A Street Cat Named Bob

As I sat on the bus, I was still having those huge temperature swings, sweating one moment, shivering the next, my limbs were still twitching every now and again, although not as badly as during the middle of the night. People were looking at me as if I was some kind of nutcase. I probably looked unbelievably bad. At that point I didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the DDU.

I arrived just after nine and found the waiting room half full already. One or two people looked as rough as I felt. I wondered whether they’d been through forty-eight hours as hellish as those I’d just been through.

‘Hi, James, how are you feeling,’ the counsellor said as he came into the treatment room. He only needed to look at me to know the answer, of course, but I appreciated his concern.

‘Not great,’ I said.

‘Well, you’ve done well do get through the last two days. That’s a huge step you’ve taken,’ he smiled.

He checked me over and got me to give a urine sample. He then gave me a tablet of Subutex and scribbled out a new prescription, this time for some Subutex.

‘That should make you feel a lot better,’ he said. ‘Now let’s start easing you off this - and out of this place completely.’

I stayed there for a while to make sure the new medication didn’t have any odd side effects. It didn’t. Quite the opposite in fact, it made me feel a thousand times better.

By the time I had got back to Tottenham I felt completely transformed. It was a different feeling from what I’d experienced on methadone. The world seemed more vivid. I felt like I could see, hear and smell more clearly. Colours were brighter. Sounds were crisper. It was weird. It may sound strange, but I felt more alive again.

I stopped on the way and bought Bob a couple of new flavoured Sheba pouches that had come on to the market. I also bought him a little toy, a squeezy mouse.

Back at the flat I made a huge fuss of him.

‘We did it mate,’ I said. ‘We did it.’

The sense of achievement was incredible. Over the next few days, the transformation in my health and life in general was huge. It was as if someone had drawn back the curtains and shed some sunlight into my life.

Of course, in a way, someone had.

Chapter 18 Homeward Bound

I didn’t think Bob and I could have become closer, but the experience we’d just been through together tightened our bond even more. In the days that followed, he stuck to me like a limpet, almost watching over me in case I had some kind of relapse.

There was no danger of that, however. I felt better than I had done in years. The thought of returning to the dark dependencies of the past made me shiver. I had come too far now to turn back.

I decided to celebrate my breakthrough by doing up the flat a little bit. So Bob and I put in a few extra hours each day outside the tube station and then used the proceeds to buy some paint, a few cushions and a couple of prints to put on the wall.

I then went along to a good second-hand furniture shop in Tottenham and bought a nice new sofa. It was a burgundy red, heavy-duty fabric, with a bit of luck the sort of material that would be able to resist Bob’s claws. The old one was knackered, partly down to natural wear and tear, but also because of Bob’s habit of scratching at its legs and base. Bob was banned from scratching the new one.

As the weeks passed and the nights turned even darker and colder, we spent more and more time curled up on the new sofa. I was already looking forward to a nice Christmas for me and Bob, although, as it turned out, that was a little premature.

It wasn’t often that I got post apart from bills, so when I saw a letter in my mailbox in the hallway of the flats one morning in early November 2008, I immediately noticed it. It was an airmail envelope and had a postmark – Tasmania, Australia.

It was from my mother.

We’d not been in proper contact for years. However, despite the distance that had formed between us, the letter was very chatty and warm. She explained that she had moved to a new house in Tasmania. She seemed to be very happy there.

The main point of her letter, however, was to offer me an invitation. ‘If I was to pay your air fares to Australia and back, would you come and see me?’ she asked. She explained that I could come over the Christmas holidays. She suggested I could also take in a trip to Melbourne to see my godparents, to whom I’d once been very close.

‘Let me know,’ she said, signing off. ‘Love, Mum.’

There would have been a time when I’d have thrown the letter straight into the dustbin. I’d have been defiant and stubborn and too proud to take a handout from my family.

But I’d changed, my head was in a different place now. I had started to see life a lot more clearly and I could almost feel some of the anger and paranoia that I’d felt in the past falling away. So I decided to give it some thought.

It wasn’t a straightforward decision, far from it. There were lots of pros and cons to take into consideration.