Full Steam Ahead, Felix

15. Shocks and Sadness

‘Come on, princess,’ said Karl. ‘Where’s my hug?’

Sara squeezed her friend tight before heading home that September evening. She’d been a bit down of late, still pining for Dan yet persistently tongue-tied about saying how she felt, but Karl never let her go home feeling low. Every day as they said goodbye he and Sara would have a quick hug, and within his big, brotherly, bear-like arms, she always felt so much better, whatever had happened that day. Sara, at twenty-four, was the eldest of her real-life siblings; to have a work ‘big brother’ in the form of Karl, who was twenty-nine, was a lovely perk of the job.

Even after all these months, Sara really didn’t know how Dan felt about her. They got on so well, but he had never made a move. Every day, they laughed their heads off together, but she wondered if he just saw her as a friend. Karl acted as a go-between, encouraging each of them separately, dropping hints and teasing them, but despite his cheeky words and the knowing twinkle in his brown eyes, neither Sara nor Dan had taken things further. Since Dan had joined the station, he had become heavily involved in Felix’s Facebook page; a recent, popular video series he’d made, called ‘The Floof Files’, had included the following caption from Felix: ‘Dan. Must you tell the world our secrets?’ But when it came to the secrets of Dan’s heart, he was keeping them under wraps.

For the newly engaged Karl, it seemed obvious that love was in the air – but for the time being he and his fiancée were on their own when it came to such affairs of the heart. All Karl could do, besides urging Sara to seize the day and tell Dan how she felt, was try to cheer her up. That September, he took her to her first football match at Old Trafford, where they watched his beloved team Manchester United roar to victory. Aside from his fiancée, Karl’s passion was football, and Sara didn’t think she’d ever seen him happier than watching his team play that beautiful game.

As for Felix, more game-playing was certainly afoot that autumn – not least when Jack Kempf organised an autumnal-themed photo shoot for her upcoming 2018 calendar, which would this time be raising funds for Cash for Kids.

At six years old, Felix was a pretty worldly-wise moggy. She’d been around the block a few times; she knew her four foot from her forests and her Dreamies from her supermarket own-brand treats. She knew, too, all the ins and outs of station life and had seen all the usual things that regularly got rolled out on to the platforms – suitcases and carry-ons, beer kegs and crates. So what – she must have thought that autumn – was this new, huge object? And what on earth was it doing in the middle of her train station?

For on to the platform that September rolled a massive orange pumpkin, the ideal prop for the October 2018 calendar image. Jack and the team had sourced it from a local veg shop in Huddersfield and it really was gigantic – about ten times Felix’s size. She watched warily as it came closer – it was that heavy, it took at least three men to move it – and Jack plonked it down with some relief in the centre of platform one. He didn’t think he could drag it any further if he tried.

‘Come on, Felix!’ he called out to the station cat. ‘Come and check this out!’

Felix needed no second invitation. Curiosity soon sent her scurrying over to the mysterious orange globe, which had a thick green stalk in its centre that was almost as long as Felix’s fluffy tail. Nose twitching furiously, she gave the pumpkin the once-over, walking all the way round its very long edge. Still no closer to deciphering its identity by the time she had completed one circumference, she decided to jump on top of it, launching herself at it with all the velocity of a space rocket. It was so high up when she landed that, really, she might as well have been on the moon, albeit a bright orange one.

Way up high, Felix continued her investigations. She seemed to decide that, whatever this ginormous object was, it was really fun! Before too long she was leaping all over it, as a professional photographer snapped away happily, capturing Felix as the queen of the pumpkin castle, as well as midway through her own private hide-and-seek game; the pumpkin made the perfect shield for the mischievous station cat. Squashed down on the floor beside the pumpkin, doing her best to conceal herself, Felix made the giant orb look even bigger than it really was. She seemed rather sad to say goodbye to it when the photographer finally finished the shoot and the orange moon rolled away into the sunset.

Luckily, however, that was not the last of the autumn fun. In October, a brand-new toy rolled on to the concourse: a black-and-white-keyed station piano to entertain the black-and-white cat! The new arrival was partly the brainchild of station manager Andy Croughan. He’d wanted to get one for a while, having seen the success of station pianos in places such as Leeds and London St Pancras. But they were expensive instruments; wishes weren’t always so easy to turn into reality. That year, however, a local Green Party councillor had called him to discuss the idea: the councillor had links with the nearby Marsden Jazz Festival and was able to arrange for a piano to be situated at the station, as long as the station got involved with the festival. Andy was delighted to agree.

