A Street Cat Named Bob

I took it at first simply to help me get to sleep at night on the streets. It anaesthetised me from the cold and the loneliness. It took me to another place. Unfortunately, it had also taken a hold of my soul as well. By 1998 I was totally dependent on it. I probably came close to death a few times, although, to be honest, I was so out of it at times that I had no idea.

During that period it didn’t occur to me to contact anyone in my family. I had disappeared off the face of the earth - and I didn’t really care. I was too wrapped up in surviving. Looking back at the time now, I can only imagine that they must have been going through hell. They must have been worried sick.

I got an inkling of the grief I was causing about a year after I had arrived in London and about nine months or so after I’d taken to the streets.

I had made contact with my father when I’d arrived in London but hadn’t spoken to him in months. It was around Christmas time that I decided to give him a call. His wife – my stepmother – had answered the phone. He refused to come to the phone and kept me waiting for a few minutes, he was so angry with me.

‘Where the f*** have you been? We’ve all been worried sick about you,’ he said, when he had collected himself enough to talk to me.

I made some pathetic excuses but he just shouted at me.

He told me that my mother had been in contact with him desperately trying to find out where I was. That was a measure of how worried she’d become. The two of them never spoke. He shouted and screamed at me for fully five minutes. I realise now it was a mixture of release and anger. He had probably thought I was dead, which, in a way, I had been.

That period of my life lasted a year or so. I’d eventually been picked up off the streets by a homeless charity. I’d stayed in various shelters. Connections, just off St Martin’s Lane, was one of them. I’d been sleeping rough in the market next door around that time.

I ended up on what’s known as the ‘vulnerable housing’ list, which qualified me as a priority for sheltered accommodation. The problem was that for the best part of the next decade I ended up living in horrendous hostels, B&Bs and houses, sharing my space with heroin and crack addicts who would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. Everything I had was stolen at some point. I had to sleep with my most important possessions tucked inside my clothes. Survival was all I could think about.

Inevitably, my drug dependency got worse. By the time I was in my late twenties, my habit had got so bad I ended up in rehab. I spent a couple of months getting straightened out and was then put on a drug rehabilitation programme. For a while, the daily trip to the chemist and the fortnightly bus ride to my drug dependency unit in Camden became the focus of my life. They became an almost reflex. I’d get out of bed and go and do one or the other on auto-pilot, as if in a daze, which, if I’m honest, I often was.

I did some counselling there as well. I talked endlessly about my habit, how it had started - and how I was going to bring it to an end.

It’s easy to come up with excuses for drug addiction, but I’m certain I know the reason for mine. It was pure and simple loneliness. Heroin allowed me to anaesthetise myself to my isolation, to the fact that I didn’t have family or a huge circle of friends. I was on my own and, strange and unfathomable as it will seem to most people, heroin was my friend.

Deep down, however, I knew it was killing me – literally. So over a period of a few years I’d moved off heroin on to methadone, the synthetic opioid that is used as a substitute to wean morphine and heroin addicts off their habits. By the spring of 2007, the plan was that I would eventually start weaning myself off that and get completely straight.

The move to the flat in Tottenham was a key part of that process. It was an ordinary apartment block full of ordinary families. I knew I had a chance to put my life back on track there.

To help pay the rent I’d started busking in Covent Garden. It wasn’t much but it helped put food on the table and pay the gas and electricity. It also helped to keep me on an even keel. I knew it was my chance to turn the corner. And I knew I had to take it this time. If I’d been a cat, I’d have been on my ninth life.

Chapter 3 The Snip

As we approached the end of Bob’s second week of medication, he was looking a lot brighter. The wound at the back of his leg was healing nicely and the bald and thin patches on his coat had begun to disappear and were being replaced with new, thicker fur. He also seemed happier in his face, his eyes had a more lustrous gleam to them. There was a beautiful, green and yellow glow to them that hadn’t been there before.