Felix The Railway Cat

24. Clever Felix

The big black crow cawed its mocking caw.

Felix raised a weary eye from her lair by the bike racks and stared at the bird impassively. The crow was a real poser and kept flying about as though trying to impress his fellows. He had made it his habit, that spring afternoon, to keep landing on the platform to squawk at the station cat, trying to wind her up. Over and over he did it: flying off to his iron roost, then coming back down, his harsh cry getting more and more frustrated the longer that Felix didn’t respond.

But Felix merely sat there and watched him. She refused to get riled by his antics. She was Queen Felix – and even though she couldn’t fly, she had learned to rise above it.

Felix’s new maturity, and her confidence in her position as a gracious monarch, showed itself in her other interactions, too – in particular, in the way she behaved with her fellow residents of Platform 1. Though she still enjoyed a good stalking session with the posse of pigeons who scavenged at the station, the team were astonished to see that, when one of the pigeons was poorly, Felix could – in opposition to every instinct in her bones – actually be quite caring towards the suffering bird.

One afternoon, as Michael Ryan, who worked in revenue protection, was hard at work on Platform 1, he spotted Felix acting most strangely over on Platform 4. There was an injured pigeon, unable to fly, squatting helplessly on the ground over there, and Michael watched with a sense of grim fascination, safari-style, as Felix skulked over to the bird, expecting the station cat to slay the stricken creature as a lion might take down a gazelle on the slopes of the Serengeti.

But Felix did no such thing. First of all, she sat with the bird, as though she was a night nurse keeping a bedside vigil by her patient. Then she reached out a velvety white paw and patted the pigeon reassuringly, in a manner not unlike that which the same nurse might have used to mop her patient’s brow. There was no aggression nor even a mocking playfulness in that pat – she appeared to be comforting a friend.

At her encouraging touch, the pigeon, who had been trying to get to Platform 8 and given up, made a valiant effort and hopped a little further. Felix, her claws still retracted, gently touched its purpley-green feathers once again, and once more the pigeon moved on. Every time it stopped, Felix tapped it one more time, and thus escorted that pigeon all the way to Platform 8.

One could argue, of course, that she was just playing with it, and that the ailing pigeon, fearing for its life, had no choice but to ask, ‘How high?’ when Felix’s tap said: ‘Jump!’ But that wasn’t how it appeared to Michael Ryan, observing this strange scene from over on Platform 1. It was weird, but it really was like seeing Felix interacting with a friend.

The unlikely truce was maintained even when the pigeons weren’t poorly. Sam Dyson, who had worked with Felix ever since she’d arrived at the station, doing platforms, announcing and the booking office, watched one day as she and another pigeon kept each other company for roughly two hours of his shift. The pigeon had sat down on the edge of Platform 1, settling in as though he was an elderly gentleman with a rug over his knees at the seaside, wanting to watch the tide turn. He’d been there for quite a while, and Felix had eventually tottered out of the concourse to see what he was up to. She got closer and closer to him – not prowling, but rather moving with an interested, enquiring walk that took her, in the end, all the way up to him, so that she was standing right next to the bird.

The pigeon didn’t flinch or fly off, and neither was Felix fazed by him. She got so close that it was almost as if she was going to cuddle him, but eventually she decided to simply and gracefully sit down. And then she and the pigeon sat together on the platform and watched the world go by, like two old friends nestled on a comfy park bench, having a good old natter and setting the world to rights.

For all Felix’s maturity, however, in the spring of 2014 she showed Angela Dunn, at least, that she wasn’t always the smartest kitten in the litter.

‘Hiya, Felix,’ Angela said that day, as the cat appeared in the lost-property office, hopped over her open desk drawer and greeted her affectionately. Every now and then, Felix would lick Angela’s hand: a sign of real love. Given the cat’s sometimes grumpy behaviour with other people, the little rough-tongued kiss always took Angela by surprise. But she and Felix were old friends, and Angela made a point of never picking her up or pestering her, believing that the cat had enough people petting her to last a lifetime; and it seems that the cat genuinely appreciated the peace and quiet she promised. Angela was one of those figures who had been around for all of Felix’s station life too, like Angie Hunte and Billy – and Felix’s own brown bear (who was still a firm favourite, even after all these years).

