Джеймс Боуэн - A Street Cat Named Bob

As I walked up the path to the dimly lit front entrance I spotted a shape sitting quietly in the shadows to the side of the building. It was unmistakably the silhouette of a cat, but I’d given up hope by now and just assumed it was another stray, sheltering from the cold. But then I saw his face, that unmistakeable face.

‘Bob.’

He let out a plaintive meow, just like the one in the hallway three years ago, as if to say: ‘Where have you been? I’ve been waiting here for ages.’

I scooped him up and held him close.

‘You are going to be the death of me if you keep running away like that,’ I said, my mind scrambling to work out how he’d got here.

It wasn’t long before it all fell into place. I felt a fool for not thinking of it sooner. He had been to Belle’s flat with me several times, and spent six weeks there when I was away. It made sense that he would have come here. But how on earth had he got here? It must be a mile and a half from our pitch at the Angel. Had he walked all the way? If so, how long had he been here?

None of that mattered now. As I carried on making a fuss of him, he licked my hand, his tongue was as rough as sandpaper. He rubbed his face against mine and curled his tail.

I rang Belle’s doorbell and she invited me in. My mood had been transformed from despair to delirium. I was on top of the world

Belle’s flatmate was also there and said, ‘Want something to celebrate?’ smiling, knowingly.

‘No, I’m fine thanks,’ I said, tugging on Bob as he scratched playfully at my hand, and looking over at Belle. ‘Just a beer would be great.’

Bob didn’t need drugs to get through the night. He just needed his companion: me. And at that moment I decided that was all I needed too. All I needed was Bob. Not just tonight, but for as long as I had the privilege of having him in my life.

As the March sun disappeared and dusk descended over the Angel, London was winding itself up for the evening once more. The traffic was already thick on Islington High Street and the honking of horns was building into a cacophony of noise. The pavements were busy too, with a stream of people flowing in and out of the station concourse. The rush hour was under way and living up to its name as usual. Everyone was in a rush to get somewhere it seemed. Well, not quite everyone.

I was checking that I had enough papers left to cope with the surge of activity I knew was about to arrive when I saw out of the corner of my eye that a group of kids had gathered around us. They were teenagers I guessed, three boys and a couple of girls. They looked South American or maybe Spanish or Portuguese.

There was nothing unusual about this. It wasn’t quite Covent Garden, Leicester Square or Piccadilly Circus, but Islington had its fair share of tourists and Bob was a magnet for them. Barely a day went by without him being surrounded by an excitable group of youths like this.

What was different this evening, however, was the way they were animatedly pointing and talking about him.

‘Ah, si Bob,’ said one teenage girl, talking what I guessed was Spanish.

‘ Si, si. Bob the Beeg Issew Cat,’ said another.

Weird , I thought to myself when I realised what she’d said. How do they know his name is Bob? He doesn’t wear a name tag. And what do they mean by the Big Issue Cat ?

My curiosity soon got the better of me.

‘Sorry, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how do you know Bob?’ I said, in the hope that one of them spoke decent English. My Spanish was almost non-existent.

Fortunately one of them, a young boy, replied. ‘Oh, we see him on YouTube,’ he smiled. ‘Bob is very popular, yes?’

‘Is he?’ I said. ‘Someone told me he was on YouTube, but I’ve got no idea how many people watch it.’

‘Many people, I think,’ he smiled.

‘Where are you from?’

‘ España , Spain.’

‘So Bob’s popular in Spain?’

‘ Si, si ,’ another one of the boys said when the boy translated back our conversation. ‘ Bob es una estrella en España .’

‘Sorry, what did he say?’ I asked the boy.

‘He says that Bob is a star in Spain.’

I was shocked.

I knew that lots of people had taken photographs of Bob over the years, both while I was busking and now that I was selling the Big Issue . I’d jokingly wondered once whether he should be put forward for the Guinness Book of Records : the world’s most photographed cat.

A couple of people had filmed him too, some with their phones, others with proper video cameras. I started casting my mind back over those that had shot footage of him in recent months. Who could have shot a film that was now on YouTube? There were a couple of obvious candidates, but I made a note to check it out at the first opportunity.

The following morning I headed down to the local library with Bob and booked myself online.

I punched in the search terms: Bob Big Issue Cat. Sure enough, there was a link to YouTube, which I clicked on. To my surprise there was not one, but two films there.

‘Hey Bob, look, he was right. You are a star on YouTube.’

He hadn’t been terribly interested until that point. It wasn’t Channel Four racing, after all. But when I clicked on the first video and saw and heard myself talking he jumped on to the keyboard and popped his face right up against the screen.

As I watched the first film, which was called ‘Bobcat and I’, the memory came back to me. I’d been approached by a film student. He’d followed me around for a while back during the days when we were selling the Big Issue around Neal Street. There was nice footage of us there and of us getting on the bus and walking the streets. Watching the film it gave a pretty good summary of the day-to-day life of a Big Issue seller. There were clips of people fussing over Bob, but also a sequence where I was confronted by some guys who didn’t believe he was a ‘tame’ cat. They belonged to the same group of people who thought I was drugging him.

The other video had been filmed more recently around the Angel by a Russian guy. I clicked on the link for that and saw that he’d called his film ‘Bob The Big Issue Cat’. This must have been the one that the Spanish students had seen. I could see that it had had tens of thousands of hits. I was gobsmacked.

The feeling that Bob was becoming some kind of celebrity had been building for a while. Every now and again someone would say: ‘Ah, is that Bob? I’ve heard about him.’ Or ‘Is this the famous Bobcat?’ I’d always assumed it was through word of mouth. Then, a few weeks before meeting the Spanish teenagers, we had featured in a local newspaper, the Islington Tribune . I’d even been approached by an American lady, an agent, who asked me whether I’d thought about writing a book about me and Bob. As if!

The Spanish teenagers made me realise that it had begun to morph into something much more than local celebrity. Bob was becoming a feline star.

As I headed towards the bus stop and absorbed what I had just discovered, I couldn’t help smiling. On one of the films I had said that Bob had saved my life. When I first heard it I thought it sounded a bit crass, a bit of an exaggeration too. But as I walked along the road and put it all into perspective it began to sink in: it was true, he really had.

In the two years since I’d found him sitting in that half-lit hallway, he had transformed my world. Back then I’d been a recovering heroin addict living a hand-to-mouth existence. I was in my late twenties and yet I had no real direction or purpose in life beyond survival. I’d lost contact with my family and barely had a friend in the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, my life was a total mess. All that had changed.