Felix The Railway Cat

10. Doctor’s Orders

Despite Billy’s reluctance, the rest of the team at Huddersfield were happy to accompany Felix on a few laps of the station. Before long, she was able to be taken off the lead altogether and could be let loose.

Part of the reason the staff were so confident about doing that, however, was because they themselves were like mother hens – or bodyguards, which was perhaps a more befitting description given the glamourpuss look Felix was rocking these days. Gareth would often accompany her outside, and if she went anywhere near the edge of Platform 1, he would cautiously shepherd her away from the yellow line, making sure she stayed safe. Felix, in truth, showed no signs of wanting to peer over the edge of the abyss. She kept well back, just as her colleagues showed her, and never really ventured of her own accord away from the area adjacent to the office. She never even went down the steps to the subway. In fact, she spent most of her time outside by the bike racks.

They were perfectly located, as far as Felix was concerned, for if she was spooked by anything she could run straight back to the office quick-sharp. If she heard a train coming, she would run for home at once – for its deafening roar (and soon-to-be squealing brakes) still seemed to inspire her with a fear that the sounds from stationary trains had long since ceased to do. Often, she would flee to the lost-property office, which was located right beside the office door, and kindly Angela Dunn would pick her up and give her a cuddle until the train had gone and Felix felt brave enough to explore those bike racks once more. She was very happy sitting there and watching life go by, and it seemed to Felix she had the best of both worlds: fun times playing and snoozing in the office, and the odd promenade with an oh-so-attentive escort.

But for all the mothering the station team gave her, the time was approaching when Felix herself was going to be relieved of such responsibilities. In the middle of September, she passed the milestone of her four-month birthday, and an appointment was made to have her spayed and microchipped. Felix had to go back to the vet.

‘How are you doing, Felix?’ Gareth Hope asked his little friend.

Felix raised her green eyes grumpily to meet his, and almost scowled. Then she moved her head just a little and he suddenly vanished from her viewpoint, which was very narrow these days, as she had the most annoying post-surgery cone around her neck.

Felix hated it. She lifted a white-capped paw to her black shoulder and once more knocked at it, trying to get it off. More often than not, she succeeded. The white cone was supposed to be attached to her diamanté collar, but Felix was clever enough to have worked out how to slide her collar over her head with one paw, so she soon made easy work of giving the cone the slip. She was still tiny, too, so even though the cone was kitten-sized, it still looked too big. It was an absolute nightmare trying to keep it on her and make sure she didn’t pick at her stitches.

‘Leave her be, lad,’ said Billy, who was also in the office. ‘She just needs a bit of peace and quiet, don’t you, lass?’

The ‘grand-looking’ cat Billy had once so admired looked very sorry for herself indeed. The stitches from the operation were still fresh, and she had a big shaven patch on her side where the vet had clipped off lots of her lovely fur. As she was so long-haired, even when it started re-growing it took an awfully long time – two or three months – before her coat was back to normal. Felix looked most put out that her glamourpuss days seemed behind her.

‘How are you doing anyway, young Gareth?’ Billy asked his colleague meaningfully.

Gareth – the university dropout, who was only working at the station as a stopgap job while he figured out what he really wanted to do – was by now twenty-four and had been there for almost five years. But it was so easy to stay … It was family, wasn’t it, and how could Gareth turn his back on that, especially now Felix had joined them? The station felt like home.

Gareth didn’t reply, but he felt Billy’s wise eyes fixed on him as he fiddled self-consciously with some paperwork on his desk. Billy had become almost a father figure to Gareth as they’d worked together over the years. Billy had seen it all on the railway: he knew how people started … and then stayed. Blink, and suddenly thirty years had passed and you were still in the same job, making the same jokes with the same people, but you were now wizened and grey.

He cleared his throat and repeated something he’d said to Gareth a few times already, when it was just the two of them in the office and they had some time alone. ‘Be aware, young Gareth,’ he warned him in his gruff voice, ‘you’re getting stuck here, son.’

He slipped outside with a cigarillo between his fingers and let the door slam shut behind him.

Gareth sighed, Billy’s words of warning rattling around in his head. The old-timer had told him, ‘You’ve got to move on. If you don’t move every three or four years, people will think you’ve given up, and they’ll never entertain giving you another job.’