The new piano was a simple upright brown wooden instrument, accompanied by a smart wooden piano stool with a maroon-velvet cushion. It sat on the concourse, just beyond the gateline, and a sign on its top encouraged passing passengers to ‘PLAY ME’. And so they did …

For Adam Taylor, working on the concourse on the information stand, his Friday-morning shift suddenly took on a new element after the piano arrived. A middle-aged man took to coming in to play the piano and Adam loved listening to him. The man was always dressed smartly, usually in a suit, and he would sit down on the velvet stool at around 11 a.m. and play sad, slow, haunting songs.

When a gifted pianist took their place at the piano, it proved a truly beautiful addition to the station. The sound would sweep up under the corrugated-iron roof and out to the rolling hills beyond, soaring through the station skylights like a flock of melodic birds. The acoustics were astonishing, amplifying the music and translating the melody that flowed from the pianists’ fingers into a sound that touched the heart. Passers-by would stop to listen, their schedule for the day suddenly put out of their minds. A gent in a flat cap and black media glasses might pull his headphones from his ears, wanting to listen instead to the live music. A lady in an LBD and her hair in a bun, meanwhile, would pause a moment, then linger longer. Her neatly pulled-together appearance seemed to unravel a little, somehow, as her foot began tapping to a jazzy tune and her head began bobbing in time.

It was no coincidence that the theologian Albert Schweitzer once said, ‘There are two means of refuge from the misery of life: music and cats.’ Huddersfield, it seemed, had nailed them both. Andy Croughan, witnessing these gifted artists at work, thought that their performances had all the makings of a new Saturday-night TV show: Station Pianists Have Got Talent!

The players were not always quite so tuneful, though. When children plink-plonked on the keys or drunken fools used it to have a laugh on their way home at night, it created a terrible racket.

‘Bloody awful!’ team leader Geoff would mutter at such times, shaking his head wearily at all that he had to endure.

As for Felix, it seemed she shared his reticence when it came to the bad players. Cats have very sensitive hearing – they can hear sounds from 45 to 64,000 Hz, whereas we humans are limited to frequencies between 64 and 23,000 Hz – so for Felix the noise was even more of a headache. She kept a wide berth whenever the piano was occupied.

When it first arrived, however, she did give the empty piano a thorough investigation, leaping up on to its wooden top and sashaying along it while her flicking tail kept time like a metronome. Though it would make a lovely story, the team had never actually seen her walking along the keys – as fun as it is to imagine Felix making up her own compositions at night, perhaps even following in the footsteps of her namesake Felix Mendelssohn. But this didn’t stop Angela Dunn from joking, if ever asked if Felix liked to interact with the piano, ‘Oh yes, she plays a lovely Mozart!’

That October, it was sad songs that seemed apt for the station. It was always emotional when much-loved members of the team moved on and a card now began circulating behind the scenes for the team to say good luck and goodbye to Chris Bamford, whose last shift was scheduled for 23 October 2017. He had been a key colleague through Felix’s rise to fame and both the cat and her human companions would miss him dearly. Ironically, despite the station being the setting for thousands of goodbyes, day in and day out, it never got any easier for the team to say farewell to colleagues who had become nothing less than family.

Midway through the month, another card started doing the rounds among the Huddersfield team – this time for Karl, who had been taken ill on his return from holiday. He’d been admitted to hospital and the station rallied round one of their favourite team members at once in order to wish him a speedy recovery.

Angela Dunn came into work on Saturday 14 October feeling a bit miserable; she’d just had a week’s holiday in Malta and had four and a half days of rain. She looked for Karl as soon as she got to the station, as with him having also been on holiday at the same time, they’d had a little joke before they’d gone away about who would have the most sunshine. She wanted to tell him that he had most definitely won! But Karl was nowhere to be seen.

In the office, she saw the get-well-soon card laid out on the desk.

‘Who’s poorly?’ she asked.

‘It’s Karl,’ her colleagues told her. ‘He’s not right well. He’s been in hospital for the past couple of days or so.’

‘Oh, that’s not good,’ said Angela, sympathising. She scribbled down her best wishes to him – ‘Get well soon Karl, love Ange’ – and then turned her attention to the grim reality of the first shift back at work. Even Felix couldn’t help make that one fly by any faster.

But not two hours later, work at the station ground to a halt. The team leader on duty, David Jackson, called everybody into the office and told them to leave off whatever it was they were doing. What’s going on now? wondered Angela. It was far too early for Chris Bamford’s send-off, and there was no meeting in the diary.

David stood in front of his colleagues. His face looked ashen and shocked. Seconds later, so did everybody else’s.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you,’ he said, ‘but Karl died this morning.’

