Full Steam Ahead, Felix

25. Dream Come True

It was visits like Gloria’s, Angela Dunn thought, that summed up everything good about Felix. While some people focused on her staggering number of Facebook fans or the power of her ‘brand’, for Angela it was the near-miraculous, deep personal connections that Felix forged that made her special. Felix changed people’s lives. She saved some people’s lives. For Angela, that was what she was all about. And so it was a pleasure for her to help make people’s dreams come true. In that way, Angela was not just a lady-in-waiting: she had a whiff of fairy godmother about her too.

On 1 August 2018, she waved her magic wand once more …

She was working in the booking office that day, serving customers their tickets and dispensing information. It was another sweltering day so Angela wore a short-sleeved white shirt with her navy-and-purple TPE uniform, occasionally flapping the purple scarf round her neck in an attempt to cool herself down.

She glanced up as a blonde-haired mother and daughter approached her. The little girl was about five, wearing turquoise shorts, a pale-pink T-shirt and a nervous, hopeful smile. As she and her mum came up to the counter, the girl lifted a finger to her face and pushed her big pink glasses up her nose. Angela smiled down at her. She couldn’t help but notice that the little girl was wearing a skin-coloured patch stuck over her right eye, which had some kind of drawing on it. The railway worker asked the family how she could help.

‘Is Felix about today?’ the mother asked, somewhat wearily, as though she already knew that the answer would be no. She seemed unusually emotional to Angela, although it wasn’t anything too evident – more like a deep seam of sadness that had clearly touched both mother and daughter.

‘Bear with me a minute,’ Angela said brightly, always happy to go the extra mile. ‘I’ll just go and see if she’s free.’

Helen watched her walk away, feeling no hope that her little girl’s wish to meet Felix would be fulfilled that day. She and Eva had been coming to the station for the past eighteen months now in the hope of meeting Felix and they were still no nearer to success. With only one station cat, Felix’s time was spread too thinly to be able to accommodate meeting all her fans. All Helen and Eva had to show for their efforts was the framed postcard that still sat on Eva’s bedroom windowsill, next to the photograph of her late grandfather. Every morning, she said, ‘Good morning, Felix! Good morning, Grandad!’ and she bid them goodnight at the end of each day. But she’d never got to say hello to the station cat in person.

Helen glanced down at her daughter standing beside her in the booking office, her heart lurching to see the eyepatch stuck firmly over her good eye. This was a new development that the doctors had prescribed only the day before, and both she and Eva were still adjusting to it.

It had been a very sobering appointment at the hospital. The doctors had told them that the fabric patches Eva had been wearing for a limited time each day were not working. They had hoped that her bad eye, forced to work hard by being the only eye Eva was using, would have started to correct itself from its turned-in position by now – that her vision would have improved. But everything they’d tried so far had failed to work. The doctors confided that they now suspected her bad eye was never going to be any different. Eva, they said, was likely to go blind in that eye.

Helen couldn’t really process that bleak prognosis. She’d been focusing so much on helping Eva – encouraging her to draw so that she really used her bad eye; being diligent about following the specialists’ instructions – that she couldn’t compute that all their efforts seemed destined to fail.

The doctors said they wanted to try one last thing, a last-ditch attempt to try to save her vision: a permanent patch, changed daily, that she would have to wear all day over her good eye.

Eva, normally such a bubbly girl, was very upset about the idea. Her poor eyesight, to her, was normality, so she didn’t take in the ramifications of the wider prognosis. But she did understand having to cover up her good eye all day long. She knew other people didn’t wear patches and she became very quiet and down in the doctor’s office. It broke Helen’s heart to see her.

The doctors showed Eva the patches she could choose to wear. There were pre-printed designs for children, covered all over with colourful cars or birds or tractors.

‘Or you could try these,’ the specialist said, showing her a range of blank sticky patches that, to Eva, represented a pale-pink canvas.

For the little girl who loved to paint and draw instantly saw their potential. ‘Oh, wow,’ she said, brightening up. ‘I could draw on these!’ Then a lovely idea struck her. ‘I could draw Felix!’

So, that morning, as Eva and Helen began the new regime, that was exactly what she did. Sat at her kitchen table, Eva plucked a blue biro from her pencil case and carefully sketched out the station cat on the medical patch. Eva’s very favourite part of Felix was her long fluffy tail, so she paid particular attention to that.

When she was finished, Helen helped her seal off the sight in her good eye, gently pressing the patch to her child’s soft skin. As she sat back and looked at Eva, rather than her daughter’s beautiful blue eye looking back at her, she instead saw a jaunty sketch of Felix the cat. Helen asked Eva to go and gather her things, and when they were ready they headed into town.

Helen had planned the day trip as a treat for Eva, to try to cheer her up as she still seemed very low. She’d been such a good girl, wearing the patch even though she didn’t want to, that Helen felt she deserved a treat. They’d gone for a milkshake and then – as they always had to do when they were in town – they’d swung by the station to see if they could see the cat.