Was he right? Gareth didn’t know. Like Billy, during his five years at the station he had seen plenty of colleagues become set in their ways but – funnily enough – for all his years of service, Billy wasn’t one of them. Though some long-service employees could become very black and white in their view of things, Billy could not only see shades of grey but also in technicolour – sometimes literally. He liked to open things up and try out new ideas, and one of his recent innovations was to transform part of the station concourse into an art gallery; a vision that would come to fruition the following spring. He was a pioneer when it came to the environment, too, and had already won an award for his novel ways of making the station run more greenly. Billy’s philosophy was that the station didn’t just have to be a terminus, it could be a hub of the community and the team could make it really nice.

Nor was he the only one at Huddersfield with those ideas – Andy Croughan had started a library where people could leave and take books for free; later, the concourse would display local poetry and get involved in creative writing projects. It was part of what made Huddersfield so special and why Gareth loved working there so much – it wasn’t a big, impersonal station as some of the major hubs could be, but neither was it a quiet little place off the beaten track where people had given up. No, Huddersfield was a place where people made things happen.

And he was among those people, Gareth realised suddenly. He glanced down at Felix, who glowered at him from within her big white cone. He had made the station cat happen. It had given him a little bit of faith in himself. Maybe Billy is right, he thought. Maybe I should keep an eye out, see if anything comes up.

In the meantime, he had a poorly kitten to care for – and he wasn’t the only one on duty. Everyone passing through the office had a kind word – and more – for Felix on her sick bed. Poor thing, she really was very distressed. She took to wandering the office with her favourite brown bear clutched in her mouth, just walking up and down, mewing.

‘What’s up with you? Do you want to go out?’ Angie Hunte would ask her, as Felix cried plaintively. But the cat would just pick up the bear and go back to her slow, sad meandering. Both Angie and Angela thought she treated it like her baby; perhaps, they mused, it was Felix’s way of mothering now that she herself would never have her own kittens.

In the light of Felix’s fretfulness, lots of the team – independently of one another – took to giving her comfort as often as they could. As Felix turned her big green eyes on first one colleague and then another, the colleague favoured with her gaze would crouch down and slip a hand into their pocket, or their handbag or their desk drawer, from where they would retrieve a bag of treats that they had brought for her. They’d shake one out into their palm and Felix would stick out her little pink tongue and snatch it up, gratefully, as if she hadn’t been fed for a week.

‘Miaow!’ she’d say, plaintively, blinking those big green eyes.

‘OK, one more,’ the colleague would say, and another treat, or two, or three, would go the same way as the first, as Felix perfected the art of the pitiful stare.

Knowing no better, some colleagues even gave the recuperating kitten saucers of milk, thinking it would cheer her. Of course, she absolutely loved it, lapping it up eagerly and flicking tasty white droplets onto her velvety black nose.

As Felix’s post-op health gradually improved and she started going outside again, Angie discovered she was stumbling over her in the most unlikely places.

‘Why are you sitting there, Felix?’ she would ask in confusion.

But Felix was a clever little kitty. She had sussed out which colleagues – and it was most of them – kept treats for her hidden in their desk drawers or their pockets, and by now she had located all the hotspots. The only one who knew where they all were was Felix, and she’d hover in the relevant area until the magical treats arrived. Every member of the team had a little something on their person to comfort or tempt the cat – but they little realised that every single colleague on each separate shift was dishing out the same. Kittens at that age are recommended to have three meals a day, but as her multitude of carers nursed her back to health, Felix was getting fed a lot more than that …

But who could resist that lovely kitten face? Felix started to find her voice, too – and if she wanted food she would mew. Loudly. Until you’d fed her. Cats can change their miaows to manipulate humans, often imitating the cry of a newborn human baby when they want food. Felix had clearly mastered this art and was playing them all like a master puppeteer.

But even though her adoring fans readily gave in to her every whim, the kitten wasn’t averse to making her own luck too. One Sunday shift, when it was quiet, Gareth decided to nip to Tesco and pick up a bit of shopping for home, including some Go-Kat kitten biscuits for his little Cosmo, who was only a few months older than Felix. He dropped the bag in the corner of the office and went back to his announcing, thinking nothing more of it. It was only at the end of his shift, as he picked up the carrier bag in readiness to catch his train home, that he realised a cat burglar had been at work. Someone had torn through the bottom of the bag with what looked suspiciously like sharp claws, then chewed a hole in the bottom of the cardboard box and helped themselves to biscuits.