Felix miaowed plaintively for a treat and, when Angela obliged, she performed her little trick of catching it with her paws. Ta-da! But although she purred and pestered Angela for an encore, to Felix’s immense disappointment her colleague tucked the little orange bag of Dreamies back in her middle desk drawer and shut it tight, telling Felix firmly that she had had enough for today.

Felix sniffed at the desk, from where the tantalising scent of the Dreamies drifted, and fixed her molten eyes on Angela, begging for more – but Angela had already turned back to her work. A moment later, when Angela looked up again, Felix had disappeared. Though she still loved to doze among the soft treasures of the lost-property cave, that activity was clearly not on the cat’s agenda for today.

A little while later, Angela shut the big bottom drawer in her desk with a satisfying clatter. Done! That was her paperwork completed: now for a platform patrol. She slipped on her yellow hi-vis vest – the colour all members of the TPE team wore on the platforms at Huddersfield station – and stepped outside to join her colleagues.

They were standing there chatting when they heard a distant: ‘Miaow!’

They looked around for Felix, expecting to see her behind the bike racks or further along the platform, but there was no sign of the fluffy black-and-white cat. That’s odd, thought Angela, I wonder where she’s got to.

‘Miaow!’ They heard again. It was a deep, echoey sort of sound, quite unlike Felix’s usual voice, but it was unmistakeably her.

‘Where’s Felix?’ Angela asked her colleagues, but nobody had seen her.

‘Miaow!’ The cat’s cries sounded more urgent now, so Angela started looking around for her properly. She searched in the station manager’s office and in the team leaders’ room; she checked Felix’s bed in the shower closet and called for the cat in both the male and female locker rooms. These were a favourite retreat as they offered peace and quiet … and copious comfy bedding options. She caused absolute havoc in the men’s room because the team often left their spare uniforms in there, and Felix would bed down in the cosy clothing and get cat hairs all over them. Once, a team member forgot to lock his locker, and when he came back the door was wide open and there was a cat all rolled up in his smart jacket inside the metal cavern: just two emerald eyes peeping out. Well, he thought, I can’t be mad with her; it’s way too cute! As well as sleeping in the lockers, Felix was also known to doze on the snug wooden shelves in the ladies’ locker room, or even on top of the locker units themselves: she had a perfect view out to the town of Huddersfield from the summit of the lockers in the men’s room, and it was one of her favourite spots.

But as Angela searched for her high and low, there was no sign of the cat in the locker rooms today.

‘Has anyone seen Felix?’ she asked. But no one had. ‘Where are you, cat?’ Angela wondered aloud.

‘MIAOW!’ Felix replied, as though trying to tell her. By now, the chorus of mews was impatient and demanding. Felix was quite patently saying, ‘Let me out! I’m stuck!’ but Angela had tried all the usual places and Felix was not in them.

Angela scratched her head and stood quite still, hovering by the customer-information point, always a popular place for Felix, and where, opposite the desk, the stable door of Angela’s lost-property office lay half-open.

‘MIAOW!’

Where is she? Angela wondered. She listened more closely as Felix called again.

That’s odd, she thought, as she edged towards the noise, it sounds like it’s coming from my office …

She opened the stable door and stood on the threshold of her room. There was her desk: no Felix. There were the shelves packed full of all the abandoned items: no Felix. Angela walked in and marched up and down those shelves, moving things around in case Felix had got stuck behind a suitcase or caught up in a cagoule.

‘MIAOW!’ (‘I’m right here!’ Felix seemed to be yelling.)

Angela slowly turned round and stared again at her desk. I wonder … she thought.

