Felix The Railway Cat

13. Missing

‘What do you mean, you can’t find Felix?’ Angie asked.

Billy ushered her into the team leaders’ office and sat her down in a chair.

‘She’s disappeared,’ he said gently. ‘She’s been gone all day. Nobody’s seen her.’

‘What do you mean?’ Angie said again, the panic rising in her voice. ‘She can’t have just gone. She must be somewhere!’

But as Billy told her the whole story, Angie realised, with a sinking feeling, that the kitten was well and truly lost.

It had been Dave Rooney who’d first raised the alarm. He’d been the team leader on duty on the early-morning shift, and he’d suddenly realised mid-morning that he hadn’t seen Felix since he’d clocked on. That was highly unusual.

‘Have you seen Felix?’ he casually asked the team, strolling through the station.

But they all said ‘no’.

Dave wasn’t too worried. He sauntered down to the bike racks, checked in the shower room in case she was sleeping on her fleecy black blanket, and ducked his head into the lost-property office, asking Angela Dunn if Felix had popped by that morning. But the little kitten was nowhere to be found.

Dave walked back up Platform 1, wracking his brains. Felix sometimes liked to hang around the King’s Head at the southern end of the station, the boozy little thing, attracted by the thick brambled bushes at the very edge of the station’s plot. Could she have gone into the bushes and got stuck, unable to fight her way out? He hurried down there, but he could neither see nor hear the kitten amid the dense, knotted briars.

It was time to call in reinforcements. He radioed Dave Chin, the TPE maintenance man, and asked him to pop by as soon as he could.

Dave Chin wasn’t based permanently at Huddersfield, but worked all over the railway network, doing whatever odds and sods needed doing, turning up whenever he was summoned, like a sort of railway fairy godfather. He worked at Dewsbury, Stalybridge, Leeds and Manchester as well, but was often at Huddersfield. The first time he’d met Felix, she was sitting in a watering can on Platform 1 with her head poking out of the top – and it had been a mutual case of love at first sight. From that moment on, whenever Dave Chin came to Huddersfield, he made it his first duty to visit Felix, and it turned out that he was the ultimate Felix charmer. Though she was an affectionate cat with many people, her relationship with Dave was something else. He would pick her up and she would roll over instantly on to her back and loll there in his arms, her head hanging off one side and her legs dangling down the other, so that he could rub her belly or tickle her front paws. He’d walk all around the station with her like that: Felix splayed out in his arms, so loved up and easy and she didn’t care who saw it.

‘Felix,’ Angie Hunte used to tut when she saw her, shaking her head in mock-shame, ‘you’re an absolute disgrace.’

So when Dave Rooney told Dave Chin that Felix was missing, the maintenance man wanted to do everything in his power to find her. The team leader relayed his concern that the kitten might have got trapped in the overgrown bushes, and Dave Chin clapped his hands together decisively and sprang into action.

‘Right,’ he said firmly, ‘let’s get that cleared.’

Dave was a down-to-earth, well-muscled man with a weathered face and copious blond hair. He put every one of those muscles to use that day as he cautiously chopped down all the overgrown bushes on the station, looking under every briar for a little black-and-white cat. But when he had finished there was still no sign of her.

The clock ticked on, and Dave Rooney completed his shift. As he handed over to Billy in the afternoon, he gave him an update – and top of the agenda was that Felix was missing. The old-timer had shaken his head incredulously at all this fuss over the kitten; he was sure that the cat would turn up.

Yet as the hours passed by and Billy did his own searches of the station, and completed his own security checks, he realised he had been wrong. For there was not a hint of a whisker to be seen.

The sun set, and cold night settled like a blanket on the station. Billy, despite himself, began to worry. He often moaned about the cat, as he did everything else, calling her a ‘fleabag’ or a ‘waste of space’ or simply ‘urgh, that cat!’, but despite his mean-sounding words there was always a warmth to his tone. He really hoped she was all right.

The station clock kept time as accurately as always, and all too soon the digits turned to 8 p.m. and Angie arrived for her night shift. Billy knew she would be worried sick at the news he had to share which is why he had tried to break it to her gently by saying, ‘Now, I don’t want you to panic, Ang …’

Sitting in the team leaders’ office, having now heard the full account of the drama from Billy, Angie was panicking.

‘Have you searched?’ she grilled Billy, leaping to her feet and pacing the office. ‘I mean, properly?’

‘I’ve searched, Ang,’ he told her.

‘But have you checked underneath that disused carriage, on Platform 2? Because she likes it under there, she sometimes goes and hides there …’

‘I know, Ang,’ Billy said. Everybody on the station knew the kitten’s favourite places better than the backs of their own hands. ‘I’ve searched.’

‘And the bicycle racks?’

‘I’ve searched.’

‘And the shower?’

‘Angie, I’ve looked everywhere. She’s not here. She’s gone.’

A big lump suddenly appeared from nowhere in Angie’s throat and hot tears pricked her eyes.

‘Ang, she’ll turn up. She’ll get hungry, she’ll come back. It’s what cats do.’

‘But she’s never been gone this long,’ Angie said in a wobbly voice, sinking into a chair for support. Her poor little kitten.

