A Street Cat Named Bob

I wasn’t proud of the fact I was a recovering addict and I certainly wasn’t proud of the fact that I had to visit a clinic once a fortnight and collect medication from a pharmacy every day. So I made it a rule that, unless it was absolutely necessary, I wouldn’t take him with me on those trips. I know it may sound crazy, but I didn’t want him seeing that side of my past. That was something else he’d helped me with; I really did see it as my past. I saw my future as being clean, living a normal life. I just had to complete the long journey that led to that point.

There were still plenty of reminders of that past and of how far I had still to travel. A few days after I’d had him microchipped, I was rummaging around looking for the new Oyster card that had come through the post when I started emptying the contents of a cupboard in my bedroom.

There, at the back of the cupboard, under a pile of old newspapers and clothes, was a plastic Tupperware box. I recognised it immediately, although I hadn’t seen it for a while. It contained all the paraphernalia I had collected when I was doing heroin. There were syringes, needles, everything I had needed to feed my habit. It was like seeing a ghost. It brought back a lot of bad memories. I saw images of myself that I really had hoped to banish from my mind forever.

I decided immediately that I didn’t want that box in the house any more. I didn’t want it there to remind and maybe even tempt me. And I definitely didn’t want it around Bob, even though it was hidden away from view.

Bob was sitting next to the radiator as usual but got up when he saw me putting my coat on and getting ready to go downstairs. He followed me all the way down to the bin area and watched me as I threw the box into a recycling container for hazardous waste.

‘There,’ I said, turning to Bob who was now fixing me with one of his inquisitive stares. ‘Just doing something I should have done a long time ago.’

Chapter 9 The Escape Artist

Life on the streets is never straightforward. You’ve always got to expect the unexpected. I learned that early on. Social workers always use the word ‘chaotic’ when they talk about people like me. They call our lives chaotic, because they don’t conform to their idea of normality, but it is normality to us. So I wasn’t surprised when, as that first summer with Bob drew to a close and autumn began, life around Covent Garden started to get more complicated. I knew it couldn’t stay the same. Nothing ever did in my life.

Bob was still proving a real crowd-pleaser, especially with tourists. Wherever they came from, they would stop and talk to him. By now I think I’d heard every language under the sun - from Afrikaans to Welsh – and learned the word for cat in all of them. I knew the Czech name, kocka and Russian, koshka; I knew the Turkish, kedi and my favourite, the Chinese, mao. I was really surprised when I discovered their great leader had been a cat!

But no matter what weird or wonderful tongue was being spoken, the message was almost always the same. Everyone loved Bob.

We also had a group of ‘regulars’, people who worked in the area and passed by on their way home in the evening. A few of them would always stop to say hello. One or two had even started giving Bob little presents.

It was the other ‘locals’ who were causing the problems.

To begin with I’d been getting a bit of hassle over at James Street from the Covent Guardians. I’d been continuing to play next to the tube station. On a couple of occasions a Guardian had come over and spoken to me. He’d laid down the law, explaining that the area was for painted statues. The fact that there didn’t seem to be any around at that moment didn’t bother him. ‘You know the rules,’ he kept telling me. I did. But I also knew rules were there to be bent a little when they could be. Again, that was life on the streets. If we were the kind of people who stuck to the rules, we wouldn’t have been there.

So each time the Guardian moved me on, I’d head off elsewhere for a few hours then quietly slip back into James Street. It was a risk worth taking as far as I was concerned. I’d never heard of them calling in the police to deal with someone performing in the wrong place.

The people who were bothering me much more were the staff at the tube station who also now seemed to object to me busking outside their workplace. There were a couple of ticket inspectors in particular who had begun giving me a hard time. It had begun as dirty looks and the odd casual comment when I set myself up against the wall of the tube station. But then one really unpleasant inspector, a big, sweaty guy in a blue uniform, had come over to me one day and been quite threatening.

By now I had come to realise that Bob was a great reader of people. He could spot someone who wasn’t quite right from a distance. He had spotted this guy the minute he started walking in our direction and had started squeezing himself closer to me as he approached.