She walked over and pulled open the big bottom drawer, and out leapt Felix, looking ruffled and a little bit dazed to find herself freed from her dark and unexpected prison. Angela had never seen her move so fast. She was off!

As Angela shut the drawer again behind Felix, it was obvious to her what had happened. Greedy Felix, wanting more treats, had tiptoed into the big drawer, wondering if she could somehow help herself to the bag of Dreamies located teasingly in the middle drawer above. The big drawer had been roomy and looked a rather fun place from which to plot her cat burglary. But the cat criminal, having silently stepped inside, had then found herself trapped when Angela had unwittingly shut the drawer on her.

Well, thought Angela, watching Felix dart away up the platform, very glad to be free at last, that will teach her not to try and get treats on her own!

As Felix approached her third birthday, however, her plots to get more food grew more complex. Cats are very, very clever creatures. Their brains are more like ours than those of dogs – and Felix certainly had human levels of cunning when it came to the thorny question of how to hoodwink her colleagues into feeding her more.

The answer seemed an obvious one, given Felix’s experiences the year before. Diva Felix was required to make another unforgettable appearance in the limelight: acting was clearly the way for this drama queen to go. It was once more time for the railway cat to tread the boards with her white-capped paws.

The first Angie Hunte knew of the scheme was when she came on shift one morning. The team leader on the night shift was supposed to feed Felix, but as Angie bustled into the office and wished everyone a cheery good morning, the canny cat was waiting for her with a heart-rending complaint to make.

Felix staggered up onto Angie’s desk the moment the team leader sat down in her chair and boldly pushed her way into Angie’s eyeline.

‘Miaow!’ she mewed, terribly feebly, as though she could barely muster the energy to call out, so weak was she from lack of food. She fluttered her eyelashes and blinked her mournful green eyes at Angie. Out came one velvety white paw, which she pressed desperately to Angie’s skin, begging her to help her. She had been left alone all night with this other, mean team leader – and it was only Angie who could save her now.

‘Now then, what’s all this?’ Angie said in concern. She knew only too well which of Felix’s mews meant, ‘I’m hungry,’ and recognised that Felix was currently employing it at top volume.

Felix edged closer to Angie, channelling every flick of her tail into the act, placing her paws on Angie’s shoulders so she could stare straight into her eyes, pleading for mercy, for food, for this unwarranted starvation to be brought to an end – before it was too late.

‘Has he not fed my Felix?’ Angie said aloud in horror.

Dave Rooney had been on shift the night before. Unfortunately for Felix, he just happened to be passing through the office at the time she said it, and he stopped in his tracks and looked at Angie with an I-can’t-believe-you-fell-for-that face. ‘You know I have,’ he deadpanned. ‘That cat is trying it on.’

And it wasn’t the last time she did – not on your nelly. Felix had twigged that the multitude of carers she had as a railway cat, and the nature of their ever-changing shifts, meant that she could try time and again to get more food out of them whenever the changeover of team took place. Angie found that it was often she who was on the receiving end of the cat’s amateur-dramatics performances. So convincing were Felix’s interpretations of near-death hunger that Angie would find herself staring in genuine concern at the cat, when in would walk the colleague who’d been on duty the previous shift.

‘Oh, soft touch is here,’ they would say to Angie, teasing her, and only then would she realise that once again Felix had been pulling her leg.

But Felix did manage to grab an extra meal every now and again, and only after her subterfuge had been successful would the team leaders confer and realise that she had been given a double dinner. In the end, to ensure they were not hoodwinked by this master criminal, they decided to write on the noticeboard exactly when Felix had been fed, so that if they genuinely forgot on a busy shift, the team would know that she did need feeding if she cried; but if she was just trying it on (as nine-and-a-half times out of ten she was), they could send her packing with her fluffy black tail between her legs.

Of course, she never went far if her plans were foiled – only as far as the gateline team. With them, she’d twist in and out of their forest of legs to get their attention before it would start all over again.