Nobody spoke. The news seemed to have driven all words and all sense from the world. At first, the railway workers couldn’t compute what David had said to them. Only after a minute or two was the spell broken, and the stone statues they’d become at hearing of Karl’s death slowly began moving once more. First one colleague cried, then another. The team stood in shock, not knowing what to say or do. The news hit them very, very hard. Karl was everybody’s friend: a warm, loving, funny, helpful, young man who had adored his job on the railway. For the rest of the shift, Angela and the others operated in a stunned state of disbelief and devastation. Angela kept thinking: Why? She’d only just been told he was ill, but now he had gone forever. It was extremely difficult to take in.

Everybody missed Karl. Everybody had had a joke with him or a memory of a time he’d gone the extra mile to make them smile. He was only twenty-nine and he’d been at Huddersfield for barely a year, yet he’d made a massive impact on the entire station. He’d had his whole life ahead of him. He’d had so many plans for the future. But now all that lay in the dust.

Sara, Karl’s best friend, who was not on shift that morning, heard the news from the station manager, Andy Croughan. Knowing how close she was to her colleague, he’d phoned her as soon as Karl’s family had told him the news. She’d been about to go and visit her friend in hospital, as she’d done nearly every day that past week, but as she listened to Andy telling her firmly that she must speak to Karl’s fiancée before she left the house, she read between the words. In the spaces between them was a terrible truth that was somehow even worse for being unspoken. So she insisted that he tell her more and Andy broke the news.

It was a massive shock. A red-raw pain. Karl had been her best friend in the whole world. They had spoken every day. But, now, there was only silence.

Sara felt stunned. It had been so sudden, and so unexpected, that it was difficult to process. She stayed at home that first day, pretty much unable to function, but she forced herself back to work on Monday. But although she was there physically, her head wasn’t in the right place. It was so horrible to be standing out on the platforms, where Karl had always stood beside her, and see another colleague trying to fill his shoes.

Sara found she kept bursting into tears at work. Everybody was so kind, knowing how close she and Karl had been, but in a way their kindness made it worse. Only Felix’s cuddles were comforting. The cat seemed to pick up on her grief as she had done with others, so many times before. Sara found her attention reassuring, as Felix snuggled down in her lap for a stroke or simply sat with her as she cried. Felix was always there for her … and so was someone else.

Karl’s death hit Dan very hard as well. The two men had been close friends, and with Karl being only a year older than Dan, his passing was like a blow to his belly that pressed all the air from his lungs. Dan was too young to be burying his friends – yet that was what he was soon going to have to do.

A few days after Karl passed away, Dan and Sara went out for a drink. Usually, Karl would have joined them, ordering Jägerbombs to get the party started, his laughing voice putting everyone in a positive mood. But as Sara and Dan collected their drinks at the bar and retreated to a table, laughing was the last thing on their minds. Instead, Dan found himself crying about his friend’s death. Crying in a Wetherspoons – it was hardly cool, but he couldn’t help it. Silently, Sara reached a hand across the table and held his own tightly. She didn’t need to say anything; she knew exactly what he was going through. She was simply there with him, just as he was there with her.

For months now, Sara reflected, she had been putting off telling Dan how she felt about him. There was time enough for all that, she’d told Karl over and over; she would tell him when the time was right.

But Karl’s sudden death was making her realise time was not an infinite resource. Why was she waiting, really? What was she waiting for?

As for Dan, he found that Karl’s death made him re-evaluate many aspects of his life. Life was short. Too short. You did not know how long you had to live; Karl’s tragic death underlined that with emphatic clarity. And if he could be happy with Sara – as he thought he could be, perhaps even should be – then what on earth was he doing in not acting on his feelings?

There was never an official moment when things changed. Dan never said, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’ and Sara never asked him if he wanted to date. With Karl having passed away so recently, it wasn’t the time for anything as trivial as all that. What was going on between them was somehow deeper; it needed no label, no articulation, no moment where a line was crossed. It was more that their friendship was heading in that direction and neither of them did anything now to stop those flourishing seeds from growing, an inevitability that Karl had long foreseen. Rather, it was that their clasped hands on those pub tables became a little bit more common, that their hugs when they said hello lasted just that little bit longer than the norm. When they laughed at work in the team leaders’ office, watching Felix as she frolicked about on the floor, they kept smiling at each other long after the joke was over. Felix, in fact, was probably the first to know what was going on between the two of them.

It was just as well she was so good at keeping secrets.

There was a horrible bittersweetness in their coming together as a couple now, though. For, simply: Karl should have been there to see it. He, who had done so much for them both, would have been thrilled to see them happy. But, no matter how much they might have wished it otherwise, Karl was gone.