Full Steam Ahead, Felix

17. Not Yet Time

As time has a habit of doing, it passed, unstoppable as the seasons. Before too long, Dave Chin was dragging a Christmas tree along the platform, and Chrissie was once again draping it in lights and baubles. Felix missed it all, being out the back on her radiator bed, having a snooze. Unusually, however, even when she appeared on the concourse and cast her eyes upon the brightly lit tree, she still didn’t show much interest. For the first time in Felix’s life, that year she did not run up the trunk.

She still went over to it; she was a cat, after all. But she just sat at the bottom and batted a few baubles. Gone were the days of her athletic adventures bounding from branch to branch. She could not be bothered any more; she simply did not have the energy. She preferred to lie beneath the lowest branches on a bed of pine needles, where it was quiet and dark, and watch the wintry world go by.

Angela Dunn watched her fluffy friend from her serving window in the booking office. With Felix lying beneath the Christmas tree, she was much more ‘accessible’ than she’d been before. Yet these days Felix was much more tolerant than she’d ever been of all those who wanted to meet her. The team had noticed a real evolution in her character over the past year, as though she had slowly grown into her role. It felt rather as though the increasing numbers of fans who had come to visit since her book had been published had immunised her over time from any former fears of strangers. The Felix of old had perhaps been like a teen heart-throb; she’d loved the adulation on her own terms, but every now and then had thrown a tantrum and stormed off. Now, however, she was more like a national treasure: relaxed in her celebrity, come what may. On the whole, she was placid as she greeted people, and at times would sit for hours on the concourse, her whole attitude laid-back. ‘The queen is here, and you may stroke her.’

Her newfound maturity was something Mark Allan had noticed too, both in person as he commuted through the station each weekday and in the pictures Angela Dunn had sent him for the Facebook page of Felix meeting fans. Felix was notably more used to meeting strangers now and seemed to humour them more than she would once have done.

As for Jean Randall in the booking office, she thought that perhaps Felix’s increasing laziness played a part in it all. For in Felix’s willingness to remain in situ for people’s visits, Jean detected a classic upside for the station cat. To her, Felix’s soporific, half-closed eyes communicated the message ‘If you think I can be bothered moving, you are downright wrong, my friend. So if you want a photo, take one, but I’m not going to move an inch.’

Jean, unfortunately, was not working at the station that Christmastime. Back in the summer, she’d had a terrible accident falling over in her garden; she’d smashed her right arm to smithereens and broken her elbow too, as well as her left wrist. The doctors had likened her fractures to what would happen if you dropped a china cup on to a concrete floor from a height of about four feet. Both her arms were put in plaster casts for months and she had to have a series of operations as well, to try to repair the damage. There was simply no way she could work in such a condition, so she had been signed off sick.

She still came in regularly, however, every month or so, for catch-up sessions with Andy Croughan. Every time she did, she made a point of seeing Felix, but the little cat was confused by the plaster casts on Jean’s arms, which left her unable to stroke her fluffy friend. For a time, Jean couldn’t even have the cat sit up on her lap, which was devastating for both of them. Jean found that she really, really missed the cat.

Felix seemed to know instinctively that Jean was hurt. And Jean saw her own sad expression that they couldn’t cuddle reflected in Felix’s eyes. Ever since Felix had been a kitten, Jean had been someone who had always taken time out for her, to give her love and affection or a bit of quiet space – whatever the cat had dictated. Now it was Felix’s turn to care for Jean – and she did it as best she could. She rubbed her neck firmly against Jean’s legs, stroking Jean since Jean could no longer stroke her. She walked alongside her too, a permanent partner wherever Jean went. Her considerate attentions made Jean smile, and that made her feel a little bit better, despite all the pain she was in. In some ways, Felix was better than any painkiller – and she had no side effects.

Some weeks before Christmas, Jean had one of her casts removed. Relishing the ability to bend her fingers after so long without freedom of movement, she made sure to give Felix a chin tickle in her radiator bed on her next visit to the station. Felix purred like a train engine, so happy to have Jean back in this way. And, as she pressed her fingers into Felix’s soft fur, Jean rather felt like purring herself.