‘Miaow!’ she’d say, making eyes at them, all the world a stage. ‘I’m so hungry …’

Felix’s family was even larger now than it had been when she’d first started working at the station. With the introduction of the ticket barriers in June 2013, a new team of staff members had been added, so that the crew at Huddersfield now numbered thirty-six humans and one black-and-white cat. Not everyone was a fan of the moggy when they met her, however – there was a new team leader called Geoff who would yell, ‘Get out!’ whenever she walked into the office while he was on shift (he may also have been guilty of rudely writing ‘Fleabag: fed’ on the team leaders’ noticeboard). Yet when he bellowed, ‘Gerraway!’ at her as she sauntered in, Felix merely turned around and strolled nonchalantly out again, the carefree wag of her tail seeming to say, ‘OK, Geoff, I’ll be back in a bit when you’ve calmed yourself down.’ Like any boss managing a crotchety employee, she just needed to work out how to deal with him. She was confident that she would succeed: after all, look at her and Billy these days.

It was plain to see from the way Felix trotted around after Billy that she simply adored him – and the feeling was mutual. In fact, Felix loved him so much that, in spring 2014, she focused that clever brain of hers on to a problem she really wanted to solve: how could she make sure Billy stayed at the station all the time and never left her? Angie was there the day she came up with the answer.

Billy had been working nights, and as usual he and Felix had spent much of the time together. It had been a twelve-hour shift, so no wonder he was exhausted as he made his slow and steady way out of the station just after 6 a.m. He and Angie walked together, chatting as they went, finishing off the last of their handover before Billy headed home for a well-deserved sleep and Angie took charge of the station.

‘And Felix?’ Angie asked.

‘Fed,’ Billy said as he ticked off the items on his hand. He coughed abruptly, somewhat hoarsely, and then continued, ‘Watered. But not present and correct – I haven’t seen her since you signed in.’

While the team leaders had been talking in the office, Felix had vanished from view.

‘She’ll turn up,’ Angie said confidently, knowing that the cat would come back soon; she was always on duty for the morning rush hour.

‘I dare say,’ Billy replied, stifling a yawn.

They stumbled down the station steps and passed the King’s Head pub on their way to the car park. Billy could see his silver people carrier looming into view and it had never looked so inviting. He couldn’t wait to slip into the seat, click his seatbelt into place and drive straight home to bed.

But a cat-shaped someone had other ideas.

As they rounded the corner and had full view of the car, they also saw that Felix was sitting proudly on the roof, having selected it specifically from all the motors on offer. She looked as pleased as punch at her brainwave to stop him leaving the station. Perhaps she’d taken her inspiration from her hostage-taking triumphs, when she would jump up on the suitcases of those customers with food, trying to keep them on the platform for as long as she possibly could. For Felix looked pretty comfortable on top of Billy’s car – it was obvious she was not planning on moving any time soon.

Billy shook his head in disbelief.

‘Come on, cat,’ he said. ‘I want to go home.’

But Felix didn’t budge.

‘Get off, please, Felix,’ he went on. ‘I’ve just done a twelve-hour shift. I want to go home, cat. I want to go home now.’

Felix merely lifted her beautiful head just a touch higher, and every sinew of her fluffy body said, ‘I’m not moving anywhere.’ She flicked her tail back and forth, wagging it with great pleasure at the success of her scheme. Looking levelly at Billy, her big green eyes unmistakeably said, ‘Gotcha.’

‘Please,’ he begged.

Angie, chuckling away and not at all sympathetic to Billy’s situation, quickly snapped a photo of the stand-off between the two. There was Billy, absolutely exhausted, pleading with the cat, and facing him was Felix, sat squarely on the roof of Billy’s car, refusing to shift an inch. Angie thought it so funny that she showed the image to Billy’s wife and the team; she captioned it: ‘Preventing the team leader from going home.’ It was a ruse that Felix would try over and over again – because her heart was really in it.

As far as Felix was concerned, Billy’s home was here – with her. And with her was where he should always be.