK. A verbal warning, what does that mean?’ I asked, genuinely surprised.

He explained that it wouldn’t prevent me from selling, but that the situation might change if I was found guilty of floating again.

I felt a bit silly afterwards. A verbal warning was neither here nor there. I realised that I’d panicked completely and, typically, jumped to the worst possible conclusion. I hadn’t understood what was going to happen. I had been terrified that I was going to lose my job. The images I had of me being hauled in front of some committee and being stripped of my badge and cast out were just a figment of my imagination. I didn’t realise it was not that serious.

I headed back to Covent Garden to see Sam, feeling slightly sheepish about what had been happening.

When she saw me and Bob, she smiled at us knowingly.

‘Wasn’t sure whether we’d see you two again,’ she said. ‘Been into the office to sort it out?’

I explained what had happened. I then gave her the piece of paper that I’d been given at the end of the meeting.

‘Looks like you are back on probation for a bit,’ she said. ‘You can only work after 4.30p.m. and on Sundays for a few weeks. Then we can put you back on a normal shift. Just make sure to keep yourself clean. If someone comes up to you and Bob and offers to buy a magazine, say you haven’t got one, or if it’s obvious you have, say they are promised for regular customers. And don’t get involved.’

It was all good advice, of course. The problem was that other people might want to ‘get involved’. And so they did.

One Sunday afternoon Bob and I had headed to Covent Garden to do a couple of hours’ work. Given the restrictions on us, we had to take whatever chances we could get.

We were sitting near the coordinators’ spot on James Street when I was suddenly aware of a large and rather threatening presence. It was a guy called Stan.

Stan was a well-known figure in Big Issue circles. He’d worked for the company for years. The problem was that he was a bit unpredictable. When he was in the right frame of mind he could be the nicest guy you’d ever met. He would do anything for you, and frequently did.

He’d bailed me out and given me a couple of free papers on a couple of occasions.

However, when Stan was in a bad mood or, even worse, drunk, he could be the most objectionable, argumentative and aggressive pain in the arse in the world.

I quickly spotted that it was the latter Stan who was now standing in front of me.

Stan was a big guy, all of six feet four. He leaned down over me and bellowed: ‘You aren’t supposed to be here, you are banned from the area.’

I could smell his breath; it was like a distillery.

I had to stand my ground.

‘No, Sam said I could come over here on Sunday or after 4.30p.m.,’ I said.

Fortunately another guy who worked with Sam, Peter, was there as well and he backed me up, much to Stan’s annoyance.

He lurched back for a moment then move backed in, breathing whisky fumes all over me once more. He was looking at Bob now, and not in a friendly way.

‘If it was up to me I’d strangle your cat right now,’ he said.

His words really freaked me out.

If he’d made a move towards Bob I would have attacked him. I would have defended him like a mother defending her child. It’s the same thing. He was my baby. But I knew that would be fatal, from the Big Issue ’s point of view. It would be the end.

So I made two decisions there and then. I picked up Bob and headed elsewhere for the afternoon. I wasn’t going to work anywhere near Stan when he was in this mood. But I also made the decision to move away from Covent Garden.

It would be a wrench. Bob and I had a loyal customer base there and, besides anything else, it was a fun place to work. The inescapable truth, however, was that it was becoming an unpleasant and even a dangerous place to work. Bob and I needed to move to a less competitive part of London, somewhere where I wasn’t so well known. There was one obvious candidate.

I used to busk around the Angel tube station in Islington before I went to Covent Garden. It was a good area, less lucrative than Covent Garden but still worthwhile. So I decided the next day to take a visit to the coordinator there, a great guy called Lee, who I knew a little bit.

‘What are the chances of me getting a good pitch here?’ I asked him.

‘Well, Camden Passage is pretty busy, as is the Green, but you could do outside the tube station if you like,’ he said. ‘No one fancies it much.’

I had a feeling of déjà vu. It was Covent Garden all over again. For other Big Issue sellers in London, tube stations were reckoned to be a complete nightmare, the worst possible places to try and sell the paper. The way the theory went was that people in London are simply moving too fast, they don’t have time to slow down, make the decision to buy one and dip into their pockets. They’ve got to be somewhere else, they are always in a hurry.

As I’d discovered at Covent Garden, however, Bob had the magical ability to slow them down. People would see him and suddenly they weren’t in quite such a rush. It was as if he was providing them with a little bit of light relief, a little bit of warmth and friendliness in their otherwise frantic, impersonal lives. I’m sure a lot of people bought a Big Issue as a thank you for me giving them that little moment. So I was more than happy to take what was supposed to be a ‘difficult’ pitch right outside Angel tube.

We started that same week. I left the Covent Garden vendors to it.

Almost immediately we began to get people slowing down to say hello to Bob. We had soon picked up where we had left off in Covent Garden.

One or two people recognised us.

One evening, a well-dressed lady in a business suit stopped and did a sort of double take.

‘Don’t you two work in Covent Garden?’ she said.

‘Not any more, madam,’ I said with a smile, ‘not any more.’