Gareth surveyed the damage and glared accusingly at Felix. She was busy washing herself, looking as innocent as anything, and simply batted her eyelashes at him when he said sternly, ‘Felix!’

She never did admit to doing it. Gareth supposed it could have been Andy …

As if coping with the aftermath of the operation wasn’t enough for poor old Felix, around this same time she also had to contend with another big change. While she had been settling into Huddersfield station and getting glamorised with her sparkly collar and fuchsia name tag and harness, the station itself had been undergoing something of a makeover too. The back offices were being entirely rebuilt and the new layout was now ready for action. The team would be moving into the swish new set-up, while the old offices would be knocked down.

The new offices were still in the same location – Platform 1 – and they were still by lost property and still had a customer-service window, but they were very different inside. Gone was the large, communal, carpeted announcer’s office; that became a tiny, tiled room just big enough for a desk and a microphone. The space behind the scenes was dedicated instead to smart staff facilities: male and female locker rooms, a shower, a mess room/kitchen, and a brand-new office for the team leaders, with enough room for two desks and a couple of filing cabinets. The shower now became a favourite Felix spot and was where her bedding (a black blanket with white paw-prints, among others) was placed permanently for her, at the foot of the towel rack. Some wag made a proprietorial ‘this is my room’ wooden sign saying ‘Felix’, which hung above her bed for a while – until she knocked it down, thinking it was a toy. All the new rooms opened off one long corridor which now became the setting for one of Felix’s favourite pastimes.

Her brown bear was still her constant companion, but Felix gradually stopped pining over her baby and allowed the bear to be turned into a playmate. One of her very favourite games in the world was to stand between Andy and Gareth as each stood at either end of the corridor. One of them would have hold of the brown bear. Slowly, deliberately, he would seat it on the floor of the corridor, as Felix watched with a keen, excited, beady green eye. The bear would be sitting upright, leaning slightly forward. Then Andy or Gareth would take a step back, a run-up, and kick the bear so hard that it soared high into the air. Down the corridor the bear would fly, and Felix would watch it coming with growing pleasure, then chase it and dive as it got closer, taking total joy in their reunion. She would spend hours darting between Andy and Gareth as they booted the bear up and down the corridor: running, leaping, prowling, chasing, diving … never seeming to tire.

With the kitten clearly on the mend, Angie took her back to the vet’s for her follow-up appointment after her operation. She was expecting him to say that everything was fine, as Felix was clearly full of beans.

But as the vet checked her vital statistics – and weighed her – he realised she was rather full of cat treats, too.

‘She’s a little … tubby,’ he began.

Angie told him about the saucers of milk the team had been giving her.

‘Oh, you mustn’t allow her to have any milk,’ he said at once. ‘It’s not good for cats’ systems. It’s also very fattening: one saucer of milk equates to about four burgers as far as cats are concerned.’

Felix had essentially been stuffing her face; no wonder she was now overweight!

Angie took her back to the station and realised that something serious would have to be done. Felix’s colleagues were in danger of killing her with kindness: they had to put an end to the gravy train of treats. It was so important that she knew it was not something she and the other managers could simply mention lightly to their colleagues; unless they emphasised the gravity of the vet’s warning, it would be all too easy for everyone to ignore them, and keep on dishing out the treats at a blink of those seductive green eyes. But where would that leave Felix?

So Felix the cat was added to the official, formal station briefing for that week. This was a document containing all the key safety issues staff had to be aware of – and each employee had to sign to say they’d read and understood the topics discussed. It was proper serious stuff.

‘We know you want to spoil her,’ the managers told the team. ‘We know that everybody wants to have a little moment with her, but we also have to look after her health. Please can you refrain from giving her treats, and especially milk, or anything that’s not good for her. Please do not feed Felix; please leave it to the team leaders.’

It was the only way to ensure she would lose the extra pounds and then maintain a healthy weight.

Felix tried to get round them, of course. But all the miaows, and fluttering eyelashes, and paw prods came to nothing. Angela thought that Felix’s innate laziness was possibly part of the weight problem, too. The cat still loved to lounge anywhere and everywhere, and so enjoyed being stroked and attended to by her many minions that she rarely left the office. Angela used to say to her, ‘It’s time you went out and did something, you know.’

So far, Felix’s trips outside had only ever been with an escort. But now she was spayed and inoculated and five months old, there was really nothing to stop the railway cat from asserting her independence. Felix was about to go it alone.