Helen thought it likely they’d be disappointed again, and she didn’t know quite how Eva might take the news this time. Eva was convinced that Felix would be fast asleep. As it turned out, they were both wrong.

Angela Dunn came bustling back into the booking office, having checked on Felix in the locker room and received the all-clear from the queen herself. She sensed that this visit was important to both Eva and Helen. That was evident as they both looked up as she came back through the door – and stared at her with such hope it almost seared her.

‘We’ve been coming in for months now and not seen her,’ Helen confided, already anticipating the crushing disappointment.

But there was none to be had.

‘Today, Eva,’ announced Angela Dunn, with a dramatic sensibility that could have given the station cat herself a run for her money, ‘you’re going to meet Felix!’

Helen couldn’t help it; she started crying. Of all the days for Felix to be there!

‘Go on to platform one,’ said Angela, more gently. ‘Come to the office door and I’ll bring her out to meet you both.’

Quickly, Helen ushered Eva through the gateline and they made their way to the former customer-information point. Neither of them could believe this was really happening, especially after so long searching for an audience with Felix. Every day, Eva chattered away to her postcard of Felix; every day she looked on the Facebook page. The idea of meeting the real station cat, warm and fluffy, was absolutely overwhelming.

Eva and Helen stood nervously on the platform, excitedly anticipating the moment they had waited months to experience. As Angela Dunn opened the back-office door and came out, carrying Felix in her arms, Eva’s little face lit up. Bad eye or not, she could see who had come to say hi to her and she was absolutely made up.

‘Felix!’ she cried, and the sheer, bouncing happiness in her voice made Angela and Helen laugh with joy. Eva was beaming with such unadulterated elation that it was hard to see where her big smile ended and the little girl began. Angela didn’t think she’d ever seen a happier child in all her days.

Carefully, Angela laid Felix out on the mat and the station cat looked up to see who had come to visit her. She could sometimes be skittish around children, finding them unpredictable, but she was very chilled that day. She even allowed Eva to stroke her.

Eva was soon chattering away to her, crouched down next to Felix on the floor. She shared all the secrets of her heart with her, just as any best friend would do.

‘So I have to wear these patches now,’ she confided to the station cat. ‘But, Felix, you know what? I don’t mind it. I really don’t. And I’ll tell you why: because every morning I am going to draw you on them. And I don’t mind wearing them if you are on my eye.’

Angela Dunn, hearing this, felt herself melt a little inside.

‘You take my mind off all of these eye things,’ Eva told Felix. ‘You make me so very happy.’ Then the little girl with big pink glasses gently petted the station cat, her fingers fumbling through her fluffy fur. She wanted to say more, but in the end she simply told her, ‘Thank you, Felix.’

Helen, watching her, wanted very much to say the same. Seeing her child, who had been so sad yesterday, even just hours ago, suddenly beaming and bright, had made her year – if not her whole entire life.

She bent down and stroked the station cat too. ‘You’ve made her smile again,’ she whispered to Felix. ‘Thank you so much, Felix. I don’t think I can ever thank you enough.’

Felix accepted their adulation as her due. She was very, very good with them. It was as though all her experiences over the past few years – learning greater tolerance and growing up herself – had been building up to this one moment, where she could make a little girl’s dream come true. She patiently waited as Helen took a snapshot of her daughter meeting her best friend; her child’s smile was so bright, Helen did not even need a flash.

‘You don’t know how perfect this timing is,’ Helen said to Angela as she put her phone away, and she filled her in about Eva’s eye and the patches and Eva’s desire to draw Felix on them – an idea that came about so that her friend would always be there with her, helping her through her challenges. Angela felt so happy that she had been able to help them meet.

‘Eva, just think,’ Helen added, ‘now you’ve seen Felix in person, you can draw exactly what you’ve seen!’

As though she’d overheard her, Felix suddenly seemed determined to showcase to Eva the full gamut of her emotions, so that Eva would have all the source material she needed for the many days of patch-wearing ahead. By now, during their meeting, Felix had perfectly performed ‘patient’, she had resolutely rendered ‘regal’ and she had excelled at ‘beautiful cat lounging on the floor’. Now, as Eva went to stroke Felix one final time, the dramatic diva added ‘wild’ to her repertoire and announced rather abruptly, with a tossing of her head, that the audience with Queen Felix was over!

But Eva didn’t mind; she had her own cat at home, Sooty, who could be a very scratchy little cat, so Felix’s feisty spirit didn’t faze her in the slightest. In fact, it made her love her even more.

Though the young girl might not have grasped it yet, Eva would most likely need a bit of that fighting spirit in the weeks and months that lay ahead. Perhaps Felix would inspire her in more ways than one.