She was glad, at least, that it was Billy who had told her. They went back a long way, and if anybody was going to see her upset, she wanted it to be him. As a team leader, you couldn’t show your emotions out on the station floor – her job was to lead, to sort out problems, to get things done, and crying didn’t come into that. But Billy had always understood her. Angie’s pet niggle about herself was that she couldn’t always find the right words to say what she meant, but if she and Billy were in the same meeting together and she was floundering about, trying to express herself and failing, Billy used to clear his throat and say, ‘I think what Angie means is …’ and he would get it absolutely right. ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s it,’ Angie would say, and he’d nod at her in his gruff way, not wanting her thanks, but knowing she was grateful anyway.

Billy stood up, ready to head home. He placed a rough, weathered hand firmly on her shoulder as he went. ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up,’ he said.

After he left, Angie sat in the office alone. She felt absolutely devastated. She didn’t want to do any work; she couldn’t do any work. She couldn’t think of anything but Felix, out there, somewhere, in the dark winter’s night.

Who knew what had happened? Had someone taken her? Had she decided she’d had enough of her working life on the station and called it quits? Had – God forbid – she roamed onto the tracks and been hit by an express? Billy had told her that Dave Chin – who was PTS (Personal Track Safety)-certified and wore the all-over orange hi-vis uniform of those who could walk on the tracks – had looked all over the railway lines for her, and there’d been no sign, but even so … What if she’d wandered into one of the tunnels?

Angie felt sick. Felix wasn’t even a year old. She was absolutely frantic about her.

Every minute felt like an hour. So, when the team leaders’ mobile phone rang ten ‘hours’ into her shift at 8.10 p.m., Angie’s nerves were already shot to pieces.

‘H-H-Huddersfield station?’ she answered tearfully.

‘Oh, Huddersfield station,’ said a male voice on the other end of the phone, as though something now made perfect sense. ‘I work for Domino’s Pizza.’

Domino’s Pizza? thought Angie. We haven’t ordered any pizza.

But then he said, ‘I think we’ve got something that belongs to you.’

Suddenly, the broken pieces of her world fell neatly back into place. Angie gasped. ‘Is she black and white?’ she asked joyously.

‘Yes!’ the man replied with a laugh.

Well, that was it. Angie dropped everything – the station was secondary and her colleagues could take up the slack. She literally ran to the car park and threw herself into her car. Domino’s Pizza, she was thinking, well, I never. And also: how the hell did you get there, little kitten?

For Domino’s Pizza was quite some distance away, located right by the busy ring road that encircled Huddersfield’s town centre. It was totally out of the area that Felix was known to have frequented on her own, which essentially comprised the length of Platforms 1 and 2. If she hadn’t crossed the train tracks – which seemed unlikely since she never had before, and still ran for home if an incoming train was near – then to reach the pizza place she would have had to contend with the traffic in town and cross several busy roads. Unless, of course, someone had taken her …

At that moment, Angie didn’t care how she’d got there; she was just pleased that she knew exactly where she was. She squealed to a stop outside Domino’s Pizza and ran in as fast as she could. And there, sat on the floor in the corner, munching away on something the pizza man had given her and relishing the delicious scent of the cooking pizzas, was Felix. She blinked up at Angie as she ran in, then got rapidly to her feet, as though she’d been waiting for her ride.

Angie felt her heart flip right up into her mouth and back again. ‘Oh, you’ve got her,’ she breathed in relief to the man behind the counter. ‘You’ve got her.’

She couldn’t get to Felix quick enough. She scooped her up from the ground and hugged her. Felix looked happily at her, her fluffy tail swishing, seemingly delighted to be reunited with her mum. Angie stared right into her beautiful green eyes. She was so, so happy to see her.

‘How did she get here?’ she asked the man behind the counter.

‘No idea!’ he laughed. ‘She just wandered in.’

Angie turned her attention back to her beloved cat. ‘You’re not going anywhere ever again!’ she told her sternly. ‘What do you think you’re up to? And where have you been?’ Her worry made her voice quite sharp. She knew Felix couldn’t answer, but the questions spilled out regardless.

Angie held the kitten up in the stark fluorescent lighting of the pizza joint and checked her over carefully, as if looking for clues. There was, at least, no sign of any injury, but neither was there any evidence as to where Felix might have spent her whole day away from home.

Angie brought her back down into her arms. ‘It is good to have you back, madam,’ she told her affectionately.

‘She’s a grand cat,’ the pizza man commented from the counter, adding with a grin, ‘Can we keep her?’

Angie scowled at him jokingly. ‘You’ve absolutely no chance!’ she declared emphatically. ‘No chance! Do you know how many people have been out looking for this cat today?’

‘She’s lovely,’ he observed, with a smile.

‘We know!’ Angie cried, holding her kitten even closer to her chest. ‘We know she is!’

She thanked the man for phoning her – thank God for Christine and that heart-shaped tag, she thought – and carried Felix out to the car.

‘Right, you,’ Angie told the cat. ‘Adventure’s over. We’re going home.’

Back at the office, Angie put some food in her bowl and Felix wolfed it down at once. While the kitten ate, Angie picked up her phone again and dialled Billy. It was the least she could do after his kindness earlier; she knew that, despite himself, he would be worried too.

He answered after only a few rings.

‘I’ve got her!’ Angie said breathlessly, as soon as he picked up.

He didn’t need to ask her who. ‘Where’s she been?’ he asked curiously.

‘Domino’s Pizza,’ deadpanned Angie. ‘Only Felix could go AWOL and end up at a food place!’