Full Steam Ahead, Felix

21. The Senior Station Cat

Dale’s head snapped round to look at the train. How long did Felix have? Could he get to her in time? Had the driver seen her? There was a long-running ‘joke’ in crew mess rooms up and down the railway network which train drivers often said: ‘My life wouldn’t be worth living if I ran over that cat!’ But it didn’t seem so funny now.

The train, luckily, was moving at a snail’s pace. Dale thought it very likely the driver had seen the cat – all the crews were vigilant as they came into Huddersfield as they all knew about Felix and how special she was. The driver could hardly have missed the sad spectacle of Felix bicycling her back legs as she clung desperately to the platform edge.

As for Felix, before Dale had even reached her, he saw her springing up again from the four foot as she gave it a second attempt. Like an action hero dismissed for dead who suddenly returns in the nick of time, she emerged in a spring of glory. This time, she managed to do it in one take as the station cat powered her whole self on to the platform.

The entire ordeal had lasted only a matter of seconds, but Dale was struck with fear. Felix herself seemed unperturbed. She strolled casually away from the edge of the platform as though nothing had happened. Perhaps she was just trying to style it out.

Although she may have glossed over that incident, nothing could conceal the fact that Felix was growing undeniably older. That May, she turned seven, which in equivalent human years is about forty-four. It was hardly past it but, just like a middle-aged human, Felix found that she wasn’t as sprightly as she used to be. She could still leap the four foot, but she’d to give it a bit more welly each time, and she was more tired afterwards than she once had been. No wonder she reduced her visits to Billy’s garden after that. She was much more comfortable sticking to her favourite spots on platform one, so that was what she did. She reminded Angela Dunn of a grand old lady – no longer the mischievous kitten who had pranced about, but a mature, independent woman who knows what she wants to do and damn well does it.

On her birthday, Angela Dunn once again opened all Felix’s presents and cards that had flooded in from all over the world. Felix’s Facebook page by now had over 130,000 Facebook fans and many had generously sent her gifts. The power of the puss showed no signs of slowing; only a month or two before Felix had been honoured in the most extraordinary way with the news that she would feature on her own square in a special Huddersfield edition of Monopoly. There had been a contest to choose which English town would be next to get its own bespoke version of the classic board game, and word had it that Felix’s fans had secured the win for Huddersfield by voting for her home town to triumph. It was a sign of how brightly her star still shone – and Angela Dunn could see that for herself as she opened card after card on 17 May.

As she did so, team leader Geoff banged open the door into the booking office. ‘Are all those for Felix?’ he asked crossly. ‘It’s my bloody birthday as well …’

Angela exchanged a look with Chrissie, who was also working that day.

‘Actually, Geoff,’ said Angela slowly, ‘this one is for you.’ And she presented him with a card signed from all at Huddersfield station – and a bottle of red wine for good measure. She had remembered how upset he’d been the year before at Felix ‘stealing’ his birthday, so she’d nipped out to Sainsbury’s in her lunch hour to make sure Geoff got something too.

It wasn’t often that Geoff was lost for words, but Angela thought the kind gesture might just have done it.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well. Thank you very much.’

He had a chuckle to himself and his cheeks went a little pink. While he didn’t say much more than that, Angela could tell that he was right pleased.

When Felix visited the vet for her birthday check-up, however, ‘pleased’ was not the word that sprang to mind. To her great displeasure, the vet advised the station team that Felix was no longer classified as an ‘adult’ cat in the prime of life, but a ‘senior’.

‘Oh, Felix, love,’ said Angela Dunn when she heard. ‘You’ll have to get on to TPE about your pension!’

Felix was especially displeased as the new classification meant a recommended change of diet. Older cats’ kidneys cannot process the same amount of protein that adult cats can, so cat food companies produce special ‘senior’ ranges that are lower in protein and calories. Older cats – as Felix was already beginning to demonstrate – move about a lot less and are a lot more lazy, so they need fewer calories. It made logical sense, if you knew the science behind it – but Felix, for all her many talents, had never quite mastered that particular discipline.

So when the senior food was duly served up, Felix turned her nose up at it – just as we humans might turn up our noses at the passing of time, not wanting to admit that we have gone up an age bracket on a marketing form or transitioned to the next stage in our lives. Felix point-blank refused to eat any of it. They couldn’t let her starve, so the team went back to the adult food for a little while. They cut down her portions, so her calories were limited, but they knew it wasn’t a long-term solution. It was a battle that they would have to fight another day.

And it wasn’t as if Felix was entirely immobile. Far from it. Though she no longer really clocked on during the day, it didn’t mean she had retired from duty altogether – she had simply changed when she chose to be most active. And for Felix that was almost exclusively during the night shift.

Perhaps she took inspiration from her old colleague Dale, who had worked nights all his life and liked it. He slept like a baby in the daytime and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the station when it was silent and still. On nights such as those, you could hear the grasses in Billy’s garden rustle in the wind even over on platform one. It sounded like a whisper of gossip that spread from one end of the garden to the other, a rumour that was taking hold. Felix liked to listen, too, to the noises of the trains coming in to sleep in the station at night. They sounded tired themselves, after their days of carrying passengers about, and the scrapes of their brakes and their wheels against the rails sounded rather like the sighs of senior citizens as they heaved themselves from their armchairs and wearily climbed the stairs to bed.