But while Felix was much more tolerant of fans than before, she still needed her downtime. There were still occasions when the staff had to apologise and inform hopeful visitors that their queen was indisposed. It meant that when Eva – the little girl with big pink glasses, who was no longer wearing a starry blue coat, as she’d grown out of that last year – came calling for Felix that December, she was again left disappointed. Felix was not available for visitors that day.

Eva pushed her spectacles up her little button nose and sighed deeply. She and her mummy, Helen, had tried several times to visit Felix over the past year, scouring the station for any sign of her, but all their attempts to see her had ended in failure. For Eva, who still drew Felix at her kitchen table, who still thought of Felix as one of her very best friends, it was a bitter disappointment that was really hard to bear. Her big blue eyes would fill with tears and it was all Helen could do to get her to leave the station; Eva wanted to wait there for as long as it took for Felix to reappear. But after half an hour or so of tears and deep sadness, the bubbly four-year-old Eva would emerge again – and always with an irrepressible message of hope. ‘Next time it might happen, Mummy! When can we try again?’

Eva had this deep conviction that it was just a matter of time before she would meet Felix. She was always asking to go back to the station to look again. ‘One day, we will see her,’ she told her mother over and over again.

This day, 9 December 2017, was not to be the chosen date, but there was a new development in Eva’s quest to find Felix. Previously, she and Helen had been somewhat limited in their searches, asking only the platform staff for help. On this occasion, they had happened to be at the booking office, buying tickets to Stalybridge for a family day out, so Helen had asked at the counter if Felix was free.

Well, she wasn’t – but what was this the lady was bringing back for them? To Eva’s delight, the TPE team member pressed a free Felix postcard and pen into her hands.

Just as Angela Dunn had envisaged in the summer, the gifts went a long way towards making up for Eva missing out on meeting Felix. The little girl stared down at the beautiful image of Felix with dumbfounded joy. Across the bottom of the postcard was written ‘Have a purrfect day!’

‘Mummy, look!’ Eva cried in excitement. She was absolutely made up. ‘I am going to take it into school for show-and-tell!’ Then a new idea struck her. ‘Mummy, I am going to put this in my bedroom in a frame! Have you got a frame I can borrow please, Mummy? I want to do it as soon as we get home!’

And that was exactly what they did. Helen gave her daughter a brilliant white picture frame that beautifully set off Felix’s ebony fur. That same evening, the framed postcard took pride of place on Eva’s windowsill in her pretty pink bedroom. She placed it next to a framed photograph of her beloved grandad, who had passed away earlier that year.

He and Eva had been very close; he had used to call her ‘Grandad’s girl’. They’d spent hours doing jigsaws together, Eva squinting through her glasses, trying hard to see the missing pieces, despite the fabric patch over her good eye, while Peter smoothed her blonde hair back from her forehead and watched her with loving concern. It had been her grandad who’d been the first family member to spot her failing sight, the first to try to get her help. Perhaps, in some ways, it was a blessing that he wasn’t around to know that Eva’s sight wasn’t getting better at all – in fact, it was getting worse.

But, for the time being at least, Eva could still see her grandad in that framed photograph on her windowsill. It was one of the last-ever photos of Eva and her grandad taken before he died, of them riding the dodgems on a family holiday in Malta, so it was very precious indeed.

That night, as Eva snuggled down to sleep underneath her bedspread – which was printed with the smiling features of a cartoon cat – she glanced between the snapshot of her grandad and the new framed postcard of her very best friend in the world. And she decided to begin a new nightly routine.

‘Goodnight, Grandad,’ she whispered to the image of the smiling man. Eva touched his face gently, and then flicked both her eyes, the good and the bad, back to the fluffy black-and-white cat. She grinned suddenly, so happy to be able to say it to her face. ‘Goodnight, Felix.’