At night, the station was populated not by the commuters of the day, but by the engineers in their orange hi-vis outfits and white hard hats and by the cleaners with their bottles of bleach. Felix liked to listen as they shouted to each other across the tracks or whistled while they worked. She listened, too, to the clinking sound of bottles as the cleaners removed the rubbish to the big Biffa bins, and to the rumble of Henry the Hoover, which they dragged behind them. But on the night shift, listening was only half her duty.

Felix liked to conduct her own patrols in the evening, as though seeing what people had done with her domain during the day. In contrast to her slip in the four foot during daylight, she was much more sure-footed when she was stalking solo in the shadows of the night. She would assertively investigate each new development, such as a puddle that had formed on the platform from a daytime shower that had long since ceased. Felix would pad alongside it on the dry ground, then carefully test the damp patch with her paw. She would then nod knowingly, as though her suspicions had been confirmed, and ensure she avoided stepping in the water, valiantly leaping over the puddle instead.

When Dale locked the big blue doors at the front of the station at half past twelve each night, bolting them with a long brass pole, Felix would often be there.

‘And that’s the station locked,’ he would say emphatically, and Felix would look up at him from the floor, blinking her big green eyes in considered approval.

On the night shift, Felix was at times like her old self. She’d join her colleagues on security checks, wait out on the front steps to greet those passengers arriving for the night-time services, and oversee the arrival of the Metro newspaper too, copies of which were delivered each working day around 3 a.m. The delivery man would haul in his big bundles of newspapers, bound up in brown paper with plastic ties, and begin slicing at the ties with a Stanley knife to liberate the papers, before throwing them into pink display holders. Felix would always sit to one side of these holders, closely inspecting the man’s work. He thought her far more professional than the tabby station cat at nearby Todmorden, who, he said, tended to climb into the holders and thereby stopped him from putting the papers inside. Felix, of course, was far too professional to mess about in such a way.

But that didn’t mean that all her games were over. In the spring of 2018, Felix was known to instigate the odd game of hide-and-seek with Dan on the concourse. With a mischievous expression on her face that was like the Felix of old, she ducked and dived in and out of the local information leaflets that the Friends of Huddersfield Station had left out on display. Dan, who had not played this game with Felix before – she’d mostly played it with Andrew McClements, back in the days when he’d been a team leader – had been confused by her behaviour at first. Every time he tried to move around the display of leaflets, she had hidden behind them, deliberately crouching down low so he couldn’t see her. It took him a good couple of minutes before he realised she was doing this on purpose. After that, Felix found him a willing accomplice if ever she was in the mood to let off a little steam at night.

It was perhaps good practice for Dan anyway, to be reconnecting with such childhood games, because there had been a recent development in his relationship with Sara that made the likelihood of him playing them in the near future all the more certain. Sara was pregnant. A TPE baby was on her way.

The pregnancy may have come as a surprise to Dan and Sara, as it was still relatively early days in their relationship, but they could not have been more thrilled. Sara soon moved back into the booking office to work, as her platform job required her to lug ramps and lift luggage and the physical labour was not advisable; she also had very bad morning sickness. It helped her physically, but it was also perhaps an emotional boon too, as it meant she was no longer out working on the platforms where she had spent so much time with her best friend Karl.

She still missed him so much, every single day. She so wished he could have been around to hear their news. She knew he would have been over the moon for them; he would have been the best Uncle Karl that her daughter could have wished for. It was really, really hard to know that her child was never going to meet him, but Sara was determined that her little girl would still get to know him through her memories. Karl meant so much to her that, for a long time, she debated with Dan naming their baby after him in some way. But, in the end, her instincts told her that Karl would not have wanted that.

She could picture his brown eyes twinkling at her, full of love and good-willed guidance. ‘Don’t do that just because you miss me,’ he would have said, with his big brotherly wisdom and a big brotherly hug. ‘You must name her what you want to name her because you want to name her that.’ In the end, and well ahead of arrival, Dan and Sara decided on Maisie.

One day, shortly after their news had been announced to the team, Sara came into work to find Felix in the locker room. As she was fond of doing, Sara took a seat and allowed Felix to leap up on to her lap. Felix could be a bit grumpy from time to time, but Sara always took the risk of having a cuddle, because Felix was like the little girl in the nursery rhyme: when she was good, she was very, very good.

Normally, if she was in the mood, Felix would quickly settle down for a cuddle with Sara, and that was that. But, on this day, she looked rather quizzical as she got closer to her colleague. She did not sit down. Instead, her velvet nose quivered, as though she was smelling something new. Very, very gently, she placed her white-capped paws on Sara’s belly.

Maisie was about twelve weeks old inside Sara’s tummy at the time. Sara had not started showing yet, but it was as if Felix knew, all the same, that there was something different about her. It was as if she knew there was a new colleague sleeping away in there that she needed very much to say hello to.

So softly, very softly, Felix picked up one of her paws and placed it gently down on Sara’s belly. Then she did the same with her other front paw. Then she did the same again. Felix kept on padding Sara’s stomach with a beautiful and caring conscientiousness, as though she was stepping out a message in Morse code – a message that was intended just for Maisie.